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

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

#561

Post by ______- »

I never buy anything over $150 on Amazon, because the pricier the thing(s) you want, the more it hurts when it doesn't arrive at all. Not that I would be happy losing $150, but it's better losing that than $1500 (or more!).

I also drip feed items to my doorstep instead of doing one huge order with many items in it, that way I compartmentalize the order so that if a small order doesn't arrive, I can live with it. This should be common sense, but some people are so impatient that they have to have everything in one big order rather than span the items out over time.

Also if I want some expensive gadget like a laptop / iPad or whatever, I go to my local brick and mortar store for that. Buying high-spec luxury goods on Amazon is a bad idea.

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

#562

Post by avianlyric »

CRConrad wrote: post #536
macintux wrote: post #503

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... 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 (…

I suspect the wield this lack of choice as a weapon against the carriers. They go to each carrier and say, "that a healthy looking Amazon contract you've got there. Shame if we suddenly stopped sending packages your way", then squeeze them for price. Harder to do that if Amazon let their customer pick the carrier.

I've certainly been part of something very similar, where a company has multiple suppliers providing the same service. Near contract renewal time we would move our volume on their competitors to remind them that they needed us more than we needed them. It was a very effective way to get them to keep lowering their prices as the years went on.

There is also probably also a logistics piece as well. Amazon will be shipping products to carriers last mile hubs or similar themselves, rather than having a carrier handle the entire distance. Which makes it cheaper for Amazon. So carrier will also be picked based on which hub is nearest to one of Amazons warehouses, how full the Amazon truck going there is, which warehouse has the product etc

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

#563

Post by mlyle »

tlogan wrote: post #415
an_opabinia wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm afraid of being downvoted, but the algorithm for an Amazon return looks something like: Your LTV = Forecasting total revenue from your transactions so far Revenue = The sum of your past transactions Refund? = LTV - Revenue - Refund Cost > 0 This is a much simpler, much more logical model. It appears everywhere, like with credit card disputes or when you get service discounts to not leave. Because when you don't g…

This is 100% correct. Even our small business have rules like this: good customers will get refunds, discounts, etc. Bad ones (pathological ones) - we just try to get rid of them ASAP and no refunds. Because we do not want them to use our service anyway. At the very beginning we were thinking that good vs bad should also include our support costs - not just LTV. But that is amazingly correlated: high LTV means that u…

Does this apply to things where it obviously went wrong? E.g. if someone bought a 5lb item, and they pointed out you shipped them a 1lb box-- no refunds even then, if they're an undesirable customer?

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

#564

Post by ycombobreaker »

eeegnu wrote: post #488
TacticalCoder wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bad ones (pathological ones) - we just try to get rid of them ASAP and no refunds. A customer "not buying much" is not "bad". If you accept his money for cheap stuff, he is your customer. There's a difference between an honest customer who usually doesn't buy much and then buys something expensive and is getting sadly scammed and a customer trying to rob you. If you accept the customer for cheap stuff but refuse to…

> 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…

Trust seems to be the main issue for large purchases, but individual retailers cannot (and probably should not) know enough about a customer to trust them.

Could the retail organization use a physically distributed escrow service to somehow tie payment to physical goods delivery? That essentially outsources the "brick and mortar" aspect to a third party and removes delivery risk. Amazon and Currency Exchange, for example, can have a much healthier economic relationship than Amazon and me.

Alternatively, this sounds like it could be addressed as a sort of "consumer protection" insurance similar to my homeowners or auto insurance. I file a claim so insurance covers legitimate large losses. Risk is pooled and the underwriter is the organization that is evaluating my trustworthiness, not the individual retailers.

Just ideas off the cuff, maybe there are huge holes here.

