TL;DR: Someone replaced the Best Buy app's search with Joe Biden — now it can’t find anything. Fortunately, the website still works fine.

As someone who shops at Best Buy and also works as a sales advisor, I’ve had enough of pretending the website and app experience is anything close to acceptable. It’s clunky, frustrating, and shockingly unhelpful in the exact moments it should be most efficient — when you’re trying to find the right product.

Let’s start with the filters. You can’t select multiple filters and then hit “apply.” No — every single filter you click immediately reloads the entire page. So if I’m narrowing down a motherboard search by selecting PCIe slot types and number of ports, the instant I select one option, the site recalculates everything, and then resets the product pool based on just that choice before I can even add the others. This results in cascading exclusion — by the time I get to my third filter, half the relevant results are gone not because they didn’t exist, but because the system never gave them a chance to be included in the combined filter set. It’s fundamentally broken.

And it gets worse with the new so-called “AI-powered” search in the app. It’s borderline useless for anything specific. I searched “MX500” — a very well-known Crucial SSD — and got completely irrelevant results. Only after typing the full phrase “Crucial MX500 SSD” did anything come close. Then I tried searching “Crucial SSD” and selected the internal SSD category… only to find that the filter panel gave me nothing helpful: no filter for form factor, storage size, interface, or even basic connector type. You know — the essential specs anyone searching for storage would care about.

For a regular customer, this experience is frustrating. But for me — someone on the sales floor trying to help someone in real time — it’s downright infuriating. I can click filters in seconds, but the system makes me wait minutes. That’s minutes wasted while a customer stands there waiting, watching me fumble through an unresponsive UI that makes me look slow or uninformed, when in reality it’s just bad design dragging us both down.

Best Buy has always positioned itself as the place for tech — but if we’re going to compete with online-first platforms, the digital shopping experience has to work. Right now, it doesn’t. It wastes time, hides relevant products, and makes both customers and employees feel like they’re wading through molasses with mittens on.

Edit:

After messing with the new AI powered search even more it has come to my attention that even regular search topics yield completely unrelated results. When I searched "500GB SATA SSD", in the mobile app, I get results ranging from a PNY 4 TB SATA SSD to a bunch of one and two terabyte m.2 NVMe SSDs. When I search the same search key on the online website, I get more appropriate results including 500 GB Samsung 870 Evo SATA SSDs and the like. There is at least some good news. If you're having issues with the new AI search in the app, you can just use the online version of the website, and boom you're at the old search system.