Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of a Sony A1
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
During lockdown, I ordered a Sony camera and lens that was in the $5k+ range. The package went "missing" with the shipper with obvious fake tracking data, like multiple "customer not home" delivery attempts timestamped at 12am in the morning. The packages never showed up. Amazon kept saying it was the shipper's fault and the shipper said it was Amazon's responsibility. Lots of tweets, etc, got me nowhere.
In the end Amazon finally refunded me, but it was a nightmare. They wouldn't even talk to me until I waited a number of days after the package was late and even then all they would say is that it had to be escalated to management who would review the issue eventually. Even when they finally agreed the package was lost, I had to wait for another management review to actually get the refund issued. They had my money tied up for weeks with no recourse for a package they never even delivered. I can only imagine how bad it would be if the shipper claimed it was delivered.
My recommendation is to skip Amazon for anything expensive or at high risk of shipper theft/fraud. Your customer experience will not be the same as when they lose a $10 package. They will treat you like a criminal no matter what your past history with Amazon is.
Same with steam (that takes a big money cut and their buggy launcher is awful)
Or you could just ask your local store to order it for you and you would have it in a week. It's not like this was an unusual situation.
Nowadays, I'm not going to pay full price to wait for a week either, but there are alternatives to Amazon.
If you care a lot about the price, you already need to consider other shops, since Amazon isn't necessarily the cheapest anyway.
I have ordered one thing from Amazon in the past five years, where the manufacturer only sold to consumers through Amazon.
This is not me shilling Walmart. I've been pleasantly surprised by it in the last year, and find it to be a real competitor to shopping at Amazon.
The only problem I've had over the past year or two was with a headset that didn't work properly. I returned it via a UPS will pick up the box and slap on a shipping label option. They never did. But there was eventually a tracking number in the system anyway. UPS basically shrugged and said that the computer says it was picked up. But the refund went through anyway. I assume Amazon decided that UPS had picked it up and lost it.
Somewhere around $1,000-ish seems to be the magic threshold where their rules change and you get lost in the management void.
Some examples:
Random camera: Amazon: 2000 €, any photo dealer: 1800 €
Random high-end lens: Amazon: 2500 €, photo dealer: 2000 €
Random microphone: Amazon: 275 €, A/V distributor: 220 €
Studio microphone: Amazon: <not authorized to sell>, A/V distributor: 600 €
And that's before considering that Amazon is probably going to ship more slowly (even on prime) than most other "pro" dealers, and that Amazon is probably going to throw a box in a more or less empty parcel, while someone at a proper dealer will actually bother to package the stuff correctly.
I decided to think on it for a day, and sure enough by the next day B&H had the same price. Pretty sure it was a manufacturer discount but in general I think they try to match prices.
Also, people new to a hobby won't know that B&H, or Thomann, or Sweetwater, etc, also have great customer support like Amazon.
You can’t call Amazon and ask them what equipment you need to accomplish a task. Among many other differences…
Was only trying to improve the info you offered a bit more.
Or were you afraid of getting banned from Amazon?
I'm sure the shipper was who lost/stole the package. But my point is that you can't take your great support experience with Amazon buying $50 sheets and expect that you get the same experience when they lose something expensive. For expensive or specialist items, you can often get the item faster and cheaper going to a different retailer despite how all your experience buying cheap stuff on Amazon tells you otherwise.
In both cases bestbuy's free shipping could get the items to my house 1 day quicker than amazon so I went with them.
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.
Based on this, as you say, "rare" experience? That seems unwise when aiming for the best average outcome.
Also what would be a better alternative (provided you still want to shop and pay online)? I suspect that, while the rate of problematic experience might be slightly lower with smaller dealers, the average lost value for the customer is not (since there is no Amazon middleman that has any financial interest in keeping the customer around for future shopping, and hence their money is probably just lost when something goes wrong that the dealer is unable or unwilling to resolve)
They even screwed up and shipped a cancelled order, I was on the other side of the world when I saw the e-mail and by the time they were satisfied I really was me their attempt to intercept the package failed. $500 worth of stuff sat on our front porch for 10 days and was still there when we got back. (We live in a low-crime area and our front porch makes it basically impossible to see a package from the street unless it's large. A porch pirate would have to come to within 10' of the door to see most things, they'll go elsewhere where they don't have to be so obvious.)
One of the early-on Prime benefits for me was fairly deterministic delivery. At a time when I ordered lot of physical books, CDs, and DVDs, the minimum amount for free shipping wasn't a big deal. But random order arrivals when I was traveling much of the time were.
If they want to purchase insurance on their package, that's their choice. On the flip side if they want to "self insure" by not doing so, and assuming that on average they would pay more for insurance than insurance would pay them, that's also their choice.
Either way I'm certainly not going to purchase insurance myself, paying extra money to mitigate their risk.
-edit-
If you think we're centralized and you're "downvoting to disagree" at least have some decency to explain how we're centralized. There is nothing that Amazon sells that I can't buy an alternative product at a dozen other retailers for comparable prices, for example.
Due to network effects, there often aren't good alternatives for social media like Facebook or collaborative cloud tools like Google docs.
For games, it's not unusual for indy games to only release on Steam. Even when there is a physical release, that option is becoming increasingly difficult (e.g. many computers no longer have a built in disc drive, many stores no longer carry PC games, etc.).
This is less common than the previous two examples, but it may be difficult to find niche products outside of Etsy. For example, I haven't been able to find another place to purchase this specialized martial arts equipment: https://www.etsy.com/listing/175827423/
So Steam and Etsy themselves trend toward some amount of centralization, but in the case of Stream for example you have Playstation, Microsoft's platform, Stadia (soon to be cancelled I'm sure), Switch, Epic game store, iOS, and others. They aren't all exactly 1-1 comparable but I think that's ok. Frankly, you can get games from a lot of sources. You might say you can't get an indy title from one of these sources that you can on Steam, but you can't buy Halo on Playstation either - that doesn't make things centralized. It's a very competitive market.
In the case of Etsy I think you're a little more right, but there's no reason that has to continue to be that way.
Steam and Etsy are actually two companies that, if I were unable to use them starting tomorrow, that would basically have zero impact on my life.
Whereas, although I do order from a variety of online retailers, going cold turkey on Amazon would be a fairly significant inconvenience for me--although some seem not to use them much.
But what about your gmail? You'll lose all access to your email
The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize. As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.
"Market Power"
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
What you may think has little relation to governing regulatory law.
I would watch the same thing with Amazon (Music, Alexa, Photos, AWS, etc.)
For "prosumer" items a store that serves professionals is likely to watch their suppliers very carefully and have customer-friendly policies when things hit a snag. For cameras and optics (and flash sticks) B&H is my go-to place. My 2c.
I like buying Amazon Warehouse deals when the item makes sense to me. With larger items I think their quality control is higher, and the saving tend be bigger. The box may arrive super beat-up, but item is just fine.
My motivation is probably less about overall savings, but more about me feeling like I'm doing Amazon a favor. Weird, isn't it? I'm conditioned.
As a tangent: I've also purchased used that ended up being a return of a similar looking, but much less expensive item. So I just re-return it. In this case I assume it was fraud on the original return. With my patterns I doubt Amazon thinks -I- returned them the wrong item. Without customer context their job figuring stuff like that out would be much more difficult.
Ironically, my purchases on Amazon these days are almost exclusively books and ebooks.
I've been meaning to check out alternative ebook vendors too. Anybody have something they like on Android?
If you like SciFi/Fantasy, Baen sells ebooks direct with no DRM on their website in multiple formats and have for like 20 years. Some other publishers do this too like Image comics. Most don't though so you need to go through one of the bigger stores unfortunately.
If you watch all the videos on how to make money on Amazon. It involves buying liquidation items from places like TJ Maxx or other retailers selling second quality items. These items are commingled into regular inventory. The consumer ends up buying a second quality item for the “new” price.
I will also throw in a vote for B&H.
A customer service rep from NYC once called to personally answer some questions I had about a sub-$100 product. This happens often.
This week I ordered a display with free shipping that was scheduled to arrive 5 days later. I received it in 24 hours - 4 days earlier than expected.
Their return policy is also hassle-free.
For music or audio products, I buy from Sweetwater.
Same good points as B&H, but you have an assigned "sales engineer" which some people find annoying, but I really like - whenever I have a problem or question, I get the same person on the phone every time.
I don't order from Amazon if I'm not comfortable outright losing my money, getting it late, or receiving a counterfeit.
However, I buy all my new camera bodies and lenses direct from the manufacturer. I have found the price to be identical (or nearly so) to B&H, shipping to often be free and from time to time, without a local tax. If Nikon, Sigma, etc are selling as 'new' what are returns/refurbs then there is no hope in the system at all.
edit: grammar
That said, how would you have expected this to go? I assume everybody is in agreement that this wasn't going to be sorted out the next day. I think you might be overestimating how smoothly this would go when dealing with another company, although obviously there would be exceptions to that.
Once I had an order "delivered" without trace and Amazon asked my to check with neighbours first as, according to their records, the van has stopped at my house. On another occasion I knew that the van never came despite order again listed as "delivered" and they refunded instantly.
