Lenovo Outlet Review

If you’ve been thinking about buying a computer from the Lenovo Outlet store, you may be concerned about what your shopping experience will be like.  And the truth is that it’s a legitimate concern.  It seems like whenever someone makes a major purchase its either a dream come true or a disastrous nightmare, and what you can expect your experience to be can be a major part of your decision to make your purchase from one company or another one.

The truth is that when it comes to the Lenovo Outlet experience, there are much more negative reports than positive ones.  When researching this, I came across countless threads online that relayed numerous reports of unshipped orders, unresponsive and unhelpful customer service, and altogether major customer dissatisfaction.

Now, in all fairness, there were positive reports as well.  Just about each thread that I came across had at least one report of a purchase that went smoothly, or even better than expected.  For each positive report though, there were about 3 negative ones.  Now we all know that people like to kvetch a lot more than they like to talk about their positive experiences, but there were enough negative reports to make a somewhat skeptical consumer like me think twice about purchasing.

All told, there were some definite positives that people reported, so I will just list the pros and cons as I found them, and let you make your decision from there.

Pros

1. You can get amazing prices.  A lot of the products available at the Lenovo factory outlet were never even used.  Forget refurbished, you can get new computers at much lower prices than you’d be able to find elsewhere.

2. You can end up getting a much better deal than you expected.  Lots of customers have reported getting expensive hardware and software that wasn’t  mentioned in the product specs.  This is because all products sold through Lenovo outlets were custom built for people who either cancelled their orders, or sent the product back unopened (or in the case of Refurbished or Scratch and Dent, opened).  So you just might end up getting some fancy pants software or hardware that you didn’t have to pay for, and weren’t expecting.

Cons

1. The longest and most bizarre order processing you’ll ever experience.  From the time you place your order, it will be several days before the order actually goes through– meaning that they locate the machine and bill you.  Then it will be another week to ten days before your item is shipped.

Do not expect to get a confirmation email, so make sure to print out your order confirmation– or better yet, take a screenshot or make a pdf.

2.  Someone else might get the product you ordered.  There have been quite a few reports of people who have placed an order, only to find that someone else had ordered the same item, and since they were the second person to order it, their order was canceled.  However, they were not notified of the cancellation.

3. Not the greatest customer service.  While some people have reported very helpful customer service reps, there have been many more reports of customer service people who were unhelpful, gave contradicting information, or were downright rude.

4. No exchanges.  If your order arrives and doesn’t work, you will not be able to send it back and get a new one.  The Lenovo return policy for their outlet store is that you can return it, but you cannot exchange it.  Your only options will be to either go through tech support to try and fix it, or to return the product and place a new order.  But they may not have another computer with the same specs available.

Basically, if you do decide to place a Lenovo Outlet order, you should go into it expecting that your computer might take a very long time to arrive, and with the understanding that you might not actually get this computer, but that if you do, you will be getting a really great product at an incredible price.