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Comment by helianer | Hacker News Reader

I’m pretty surprised by Amazon’s reaction to them. This is clearly a rip-off transaction, and Amazon has always been pretty customer friendly with me.

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I would take that claim with a grain of salt. The person already claims that she didn't agree to $1000 shipping, but I think it's safe to say that there wasn't a glitch with Amazon's payment processing, she just didn't see it.

There's probably some threshold (either a fixed amount or in conjunction with the purchase price) where shipping is obviously a scam or mistake. For most transactions, I expect a severe warning if your freight is more than $100 would be appropriate.

I agree. Amazon also absolutely wants to encourage behaviour where you don’t even think before buying, so scammy listings like this are hurt their strategy. The fact that they later delisted the seller shows that they recognised the abuse.

It is not safe to say that. I've been tracking this glitch for months and I estimate millions of dollars in fraudulent shipping charges have been added by sellers exploiting this glitch.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't test ordered and seen the charges with my own eyes.

Edit: go to https://www.amazon.com/Scalpmaster-Shampoo-Brush-Purple-Coun.... Place a 1-click order. Verify for yourself.

I can confirm this. It is an item for $0.01 with free shipping. Once you add it to your cart and go to checkout it adds $10 in shipping fees.

I got a generic response from support about sellers setting their own prices. I do not know if the "concern team" will actually look into this or get back to me but my question is being sent to them.

I will no longer be using 1-click ordering until I know this issue is resolved.

This seems at best a very bad bug / loophole for sellers to exploit or at worst a deceptive scam to steal from people. I hope Amazon takes this seriously and fixes it.

Also doing a 1 click purchase purchases it for $0.01 + $9.80 shipping, but the $9.80 shipping never shows up on the product page, during the purchase, or on the purchase completed page. You only see the $9.81 if you navigate to your purchase history and see it there.

I experienced the same thing. Here is my chat transcript:

---

Me: I placed a 1Click order and was charged more than the advertised price.

Prashant: Hi, I’m Prashant, I’ll be glad to help you from here

Prashant: May I've the last four digits of the order ID?

Me: 5844 For the Scalpmaster Shampoo Brush

Prashant: I see the item is being sold and shipped by a third party seller HEHENE who is charging

Me: The listing said “$0.01 & FREE Shipping” but I was charged $9.81

Prashant: $9.80 as shipping and handling.

Me: But the listing says “FREE Shipping” specifically

Prashant: Let me quickly check this for you.

Prashant: In this case, what best we can do is to refund the shipping and charges once the item is delivered.

Me: Ok, because I feel like this is false advertising. I clicked the “buy with one click” button expecting to be charged exactly what was shown (“$0.01 & FREE Shipping) but I was not.

Me: So you’re saying I should file a complaint once it shows up?

Prashant: I certainly understand your concern.

Prashant: You just need to contact us here and we will refund the shipping charges.

Me: Haven’t I just contacted you?

Prashant: We can refund the amount once the item is delivered.

That sounds like a robot or a person on a very tightly controlled chat script. Both are bad choices.

I'm very sad to hear this. This is what we became. Instead of human-to-human communication we have people forced to say illogical things/forbidden (and often unable) to actually solve problems. What a mess.

So Amazon is knowingly part of this scam. That does indeed explain a lot. They should be prosecuted for fraud, especially given that they've been alerted to the scam and have done nothing to stop it (and therefore are knowingly complicit). Amazon's a very scummy company. They don't hesitate to close accounts for no reason and keep the prime membership payments. It's not surprising to me to see evidence of outright fraud intentionally perpetrated by then too deceive customers. They might refund the few customers who notice and name a ton of money off the ones who don't.

Arrrgh, so that's what that is about. I thought I'd imagined things when I added an item slightly lower in price than the other sellers, and free shipping, I almost placed the order before realizing I was about to pay ~10 in shipping (on a free shipping order) needless to say I didn't go thru with the transaction and ordered form a different seller.

AMZ better cut this nonsense out right quick. It's annoying.

On a side note, I also dislike how for some items they want to put you on a recurring order. Almost did that a couple of times --and now I'm careful when clicking to read the button.

These things are very customer unfriendly.

Do you happen to remember the item?

I'm sorry, no. IIRC, it was with a corp account --order quite a bit of things, so I can't recall what in particular it was. But has stuck in my mind.

Wow, wtf.

So in the "other sellers" section with seemingly more normal prices, <<$1.01 + Free Shipping Sold by: ATammy>> they have the same effect. Huge 8-10 shipping charges once you continue to checkout, but still not visible in the cart.

What a scam!

That is unbelievable. I just emailed jeff@amazon.com about this scam.

If a customer doesn't intentionally accept $1000 shipping charges, a properly run business would recognize this as a problem with their service design when they do end up with $1000 shipping charges.

The alternative is to have a slowly growing public understanding that dealing with them is equivalent to gambling. If they're happy with that, then OK.

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