(not expensive items, though)
Your LTV = Forecasting total revenue
from your transactions so far
Revenue = The sum of your past
transactions
Refund? = LTV - Revenue - Refund Cost > 0
What is frustrating to people is: it doesn't matter what happened to the package. You feel like you're this good person pursuing this great justice, but the simple facts are it doesn't matter what actually occurred. This is coming from someone who had two $3,500 computer deliveries stolen, probably because they had RTX 3080 written on them, but like, Amazon didn't care, it just refunded me. I didn't have to provide evidence or explain anything. Because my LTV was really high. Same with getting stuff refunded on my credit card. They simply did not care, and it was thousands of dollars of stuff where, obviously I was in the wrong, you can't just refund like airfare and such, but I asked for it and I got it because LTV.
Is this just? Like how else could it work? They investigate everything, spending more money than the cost of the refund? They would just not provide refunds, as was the case historically in e-commerce! And it's not Amazon, it's everyone. Indeed, the real innovation here isn't the strategy, it's that LTV forecasting has gotten really accurate. Otherwise I feel like these threads devolve into, people who don't know anything complain about stuff they keep using, and nobody critically looks into what's really going on.
There's an emotional desire, ironically, for this slow, legalistic, argumentative, plaintiff versus defense world. You know, when it suits you. The algorithmic approach, as soon as you open that Pandora's box, well of course it optimizes all that crap away - the LTV model of "justice" here is, in my opinion, a lot lot better.
It's just so inscrutable to a lay person, such a baffling reorganization of at least two decades of conditioning, I can see how the reaction is, "Oh my god, who is this blowhard, downvote." All I'm trying to do is share the facts of how remedies really work when you interact with giant, growing, successful companies.
No. If you're 30, they might (or might not) group you with other 30 year olds, if that's important, and run this model against you all as a group. But you don't punch in "he has 50 years left to live" in the model. The model doesn't know any of that, it just knows your transaction history, and it works better when the population of histories are more similar than dissimilar. Though it's also very effective when run against a large population too.
Basically, these models can pretty much predict whether you are pathological or good one. I know that models also include things like if you are a pet owner, number of pets, siblings, number of disputes in cc, etc.
I'd say three centuries, but who's counting ...
(or whenever printing got cheap enough to use for advertising)
Is anyone actually arguing for fewer "easy refunds" and more investigation? I though the point was that given the fact that most of their refunds are handled algorithmically, they have plenty of time to handle the rest of the refunds quickly and with care.
If I don't get my order, I want my money back. If the algorith decides I can get that with no investigation required, sure, I'll take it. But if the algorithm thinks they shouldn't take the "shortcut", I still deserve my money back and a human should be dispatched to deal with it ASAP.
Algorithmically adjudicating in favor of the customer is fine - it's their money they're risking. But algorithmically adjudicating against the customer should never be allowed without a human looking things over.
The law will oblige either of the two sides to carry the burden of proof. Either Amazon has to proof the package was delivered, or the customer has to proof it wasn't. If the other sides does not accept the proof received, it has to sue.
Update: I should be clear, the shipper can prove it. The customer themselves can't without the shipper's acquiescence.
The shipper might be able to prove that the transport company picked up a package. Beyond that it's all hearsay if we are talking about fraudulent sellers.
The transport company might have evidence of a tracking number and thus most probably an actual package making it through the system. Shipments do get lost or stolen though. No way to prove anything really.
The customer can't prove it either. There are enough cases of packages with a tracking number having arrived at my and other people's doorsteps without the tracking ever showing that it happened. Why wouldn't the opposite be true? Driver just needs to scan package arrival not actually deliver. Of course there can be repercussions and I'd gather it's easier for a package to be stolen off other parts of the delivery chain. Anyway in this case both the shipper and customer have 'proof' / no proof to various degrees and in reality something 'fell off the truck'.
It's all about being convincing enough to whoever will be adjudicating this but 100% proof is impossible. The closest the customer could get I think would be 24h Video surveillance of their front entrance. No motion detection, just 24h continuous tape.
In theory, Amazon's T&C's attempt to pass on the risk of loss to me after delivery of the item to a carrier. In practice, this is far less clear, because of merchant agreements / cardholder agreements and overall FTC regulation of goods sold directly to consumers.
But it may be moot, anyways: if Amazon decides to screw me, they have a bunch of digital assets that they hold hostage and will remove my access to if I initiate a legal dispute or chargeback, even if I'm in the right.
And I'm not just using the term "responsibility" im a moral sense here - consumer protection laws in many places agree with this. The seller is an "informed market actor, taking on the risks of the transaction". The consumer is not an "equal market actor" and is therefore afforded protections from the risk.
But Amazon has more information and uses that too. They know loss rates by zip code or by block by carrier.
Usually items I order for them that are higher shrink risk don’t go through their Amazon distribution network and come UPS or USPS. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed those returns are easier — they probably dump cost on the 3rd party shipper.
I asked the question because they spoke with the assurance of an insider... so I wondered if they worked on it.
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 user has very low support cost (or at least a very nice people to work with).
It is very simple.
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 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. These bad actors are why honest consumers have a hard time. I don't know what a business can do to actually differentiate the two.
On eBay fraudsters buy large quantities of eg $1 seed packs, to build up artificial account ratings. Then they try to steal expensive things (didn't arrive, wasn't in the box, arrived broken, etc), and eBay shields the accounts heavily because they favor buyers to an extreme. All the thief has to do is be disciplined about it, buy $40-$50 of cheap items for positive feedback, then go after a $300-$500 item. Sellers can't even leave negative feedback on eBay, which further cuts off a mechanism for at least warning other sellers of a running con (sellers sometimes leave the negative language in the neutral/positive feeback segment instead, which rather points out the absurdity of eBay's broken system).
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. (People were returning laptops after a year of use just to upgrade). This is why we can’t have nice things.
source: I worked at Costco before they had restrictions on their electronics return policy, when they bragged about accepting returns on anything for any reason… before the cost of doing so became prohibitively high.
LTV refunding like Amazon is doing is a huge leap forward that lets every business kind of act like Costco.
You seem to be saying 'well they did say any reason' and that good faith on the part of the buyer didn't/shouldn't enter into it. Yes they did, and people behaved the way they did. Now the generous refund policy no longer exists. See how that works?
People suck, especially when they are disconnected from the human side of business.
It’s a shame the policy is gone. There was really no peace of mind quite like it, knowing that if your device failed after years of use, but still due to a defect, you had recourse. And for poor people, it was a godsend of a program especially (and not because it could be abused, but simply Costco providing a service that anything you buy will work as advertised)
[1]source: some internal training I received back in 1998
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.
It makes me sad. Ebay two decades ago was a lot different. I never got burned back then, and did a fair bit of buying and selling snowboard gear, including boards that get up to around $800 each. There's absolutely no way I'd do that today. Just impossible not to get ripped off on it.
They're not always the cheapest, but the overall experience is great - and I just love that I can see all my orders for such a long time span.
Now, I've always had good customer support experiences with the company, and your model helps explain why I suppose; loyalty has a value of its own.
Yep, I think this is exactly how things work. My household buys pretty much anything it can from Amazon unless it's more expensive than we can get elsewhere because our Amazon credit cards automatically give a 5% discount (cash back). Since we pay our balance every month this is basically like having 5% more income proportional to the amount spent on Amazon**
We never have a problem dealing with customer service. A simple chat solves pretty much everything immediately, and when it's Amazon's fault they'll apply a courtesy credit towards our account. (Actually that hasn't happened a lot lately-- maybe something they don't do as much any more, or maybe they've calculated that we're solid enough customers that we're not quiting Amazon just because Amazon didn't give us free money)
*The first time we used Amazon Fresh was a complete epiphany for us. I was sick so couldn't go food shopping. Instead I gave Fresh a shot, and found out that on average their prices were 10% to 15% lower than I paid at the supermarket, and* we still got the same 5% cash back from using our Amazon credit card. Even after a good tip for the driver, we were still saving money. In terms of selection, they probably lack about 10% of the things we normally buy or they're much more expensive (meats especially) so I still do the occasional trip to the local grocery store to stock up.
(I have never bought anything expensive from Amazon, and so I have no idea what its stated policy is.)
Where people haven’t seemed to have learned their lesson with this is with airlines and to a lesser extent hotels. People will just buy the cheapest ticket, which is completely fine if that’s what you want or need to do, but they then complain that the airlines don’t bend over backwards when things go awry.
Example: you have to check in to international flights 60 minutes or more before the flight leaves (from the US). This is a reasonably strict rule. I once arrived 45 minutes prior and they checked me in anyway. I give that airline a lot of business and they know it.
So I order a lot of packages from Amazon and have had zero problems with returns and cancellations but almost all my purchases are low end.
For, say, new electronics, I’ll just go straight to B&H or Adorama. Or even Best Buy.
If Amazon chooses to refund without question to save disputes money, that's their choice. But it's not the customer's problem. If you pay for something and you don't receive it, you must get refunded.
