Banned by Amazon for returning faulty goods | Hacker News Reader

Banned by Amazon for returning faulty goods

theguardian.com

76 pointseginhard87 comments

If you follow electronic forums or photo forums, for many people it's common practice to order new electronic or photo toys and return them, with no intention to ever buy them. They boast how clever they are.

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.

Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine buying a large TV, having it fail or arrive DOA, then, rather than getting a replacement, saying "give me my money back". Maybe once or twice.

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.

Yeah. The only things I've ever returned and didn't want replacements for were cheap junk. I took a gamble on a $5 pair of touchscreen gloves, and of course they were worthless (didn't work at all, and weren't even that warm), and I got my money back.

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 can count on one hand the number of online orders I've had to return in the past five years. Usually it's RMAing an electronic device that was DOA, or a product that looked iffy on the order page and ended up being complete junk. Now, to Amazon's detriment, there's a lot of things I don't even attempt to buy on it anymore because there's so much low quality junk being sold.

Who returns dozens of items in a year?! That's like the picky customer that no restaurant wants to have to deal with.

"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.

I spend in the 10's of thousands range with Amazon and I return at most a dozen items a year.

Based on the wording used in the article he was buying big ticket items and returning, not replacing, them. That always tosses a red flag.

Based on my own experience and that of my family members, what you buy and return is irrelevant. The monetary value also seems irrelevant. My account was closed for returning around $100 worth of junk, mostly broken shoes and clothes that don't fit. A lot of shoes and clothes on Amazon are just cheap crap and break all the time, but they'll still close your account for returning too many of them. The point is, returning 10% or even 30% of the shit Amazon sells is not only reasonable, it's to be expected given the quality--or lack thereof--of products on Amazon, especially in certain categories. And even returning big ticket items happens all the time. I bought a 4k 40" monitor that was broken and multiple Roomba-like robots that all broke amongst other things.

There is just absolutely no excuse for what Amazon is doing here. If they want such a policy it should be public. Otherwise, they're just fucking over their customers arbitrarily. It's that simple. If people want to defend Amazon in this matter, that's fine, but let's be perfectly clear about the fact the customers have done nothing wrong by definition in all these cases. Amazon policy clearly does not state any limits on returns. In fact, the availability of a paid Prime membership whose only purpose (that's actually worth any money) is to allow for quick shipments and simple, quick returns would suggest that they have a policy that accepts returns.

For all intents and purposes, Amazon does not allow returns. If there is a chance you might be stuck with a shitty, defective product because Amazon refuses to follow its published policy, they might as well not even have such a policy since it's meaningless.

This company can't even follow its own written policies. It's clear they don't give a fuck about any of their customers. And yet we still trust these assholes with our computing infrastructure, digital goods, and worst of all money?

Stop buying junk! How many times do you have to be bitten before you establish some kind of quality floor on your purchases? There's entire categories of products that I won't buy on Amazon because the odds of getting shit are too high. There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.

> Amazon policy clearly does not state any limits on returns.

Amazon is a private company. They are not required to do business with you. That's in their policy too. Returns are guaranteed; your continued ability to do business with them is not. Though why you keep going back to them after they keep selling you items of such inferior quality I can't discern.

Sure, blame the victim.

As if I'm supposed to know that Amazon--or any other company--will throw a hissy-fit when I'm using their product according to their own rules. Now I have to be both a mind reader and fortune teller just to buy things online?

You're being hyperbolic. You bought a lot of stuff and returned a lot of stuff, and now you can't buy any more stuff from Amazon. You are not a "victim" because they no longer want you as a customer.

The examples in the article showed people were returning 10-30% of their purchases. Servicing these customers is not sustainable for retailers. Return policies do vary by retailer, manufacturer and product . It is common to load up returns on a pallet and auction them to the reseller/flipper market around 75% off.

Walmart has no problems with them. What you're essentially saying (I think) is that generic online retailers cannot handle the amount of returns they need to to stay in business so they need to get rid of customers to stay profitable. Seems spot on to me.

