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Best Buy is expanding a buy-back program so customers can sell their old electronics back to the retailer.

The catch: You need to buy into the Buy Back Program when you first purchase your gear.

Starting Monday, Best Buy will offer customers the option to purchase the Buy Back Program when picking up a product in one of five categories: laptops, netbooks, tablets, post-paid smartphones and TVs.

It’s a bit different than the usual trade-in programs that already exist, which usually don’t let you know how much you’ll be getting for your old stuff until you bring it in. In the new Buy Back program, Best Buy lets you know up front how much you’ll be getting back when you decide to sell, based on the amount of time you’ve owned the product. The longer you’ve owned it, the less you get back when you return it to the store.

“Weve learned from our customers that they do have a fear of new, greater technology to come,” Best Buy CEO George Sherman told Wired.com in an interview, “and we’ve found it has led to hesitancy to buying. Our program protects against that.”

For example, say your folks bought you a shiny new Galaxy Tab for Christmas. That’s great, until you hear that Samsung will be releasing a new line of Verizon-carried 4G Galaxy Tabs sometime in 2011. If the folks purchased the Buy Back program and you return your now obsolete tablet within 6 months of the original purchase date, you’ll get up to 50 percent of your purchase price back when buying the new piece of hardware.

Not a bad deal for the early adopters out there, although there’s always the Craigslist route.

The price of the Buy Back program varies depending on the price of the gadget you’re buying it for. In other words, get ready for the sales clerk to offer you yet another option along with the useless extended warranty.

See Also:

• Best Buy
• Best Buy to Sell iPad in Reportedly Limited Quantity
• Best Buy to Sell Nook, Target Bags Kindle?
• IPhone Coming to Best Buy

Photo: Ian Mutoo/Flickr

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Source:wired.com

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Best Buy is trying out a rather clever marketing trick. The retailer announced a new line of consumer electronics products called Blue Label that it claims will be specially created based on customer feedback.

First up will be laptops, one each from HP and Toshiba.

Best Buy says it found customers want "longer battery life, a thin and lightweight design, an illuminated keyboard, more optimal screen size
and superior warranty support"— something that shouldn’t come as a surprise to any PC user.

The better warranty support though seems a tad suspect considering Best Buy peddles a ‘product replacement plan’  that it pushes to electronics buyers during the checkout process.

Best Buy’s Toshiba laptop is a 14.1-inch screen device, 1.2 inches thin and weigh 4.99 lbs. It offers about 5.5 hours of battery life and retails for $1199.

The HP model has a 13.3 inch screen size, be 1.14 inches thin and offers up to 4 hours of battery life. It weighs 4.6 lbs and also costs $1199.

Both the laptops will come with two-year warranty at no extra charge, said Best Buy. They will also get 30 days of support from Best Buy’s Geek Squad.

Best Buy hasn’t said how it is gathering its customer feedback or how that is being incorporated into the products for the label.

Even if those details are hazy, given enough advertising, the idea should work well enough to get customers to the store to check it out.

Photo: Best Buy, Toronto (Ian Muttoo/Flickr)

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Best Buy isn’t going to let Amazon hog all the attention when it comes to selling netbooks, which are increasing in popularity faster than Laney Boggs after she lost the glasses and pony tail.

In addition to its announcement that it would soon start selling the MSI Wind netbook, Best Buy told Laptop Mag that it plans to expand its netbook offerings. The company made its efforts clear today by posting the definition of a netbook on its site:

"Netbooks may look like laptops, but they don’t have the full capabilities of a computer," the site reads. "Instead, a netbook specializes in mobility and the Web, so it’s great for travel or as a supplement to your main PC."

Pretty good timing for Best Buy: With the economy crumbling and what not, there’s no doubt many more are going to be jumping on the netbook mini bandwagon soon.

Best Buy Helps Define Netbook For Customers [Laptop Mag]

Photo: Whurley/Flickr

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the news that MSI’s Wind would soon be stocked by “a major U.S. retailer”. Today, Best Buy has made it official. The little netbook will be sold in its Windows XP Home incarnation, and sit on the shelves alongside Asus’ Eee PC 900.

Best Buy hasn’t yet revealed the price, nor has the Wind appeared on the website, but we can’t imagine it will be far off the $500 Amazon is asking. The specs remaon the same: Black or white, a 120GB hard drive, a three cell battery (that’s the one that lasts a couple of hours), a Gig of RAM and a 10″ screen. Wi-Fi is b/g and the processor is that netbook standard, the Intel Atom 1.6GHz.

With these things ready to pick up and go, we predict a lot of 10″ packages in this year’s Christmas stockings.

Retailer page [Best Buy. Thanks, Mark!]

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Purported photos of Best Buy’s inventory list suggest that the electronics store will soon be carrying some of the latest and hottest cell phones, including the Google Android-powered G1.

The Boy Genius Report came across these photos, indicating that a slew of hot new phones will arrive in the store Oct. 26. From the looks of it, Best Buy will be selling the unlocked Treo Pro smartphone — a highly anticipated (albeit not all that exciting) handset from Palm. It also appears the much more exciting BlackBerry Pearl Flip (in red) — the first flip version of the popular BlackBerry smartphone — will make its way on shelves.

Finally, one of the photos indicates the T-Mobile G1 — the first handset to run Google’s open platform Android operating system — will arrive at Best Buy on Oct. 26 as well. However, the screen says the phone won’t start selling until Nov. 16, which is odd since the official release date of the phone is supposed to be Oct. 22.

Strange. What do you think about these photos, Gadget Lab readers? (More below the jump.)

Palm Treo Pro, Pearl Flip 8220, T-Mobile G1, and more coming soon to Best Buy [BGR]

Photo: BGR

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