Behaving otherwise would just be shooting yourself in the foot for weird ideas of fairness.
Sure, it is, when you're rich. If you're some poor bastard who's scrimped up a whole lot of money to buy an expensive item, and Amazon figures you won't spend much money in the future, you get ripped off.
There's a couple of externalities you've left out, too, because your LTV doesn't predict them:
* Reputational costs
* Risk of adverse legal outcomes, where you decline to provide deserved refunds after failing to deliver merchandise.
You’re talking like there’s no legal recourse (or even financial, like a chargeback). There simple aren’t enough resources to track down the source of every sob story, the hard truth is this “inhuman” efficiency is a huge boon for the vast majority of us.
There may be very valid reason to shortcut claims and to grant dubious claims of high value customers. But you really shouldn't just ship an empty box and say "sorry, you're not getting your money back unless you sue us". (And worse, break the customer's existing digital content if they do, because you can hold it hostage).
I mean, I get that it's financially appealing to externalize the costs of in-warehouse and in-transit shrinkage to random low-value customers, but brah-- that's just not right.
IMO this should be a flag for regulators to start taking a look, too, to understand how systemic this is.
For instance, in the short term it's better to take the loss instead of investigate. But that then makes your platform an easy pick for fraudsters, so you end up with way more fraud and way more costs overall. If you were a bit more thorough and spotted scammers better, you would have a higher cost _per incident_ but lower cost overall in the long term.
This is particularly true if you are such a big player that you are the market in practice (so general equilibrium effects cannot be ignored anymore). And reminds me a bit of what eBay did in the past (sided with buyers almost every time without investigating, and made selling much more difficult).
Taken to the extreme (and I don’t see anything in the argument that prevents it being taken to the extreme) and combined with acceptance of utility functions (_i.e._ that the value of anything is comparable to anything else, including human lives) this seems to also reduce any and all rule enforcement to wergild or something radical in that vein. Which—I’m not sure how it worked historically, but it also seems to be the current state of patent law (it doesn’t matter if the patent has merit, the side with the better and more expensive lawyers will starve out the other), and the results look utterly miserable.
Vague generalities aside, the complaints (and hypothetical downvotes) seems to indicate that, however simple and transparent a rule this is from the inside, people don’t want to pay for what is not their fault (cf experiments where people rejected a $1/$99 split in favour of a $0/$0 one to punish the other guy). I’m reminded of people queueing up in droves to the first McDonald’s in Moscow nor for the food or the prices, but for the customer service, because that was literally the first time in their lives they could get that anywhere.
Unless it’s marketed as a luxury good, people will actually pay for decent customer service that, among other things, satisfies their sense of fairness. That a model which does not reflect this can be simple is not a virtue of that model, it’s shoddy model-building. Not providing that service might still be the better economic decision (with caveats), if few enough people end up bitter over it (and complain on HN, etc.), but that’s a much more involved claim than “but it’s so simple!”. It also has very little to do with its moral merit, and if the better economic decision is too far from the moral one, it may well be time to go tune the incentives again and not to give up on your set of morals.
I’m not convinced customer protection regulations are the answer here, but the results of no customer protection regulations also seem completely idiotic from the outside. The third option of piling upon the company online also seems revolting for entirely different reasons.
I wonder if that factors in somehow.
I also wonder - since the box containing five CPUs looked like a "single product" box - how often that must have happened.
Electronics I buy from either Best Buy or B&H Photo.
For non-electronic "Name Brand" items where counterfeit is likely, I'll go to Target.com, etc.
I called amazon every time it happened. I told them the various things that their driver did, explicitly asking them to replace that specific driver. And after a while it was like they flagged my account as fraudulent (customer service began issuing canned responses with no follow up).
Eventually, after a few egregious cases, my property management company sued Amazon. Overnight, packages started being delivered correctly, and I haven't had to call CS since...but I now refuse to buy anything of value from Amazon anymore due to a combination of fraudulent marketplace items and the lingering fear that if something goes wrong I won't be able to get any compensation for it because my account has been flagged.
Funnily enough, Ali Express is now the more reputable company in my eyes.
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. I contacted them and they said they were on it and it would arrive soon. At 5 months in I just canceled the order, only to get an email saying, "Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cancel the items you requested and these items will soon be shipped." I spent a bunch of time in chat and on the phone getting the runaround, complete with new ticket numbers, promises of personally following up, and even a $20 credit. But they were firm on saying, "Please be assured, we will ship this item very soon."
Occasionally I'd try again, insisting that they either cancel the order or actually ship it. Each time I was told it would be shipped. Long after I'd given up, in late October 2020, they finally canceled it, saying, "We regret to inform you that, due to a technical error, we will not be able to fulfill your order." For all of Amazon's vaunted customer focus, my impression was of a lot of unhappy, fearful customer service staff passing the buck so they could avoid bad metrics.
issue a chargeback and move on.
So if you're prepared to take that risk and never buy from Amazon again, sure.. go for it..
But given the centralization of vendors this can have bigger downsides than upside.
I assume all my not-downloaded Kindle books become unavailable. Does the Kindle app delete the ones I have locally? (I assume the result would be similar for movies/shows purchased.)
Does it ban my credit card, name, address, or a more abstract "buying profile"?
And while they definitely deserve the ire for doing that with 1984, even in 2018 when I left preventing 1984 like issues were commonly brought up in design reviews, calling out 1984 by name.
This seems to be a problem for all big platforms. When they’re small enough to not change the ecosystem, they can do what they do well. Eg amazon ships more conveniently and google returns better results and uber is less scammy. Then they get massive and become a viable,better understood target for fraud/manipulation, and suddenly their offering begins to suck. It’s frustrating as a consumer.
As many have testified here, they just aren't like that anymore.
How does this relate to you repeatedly doubting what I said?
* I guess I’m just trying to understand what exactly has declined over two decades? Because I feel like I’ve had the opposite experience.
Which of course is nothing more than a convenient excuse for them to use when the only ones with the power to regulate what sellers end up on their platform is... Amazon.
This (soccer magazine case) does not seem like a 3rd-party seller issue. Third-party sellers only have a limited amount of time to ship (30 days in 2018) after which the order is automatically cancelled.
Also, the Amazon "we weren’t able to cancel the items" message only occurs with Amazon-fulfilled items.
The long "4-16 weeks" estimate also suggests it was not 3rd-party seller selling via FBA, either, but straight-up sold by Amazon.
In the 1980's, B&H was the queen of the "grey market". Now, I trust them to deliver authentic goods with legitimate warranties, and I'm profoundly suspicious of unnecessary transactions with Amazon.
Between this experience and my lack of trust in their supply chain, I now never buy anything expensive on amazon.
I had a similar issue to what you describe ordering a vintage item on Etsy and the tracking info provided was fake and delivered to a different address. That was a huge hassle to prove and get refunded for.
Amazon’s return process is becoming incrementally more obtuse as time goes on. While they’re still decently good, it’s getting harder to do easy, no-nonsense returns. Typically—if they don’t just tell me to dispose of the item myself—they demand I drive to Amazon lockers or Whole Foods or Kohl’s to drop stuff off at no charge, and pressure me into just getting Amazon credit.
I would never buy a $7,000 item on Amazon under any circumstance.
In my experience Amazon Japan still knows how to pack books correctly, but I haven't ordered from them since the start of COVID... they properly secure books to a bit of backing cardboard (with shrink-wrap and/or rubber bands, usually) and then mount the backing cardboard inside of the packing box so that the books don't slide around and get damaged. I'm sure it costs like an extra 50 cents per package to do this, but presumably their customers demand quality in other countries where Amazon doesn't have a de-facto monopoly.
Previously I was buying electronics and I needed to use proxies which are added cost and hassle.
Got any tips?
As for Amazon Japan, their packaging is most often top-notch although that’s more related to Japanese mentality than to Amazon‘s policy.
But you end up with smudgy pages from a bad printer, pages missing, and a book binding not lasting more than a day.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazon-Print-on-Demand-Guide/b?ie=U...
That's how they used to do in France when they started (15-20 years ago): a base cardboard plate at the right size for the box, the stuff stacked on the cardboard, and both united by a shrink wrap. That was both simple and extremely effective, or otherwise said: great.
I don't know why they stopped. And I don't know why nobody else copied that system.
(I used to order from 2000 miles away, now I don't order books from Amazon no more, except second hand foreign language books I couldn't get otherwise.)
If I try to order a book on Amazon today, it gets shipped in a manila envelope (with bubble padding built into the envelope). The tightness of the envelope damages the book.
I have no idea who thought this was a good idea, or even an acceptable idea.
I'd have to think theft by the warehouse workers is pretty rare, it feels like the kind of thing they'd surveil and police quite zealously.
You can tell they're increasing the scrutiny on drivers as well with them having to take photos of the delivered item, and they've clearly always been closely tracked on time and location.
This is actually largely Amazon's fault, as far as I understand it. People buy obviously counterfeit items, then buy the real thing on Amazon, and return the counterfeit item. Amazon does ~zero verification of the return and puts the counterfeit item back on the shelf/bin with the official SKU.