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

#565

Post by secabeen »

blihp wrote: post #541
throwawayboise wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That policy assumed good faith on the part of the consumer. The original thinking was likely 'OK, if they return it after it's because it was a lemon/never worked right/etc' rather than for abusive reasons like 'TV returned right after Superbowl Sunday' (because they had their party and no longer need it) or 'returned laptop after 6 months' (because the school/work project ended and they no longer need it) So the ass…

Yep. The same thing happened with LLBean. They used to offer lifetime returns/warranty replacement on all items, which worked when people acted in good faith. After many decades of this policy, a gray market of used LLBean items emerged, people would buy multi-decade-old used LLBean items, then "return" them as worn out for a new one or even a full refund. It became a whole cottage industry, and they now have a one-year limit on their any-reason return policy.

People suck, especially when they are disconnected from the human side of business.

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

#566

Post by heavyset_go »

Shacklz wrote: post #537
aristophenes wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

The majority of people making over $100k a year voted for Trump, and those numbers jump even higher if we look at race and income, where white people making over $100k were much more likely to vote for Trump.

Similarly, look at the economic demographics of the people who were able to afford to travel to DC on or before January 6th, and the people who attacked the Capitol. I saw a lot of relatively wealthy business owners break into the Capitol, even some IT company owners.

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

#567

Post by tharkun__ »

s_fischer wrote: post #381
kevinmchugh wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've moved more of my shopping away from Amazon I've noticed that lots and lots of online retailers are now competitive on the logistics side. Fast shipping is now table stakes.

I'll go one further and say that some are actually quicker than Amazon. I've recently bought two different items from bestbuy.com that I would have normally bought from Amazon when prime shipping actually took two days. In both cases bestbuy's free shipping could get the items to my house 1 day quicker than amazon so I went with them.

Amazon is also I think still trying to push prime on people. It used to be that stuff arrived basically overnight for me when I bought early enough the day before. When they started prime we suddenly started waiting for our regular free shipping packages. And you can't tell me it's because of volumes and they had to introduce prime. This literally started overnight when prime was introduced, not slowly getting worse until you could pay for priority.

They basically just have the order sit around, sometimes with the tracking number already created and in the system but it takes 3 or 4 days before the shipment actually leaves their facilities. They basically have an incentive not to be fast now unlike when they started out and the fast an free shipping was one of their great selling points over other online retailers.

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

#568

Post by pnutjam »

rantwasp wrote: post #486
wpietri wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfectly believable. The thing I really loved about Amazon is that they had their act together. But that has declined drastically over the decades; now whenever I actually have to deal with them it seems like there's a ton of internal chaos. In June 2018, I ordered a soccer magazine, "Futbol Total", for my soccer-mad nephew. It said it would arrive in 4-16 weeks, which seemed weird. I waited it out, and no magazine.…

so, at what point is legitimate to involve the Credit Card company? you don’t even need to actually do it, tell cs you will do it unless it gets here in x days. issue a chargeback and move on.

BB lost a part of an order, just a $3 thermal paste. Luckily the heat sink came with some. I couldn't dispute it with BB, post office blew me off, and since it was only about 10% of the order I couldn't dispute with cc.

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

#569

Post by smsm42 »

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. (…

I love Costco return policy and we bought a lot of stuff there just because "well, if we don't like it we can just return it anytime" (and we did like it and never returned it) over the years, but I've seen some ridiculous returns there. From people treating returns as a zero-cost rentals to buying a tree, failing to water it until it's dead and then returning it. They still have very generous policy and I would hate to see it ruined by people who're just taking an unfair advantage of it and ruining it for everybody.

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

#570

Post by DSingularity »

wpietri wrote: post #428
ageitgey wrote: post #215

Like most people, I've ordered a lot of packages (hundreds?) on Amazon and almost never had a problem. In the rare case of a problem, Amazon would instantly refund me. But almost all those orders are under $1000. Everything changes when you have a problem with an expensive order. Amazon has a price threshold where the support system is different and the normal CS people are powerless. During lockdown, I ordered a Son…

Perfectly believable. The thing I really loved about Amazon is that they had their act together. But that has declined drastically over the decades; now whenever I actually have to deal with them it seems like there's a ton of internal chaos. In June 2018, I ordered a soccer magazine, "Futbol Total", for my soccer-mad nephew. It said it would arrive in 4-16 weeks, which seemed weird. I waited it out, and no magazine.…

Declined over the decades? Decades?
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