Best Buy open box warranty: What's actually covered (and what isn't)

There's a heavily discounted corner in every IKEA store which acts as a confession room for furniture. A dresser with a gouge down one side tells its story. A sofa minus a cushion tells its own, so does a coffee table somebody assembled and then abandoned.

It sits past the checkout, near the exit, which is a merchandising decision I've always admired.

You've almost certainly slowed down in front of it. But almost certainly never wondered whether any of it came with a warranty, because the answer is obviously no and everybody knows it without being told. That's the understanding with IKEA’s As-Is furniture.

But when you walk into Best Buy past the open box shelves and sets, the story becomes different.

Marked down, slightly compromised, buy at your own risk - plenty of people walk away from a fully covered open-box electronic item because they assume there's nothing covering its failure. Plenty of others buy one assuming there is, then find out in month four that they were mistaken, just like this unfortunate customer did:

“I asked about my open box Dell laptop warranty when picking it up. I was [told] that it did carry a full 1 year factory warranty still. But found out otherwise same day after getting home. What a horrible experience.”

Mind you, if the complaint is coming from a Redditor who named himself BestBuySucks, things must have gone spectacularly wrong. To help you avoid the same story, we've unpacked every piece of the Best Buy Open Box puzzle... answering the questions those little red and white stickers almost never do.

The Schrödinger's warranty: running, expired, or somewhere in between?

Let's cut to the chase.

In case you're reading this on your phone in a Best Buy aisle considering a purchase. An open-box item usually still comes with the original manufacturer's warranty. Since that warranty is provided by brands like LG, Dell, or Apple (not Best Buy), it doesn't disappear just because the product was returned.

But the only catch is that you're getting whatever time is left on the original warranty, which depends on when the first buyer purchased it.

For example, let's say you're buying an open-box MacBook with a one-year Apple warranty. If the original owner bought it three months ago and returned it last week, you'd only have about nine months of warranty left. If they bought it ten months ago, you'd inherit just two months.

There can be exceptions in some cases, because, as several Best Buy shoppers have pointed out, you can provide a copy of your receipt from Best Buy to the manufacturer and a few of them might recalculate your warranty coverage to reflect your purchase date instead of the original buyer’s date.

However, the details around this are a bit hazy from brand to brand. Take Apple for instance. Their open box policy is stricter, as several buyers on Apple's own support forums keep reporting that coverage begins when the unit ships rather than when anybody buys it.

The genuinely maddening thing is that nobody at the store level seems to have a settled answer. On a single Best Buy Q&A thread, one shopper stated plainly:

"Open box items come with all the original accesories minus the manufacturers warranty."

But the very next reply says that claim is simply wrong. Both answers sit there, unresolved, just collecting upvotes, but no definitive answers.

That being said, there is a fix, one that would make your choice a lot easier.

The four grades of Best Buy open box electronics

Best Buy sorts open box inventory into four tiers. This grading is the single strongest predictor of how much hassle you're buying.

But remember: grades describe intent rather than guarantee outcome. One buyer on that same thread reported ordering an Excellent–Certified MacBook, the highest tier available, and finding it badly bent, with their recommendation being to buy open box only in person where you can inspect it first.

Factor in the clock, too. Because Best Buy allows fifteen days to return an open box purchase against thirty for a new one, your window to catch a problem is half as wide.

Also, one thing the grade doesn't tell you is how much warranty is left.

An Excellent – Certified laptop might have ten months of manufacturer coverage remaining, while another unit in the same grade could have just a few weeks. Likewise, a Fair item isn't automatically out of warranty, although older, more heavily used returns are naturally more likely to have little or no manufacturer coverage left.

In other words, condition and warranty are two separate checkboxes.

The two-minute check that settles it

Do this before you pay:

1. Check the serial number on the product itself, not the box. In several cases, boxes get swapped, and tags get reprinted.
2. Look the serial up with the manufacturer. Most manufacturers have a warranty status page, and support lines will check it while you stand there.
3. Ask two questions: "Is it in warranty?" and "What is the start date?"
4. Keep your receipt. It's the only evidence you'll have if you later ask for the realignment described above.

Pro tip: If you're weighing a Best Buy open box laptop warranty specifically, add a fifth step and check the battery cycle count in system settings. A floor model may have hundreds of cycles on it, and battery wear is not covered by almost every manufacturer's warranty anyway.

How is open box different from 'as-is' or 'refurbished'?

If you're confused about these similar-looking concepts, congratulations. You're having the intended experience. So, let's break it all down in simpler terms:

Other big box retailers also built such classifications into their listings. eBay's Certified Open Box program includes a one-year warranty on every item along with free shipping and thirty-day free returns, and eBay Refurbished runs two years on Certified and one year on Excellent, Very Good and Good. Amazon goes the other way and is refreshingly blunt about it, with Amazon Warehouse telling buyers outright not to assume a manufacturer's warranty exists and to read the listing.

That leads us to the question...

Should you add a protection plan? 

You can.

The smartest way to think about a warranty is as a bridge. It doesn't replace the manufacturer's coverage but picks up where it ends. So, if your open-box TV has four months left, you're only paying for what comes after. That logic applies just as much to an open-box TV warranty as to a laptop, and arguably more, because nobody ships a 65-inch panel back to a manufacturer casually.

The takeaway

The reason nobody asks about warranties in the IKEA as-is furniture section is that the deal is stated plainly.

But the things are different with Best Buy. The gouge, if there is one, sits in the paperwork rather than the plastic. There's usually real coverage attached, sometimes eleven months of it and sometimes none at all, and the shelf tag stays quiet about which version you're about to carry home. The discount is the only number anybody prints.

So the whole distance between a genuine bargain and an expensive lesson comes down to two minutes with a serial number. Ask what the start date is. Write down the answer. It's a short conversation to have standing in an aisle, and it beats the alternative, which is finding out in month four and going off to invent a username in anger.