Retail stores do prohibit returns for people that abuse the returns process. You've never had a retail store ask for your driver's license to process a return? They're doing it to enter your information into their system, to determine if it's abuse.

Walmart is a retailer that does this. https://liquidations.walmart.com I don't know if they work on tracking returns by user, but they take a decent loss on returns. Without anonymous cash purchasers, it's easy for Amazon to filter out abusers.

If Amazon restocks returned items and sells them as new, I'd say Amazon is to blame for the situation that you depict.

I'm also not sure if that is legal in he EU.

They don't. They sell them via Amazon Warehouse as second hand, often in perfect condition but with opened packaging. Sometimes minor scratches etc. It can be a great way to buy some things.

If there's something missing or noticeable they'll tell you in the listing.

40% or so of the items sold on Amazon are 3rd party sales, where the seller could potentially be re-selling returns as new items.

True.

I've learnt from experience to be very wary of 3rd party sales on Amazon. So much cheap crap. Never understood why Amazon cheapen their site with much of it!

It's ruined the quality of the Amazon brand to me. I used to buy a lot more on Amazon than I do now. There's so much junk on there, a lot of it of such poor quality that it should never be sold at all, and then there's also a lot of counterfeits. God help you if you ever want to buy, say, a replacement phone or laptop battery, or charger.

I buy a lot on Amazon and I had a very odd experience the other day for the first time. I ordered a board game expansion and when I received it there was a sticker from Amazon Warehouse deals on it. I certainly didn't order that and the item was slightly damaged so I replaced it with a new item instead. But it was the first time they ever sent a AWD item instead of a new item.

It's a continuation of buying clothes on the high street for a night out, then returning for refund after.

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'm not sure I understand what the motivation is for doing this with electronics? To try them out? Who would want a camera that you can only use for like a week or so?

That's plenty motivation. Who doesn't want to keep up with the latest hardware? You can figure out most of what there is to figure out about something after a week with it.

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.

Some want to play with new cameras, show that they have them, post to forums but don't have the money.

Others order 5 cameras and lenses, select one, and send 4 back to Amazon.

> Others order 5 cameras and lenses, select one, and send 4 back to Amazon.

I have been tempted to do this. It makes deciding on a purchase very easy. Now that I've read this I will not do it. Maybe this is Amazon PR to discourage people like me.

Seems entirely reasonable to shut off a customer like this.

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.

Have you actually used Amazon in Europe?

Yes, regularly. Never had to return a thing.

There are categories of products on Amazon where the majority of the listings are counterfeit products. One could easily face returning a product 3 or four times before finding a listing that is what it claims to be (or before giving up and finding a retailer that isn't trying to defraud you).

Examples include oral-b toothbrush heads and "genuine" apple laptop batteries.

Are these sold by amazon or marketplace sellers?

>Dispatched from and sold by Amazon

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-TriZone-Electric-Toothbrush-R...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-Precision-Clean-Toothbrush-Re...

See the various reviews about them coming apart and cutting people in the mouth. Being able to scrape off the logo with a fingernail is the usual giveaway.

My impression here is that some people are getting fakes, possibly because they are buying from marketplace sellers. The reviews don't distinguish but the number of positive reviews suggests this?

That said, one has to ask why Oral B, and others, are allowing their brands to be tarnished in this way. I'm assuming there are many more dissatisfied customers who don't take the trouble to leave a review?

If you expand the replies to most of the unfavorable reviews, it becomes clear that the fakes are from marketplace sellers, and not the main listing. As you say though, Amazon and Oral B should be doing something about it.

Because of this I only buy items that Amazon ships and sells if the item is a brand name item that is widely available. (Fulfilled by Amazon can be ok if buying from a brand that has chosen to have Amazon do all their fulfillment.) The amount of deceptive, substandard, and counterfeit crap on Amazon's site is enormous and they don't seem to be trying to do anything about it.