Amazon has no concept of "open box" vs "new," and they don't want to be the arbitrator of returns.
Yes they do. There is a large section of the website ("Amazon Warehouse deals") devoted to open-box items. I've used this a few times and got great prices on perfect items, just with opened or damaged packaging.
Some time ago, my wife ordered something from Amazon, and it was reported as “delivered,” but the photo was of someone else’s doorstep.
She had no problem getting them to ship a replacement, but it added a few days to the process.
The “last mile” stuff is crazy. I sometimes see two Amazon Prime Sprinters on the same street, at the same time.
It was much worse, when it was done by independent contractors. We would see these folks driving around, with so many boxes in the cab of their vans, they had to make a hole to see through.
Looked like an episode of Hoarders.
I’m not surprised they have issues. The system is basically strained to the max. It’s a miracle that it works as well as it does.
This happens to me about every third time I get something from Amazon. Fortunately, the wrong house they keep delivering to is in my neighborhood and I recognized it in the picture.
I report this every time, but I don't expect it to do any good.
Not really, I'm currently living out of an apartment with a mailroom and it seems like half of the orders are correctly marked as "Left in mailroom" with a picture, less than half the time they actually put it in the parcel locker, most of the time it's just dumped on the floor even when it would obviously fit, and when it's not marked as "Left in mailroom" it seems that delivery drivers are exploiting the fact that they don't have to take a photo if they select "Left with receptionist". We don't have a receptionist, so every time they select that not only do I have to try and figure out where in the mailroom my package is, I have to do it immediately because now I have no clue if they correctly put it in the parcel locker where it's safe or if it's just lying in a stack of boxes out in the open.
Not to even mention all the times packages are marked as delivered the day before, presumably to hit some delivery quota. Currently if you open up a case with Amazon for a package marked delivered that you haven't received they make you wait at least 2 days because odds are it's still in transit.
In the case of Spain their customer support is fine, but it falls flat because delivery is a shitshow.
In fact, nothing tells us we all see the same prices either. I suspect they only show me more expensive items, because I can find my A4 paper at 6€ elsewhere instead of 10€ on Amazon. And same goes for most other stuff. Maybe after a few years, Amazon profits off us with a hefty margin. Price segmentation by (reverse) customer loyalty.
They've been shipping the wrong items lately too, twice in the last year when I order something that has multiple selections like color, scent or flavor etc I'll sometimes get the wrong item sent. I've done more Amazon returns in the last 2 years than my previous 15 combined.
The other side of that coin is that Amazon used to have relatively low prices. Not anymore.
As a matter of fact, I would go to great lengths in order to return or replace the coffee scale if that happened to me. It places my mind at peace to have things exactly as I expect them to be.
I think Best Buy is the absolute best ;) place to buy a TV; good prices, huge selection, always handled carefully. YMMV!
Like, I see all of these comments on HN all the time but I have the exact opposite experience - they just have no competition over here. I'm at a point where even if something is slightly more expensive on Amazon I'd rather buy from them as I know their CS Support won't try to screw me over.
Not to mention not everything is shipped from seller / manufacturer to you via Amazon.
Maybe with commodity household goods it’s different than with higher value items or with electronics.
The main issues you get are when returns are put back into stock but haven’t been sufficiently checked.
I used to work for an online retailer who sold things like games consoles and the amount of return scams we got was absolutely shocking. If you sold a games console with a free game (usually a code inside the console) people would take the game code out, or copy it, and then return the console and have the game. Other times they would take an iPad out, put a brick in the box and then shrink wrap it. Or buy counterfeit AirPod pro’s and swap them for the real ones and return the fakes.
The problem is compounded because people want to buy “new” items with shrink wrap around them, so it’s harder to check returns aren’t scams when the scammers have shrink-wrap machines.
If you could turn that into a ribbon, then any box could be wrapped in such a way any tampering is evident.
If you could also print a QR code on top, then you have a per shipment tamper proof
I suspect it exists but i am sure there is a long way between that and cost effective useage
The issue here is people returning it in a state where it is still sealed - as if an item is sealed it will go back into stock straight away and the retailer can’t open it up to check that it is in there.
If it’s opened you can still return it, but once that happens usually electronics have to be sent back to the manufacturer to refurbish/reset.
It’s not about stopping people returning items, it’s about making sure the correct returns channel is used and detecting fraud (which happens when people return the item pretending it’s unopened so it goes back into stock unchecked, but the item has been replaced with a brick).
Also, how does Amazon prove that the brick they received came from the customer and not some employee?
As for the second one, with bin/lot tracking you can identify if the item had previously been returned. Employee theft doesn’t usually involve putting bricks in it within a DC - it’s usually easier and less risk to take the whole box (and maybe get rid of the packaging in the toilet, at a warehouse I used to work at someone was found to be stealing iPods because a lot of packaging was found behind a toilet ceiling tile). If the item hadn’t previously been returned, this would usually infer that the customer was lying about receiving it with a brick in it (although obviously there is the possibility that it came in that state from the supplier).
The usual assumption is that the supplier didn’t send it in with a brick, because otherwise customer fraud is too easy - but occasionally that assumption is wrong, which is probably what happened in this case.
They probably checked there was no return in the history, made the assumption it wouldn’t have come empty from Canon, and figured it was the customer that lied.
The main thing is making sure that these things are ubiquitous, that there isn’t a workaround and that systems are in place to do the specific checks which are different for each item at every return point.
In the example with the Xbox games, not all games had the seal, or the same game SKU might sometimes have the seal and sometimes have a standard case. Then there was the workaround where people could lever the case open at the top and still take the game out.
The danger of seals is sometimes they can provide a false sense of security, but they probably do help when implemented well.
I don't know if it has been invented yet, however here's the idea: a RFID tag that normally returns a valid code, but any removal attempt would not simply destroy it, but rather change the code (for example through bit changes by peeling conductive parts of it) into one that would return a tamper warning at next readings. That would also make possible to track when the box was opened (therefore potentially also finding by whom) since all boxes must be scanned at every step. The tag however should be put in a place where the user would not stick a cutter blade; it should peel off for example as the result of pulling a string to open the box, removing a piece of cardboard, etc.
ALL other delivery outfits are horrible in comparison, and i actually dred using any other service.
I’ve run a huge pile of apple kit through them in the last two years and when a Mac mini disappeared from my doorstep they refunded without question.
The Mac mini did make a reappearance a week later as it was dumped in someone’s porch down the road and they brought it back round. Spoke to customer services and they sent me a return label to send it back.
Probably. There’ll be some people who can rely on their reputation with their CC company too to do a chargeback.
https://old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/nm1mm1/i_got...
If the chance of a problem worthy of complaining on reddit or a blog was a million to one that world be 4 problems a week.
[0] https://tamebay.com/2018/09/amazon-established-as-3rd-larges...
And I love the ability to take items back to our local Amazon depot without having to box the item. Just give it back to them and they handle all the shipping.
Since then though I won’t use Amazon for anything remotely safety related, think child car seat - nope, some equipment for rewiring house, nope.
This also makes me think about higher end purchases, whereas before I was like 100% Amazon, they have lost the trust I had for them and doubt they will get that back.
My main issue is that by the time I realised it was fake the game had been stopped and seller removed so they probably knew the game they sent me was fake (because of other complaints) but they made zero attempt to put it right. It seems if customers report fakes, customers who potentially also received fakes are not alerted and that is a real problem for me.
Amazon doesn't even bother to collect that data. If you want to make a return because you received a counterfeit, you need to lie about the reason for your return, because "I received/believe I received a counterfeit product" isn't a choice they let you choose from when filing a return.
I mean, I am not sure, if anybody ever reads those, but you I would not have to lie this way.
Honestly, it feels like Amazon is intentionally not keeping explicit records of the counterfeits they sell because of their potential liability and the fact that such records would make Amazon look bad in depositions.
We passed a ton of orders for valuable goods that were processed by small companies who used amazon as an alternative storefront to boost their sales. Communication was finnicky but everything went fine.
Then we also order a ton of cheap, little convenient stuff that we could have ordered on aliexpress but went to amazon for faster delivery. It was a lot more hit or miss, with pure junk coming in from tjmes to times.
We never hit the level of scam described in the article, but we'd also pay a lot more attention on where it’s coming from before forking 7k.
I have also seen a few deliveries with pictures that went to what was clearly the wrong address, had a box of chocolates arrive totally melted where the ice pack exploded and left me with a wet, melted box of chocolates, and during early Covid, I did end up getting scam toilet paper rolls shipped in from China. Oh, it was actually toilet paper, but the rolls were incredibly tiny and nothing at all like the pictures.
So... definitely hit or miss and it depends a lot on what you order.
I buy about everything from Amazon, since the beginning, and have had nearly zero issues. A screw-up now and then is forgivable.
I wish Amazon could randomly test and delist some of those products or whatever. Or maybe do some random testing before listing them for sale, it's not some obscure scam after all.
My preferred approach now is to use niche-retailers for things I care about arriving intact on the assumption that if your entire business is about that product category then you should be knowledgeable about how to ship those items safely. Barnes & Noble for books, B&H for camera, BestBuy for consumer electronics and video games, etc.
