Disposition Preferences: Tell Us What You Want Done

Some customers want their retired hardware refurbished and resold; some want it shredded; some want it donated; some want a mix per device category. The disposition_preference field captures the customer’s intent at intake, persists through the request and the bid and the award, and tells the awarded ITAD upfront what to do with what they cannot resell.

What the customer picks

The trade-in intake has a disposition step: pick a default for the request (resell where possible, with a fallback to recycle; recycle everything; donate where possible; shred everything; no preference, ITAD decides). The default applies to all devices in the request; per-device overrides are available for the customer who has specific devices that must (e.g.) be shredded regardless of resale value.

Why persist through the lifecycle

Persisting the field through the lifecycle means the bid form shows the disposition preference, the ITAD’s bid pricing reflects it, and the awarded contract carries it as part of the agreement. The customer’s intent is visible before pricing and still visible when the work begins.

How the ITAD reads it

On the bid detail, the disposition preference appears alongside the V3+V4 compliance/security requirements (see sourcing-bid-detail-compliance-display). “Customer prefers resale where possible, with shredding for any device flagged as data-bearing post-erasure.” Means the ITAD prices the resale-likely portion at one rate and the shred-likely portion at another, with confidence that the customer agreed to both paths.

Override at receiving

The disposition preference is a customer-side intent, not a platform constraint on the operator’s judgement. If the awarded ITAD receives a device the customer marked “resell” but the testing reveals it’s unusable, the operator can change the disposition with a reason note — the change writes to the audit trail, the customer sees the override on their portal, and there’s a paper trail for why.

Mapped to settlement

Settlements summarise outcomes against the agreed disposition: resold (with the resale value), recycled (with the material flow), donated (with the recipient), shredded (with the certificate). The customer sees on the post-pickup invoice not just “your devices were processed” but “of your 340 devices, 220 were resold, 80 recycled, 40 donated, 0 shredded — here’s the breakdown by serial.”