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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)

#51

Post by wutbrodo »

spuz wrote: post #30

There is currently a thread on Reddit where hundreds are reporting having their orders cancelled but still being charged. https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_... A similar thing happened to me. I still have an email that says "your order was cancelled but we'll refund you in 3 weeks". Three weeks later I still had no refund but since so much time had passed, their support refused to consider m…

I have never had to do this, but I always figure that I can just cancel the transaction as fraud via my credit card. Possession is 9/10 of the law and all that.

Is there some limitation to this approach that I'm not aware of?

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

#52

Post by dboshardy »

dmurray wrote: post #38
spheroidmethod wrote: post #20

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…

> 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). I don't see any reason from the post to believe this kind of race condition is what happened here. Uber's CS says the promotional code used was not valid for this restaurant, but presumably the app accepted it…

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

That's what OP was saying.

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

#53

Post by potatolicious »

cameronh90 wrote: post #19

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 restauran…

Similar experience in the US for me. I wrote off UberEats completely after a truly abysmal experience where Uber accepted the order, and the restaurant made it, only for Uber to fail to find a delivery person to deliver it.

Except the app gave no errors or notices about this, no "sorry, we can't find a driver right now, hang on..." prompt. Nor did it update the ETA for the order. It just happily kept pushing the ETA back, 5 minutes at a time, with no notice of any sort.

After about an hour I contacted the restaurant - I'm a regular there and they were puzzled - the order had been ready for quite some time and no one had shown up to pick it up. The Uber app on their end showed no errors or notifications to indicate something was wrong. So I contacted UberEats CS, where the agent revealed the "can't find a driver" part of the story, and then announced that there was nothing to be done about it.

That part really pissed me off - Uber charges surge pricing to customers to incentivize more drivers, but when push comes to shove on a poor customer experience is unwilling to increase the payout for a delivery to expedite it? Given the absolutely usurious rates Uber charges restaurants to use their service they weren't even willing to sacrifice a small part of their margin to try and get a stuck order moving?

The craziest part of this is how apologetic the restaurant was for something that absolutely had nothing to do with them. It sounds like UberEats fucks up regularly and customers take it out on the restaurants - meanwhile UberEats runs away to the bank with their absurd per-ticket commissions for failing to fulfill their role.

Oh wait, no, they're not running away to the bank at all. Somehow despite running a truly shitty service and charging usurious fees to restaurants they are still losing money hand over fist.

I will say - I have misgivings generally about the gig economy, but I now exclusively use DoorDash. I've had a couple of screwups with them but they have always responded promptly in a no-bullshit way.

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

#54

Post by everfree »

molszanski wrote: post #41
armchairhacker wrote: post #26

Meanwhile trending on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_... > Bill's Kitchen couldn't complete your order and has to cancel. We're sorry we couldn't complete your order this time but thanks for continuing to support restaurants. > You'll still be charged Commenters are saying this is flat-out illegal and OP should contact their bank.

If you contact the bank or a card company for a chargeback they will likely block you on Uber. Which might be PIA when traveling. All hail monopolies.

At least there's also Lyft. The same can't be said for the broadband internet market, for example.

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

#55

Post by sascha_sl »

The monopolization of the market has been much worse here in Germany.

Delivery Hero controls everything, and you can tell. Nonexisting support, double charges if you happen to break their frontend (no nonces here), addresses, phone numbers and emails leaking to spammers without any consequences or even acknowledgement. (I only know this because I use unique data)

Please consider cutting these services out of your transactions, or at least the ones that are too big to care about consumers or providers having a good experience.

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

#56

Post by monkeybutton »

wyre wrote: post #28
pgrote wrote: post #18

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 u…

UberEats is making money from VC and isn’t profitable [1]. They charge the customer a fee, and take 30% from the restaurant as a middleman fee. [1] https ://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/if-uber-eats-isnt-profitable-now-when-can-it-be.html

30%. Thirty freakin percent. Plus a delivery fee. And they can't turn a profit? That's not a business model that can be fixed by optimizing some conversion rate or efficiency factor by any reasonable percentage.

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

#57

Post by potatolicious »

monkeybutton wrote: post #56
wyre wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UberEats is making money from VC and isn’t profitable [1]. They charge the customer a fee, and take 30% from the restaurant as a middleman fee. [1] https ://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/if-uber-eats-isnt-profitable-now-when-can-it-be.html

30%. Thirty freakin percent. Plus a delivery fee. And they can't turn a profit? That's not a business model that can be fixed by optimizing some conversion rate or efficiency factor by any reasonable percentage.

> That's not a business model that can be fixed by optimizing some conversion rate or efficiency factor by any reasonable percentage.

Many, many people made this exact case during the heyday of gig economy companies. Many a VCs and investors (including those who run this illustrious site) mocked this criticism as that of know-nothing haters who simply could not understand the brilliance of the minds behind these operations.

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

#58

Post by oceanghost »

armchairhacker wrote: post #26

Meanwhile trending on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_... > Bill's Kitchen couldn't complete your order and has to cancel. We're sorry we couldn't complete your order this time but thanks for continuing to support restaurants. > You'll still be charged Commenters are saying this is flat-out illegal and OP should contact their bank.

I had a similar issue with GrubHub. I ordered a pizza from a local shop. Got charged for it, drove there to pick it up and the pizza shop was closed.

I opened a support ticket but GrubHub kicked me out of the support chat claiming my issue had been solved, and I couldn't open a new one.

I meant to file a charge-back but never got around to it.

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

#59

Post by duxup »

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #49
spuz wrote: post #30

There is currently a thread on Reddit where hundreds are reporting having their orders cancelled but still being charged. https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/rj0a19/made_... A similar thing happened to me. I still have an email that says "your order was cancelled but we'll refund you in 3 weeks". Three weeks later I still had no refund but since so much time had passed, their support refused to consider m…

I'll share my less dramatic experience, on the off chance others have seen the same: Every few weeks I get an email from Uber Eats with a generous-looking promotional code, to the tune of 25% off. If I line up an order on the website and enter the promotional code, no discount appears on the order. If I refresh the page and re-enter the code, it tells me That code has already been used . This has happened to me 3 tim…

I had the same experience with a couple food delivery services.

At first I figured it was a bug, after a couple more rounds I wondered if they counted on me deciding “whatever I’m hungry”.

Had similar issues with coupon codes from other non food services too…

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

#60

Post by Zanfa »

pgrote wrote: post #18

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 u…

They don’t. All of the delivery companies are massively (as in billions) unprofitable with no reasonable path to profitability due to competition from other equally unprofitable VC funded companies.
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