I suspect they are playing the odds, accepting that they will have to refund a few items that got smashed from inadequate protection.
I’m like you - I’ve ordered so many things from Amazon this last year or so (new circumstances plus pandemic lockdown) and literally not one problem of the sort described. I can think of two items out of hundreds which weren’t on time (one, Amazons’s logistics made it a whole day late, and one was the seller’s issue). And the (very rare) returns were dealt with without a hitch.
For other reasons, I actually want to not be so reliant on Amazon, but their combination of Prime delivery, reliability, and customer service is unbeatable for many/most non-specialist items.
I ordered a bunch of small electronics stuff, about 100€. In the order process Amazon selected an expired credit card (which I'm sure I had replaced in the settings already). They then split the order in parts and for each order part demanded an additional late pay fee, because the card was expired. This is despite me calling them to stop the order or to correct the payment method, before the package had arrived.
They couldn't help, I was promised a call back, never arrived. The chat support deleted the expired credit card from their system, only to cut the connection as soon as I asked for a solution for the fees and to know why the wrong card was selected. Later, that expired credit card turned up in my settings again.
In the electronics stuff that arrived, a converter I bought was evidently fake. It was also a converter, but it had different markings than the one on the product photo (including a missing CE symbol). I sent that back. A short while later, Amazon accused me of not having sent it back and wanted me to pay again! I still had the proof of having sent a package, which made them shut up.
Never again.
Edit: Had a look at my writeup in my blog [0], Lastschrift it was. Amazon picked a bank account that did not exist anymore to pay for the order. When that bounced came the fees - and while one fee for that would have been normal if I had given the wrong bank account (which I'm pretty sure I only did, if I did, because their system did not save when I changed the bank account before), to take multiple fees for one order was in no way okay.
[0]: https://www.onli-blogging.de/1832/Meine-richtig-schlechte-Su... (in german)
You'll have to ask the banks why. In my case it wasn't a problem, but technically it shouldn't happen and it's strange that it did.
That added to my concern with Amazon just using the wrong bank account, and that old account occuring again and again in my profile. Even if I wanted to order something at Amazon it would be too risky now.
Trivial for small items, but doesn't bode well for high value orders.
It's a confidence issue. Amazon has become a logistics giant but is steadily losing customer confidence.
A combination of fake reviews, fake items, high-friction or just plain missing consumer support on high-value items, and a hopelessly confused mess of a shop front all add up to a mediocre and untrustworthy experience.
On HN I put comment below because I had some issue - if I had not, such comment would have too little value to post.
I did receive many things without issues and have also received books that looked way worse than if you gave them to a toddler. It's bizarre - they started with books and books are items that are trivial to pack securely.
I have had issues with Amazon in the past, but if you do have a poor support experience you just need to persevere until you get someone more flexible. Which is somehow still better than most of our other stores here in the UK.
For example, I bought a projector on BestBuy. They had the dimensions wrong and it wouldn’t fit where I needed it. With amazon, that would be a simple return. With BestBuy, a simple return and a 15% restocking fee. Good luck reaching someone at BestBuy to explain why that fee should be waived. With amazon, it would be a simple chat.
Amazon is infinitely better than most other retailers. People just forget how good we have it.
Based off this thread I might think twice before ordering expensive stuff from them though - however I usually find other places are better value for expensive electronics etc. anyway
Another location and I’d get these local people delivering packages in their personal cars and that was really hit or miss. Seems like anytime they were busy they just report that they tried to deliver but no one was home. They could steal whatever they wanted, it’s a matter of trust. How does Amazon know who is lying? Maybe I’m scamming them, maybe the shippers, maybe someone else is stealing packages off my doorstep.
There was just no way to choose a shipper or report problems with one. Don’t have any problems where I am now, so I don’t know if they’ve fixed that. They should be able to tell, statistically, if packages have more problems with one shipper over the other, but smart shippers who want to steal could probably game the system.
Periodically I do have shipper issues (including USPS on occasion). I have a long gravel/dirt driveway and some shippers obviously don't like to come down it. (I also have a neighbor with a large dog that likes to bark and that sometimes scares off drivers too. Oh yeah, that was FedEx too. Saw their truck and they claimed online not to have been able to deliver due to local regulations.)
If Amazon gave these choices to customers for shipping, it would apply pressure to shipping carriers to improve their service, as people would experiment and pick the best ones and stop picking bad ones. Eventually a bad carrier is forced to improve to not lose revenue. And Amazon would get way happier customers, who can pick what is best in their region, and they would have a massive advantage over smaller shops.
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 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 (presumably) some algorithm selects which one that is in each case. All it takes is to put one more selection field on the order (and I guess in the customer profile, for a personal default value) and then use that if provided and the algorithm only if not provided. What's so hugely complicated about that?
Maybe it’s in fact trivial, but at Amazon’s scale I find it hard to imagine that any changes to their shipping algorithms are that easy, at least compared to the increased revenue that goes along with it, which in this case presumably is zero.
If you’re willing to put up with all of Amazon’s other crap in exchange for convenience, you’re unlikely to drop them because they won’t allow you to pick the shipper, at least until someone else starts taking business away from them.
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
Why camera equipment? IDK. Even before Amazon was a thing, buying camera equipment online was always a bit shady. I assume those same people just move to Amazon.
I should add that I've never had a problem sending back or replacing the item even when it was over 1k.
When calling Amazon about it they said I needed to ship the adapter back before they would send me the part I ordered. I told them it was totally unreasonable for me to have to wait many more days to get the thing I paid for when they obviously made the mistake and adapter wasn't worth anything compared to what I ordered. They could easily see that the weight of what they shipped was less than 1/1000th of what I ordered too but they refused to handle my case before they got their adapter back and they ended up hanging up on me.
Migrated my company off AWS after that and haven't used Amazon since. I value other things higher than saving an occasional dollar here or there.
A Japanese friend said he could Amazon order a particular variety of candy and it would arrive next-day in good condition and I felt jealous. In America there really is no such service for ordering food or spoilable items online.
I have received one wrong item (refunded, told to keep) and one item I didn't order. The only hassle I've ever had was a damaged item they were trying to talk me into accepting a discount rather than returning (a very heavy item, I'm sure shipping was an issue.)
There very definitely is an issue with counterfeits and their comingled inventory system needs to be nuked from orbit. I have once seen a product where it was pretty apparent *every* offering was garbage or counterfeit. I even reported one of the counterfeits to Amazon as the image revealed it was one of the garbage things, not the name brand it purported to be.
And now are surprised at how shitty their delivery is.
The worst case was when they bought some medicine for their dog and a expensive screen to use in their business.
The dog medicine arrived on a friday, I was present and heard a car horn, went to check, and it was a random normal car, a lady climbed out, said it was a delivery. when I said I was son of the person that made the purchase, she just shoved the package through the gate opening and drove away, didn't even said hi or bye or whatever, didn't check my identity properly, didn't take a signature, didn't even tried to deliver the package safely, she almost threw it at me.
Then saturday my parents had a meeting with someone, and left, but on that day the city hall sent some workers to do some work on the sidewalk.
Seemly Amazon deliverd it to these workers, Amazon claims they delivered, and claims some dude we never heard of accepted the delivery, we believe the dude in question is some random city hall employee that was doing sidewalk maintenance.
As you can imagine, quality of delivery is pretty variable. I had an Amazon Flex worker steal a phone that I'd ordered - Amazon refunded with no questions asked and as far as I know didn't bother to investigate the theft.
I would definitely not buy dog medicine.
Amazon delivery is outrageously atrocious in my (poor) country. As an instance, this was the condition of an assorted pack of fruit juices that got delivered to me just yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/sSMmgot
To top it off, (rather poorly trained) Amazon support encouraged me to consume the contents of the pack with no understanding of what a health hazard means; at which point I hung up and cancelled my Prime membership.
Interesting that you bring this up- I have noticed over the past year and a half that all my Amazon books have been showing up with damaged corners and smudge marks all over the covers.
I understand purchasing from other categories on Amazon, but with books it's so easy to avoid Amazon all together. Plus you know you won't receive a counterfeit (https://twitter.com/nostarch/status/1183095004258099202) if you order directly from the publisher.
Last hard drive I ordered from them came wrapped in factory issued static plastic bag, and NO padding inside the Amazon issued cardboard box. I of course returned it after confirming it was broken.
That's not the only reason I gave up on them. Searching is getting really hard, reviews are meaningless due to fake ones, counterfeit products, ...
To me it looks like they've decided to run the business to the ground and cash in a monumental amount of money.
Part of the appeal of reading deadtree is the paper feel, smell and type quality. Majority of paper backs from amazon are nigh unreadable.
Lots of brick and mortar stores improved their curbside flows during the pandemic, and this is the sweet spot for me. Same day pickup of items you could have grabbed yourself off the shelf, and humans around to dispute problems with.
For returns, I was surprised to see only drop-off options, but I found that they actually just bury the pick up option on another page. I usually find it now under a small faint "more options" link. Good luck.
