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  • Best Buy BuyBack Program
Technology Articles > Hardware > Others > Best Buy BuyBack Program

Technology in the past decade has exploded. These days it seems that as soon as you buy an electronic device, something new comes out a year or less later. Best Buy has thrown its hat in the ring by being the first company to offer a buy back program.

The Best Buy Buyback Program is a contract program that can be bought upon purchase of just about any electronic device sold in Best Buy. TVs have a 4 year plan and all other electronics have a 2 year plan. Upon purchasing an electronic product from Best Buy a customer has the option to buy the Buyback Program. Some might see this as a downfall that you have to purchase the Buyback Program. The program costs $99.99 to purchase and is a 2 year contract (4 years for a TV) to buy back the item being purchased. Once the program is purchased it does not, however, kick in until 31 days from the purchase of the product. Most Best Buy products have a 30 day exchange or return policy and may be seen as for the reason behind the 31 day kick in effect. This also gives you an extra month on your Buyback plan as well.

The way the Best Buy Buyback program works is this: After the 31 days is up your electronic product can be resold to Best Buy for a gift card, in monthly increments. At 6 months Best Buy will pay 50%, 6-12 months 40%, 12-18 months 30%, 18-24 months 20%, and for TVs 18-48 months 20%. To put this in perspective an example: Say if you bought a phone (phone’s contract is not included in the buy back) for $200. 6 months later a new and better phone comes out. Take your Best Buy purchased phone back to them and they will give you a $100 gift certificate. A TV example: Say if you bought a TV for $2000 and 6 months later a new one comes out. Bring back the TV to Best Buy and you would receive a $1000 gift card towards your purchase. Best Buy does offer this program for in-store and online purchases. They even provide an easy to use buy back calculator so that a customer can calculate what they would get in return. Products must be in clean and working condition for the buy back to happen.

Deciding whether or not to purchase this program would largely depend on the product being purchased in my opinion. This program is definitely a new source of revenue for Best Buy. Having said that though, this program can be very effective for expensive purchases such as TVs,laptops, and game systems. For smaller items such as phones or CD players, it would probably be best to try to pawn or sell your unit on your own. The reason for this is this: Like an example earlier, say if you bought a $200 phone and purchased the Best Buy Buyback Program for $99.99. That is a $300 purchase plus the taxes paid. 6 months down the road a new phone comes out and return the unit for buyback. A customer would only receive the money back they used to purchase the plan in the first place, thus eliminating its effect. For expensive electronic units though, it might be very worth while. If a customer were in the market for an expensive new 3D HD TV or new laptop that ran i.e. $3000, purchased the Buyback Program bringing the total to $3100, and say a year later a new unit came out. Then the customer would bring back the unit for buyback and receive a $1200 gift card, thus making it very worth it.

In the end this program is worth it if you are buying an expensive product i.e. a TV, laptop, etc..If you are buying an inexpensive electronic unit, then I would say it is not worth being purchased. This program is a great idea through and through. Perhaps with a little tweaking this could be a very effective program, but is ultimately aimed at generating more revenue.