Best Buy to Eliminate Mail In Rebates
Posted by Jeff Chenkus on January 28, 2006
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Maybe Best Buy’s push to move from mail in rebates to being able to process them online will be emulated by other major retailers as well. There is no doubt that mail in rebates are a nuisance. Best Buy recognized this and has worked since April 2005 to convert over to the electronic rebate. The say the complete change away from mail in rebates will take two years, and will require a lot of cooperation from their third party vendors. For now, they are offering electronic rebates on all notebook computers, and by February will extend that to computer accessories for which Best Buy offers the rebate themselves.
From a PC Magazine article, “We realized that mail-in rebates were a source of frustration with consumers, and something worth taking on,” said Brian Lucas, a spokesman with the Minneapolis, Minn. retailer. I think that frustration is a nice way of putting it. It seemed that the generous rebates were just a promotional ploy, that were very difficult to obtain after the purchase. Made you feel ripped off.
In addition to the ease of doing this electronically, they say that most rebate checks will be mailed within 7 days. That is better than the turnaround for mail in reabtes, which I have seen range from 4 to 12 weeks. This should also alleviate the problem of sending in an incomplete rebate submission as well, since it will just be information you can punch in as soon as you get home with your purchase.
The only question that remains to be seen is if this will affect the size of the rebates typically offered. Maybe it is just a conspiracy theory, but it always seemed that larger rebates were offered because the company assumed that a certain percentage of people would never get around to mailing it in. If you now make them easier to receive, will they have to reduce what they offer? Or were they always prepared to fully fund the program if required? In any case, it is nice to see a company trying to make their customer’s lives easier.
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One Response to “Best Buy to Eliminate Mail In Rebates”
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Nice. Mail in rebates suck.