(And yes, despite being a multi-decade Prime customer, I now avoid Amazon for many categories, including books, & especially batteries)
What I can say with certainty is that the attention to shipping the books has plummeted compared to the early years of Amazon. Back then they would put the book(s) on a piece of cardboard and shrink wrap that and then put some of the bubble stuff in the box.
Now you are lucky if they even put any filler in the box and best hope its not a rainy day and delivery leaves the package outside your door as boxes are flimsier and not always sealed tightly.
Strangely enough, a company whose employees have to piss in bottles and use crying booths may have staff that are not especially engaged in the highest quality work.
The latest book I ordered came unbelievably spotless. It was about $4 AUD including shipping for a book that would usually cost me $50+ shipping from USA (it was sheet music) so I was very happy. The original delivery date they gave me was delusional so I paid it no mind when it passed. Two days after it, I get an email saying they’re refunding me $3 for the inconvenience, and my spotless book arrived the next day. Three days late is a rounding error in postage delivery timelines where I live. I’m still bewildered by the whole experience to be honest, but hey, almost free expensive sheet music book. Definitely low risk for that purchase.
Not sure why Amazon was still arguing at this point. If UPS confirms the package was basically empty, then Amazon has no reason to believe the customer was lying.
Business systems are a chain of events. Every event has x% chance of happening and leading to the next one. If the next event makes money, it's optimized up. If it costs money, it's optimised down. Efforts to pay unclaimed rebates are never as enthusiastic as efforts to claim unpaid receivables. Thus is life.
No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit.
Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal with, and will ultimately lead for a better experience for everyone involved - except for the very few at the top, which are currently reaping all the profits.
Whatever your definition of capitalism, I'm sure you can find examples outside of it. There are an infinite number of variables besides profit. Profit isn't the only possible motive for such systems, and it only takes one.
A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
Different systems of people behave very differently with different kinds of motivations, stimuli and sanctions, on the individual and collective level.
And while there are many variables besides profit, it is money (and capital in particular) which enables most activities of a commercial corporation - not voluntary willingness to work or serve for some purpose; and it is Amazon's profit which the organization is designed to promote and maximize, over anything and everything else.
In almost all cases though, they're not going to be as motivated to pay as they are to receive payment. Take subscription antipatterns for example. Charities do this too. They both also create similar self deceptions to justify the more onerous examples. It's not even just about money, convenience is a pretty big motivator.
Again, I'm not saying that everything is the same, or being reductive. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that reducing everything to "capitalism," "greed" or whatever is meaningless. It's just normally the case, that people and groups are more cognizant of their own goals and wants than they are of others'. Altruism exists, but it's not uniformly distributed across everything an altruist does.
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 tools that we have nowadays, but neither did anyone else, irrelevant of income.
> the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing
Irrelevant of whether this might be true for Amazon - what about health care? Telco? Public transport? Basic utilities like water, electricity?
The US is a prime example on why "neoliberal capitalism" (at least if we're speaking about it in the Reagan/Clinton sense) is a complete and utter failure - it is the only developed country with a declining life expectancy, the richest country on earth with a sizeable amount of the population having multiple jobs and still living from paycheck to paycheck.
Don't get me wrong, I get your point. But it is really important to try to take the perspective of those who are the losers of the system, and for those people the current time is _for sure_ not the best to be alive. 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?
> Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better.
Relative to what? Compared to the "old experience" of having to go to a physical store - sure. But that's a damn low bar; everyone who can write a webpage can beat that these days. Amazon got where it is today because they straight-up ate the market, but not by being the best, but by being the ones who had the capital to sink everyone else before they went belly-up themselves (for how long is Amazon actually turning a profit? Not that far back, I reckon). In short, they played the market instead of letting the market play. And that's exactly my main gripe with what I'm calling 'neoliberal capitalism' here: The way Amazon played is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. It will continue to happen, until regulators kick in and set boundaries that go beyond anything what we can call neoliberal capitalism. It might still be a 'free market', it still allows for competition, but most definitely not in the barely-regulated sense that the neoliberal capitalism envisions.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Consideration
>Anything of value promised by one party to the other when making a contract can be treated as "consideration": for example, if A signs a contract to buy a car from B for $5,000, A's consideration is the $5,000, and B's consideration is the car.
A failure of a contract for lack of consideration would be if there’s no exchange of value contemplated, ever. For example if I made a promise to provide you a valuable service for nothing in return.
In this situation both sides agreed to exchange something of value so there’s obviously consideration.
They could make an argument that no damages have occurred and claim you have no credible allegation of being harmed, but that’s a different thing and far from automatic.
If this wasn't the case then every single financial futures contract or swap would be null and void. These contracts incur no cash flow on day one. They're merely a promise by one part to pay another based on some event in the future. If your legal theory was true, then one party could simply cancel any losses by voiding the contract as soon as the position moves against them.
Yes, 2 lbs of packaging. It’s a $7000 camera. It’s well packaged. Even my $300 Canon was double boxed. (As are the customer’s photos of the packaging in the article)
The spec sheet of the a1 lists it as weighing 1.6 lbs. it lists the boxed weight as 3.22 lbs. This means the Sony packaging is 1.62 lbs.
The remaining 0.38 lbs is the packaging that Amazon put the Sony box in.
The math checks out.
For anyone unaware, go to telegram and do a public search for 'refunding'. There are hundreds of channels where you can pay someone to refund >£10,000 of stuff for you for a 10% fee. Afaik, the main method that 'refunders' use to defraud amazon is to (1) initiate a return (2) modify the return label so UPS accepts it into their system but (3) deliver it to the wrong address. So it looks to amazon as being successfully delivered to the return warehouse, but what actually got delivered was a brick, to some random house.
I wouldn't be surprised if >1% of macbook and iPhone refunds are fraudulent in this way. Someone in a cybercrime lab they should write a paper about this whole ecosystem because it is a huge black market.
but how amazon does not check the quality of the return? I mean, even if UPS confirms that the package arrived to right address, wouldn't someone from amazon warehouse check if the package is valid?
I think for the last-mile of delivery, couriers rely on the actual address written on the package, not the address that the barcode scans to. I might be wrong though.
There is the caveat that they will recharge you if the item isn't in good condition, but if they never receive it, I guess they can only assume the shipper lost it.
This is also true for Amazon business purchases. I have returned items around $600 and have never been asked to put a code in the box.
But I’ve never returned anything over $1,000.
In the USA FWIW. And no super expensive stuff.
Even in the commercial invoice the gross weight of the laptop package was just 1.81KG! The laptop itself weighs about 2.3KG!
When I connected Amazon support they basically said that the package was delivered and they did an investigation the the weights are correct as well.
The UPS has filed a claim with Amazon and Amazon is not responding to UPS even and insists I obtain a police report. I didn’t even receive the package. Shouldn’t UPS and Amazon sort this out?
We are under lock down due to COVID and I can’t go to a police station to make the complaint.
Now I don’t have the laptop or a refund…
This costed me about 1700 usd with shipping. It’s not a cost I can afford to just write off.
The best experience is still Amazon JP but returns are a little more complicated (Even within Japan) — Obviously b/c you more or less do not return stuff in JP [Hansei (反省].
I get a combination now of Amazon's own service or one of the big third-parties. All of them are great I think. I might prefer Amazon's since they're willing to just leave the package in front of your door.
Even if I'd replace all my store visits (grocery store, hardware store, electronics store are the main ones) with online orders, I'd probably still not oder more than once every five days (or maybe once every 10 days during covid, now that I go to the grocery store less often).
Or are you talking individual items, like you buy groceries from Amazon and every item is a separate order because they all ship from different sellers?
I think this explains it. Cheapest ducktape on Amazon is like $3.48 with free shipping for Prime users. Ordering one such tape every other day only costs $52.20. At some point you stop caring how much externalities it might be causing by clicking "Order Now" in Tuesday 3:40 AM just for a single M4x20 screw you forgot to add earlier in the day.
*Exceptions are software, digital products, etc.
I was only ever asked about my return _after_ it was issued by Charles Tyrwhitt after I ordered and returned a good number of items (due to their fit being all over the place). That was fair IMO.
On the other hand Amazon has numerous times shown that if you return too much (or don’t behave due to some other opaque metric) your account can get suspended. Even my account was suspended once, though I am only a moderate shopper and have returned less than 10 items over my 18 years membership. I raised the issue with support and asked why (there weren’t even any returns around that time) and they could not tell me but reinstated my account. Good demonstration of power and a reminder to move away from using kindles.
Amazon returns may be easy until you cross some threshold and end up on their bad side.
Amazon: 30 days https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
Walmart: 90 days https://www.walmart.com/cp/returns/1231920
Target: 90 days: https://help.target.com/help/subcategoryarticle?childcat=Ret...
E.g.: https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers...
It'd never occur to me to make online ordering an integral part of my personal logistics and avoid it as much as I can.
Amazon can both treat a large number of people well and treat other customers badly, there’s enough customers to do both to millions.
Not so obvious to me. Could you elaborate on what you mean here, sounds intriguing.