At what point do you simply stop trying to buy these items from Amazon? I don't purchase everything from there; it's good for some things, terrible for others. Mailing stuff back is a pain.

Even if the returns are genuine, it appears that puts him at over a 10% return rate. That's stratospheric - I believe 1% or less is a more typical range.

Don't forget the historical context here too: physical stores don't have costs in return shipping for unhappy customers, and this was as much a move to ease customer concerns about online shopping earlier on. Amazon isn't paying register employees and gets a lot of expense saving out of that, in return they probably were going to have to expect a greater rate of return. He also had a return rate of 10%, so maybe labeling the guy as a total problem customer is a bit much.

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.

Also in the UK returns on Amazon are free, so it must be costing them quite a bit.

So the customer didn't do anything wrong but Amazon should be able to lie to him about their policies and fuck him over when its convenient for them just to make a few extra dollars. Yeah, that seems really reasonable to me.

I've encountered so many defective or questionable products on Amazon lately. I basically have no trust what I receive any more. I even had issues returning items. I've started buying directly from companies, or offline in real stores more often.

Same here (Prime customer for the last 6 years). Their drop-down menu for the reason for a return doesn't have an option for "is complete crap, but couldn't tell from the reviews because of all the Vine Voice and company shrills." I end up paying the shipping back, when I could almost always return the equivalent item to a brick-and-mortar store without a charge.

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.

Thank you. I've e-mailed support/Jeff asking for a way to disable Vine Voice reviews from showing up, but no dice yet.

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.

I'd like a way to report items I don't buy as bogus/fake/spam to help eliminate all this noise: https://twitter.com/JohnTHaller/status/648883968201355264

Me too, I bought a $1k cycling trainer that turned out to be defective. Bought my replacement directly from the manufacturer.

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 see a lot of complaints about how Amazon dealt with this customer.

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.

I don't see an easy solution here. Sellers end up raising prices to compensate for these kind of buyers.

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 :)

And there is no end to the pipeline of new buyers who expect miracles to happen, i.e. quality product, which normally cost $100, to buy with shipping for $10.

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.

Sounds doubtful to me that under EU law, a company can simply deny access to funds in a gift card, even if it's not actual money. Sounds like something a small claims court should be able to resolve, has anyone tried it?

I don't think that they could legally do that in many US states either - many states have laws regarding how long gift cards have be accepted, and some never allow balances to expire.

> Sounds like something a small claims court should be able to resolve...

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.

I don't know about EU law, but in Australia we just had an electronics company (Dick Smith) go into administration and refused to honour all gift cards, even though they continued selling gift cards while they were searching for an administrator:

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.

A company in bankruptcy is completely different from one in normal operation. Accepting gift cards during bankruptcy proceedings is against the law, even.

The article mentions a case where Amazon Prime membership wasn't refunded. The Amazon Prime terms state that it would be refunded on termination. However, it also has the following term:

> 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?

Prime memberships are not refunded upon termination.

Actually closing the account is dumb, it would be more fair to just stop the account from buying stuff (still allowing to see videos, etc..). And mostly in the current world I doubt it's useful to block them forever..

I'm guessing that Amazon suspect that the user is doing something that they feel is deliberately untoward, but that they cannot prove.

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.

Not enough info here to really render an opinion. Since Amazon won't discuss it, you're hearing only one side of the issue.

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."

Amazon doesn't have the best PR lately. A few months ago it was in the news on the harsh working condition, and now it is shutting down customer accounts. Most likely Amazon has its own reason, but the information so far doesn't shed any light on if the customer has indeed abused the system.

Also there is a campaign against amazon in the UK. Politically motivated in the case of the guardian and some other reason (maybe 'top gear' or a general fear of future competition) from the bbc.

Amazon doesn't like to ban customers.

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.

I returned 20 items in 2015 alone. Half were shit products returned shortly after purchase, the other half were probably unused still in packaging. Only one was electronic. They have tightened up return policy, often you must choose "wrong description" just to get it returned fairly. I'm pretty sure this person abused the return policy. I'll also say the QC on items sold has gone down significantly. There is so much shit on there now, it really ruins the amazon experience.. I really don't enjoy returning stuff, it stresses me out every time.

