Online Retailers Are Desperate to Stem a Surging Tide of Returns | Hacker News Reader

Online Retailers Are Desperate to Stem a Surging Tide of Returns

bloomberg.com

2 pointstim_sw3 comments

I don't know if I'm wired weirdly, but I vert rately return things. I really don't like dealing with customer service, and I kind of live by a "buyer beware" motto. One time amazon shipped me a broken AmazonBasics mouse. For $6.88 I said screw it, literally not worth my time, and just stopped doing business with Amazon.

On larger problems, I would issue a chargeback with my credit card company. I have won 4 of those for between $25 and $1500!!!

I used to have an Amazon seller account where I would ship video games and books. People who tried to return items and complain to Amazon were literally the death of my business. One chargeback wiped out the profits from 100 successful sales.

So like I said, I'm not sure if I'm wired differently, but I don't like this phenomenon and avoid it 99.99999% of the time.

> I really don't like dealing with customer service

Most online retailers (including Amazon) require zero interaction with customer service to return something. Some clothing stores actually send retail labels in the package itself.

> On larger problems, I would issue a chargeback

> One chargeback wiped out the profits from 100 successful sales

It's really wrong to issue a chargeback when the seller is willing to work something out, and it seems like you were bitten by the same type of behavior.

Amazon requires zero interaction? I didn't know, it's been a few years since I have interacted with them, and I always remember my friends and family having to call Amazon to fix some issue, which, good on Amazon for handling that process efficiently.

Any seller who is willing to automate returns and eat costs is good in my book. Sadly, as a small shop, I couldn't automate that process and couldn't eat many costs whether I was in the right or in the wrong. So it was a big problem when Amazon would just automatically side with the customer, no matter how hard I tried to work with them and prove my credibility.

Like I said, I try to avoid issuing chargebacks wherever I can, 99.9999% of my purchases are just fine. But I've charged back 2 plane tickets and 2 parking tickets, believe it or not, and my credit card company was just absolutely stellar in handling the situation for me, since the companies involved were totally corrupt and non responsive.

So the net net of all of this is, unless you have deep pockets to fund your customer service ops (an increasingly large cost center), you will probably get burned on chargebacks and returns.

This will only increase the centralization around Amazon and Walmart, which I would define as "not always a good thing".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com