Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1 • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#531

Post by mlyle » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:03 PM UTC

jquery wrote: post #507

franga2000 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, if the tracking doesn't say "picked up by recipient", a refund should be given no questions asked. It's then up to the seller and shipping company to figure out who screwed up amongst themselves.

You can purchase package insurance if you’re willing to go that far.

How do I purchase package insurance on something Amazon ships to me?

In theory, Amazon's T&C's attempt to pass on the risk of loss to me after delivery of the item to a carrier. In practice, this is far less clear, because of merchant agreements / cardholder agreements and overall FTC regulation of goods sold directly to consumers.

But it may be moot, anyways: if Amazon decides to screw me, they have a bunch of digital assets that they hold hostage and will remove my access to if I initiate a legal dispute or chargeback, even if I'm in the right.

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#532

Post by mlyle » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

asimpletune wrote: post #458

franga2000 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but where I'm from, consumer protection laws exist specifically so consumers don't have to sue in these cases. Providing a fair refund process is their legal duty, not a courtesy.

To me about how these infractions can be enforced without suing though?

If they make you sue when the case is clear-cut, good regulatory regimes charge punitive damages to discourage the customer-hostile behavior.

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#533

Post by cerved » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

rkk3 wrote: post #79

cerved wrote: post #52

I always record unboxing anything I buy online, it's a convenient way of proof of something is missing out damaged

At the end of the day most big companies have found its a better strategy to trust/not dispute customers in these situations. If they wanted to I don't think that would hold up, it's not as though you are opening it in a controlled supervised environment.

tbf I mostly do it for EBay type stuff

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#534

Post by throwawayboise » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:19 PM UTC

jquery wrote: post #505

eeegnu wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you accept the customer for cheap stuff but refuse to help him when he gets scammed on an expensive item, you are the bad, pathological, person/business. For every refund system you will unfortunately get people who attempt to game that system. They'll buy many negligible cost items without issue, then a single high cost item that they'll claim never arrived hoping they've outsmarted the store or algorithm. Thes…

There’s probably a lot of money for the first person who figures out how to solve this problem instead of complaining about evil uncaring business owners. Costco kinda figured it out, by charging a membership fee they got rid of most low LTV customers from the get-go. Unfortunately, their generous refund policy still got hacked by bad actors which is why they have a lot of restrictions around returning electronics. (…

If their refund policy was literally "accepting returns on anything for any reason" how is it "hacking" to return a laptop after a year?

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#535

Post by therein » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:25 PM UTC

This happened to me as well.

I was sent a A7sII box with a ziploc bag with the exact amount of cat litter to make the box as heavy as it should be.

I had sent Amazon photos back when this happened. They refunded me no problem. But I think they wouldn't do it today.

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#536

Post by CRConrad » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #503

felixfbecker wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why Amazon doesn't allow the customer to chose between multiple available shipping carriers. They do for returns, which is fantastic and one of the reasons I love buying on Amazon, because I can always chose to pick the carrier that has the office 1 minute walk away from my home that is never busy, instead of being forced to drive to some remote store and stand in line. If Amazon gave these choices to cus…

> I don't get why Amazon doesn't allow the customer to chose between multiple available shipping carriers. They do for returns... I assume because the volume of returns is much lower than the volume of sales, plus Amazon isn't responsible for coordinating the return. In essence, my suspicion is that at Amazon's scale they literally can't afford to let customers pick their own shipper. That's one variable too many to…

> In essence, my suspicion is that at Amazon's scale they literally can't afford to let customers pick their own shipper. That's one variable too many to manage for their massive logistics problem, and the expense of building out the support for that would never be recouped.

I don't get it. All the alternative carriers are obviously in their system already, since deliveries obviously get routed via all of them, and (presumably) some algorithm selects which one that is in each case. All it takes is to put one more selection field on the order (and I guess in the customer profile, for a personal default value) and then use that if provided and the algorithm only if not provided. What's so hugely complicated about that?

