Best Buy Idea X Blog

Hey all,

There’s some great news around one of the most popular ideas on IdeaX. Best Buy has been testing Free Customer Wi-Fi in 10 stores in the New York market. This is an exiting first step in turning our stores on for our customers to access content like our m.bestbuy.com site (including product reviews), your Reward Zone information (including points and purchases) and even connect to feedback sites like IdeaX and Twelpforce while you shop.

As a technology company, we know it doesn’t make sense for our customers to have to leave to connect to the Internet—and in many stores customer 3G access on their smart phones can be spotty at best.

Through this test Best Buy is looking to understand better how customers like you are connecting in our stores, so we can turn on new experiences while you shop. Right now the team working on this roll out is looking to learn from the NY test while working to get the budget to offer free Wi-Fi in more stores across the nation.

We’d love to continue to hear your thoughts and suggestions, on how you’d like to use Wi-Fi in our stores, and what experiences you’d like to have with our stores on your web-enabled phones.

You can share your thoughts and ideas on this topic in our Wi-Fi Current here.

This is your chance to shape the future experiences you have at Best Buy.

Hey all,

We’ve noticed recently that there have been a few occasions of rude and/or offensive comments between users on the site within various idea discussions. I’m offering this reminder to keep it clean and show respect to others. Disagreement and debate on ideas is great, as it can make ideas better and fuel new ideas. Although when disagreements become personal that falls outside the intended purpose of this site. If you feel like lobbing a personal insult, please refer back to our terms of use. They are not acceptable. If you choose to ignore those rules we will contact you directly and warn you that your access priviledges will be suspended if it is not cleaned up (regardless of your contribution level). So please, keep the great ideas, comments and even the healthy debate coming—just keep it clean.

P.S. Thanks to the 99.9% of you out here on IdeaX who show respect out here all the time. It’s appreciated.

The IdeaX site is the culmination of work done by some carefully selected and dedicated partners.  Jeff Lin and the company he founded, Bust Out Solutions, are THE key partner for us as they have handled the development and design work on IdeaX since its inception.

A few weeks ago Jeff suggested we bring another partner into the fold, Heroku, a Ruby on Rails application deployment platform.   We’ve since taken Jeff’s suggestion and moved IdeaX to Heroku.  Jeff’s reason for recommending them…

“We were very interested in running IdeaX on a cloud computing infrastructure such as Amazon EC2, but the cost of maintaining our own EC2 instances was just too high, not to mention frustrating. Heroku solves those problems for us with their solid platform infrastructure and nice user interface. We’re saving time and money, and enjoying development much more.”

Today the Heroku guys put up a success story on their site about what we’re doing here with IdeaX, we thought we’d share some link love and a virtual clinking of the glasses with our new friends.

Hey all,

We wanted to let you know that the 2nd most popular Idea post “Create Electronic Receipts” has been fully considered and reviewed. Here’s the feedback we’ve heard from the business team on the project:

“Thanks for all of the great ideas and comments on electronic receipts! We wanted you to know Best Buy is excited about this idea and we are actively looking into ways to deliver electronic receipts for customers.”

As a result, we have updated the status of the idea to REVIEWED. As you can imagine, there are processes and systems that need to be in place to accomplish something like this. So we will continue to update you as progress continues to be made on this idea. Thanks for putting your voices behind this and other ideas on the site.

And please, keep the great ideas coming in!

Hey all,

I wanted to give you an update on the status of a few hot Ideas. Currently the top 3 Ideas on the site are under review. This means various business teams at Best Buy are considering the ideas in some shape or form. The top voted ideas include:

Get rid of those stupid plastic boxes — Posted by Paul
There is new work already underway with Best Buy’s own Private Label brand team around new package development for some of their products. This is a small start, but exciting that our own house brands are leading this charge.

Create Electronic Receipts — Posted by fredneil2
There are a lot of conversations happening about the how and when. It’s a fantastic green opportunity and could be a great convenience for customers. There is no definitive answer, but it is certainly under review.

Reward Zone Points Redemption — Posted by s_foy
You can view the posted comments from our Reward Zone team under the actual Idea post. The Reward Zone team is always looking for new ways to improve the program and points redemption is a hot topic on the IdeaX site. A few ideas will be tested out over the next several months to see how members like them. More to come on this.

Your voices are being heard. In some cases your ideas are helping businesses make informed decisions about the future. In other cases, your ideas are reaffirming things we may already be considering. We will continue to update you on the status of these ideas and others. And thanks again for all of the fantastic ideas, comments and of course your votes. Keep them coming.

Here’s a list of the new features in the latest IdeaX deploy. Enjoy.

Hey all,

Here’s a request from micheleazar of our Mobile team looking for your thoughts on improvements to Best Buy’s Mobile site. Read below then, comment and vote at.

http://bestbuyideax.com/ideas/1326

micheleazar: We’d like your help enhancing Best Buy’s Mobile Site, m.bestbuy.com; please vote on this post if you like our ideas for release 3. Here’s what we’re thinking: 1.) Order Tracking/Account Lookup including gift card balance, SMS alert when in store pick up item is ready 2.) New Promotional offers, financial, in-store deals by location 3.) Extend Checkout: PayPal 4.) Enable Sharing: wish lists, SMS friends, Gift Registry 5.) Check out via Mobile I-phone Apps, Add pre-order ability within apps. BTW, the ability to buy stuff is coming soon! And, we’re not looking at mobile web alone as the big idea, we’re viewing the end user benefit as unlocking more utility within the multi-channel shopping experience at a local level. The features we can’t fit into a release, we may build out via mobile apps to learn more about what appeals to customers.

Update from Ryan Salow on “Get rid of those stupid plastic boxes that are way too hard to open.”

These are great comments, please keep them coming – we’re listening!
Your comments and concerns really help validate the work we are doing on the Best Buy Exclusive Brands (Insignia, Rocketfish, Dynex, Init & Geek Squad) Packaging team. Over the past several months we have increased our diligence in offering more customer and environmentally conscious packaging options. Examples of these efforts range from our more established products such as the Dynex Optical mice skus (DX-WLMSE & DX-WMSE) that are in easy-to-open hybrid boxes and use a minimal amount of plastic, to our recent Dynex 6’ HDMI cable which is held in an efficiently sized corrugate box, using only as much plastic as needed to showcase the product. While we aren’t currently able to eliminate molded plastic packaging for all of our products, we are working towards incorporating a customer-friendly opening feature on all clamshells going forward. An example of this would be our latest headphone offerings with the Rocketfish ear bud products (RF-EHP11 & RF-EHP12). The perforation on the back of this package allows the clamshell to be opened with one pull of the finger tab – no more scissors, no more injuries! Our newly launched Rocketfish Gaming line is a great example of family-friendly packaging which has a focus on offering the customer products children can open themselves, without the use of tools or adult assistance.
Again, your comments are appreciated. Our innovations don’t always come from within our own walls; a customer’s feedback speaks volumes! Regards, Ryan Salow