Once preordered a Blu-ray from Amazon JP. It arrived on release day. My only complaint is they won’t ship Blu-ray’s from adult video producers even if the title isn’t hardcore porn.
Panasonic's microwave is dead on arrival, then Amazon shipped replacement one soon before I sent broken one.
Sony's headphone's bone is broken after a few month, so I sent it to Sony's service center but the shit support said that it's broken due to me, not product's fault even though it never taken out. They tried to charged me repair cost before repairing, so I tried to return the product to Amazon JP because it's faulty product. They accepted refunding with exactly same argument wrote here. I believe it won't happen on other Japanese shops.
From this experience, I sometimes buy from Amazon for products that possibly fragile and manufacturer's support is not reliable. (Or add extended warranty that covers my fault)
My friend often buy Chinese cheap electronics from Amazon JP (a.k.a. AliExpress Japan branch) and often return crap. He said it work flawlessly.
I've never lost my package, thanks to high quality delivery company and secure place.
You can claim you got an empty box, but everyone's on the internet here, and pictures of an empty box with indignation as guide text gets you fake internet points on every social media site.
That alone isn't enough for any seller to take your claim as true until you take the necessary steps that come with "I've been defrauded", like filing that credit card dispute and police report. Which they did, after which Amazon accepted the dispute, so... where's the news angle here? "Store honours a $7k claim without questioning it" would almost be more newsworthy.
There will always be a generic and broad policy first. Then it will - and did - get resolved on further investigation.
Because again, it's the internet, just doctoring a UPS web page and printing your own shipping label is trivial for anyone who stands to me $7000 if they get away with it.
It sounds like Amazon refused to refund their money until the media got involved.
Also, even if that were not the case, a big part of what Amazon sells is convenience and (supposedly) great customer service. If you pay $7,000 only to receive an empty box, and you provide Amazon with evidence from UPS that the box's weight was less than the weight of the actual product, that should be all it takes to get your money back.
Jumping through hoops with your credit card company and filing a police report should be the last resort for dealing with shitty companies that won't listen to anything but threats. There is no reason that the buyer should have to do that when dealing with a reputable company, especially when they have evidence from the shipper that the box did not contain the product they ordered.
Because remember: the refund process for products that have vanished isn't "you complain, then you get money", it's "you complain, the seller files an insurance claim with their insurance company, they get the (promise of) insurance compensation, THEN they pay you". You get paid with that insurance money, so: no insurance compensation, no refund.
And that's the only thing the police report does: it lets the seller go to their insurance company and go "here's the paperwork you need so you can justify honouring our claim", and then the insurance company will pay the seller, and if the amount is large enough, and its worth their time, the insurance company will do an investigation.
(and note that this is specifically the process when it comes to fraud or theft, where the law has been broken. It has, obviously, nothing to do with the refund process for a defective product)
The sellers don't care whether the police is going to investigate, they only care that you have the legal paperwork that they can give to their insurer so that THEY can get that money back, too. Because you don't get paid "by the seller", you get paid with dollars that the seller gets from their insurer.
Until they have the evidence that the insurer will accept, you're not getting paid.
Shipping is a subcontractor to the company that sold the product. It is 100% the responsibility of the company to make right.
Imagine if you bought a TV at a store and they said, "want us to bring it out to your car?" And they did. And it got destroyed in the parking lot. And the company said, "you'll have to take it up with the parking lot parcel company. They don't technically work for us."
I agree that underlines how especially ridiculous it is.
Growing market, good press around, apologists for your brand, regulation and anti-monopoly scrutiny seems far away. Then the company is risk-taking, 7k$ that somebody occasionally may cheat is nothing in comparison to a possible blog post saying how awesome the company is. I think miraculously Apple is still here now, Google and Amazon were here 10 years ago, now AWS is here, Microsoft came here again recently, etc.
Then times come that bad press is there regardless of what you do, regulators watch you carefully. Then the user support becomes some scripts to follow, revenue over the next months (or launch before the next promotion cycle) is all you care about. Here I think how Verizon were super greedy and tried to milk the Droid brand within the 1st year, essentially killing it. I think the problem is once you enter this phase, it self-reinforces to stay here.
I have a theory why Google moved from one to the other and I have no view on the others, but at least here I think it was majority external factors not withing the company.
After a few such accidents, each of it super tiring on its own to get things reshipped or reimbursed (and often I failed), I decided all this modernity is not for me. Nowadays I rather buy whatever I can physically in a store, even if it's a bit more expensive.
But again, that's an experience from a "special" part of Berlin, not the standard one I guess.
The only problem I had was that sometimes they drop them off at a neighbor even when I am at home. At least nowadays the name of the neighbor is printed on the notice they leave in the mailbox (and is also included in the email notification) so X instead of signature doesn't work - at least for DHL and my area.
On top of that, DHL refuses to deliver to their own Postfiliale locations at times, DHL express even explicitly say they cannot do this.
I did some research and you don't have to put up with it. Contact Amazon DE customer service and tell them to put a note on your account that you do not consent to any changes to the delivery address. Legally you don't even have to do this but it makes the next calls go easier.
If DHL leaves your package someplace else, like with a neighbor, that is between DHL and Amazon has to sort out.
When next package was left with at a nearby building, I immediately contacted Amazon and informed them my package was not delivered to the correct address. I refused any and all suggestions that I go look for the package. I just repeatedly asked when I can expect delivery to the correct order address. They ended up shipping a replacement.
After standing my ground on this a few times with Amazon, DHL stopped leaving my packages with other people.
DHL doesn't their best to push last mile delivery costs onto you but you don't have to accept it.
edit: typos
I find this super convenient and it has to be less expensive for the delivery service too. I just can't understand why door to door delivery is the norm in some countries.
To me it's just annoying when I get sent a UPS package.
I never ordered there, always to my employer's office. I had my neighbours ringing me multiple times, looking for their package (that naturally wasn't there).
Part of the problem at least in the US is that retail stores don’t have the selection or availability that Amazon does, never mind the price. There are also some things that just aren’t sold in retail stores very often — I’m a competitive sport shooter and parts / supplies were hard to come by locally even before the pandemic.
Largely the same situation in Germany, except stores in the US are much more likely to be open past 18:00.
A few years ago this could have described half of Mitte tbh
BTW, it's off-topic, but this right here is the among best arguments we can make for strong privacy, and against mass surveillance. If people are willing to swallow monetary damage out of fear to upset an algorithm that may cut back their privileges, imagine what happens to political free speech when you have to fear govt surveillance and black vans.
The only error I can recall from Amazon is they once included an exacto knife I didn't order in a package to me.
If same thing kept happening inside non-online business I think we would find it pretty okay...
You keep finding the food you're buying is mouldy so you complain/return it.
They ban you.
So, now you need to spend significantly more money and time on petrol and driving in order to do you weekly shop.
That's OK?
On other side, let's say customer violently attacks other customers or staff. Or causes substantial property damage intentionally, maybe attempts arson. Would you still disagree with them banning such customer?
In the past I've got sent sometimes used electronics sold as new - recently I got 3 times used electronics as new in a row. Isnt that fraud?
Another time DPD messed up my package and never delivered it, they just shipped it again and it I finally got it. The only nuisance was the wait time.
That being said my trust for Amazon is at an all time low due to their marketplace listings. The discoverability has gone awfully bad, I generally end up searching for stuff elsewhere, researching stuff on Google and if I find something I need that’s only available through Amazon, then I have to and dig deep to see if it’s okay.
They simply allow through all sorts of dubious items, knockoffs and scams that clearly just ship from China. Whenever I can, I just order straight from smaller, specialty shops that deliver abroad, instead. It’s not an Amazon-unique situation, however. A local giant online e-tailer started a marketplace and they pretty much instantly started having very similar issues.
I still dislike having to spend lots of extra time just to not to accidentally buy something else instead of what I wanted. Frustrating, to say the least!
Because it most certainly will, sooner or later.
Then any claims of missing/wrong/damaged goods go through smoothly.
Most security cameras don't have autofocus, so showing closeups of scratches doesn't work...
I generally use Amazon as a search engine to see what exists, look at reviews, then buy locally and physically if at all possible. Especially books, after they folded, spindled and mutilated too many books and their replacements.
But I'm in the same boat. A lot more often I'll find myself looking at things on Amazon's site, then seeking out the manufacturer's own site, or another retailer, to make the actual purchase.
I just don't trust Amazon anymore. So much rebranded Alibaba shit on there, or counterfeit hazards.
The latest one I got specifically stated they didn't need a positive review (presumably to get around Amazon's rules?) but it's still a bribe even if it is via an implicit debt.
Vox media Podcast How amazon became giant and dominates the Indstry https://www.vox.com/land-of-the-giants-podcast
That is exactly what I do for every >300€ purchase I make online. Otherwise, refund without "video evidence" becomes impossible for the majority of platforms.
Open a package, empty it, tape it up, and then film yourself opening an empty package.
I try not to buy anything from amazon since FBA is mixed in with knock offs and other garbage items. They have no quality control at all and don't care about knock offs.
