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UberEats took unauthorized amount (and not willing to pay it back)

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Re: UberEats took unauthorized amount (and not willing to pay it back)

#11

Post by paulgb »

SllX wrote: post #5
cbhl wrote: post #4

In the US one would consider escalating to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, since this seems like lying (the price before the button press is different from the price after). Not sure if the UK has a similar ministry you could appeal to? Though one would consider the risk of being banned from Uber Eats over $4.

Risk being banned from a service that stole your money and refused to give it back? You chargeback and move on with your life.

Yeah, this is a slam-dunk chargeback; the user has documented the disparity and documented their attempt at going through the businesses’ preferred channel. Assuming that what’s presented is true, of course.

I guess chargebacks are less of a thing in the UK?

Re: UberEats took unauthorized amount (and not willing to pay it back)

#14

Post by paulgb »

BossingAround wrote: post #9
boros2me wrote: post #2

Probably no one cares as it's only £4, but posting on HN has a therapeutic effect.

Why should a customer pay for bad app design? The app allowed the code to be applied to that specific restaurant. Then backend refused it and customer pays the difference. In what world is that acceptable?

I recently(ish) discovered a legitimate billing error with Lyft/Bay Wheels that caused a few bucks of overage[1]. It wasn’t a lot of money to me, but I pointed it out to them as it was an obvious error. To their credit, they refunded several entire trips, not just the disparity, and I believe they refunded others’ affected rides as well. I think that’s a satisfactory approach: mistakes happen, but companies should make an effort to ensure that they don’t benefit if they make an accident that favors themselves.

[1] https://twitter.com/paulgb/status/1449779457200300033?s=21

Re: UberEats took unauthorized amount (and not willing to pay it back)

#15

Post by berberous »

BossingAround wrote: post #9
boros2me wrote: post #2

Probably no one cares as it's only £4, but posting on HN has a therapeutic effect.

Why should a customer pay for bad app design? The app allowed the code to be applied to that specific restaurant. Then backend refused it and customer pays the difference. In what world is that acceptable?

This is so bad I can’t imagine even Uber Eats really thinks it’s acceptable. Probably a bug.

The problem is that tech support are useless automatons and there is no way to really escalate to those that can see it clearly should be fixed other than shouting on Twitter. Very frustrating when there’s no avenue for real review and redress other than chargebacks.

Re: UberEats took unauthorized amount (and not willing to pay it back)

#18

Post by pgrote »

This is the one thing I cannot wrap my head around. How does anyone make any money on orders this low? Based on the screenshot the total was 12.28. UberEats takes 1.00 for a fee and I think some from the vendor. The delivery person gets 1.29.

Does UberEats pay a minimum for the delivery to the delivery person and the tip is addtional? If so, whose end does it come out of?

Are the delivery services trying to make it up in volume?

Re: UberEats took unauthorized amount (and not willing to pay it back)

#19

Post by cameronh90 »

UberEats are shockingly bad in my experience (London, UK).

They constantly try to tempt us back with 40% promos, but we have sworn off ever using them again.

Last time we used them, every driver allocated to pick up the order abandoned the delivery when they got to the restaurant. I assume something was going wrong at the restaurant. This happened maybe 10-15 times, to the point that we were joking that the restaurant was murdering the drivers. The app didn't offer any ability to contact customer service, as it only seemed to unlock customer service after the order is actually delivered. None of the phone numbers online would get through to a human. We didn't want to order from elsewhere in case that order ended up getting delivered. It took 5hrs (!) before the app auto-cancelled the order.

Additional to that, the drivers rarely find my house, always turn up in different vehicles to what is claimed on the app and quite frequently a different person entirely. The order time is always longer than what it claims (much like Uber itself). The app is terribly unstable and frequency crashes, displays errors or loses my basket.

Deliveroo are so much better it's not even funny.

Re: UberEats took unauthorized amount (and not willing to pay it back)

#20

Post by spheroidmethod »

I once worked on a reasonably complex e-commerce system with millions of products, add-to-cart, taxes, promo codes, etc. Every so often, an order total changed between the time that the user saw the total on the confirmation screen and when they actually hit the button to place the order (which seems to be what happened here). This happened because of promo applicability changes, product price changes, products being de-listed, etc.

But it was relatively easy to prevent problems with this. When the user clicked the button to place the order, we sent along the expected order total, the expected item IDs to purchase, the expected tax, etc. In the backend, one of the last validation step before the order was finalized was just to compare the final order details against those expected values. If there were any differences, the order was rejected with an error message to try again. There were then monitors on these types of errors which would go off if there was a higher-than-normal frequency of these sorts of errors, so we could track down any bugs causing price discrepancies.

I'm kind of surprised that UberEats doesn't seem to have a similar validation step.

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