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#537

Post by Shacklz » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:44 PM UTC

aristophenes wrote: post #314

Shacklz wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thus is life. No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit. Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal wi…

The main thing to watch out for is monopolies. If customers always have enough choice then the customer and workforce satisfaction will get sorted out eventually, as those organizations will be selected for and companies won’t be able to exist without doing that right. It works really well, and is actually a strength of our free markets. Governments and committees stepping in and trying to fix the system tends to mak…

> For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been

That really depends on your point of view. For the average person on HN, upper middle class income or above? Sure thing, 100% agreed. Especially in the US however, if you're not part of that group, it would have been better to live 40-something years ago. Yes, you did not have all those fancy devices and cool tools that we have nowadays, but neither did anyone else, irrelevant of income.

> the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing

Irrelevant of whether this might be true for Amazon - what about health care? Telco? Public transport? Basic utilities like water, electricity?

The US is a prime example on why "neoliberal capitalism" (at least if we're speaking about it in the Reagan/Clinton sense) is a complete and utter failure - it is the only developed country with a declining life expectancy, the richest country on earth with a sizeable amount of the population having multiple jobs and still living from paycheck to paycheck.

Don't get me wrong, I get your point. But it is really important to try to take the perspective of those who are the losers of the system, and for those people the current time is _for sure_ not the best to be alive. They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time?

> Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better.

Relative to what? Compared to the "old experience" of having to go to a physical store - sure. But that's a damn low bar; everyone who can write a webpage can beat that these days. Amazon got where it is today because they straight-up ate the market, but not by being the best, but by being the ones who had the capital to sink everyone else before they went belly-up themselves (for how long is Amazon actually turning a profit? Not that far back, I reckon). In short, they played the market instead of letting the market play. And that's exactly my main gripe with what I'm calling 'neoliberal capitalism' here: The way Amazon played is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. It will continue to happen, until regulators kick in and set boundaries that go beyond anything what we can call neoliberal capitalism. It might still be a 'free market', it still allows for competition, but most definitely not in the barely-regulated sense that the neoliberal capitalism envisions.

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#538

Post by noduerme » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

jquery wrote: post #505

eeegnu wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you accept the customer for cheap stuff but refuse to help him when he gets scammed on an expensive item, you are the bad, pathological, person/business. For every refund system you will unfortunately get people who attempt to game that system. They'll buy many negligible cost items without issue, then a single high cost item that they'll claim never arrived hoping they've outsmarted the store or algorithm. Thes…

There’s probably a lot of money for the first person who figures out how to solve this problem instead of complaining about evil uncaring business owners. Costco kinda figured it out, by charging a membership fee they got rid of most low LTV customers from the get-go. Unfortunately, their generous refund policy still got hacked by bad actors which is why they have a lot of restrictions around returning electronics. (…

Well said. And "This is why we can't have nice things" sums up this whole thread pretty neatly.

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#539

Post by m0dest » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:51 PM UTC

cortesoft wrote: post #442

an_opabinia wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model isn’t aware of that stuff. They feed groups into the model, it might be grouped by zip code. But there isn’t a variable for zip code in the model. The model just forecasts LTV and nothing else, from transaction histories.

Do you know this because you work on the model?

That sounds like an unanswerable question.

Re: Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1

#540

Post by tharkun__ » Sun, May 30, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #499

miracle2k wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see regulation being the issue here. The law will oblige either of the two sides to carry the burden of proof. Either Amazon has to proof the package was delivered, or the customer has to proof it wasn't. If the other sides does not accept the proof received, it has to sue.

You can't prove a negative. There's effectively no way for a customer to prove a package wasn't delivered. Update: I should be clear, the shipper can prove it. The customer themselves can't without the shipper's acquiescence.

Nobody can really prove it. But each side can have some supporting evidence.

The shipper might be able to prove that the transport company picked up a package. Beyond that it's all hearsay if we are talking about fraudulent sellers.

The transport company might have evidence of a tracking number and thus most probably an actual package making it through the system. Shipments do get lost or stolen though. No way to prove anything really.

The customer can't prove it either. There are enough cases of packages with a tracking number having arrived at my and other people's doorsteps without the tracking ever showing that it happened. Why wouldn't the opposite be true? Driver just needs to scan package arrival not actually deliver. Of course there can be repercussions and I'd gather it's easier for a package to be stolen off other parts of the delivery chain. Anyway in this case both the shipper and customer have 'proof' / no proof to various degrees and in reality something 'fell off the truck'.

It's all about being convincing enough to whoever will be adjudicating this but 100% proof is impossible. The closest the customer could get I think would be 24h Video surveillance of their front entrance. No motion detection, just 24h continuous tape.