I, too, like living dangerously, but only to a certain extent.
I think it's just normal operating procedure unfortunately: checking and confirming every returned item is expensive. Simply turning around and delivering to the next chump is probably more profitable, even with the high error rate.
I bought one of those blind spot mirrors for like $10. I received an envelope (think the old white and blue envelopes) that had nothing. Since the package was "delivered", the only option was to "return the items" but since I didn't have anything to return, there was nothing Amazon could do for me. It was almost funny.
Data sent over neighbors wifi via another amazon device
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/22-year-old-mud-filled-boxes...
I thought it's a weird super expensive smartphone until I read the author's bio.
The TV you speak of belongs to a literal latin A line of products.
The thing that confirmed for me that this was a camera was the domain of the article, which relates to photography. As others have noted, Sony’s naming scheme is confusing.
Their regulars are bound to know what Sony A1 is, but it sure can be confusing for new readers.
It's such a common scam to buy stuff and return an empty box. If they've deemed it not worth the cost to check returns it's again on them.
But now those returning empty boxes will probably add rocks to match the weight or so.
The article we're responding to, not to mention the comments, is evidence that that is at minimum an unreliable assumption.
Re your second point, the seemingly standard way of resolving these issues after the company refuses to comply is to make it a PR problem for the company. Videos are going to help for that.
They were already refunded before the story was even published. Yes, Amazon didn't refund them 7K in their first customer support call, that ruffled their feathers but it is not at all surprising. At that $ obviously they need to be be escalated.
I don't know about you, but I've never filed a police report because someone made me call twice to resolve something.
At the same time, I think it is naive to expect a customer support rep in the Philippines to handle this sort of situation. They do not make 7K in a month. If they bought the empty box at a brick and motor store, I wouldn't expect a cashier to be trained in dealing with a 7K fraud issue, and the general manager may not be able to resolve it on the spot either.
My guess is they eventually did a google search, and thats how they found advice telling them to email jeff@amazon.com. They have a large team of people managing that email and advertise it for situations exactly like this. Its hard to interface with a 2 Trillion Dollar entity but I think it's fair to say they do a ok job.
I agree with you about the frontline rep, that's not the person I have a problem with. I don't expect a low-level customer support rep to be able to approve such a thing. I expect Amazon to, in the event that a rep can't handle a complaint, proactively solve it in a different way, not try to fob the claimant off.
It would be just as easy to, say, bump any refund claim over 1k to someone who is paid enough to make such a decision. Amazon have decided they don't want to. And I don't really think that's acceptable. Just look at the comments in this thread of people self-censoring to avoid getting on the wrong side of the algorithm.
This is a situation Amazon has engineered, because it's cheaper to run these things through automated systems, or only frontline workers. I'm not inclined to accept what I think is pretty bare minimum as good enough on account of their size. If anything, I think their size allows them to afford and amortize better systems than a small company.
Edit: cooled it a little
> This is a situation Amazon has engineered
I agree but I disagree with you as to why. I see two distinct issues.
1. Amazon marketplace reliability/integrity.
2. Customer support escalation process.
_________________________
1. I think Amazon does an abhorrent job, it's the wild west with regards to quality, fraud. & counterfeits. I personally don't trust it.
2. Unfortunately almost everywhere cuts costs and uses automation & frontline works but I think Amazon has a significantly above average process for a large company. The jeff@amazon.com is a very publicized escalation option/safety valve, which worked in this case & I am not aware of for other large brands. It's unfortunate they had a bad call the first time, but that happens. If this sort of thing happened with another retailer (although it's less likely to), I doubt they would have handled it until they went to twitter or was generating press with the story.
NewEgg > Amazon for computer equipment but the jury seems out. Any other alternatives for expensive PC parts?
Box had someone's old power supply inside with all the cables cut off.
And it was "sold and shipped by amazon"
Was furious and then really worried amazon would not believe me but they overnighted another one to my surprise.
I mean that's got to be a felony on an expensive item and Amazon has to know who returned the item to them previously?
I still don't understand with all their automation and integration why they do not photograph the item as it is being packed so you know what it looks inside the shipping box and then the outside of the shipping box itself? Just out a camera over the packaging station right over the box.
In addition, I have a Amazon card from Chase that offers 5% of cashback on amount spent at Amazon. Most of the time factoring in shipping and cashback seals the deal for Amazon and covers for the price difference.
Also: I usually buy the really expensive stuff from B&H, mainly because they have lower prices than Amazon (they have an in-store credit card which pays the tax for you), and have never had a problem with them.
Who I have had issues with is eBay; I have at least twice received counterfeit lower-quality goods from them, such as the time I got an obvious pirated and burned Blu-Ray when ordering a movie.
They really do not honor their prices if you get a good deal or a slip up.
I'm sure this refund kicked off a serious investigation inside of Amazon/FedEx/UPS as this has been getting pretty bad - so for us to notice theft with SOMEWHAT regularity, I imagine it has to be an insanely pervasive problem.
The Google Fi forums seem to mention the phone-then issue regularly... "I ordered Pixel 6 and never received it", etc. etc.
Yeah, for years I've been taking photos and/or video during the process of unboxing expensive items received via mail. Heard too many horror stories over the years.
FWIW I would never purchase a $7000 camera on Amazon.
Camera and so on, check B&H first.
Other electronics, check Best Buy first.
TV, check Costco, they have 7 year warranty and great prices.
Food items, check Walmart first and maybe Target.
Home improvement stuff, check Home Depot.
N95 masks, never buy on Amazon, you never know what you’ll get, check office stores and Home Depot first.
And so on…
I don't know why this never occurred to me, but I will be doing precisely this in the future.
Bonus points if they have a proven billing system that still runs on AS/400 and produces nice invoices in Courier font sent by physical mail.
I either buy at these merchants or offline.
For human rights reasons, I am avoiding Amazon unless the price is clearly much better. The funny thing is, it usually isn't (except for books).
I was sent a A7sII box with a ziploc bag with the exact amount of cat litter to make the box as heavy as it should be.
I had sent Amazon photos back when this happened. They refunded me no problem. But I think they wouldn't do it today.
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.
I had a 2 week contract. They cut it should. I went on a bender and low and before the CEO wants it take ln care of.
I made a compromise and cut off a week but added a 500 "don't be a dick fee
Hi @nfty-labs
Lots of folks have come to trust Amazon's reliability and customer service over the years, so it does make sense for customers to order expensive things from Amazon or any other online store, especially with a pandemic going around.
This incident in particular does seem to be an outlier, and we'll have to see how Amazon resolves it.
For any substantially expensive device, they can also void the warranty by not being an authorized dealer. Or at least create a hassle for the person attempting to use that warranty.
I do NOT trust the million other people selling things on amazon storefront hoping that you don't notice they're not actually amazon
I've recently used newly opened Amazon.pl, first purchase and I had to wait +5 weeks for a small item. I'm not used to navigating the labyrinth of checking whether something is fulfilled by someone or whatever. I just had the displeasure of buying something from a dropshipper.
Nowadays I research items on Amazon and search specialized shops to get them from and maybe get someone to chat with about the stuff I am going to buy. Because I can't trust the reviews on Amazon
There are a lot of knockoff products on there, even benign things like birdfeeders are getting faked and sold: https://www.marketplace.org/2019/11/18/how-amazons-counterfe...
I have not heard that, but holy cow. Just so incredibly shady.
For what it's worth, I bought that same birdfeeder directly from the manufacturer's own storefront on ebay (I've found ebay to be easier to find real sellers than Amazon and don't have to deal with figuring out who is doing the shipping etc) and it's awesome.
Removing the links just affirmed they don't care whats in their marketplace, and they just backed that attitude up with their recent lawsuit claiming they're not responsible.
I've even reported people who include the "$5 for a review", but they don't ever do anything about it. What trust have they earned except from a few people not complaining?
This 1 case was listed as free shipping. So I ordered it, was charged S$180, and 2 weeks later received a brand new, unopened, case, with glass panel all intact no issues.
https://www.ups.com/track?loc=en_US&tracknum=1Z9X26374278728...
Can you explain what you mean?
Edit: I am describing the process as it is now. I am not saying that it should be this way.
I am simply stating facts as to how the website operates today. Right now, it's possible to order an item on the Amazon.com website that does not come from Amazon.com at all. It can be "shipped and sold" by a complete third party. Most items are shipped by Amazon, but it's not difficult to find items that are just listed on Amazon but the entire sale/shipping process is done by the third party.
The parent comment:
> If you buy on the Amazon.com website it’s on Amazon to deliver your order and provide a good shipping experience.
is simply false, because that's not how Amazon operates today. It is literally wrong because it does not apply to all items on Amazon. That statement is only true if something is fulfilled by Amazon, which includes items "Shipped and sold by Amazon.com" and "Sold by <some_third_party>, fulfilled by Amazon". Fulfilled by Amazon means it's located at one of its many warehouses and Amazon ships it in their Amazon boxes.
If I misinterpreted the comment, then my mistake.
I state what I as a consumer expect when shopping.
You state what is actually happening today.
I think we both agree with both points.