How I helped Best Buy reach $8.53 billion in revenue

Before we start: This is NOT a sponsored or paid for Post. This is MY personal experience. I feel like I need to clarify that up front before the trolls come out from under their bridges with stupid accusations…#BloggerProblems.

My tale of woe began when my laptop decided that it had enough of being overworked and started to overheat. Repeatedly. I knew that it wouldn’t be long now before it would join that great recycling heap in the sky… I had to move quickly.

Backup EVERYTHING

First task: back up everything. Panic Mode. In the event that it would shut down for the last time, I needed to have my info safe and accessible. With a mixture of cloud storage across various services such as Google Drive, Microsoft Onedrive, and Dropbox, this task was quickly achieved. Phew.

To be extra safe I also Cloned the computer which is a process where you use software to make a replica of the entire hard drive including software, apps, settings, and info.

Which laptop should I buy?

The second task: Find a replacement laptop. But it’s been a while since I bought new hardware so I reached out to my Twitter friend Chad Christian who is a hardware King and he gave me some suggestions from his experience with laptops.

After weighing up all the hardware options, I knew I couldn’t get everything I wanted on a limited budget so I had to prioritize. I chose to compromise on the processor and rather have the Solid State Drive. That makes the machine much lighter, more reliable, slightly improved battery life, and most importantly – FAST. From boot up time to dealing with large video files, the SSD is the way to go and in my opinion, by far the most noticeable upgrade you can make.

I wanted a 2-in-1 type of ultrabook as that offers the best flexibility of a full laptop AND when you bend the screen you have a tablet. This would be handy especially with the latest Windows 10 Creator Update that really takes advantage of this facility.

Where is the best place to buy the laptop?

Next stop: Where do I hunt for this hardware? All roads led to BestBuy.com where every laptop was available for the picking.

I had my mind set on a stunning Lenovo Yoga 2-in-1 ultrabook that was perfect but it was above my budget. %#$%@. BUT I really really really wanted it… 

I noticed that the Best Buy site had something called “Open Box” price. This is the exact same laptop I wanted but it wasn’t brand new. I assume it was returned. The Open-Box Excellent Certified means that “Product has passed the Geek Squad Certified process, has been professionally cleaned, looks brand new and includes original parts and accessories”. Good enough for me. There were also other Open-Box conditions such as Excellent, Fair, and Satisfactory each with their own “condition” and a discounted price to match.

I purchased the one in Excellent condition, added to cart and checked out. Within a few days, I received the laptop at my front door.

After opening the box and looking at what I can only describe as a brand new laptop, I noticed that the Yoga’s pen/stylus was missing. Perhaps it wasn’t packed after being checked. No biggie. I called the Customer Services and the super helpful lady immediately offered a discount or they could ship me a new pen. This was processed in minutes without any fuss at all. There was then a follow-up call to ensure all was fine. It certainly was nice speaking to a person who was not only helpful but had the authority to deal with situations.

After I was done transferring the info from my old laptop to the new one, I wondered what I would do with the now old laptop when I noticed another element on the Best Buy site that I didn’t see before: Trade-In.

My laptop was still working, had a Solid Sate Hard Drive with 8GB of RAM and Core i7 processor. There were no damaged keys or missing bits from the laptop and the screen was perfect. It was just not able to keep up with my video editing that I was doing on my YouTube channel (see how I weaved that in…). I reset the laptop and took it into my local Best Buy shop.

The Customer Services guy took a look at the laptop, made sure it was working, examined it from top to bottom and ran the specs through their system. They made me an offer which I accepted and minutes later I had a Best Buy gift voucher and a big smile.

Not only did I get the laptop I wanted, but I got it for a cheaper price as it was a so-called “Open-Box” AND I traded my old laptop in. Best Buy fan!

So in summary:

I had gone from “panic mode” when the old laptop could no longer keep up, to full functioning within days, paying the right price I wanted for a high spec computer. Everything was done online and technically, I could have mailed in my trade-in laptop too. Now THIS is how you serve the always-connected consumer today.

With 79% of Americans shop online according to Pew Research Center, it goes without saying that eCommerce is the fabric of commerce now and into the future. Websitebuilder has a cool infographic which shows that 4 our 5 people use their mobile phone to make an online purchase and the market is worth over $83 billion and clearly Best Buy caters to that market with their mobile app.

Best Buy just reported their first-quarter revenue which was $8.53 billion. I attribute that to their finely-tuned systems, customer service and of course, my latest purchase which helped secure that figure!

Note: once again – this is NOT a paid for Post. Just a happy customer’s experience.