Amazon also happens to close seller accounts with equal ease (and no explanation, of course): http://aaron.kavlie.net/amazon-com-just-closed-my-seller-acc...

And it depends what they buy. A 5-10% return rate for hard drives isn't unreasonable.

Within 30 days? Yes it is.

DOA are very frequent with hard drives, particularly WD in my experience.

Are you claiming here it is normal that one out of every 10 WD hard disks sold are defective by the time they reach the customer? That's a very bold and frankly ridiculous sounding claim.

Backblaze does a thorough hard drive reliability report, here's their latest:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-201...

Those stats quote AFR not IMR. The OP was talking about infant mortality.

For the avoidance of doubt, I count as infant mortality when a new hard drive would drop from a hardware RAID array during initial construction of the array (we are talking about NAS drives). Not just "the drive will not start".

Well, let's see, I bought 4 x Toshiba 5TB HDDs from Amazon.

Within 3 months, 2 of them had failed (not completely dead, but reporting a high number of unrecoverable sectors). I probably just hit a bad batch.

So yes, if somebody unlike me took the time to thoroughly burn-in their drives, they might well return 1 out of 10 within the 30-day period.

Just blatantly dismissing another post, without providing any evidence of your own at all is just a bit douchey. At least suggest your own experiences, or even better, point to some sources or statistics to back up your point.

The above is my own experiences - but as noted, I may have just hit a bad batch.

If you look at BackBlaze's results:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-...

You can see that some problematic drives (cough Seagate cough*) had failure rates around 20-25%...

The last time I checked, as shipped by Amazon in the US without any care in packing as reported in feedback, I'd expect that or a higher defective rate for any manufacturer.

Been a few years since I've bought any, but with any luck Newegg is still packing them well.

As covercash commented, this is pretty much in line with the blackblaze statistics, and also when you buy a hard drive on amazon, whether from amazon or from the market place, the chance that the HD has been damaged in transit is much higher than if the drive came directly to the datacenter from the manufacturer.

Even if the average is lower than that, it wouldn't be surprising for any particular buyer to have above-average DOA rates. After all some buyers have below-average rates.

I ordered 4 a few months back and 3 were DOA. (I suspect the shitty way they were packages was to blame). WD replaced them all & the new ones have been fine ever since, but either way, i could easily believe those failure rates from my experience.

Fortunatly they were WD red's so they sorted them all out without hassle & the new drives have been fine ever since.

No it's not. I work on a team that tests drives for a living. Typical infant mortalitity rates are .05 to 1 percent.

I received a hard drive from Amazon, loose in a large box with some cardboard stuffed on top. Unsurprisingly it was DOA.

Books shipped by Amazon in Europe often have defects to the point that I suspected that Amazon has a deal with publishing houses to sell B-quality.

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.

That's also my experience. Horrible quality from some major publishers they sell.

Inconsequential fluff piece. Complaining, unverifiable claims, no mention of lawyer.

It's England. Lawyers are a measure of last resort here, not a first response.

He's dealing with Amazon, an american company. They won't listen to anything else. Heck, according to the article they've explicitly said they won't listen to anything else since they've told him not to contact their support.

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.

He's dealing with Amazon Europe Core SARL, and Amazon EU SARL which are not American companies. Their addresses are both: 5 Rue Plaetis, L-2338, Luxembourg.

Their registered adresses don't matter when their policies are dictated by the american head company. They're not somehow magically free to make 100% their own decisions just because they're in another country.

Their registered addresses matter because it dictates which laws they obey to.

Exactly correct, and thus, after talking to said appeals email, a lawyer should be the next step.

They have to make different decisions, because the laws in other countries are different.

"He emailed Amazon to point out the unfairness in closing accounts based on unpublished limits of legitimate returns, but says he received a standard response refusing to reopen his account."

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?

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