All the rest of us then receive "new" articles from Amazon that have been opened, played around and returned by these people.
Tell tale sign in the article:
"[..] said the majority of items he returned were high-value electronic items that had failed. He had chosen to cancel problematic purchases rather than wait for Amazon to simply exchange the item."
He had no intention to get an exchange, because he had no intention to ever buy those articles.
Who returns dozens of items in a year?! That's like the picky customer that no restaurant wants to have to deal with.
Someone that's doing tens of thousands of dollars of business with Amazon a year. You know, the most "valuable" customers Amazon seems to hate for giving them so much fucking money.
Shops are entitled to refuse a sale, or ban a customer, so are Amazon.
Having said that 10% failure rate doesn;t seem impossible. I've certainly gone through phases where it seems everything I bought this month is cursed :)
I used to hang around Caraudioforum years ago, and it was a "thing" to buy cheap subwoofers from Walmart and experiment with them, like plugging them into an electrical outlet. Then return them, no questions asked. This is not new.
For parts like electronics, I of course want a replacement. I've had to RMA a motherboard and a hard drive in two separate instances over the past decade. In both cases I really wanted the replacements to ship quickly, because I was waiting on them to finish a build!
I'm also not sure if that is legal in he EU.
If there's something missing or noticeable they'll tell you in the listing.
I don't do it myself because I consider it against my ethical code to buy something with the intent of returning it in order to effectively get a free rental, but I totally consider the appeal. Hell, I'd love to have a fancy telescope to play around with for free for a week.
Others order 5 cameras and lenses, select one, and send 4 back to Amazon.
It makes sense for Amazon to eat losses in returns, since the goodwill it generates offsets the a comparatively tiny losses it has to eat. But at some point you have to draw a line with obviously abusive customers. 37 returns in 3 years in not something that happens to a regular unlucky guy. It's the pattern you see in the guy who buys the 50" plasma screen a week before the Superbowl then returns it the day after. It's a guy you don't want as your customer.
Examples include oral-b toothbrush heads and "genuine" apple laptop batteries.
I don't understand why Amazon wouldn't trend towards a restocking fee if they were really concerned about this type of customer. And it seems like they generate way more bad will (and likelihood of lawsuits and regulations) for stuff like not refunding gift card balances. But it's their biz so, whatever.
> However, we will not give any refund for termination related to conduct that we determine, in our discretion, violates these Terms or any applicable law, involves fraud or misuse of the Prime membership, or is harmful to our interests or another user.
IANAL, but would that not constitute an unfair contract term under UK law?
http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/dick-smiths-w...
It seems that while it's a slimy thing to do, it's apparently legal. Gift cards aren't money.
Not worth the hassle unless the balance was more than a few hundred quid or purely out of principal.
https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money/court-fees
Just bear in mind there is the time of preparing your claim and a hearing fee to pay also.
It seems to me that there are certain kinds of items where, like toasters and countertop dishwashers, where Amazon has a dozen lazily branded versions of the same (low quality, guaranteed to fail in a year) OEM product, no mid-range, and then 1-3 high-end ones for 5* the price of the low quality tier.
Most of the Amazon reviews already game the system trying to get as many upvotes as possible (the latest trend is posting some 10 page meaningless "comparison" of X product and Y,Z,T competitors), but Vine Voice is even worse. Have yet to see anything under 4 stars.
After returning that, I got a warning email from Amazon telling me to read the return policy. I think I was close to being banned.
I've also bought a number of items that turned out to be defective on arrival. Returned all of those.
I will tell you story from other end - I sell few private labeled products via Amazon as a third party seller. I had instances where people return supplement bottle with reason "Do not match description on website". Bottle is unopened, picture is exact picture of the product, description is the same. The only reason for return is - "Changed my mind", but it will cost $5.5 to ship back in that case, that's why "Not as described".
As a result this costs amazon few bucks for return shipping, it costs me few bucks for "pick and pack" fees.
So do not assume automatically customers are always right. There are people who takes advantage of it.
We all need to work together:
1) sellers needs to listen to customers and bring high quality product
2) amazon needs to weed out sellers with poor quality of service
3) amazon needs to weed out buyers who either take advantage of the system, or just never learn a lesson about "if it look cheap, it is probably a junk" (and this is because buyer can take an advantage)
4) buyers - be responsible and think about consequences of you actions. And not blame everybody else. Also, try to work out with amazon/seller - there is no shame in reaching out and explaining problems. Most likely you problems will be solved.
Only via such iterative way whole ecosystem can grow into convenient and efficient thing of tomorrow.
Then, what happens is that new sellers enter the market and undercut you...until they figure out they are losing money.
The trouble is, there's no end to the pipeline of new sellers :)
Also, sellers already get kicked out from Amazon quite often for not being responsible. Now we see other side to be forced to be responsible. If anything - this is good tendency, unless government or media will intervene.
Edit: Turns out the real content of the closure message is available online:
http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/amazoncom-seattle-...
It includes the following line: "If you require additional assistance, or have any concerns, feel free to contact us directly at account-appeals@amazon.com."
This was conveniently left out of the story, and there is also no mention of his appeal made in the article.
I've had slight water damage, individual pages printed in light gray instead of black, scratched DVDs and so on.
I'd estimate that 30% of Amazon deliveries had some defect that would warrant a return.
Therefore, rather than feel that they are being cheated, they decline to have the person as a customer any longer. Whilst I find it hard on the customer if they have unused gift cards on their account, I have no problem with Amazon choosing not to deal with a customer that deliberately is trying to exploit the company.
It is no different to a physical shop declining the custom of any walk-in customer. That is their right, as it is our right to spend our money there or not.
What if those 37 returns were mostly in a row? Or mixed in with questionable chargebacks? Or ?
There is one thing Amazon says that seems like a clue here "In a tiny fraction of cases we are forced to close accounts where we identify extreme account abuse."
Chances are, banned customers are buying expensive products with no intention to ever keep them to:
- "Test" the latest gadget for a few weeks.
- "Review" for their "Youtube review" or forum friends.
Note, that he did nothing wrong, he violated no Amazon rules, violated no laws, and still got fucked by Amazon. This is how Amazon treats its loyal customers. I had about ~$100 of returns when they closed my account after I had been doing $10-20k of business with them for years on a paid Prime account opened in the late 90's. There are a lot of defective products that Amazon sells and the mere nature of online commerce dictates that there will be a lot of returns. To randomly close people's accounts, stealing their products, money, and even AWS computing resources, that's fucking criminal.
"How easy it is to set up an alternative account remains to be seen."
No, it doesn't. You cannot set up another Amazon account (you can but they will close it) and neither can your family or I assume anyone living at your address, ever agin. In fact, your family's accounts will also be closed if not at the same time, soon thereafter. Just in case Amazon didn't fuck you hard enough, they will also fuck your family over too.
If this is how Amazon wants to continue doing business, fine. They can continue to fuck over their customers because they're big enough and we can't do anything about it. It makes Walmart look saintly in their practices. Fuck Amazon. I hope more people realize what's happening and boycott this piece of shit company.
And if you have AWS resources, you should really think to yourself if this is the kind of company you want to trust with all your computing resources, a company that will for no reason and without warning close your account and likely kill your company in the process?
