Tell HN: Amazon fraudulently canceling orders as returned items | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Amazon fraudulently canceling orders as returned items

311 pointssigmaprimus144 comments

Just wanted to let people know incase there are sellers that are having to pay return fees for items that Amazon has canceled due to the state of emergency and highway washouts in British Columbia.

I just got scolded by the rudest customer service rep I have ever dealt with. Apperantly I should "Know full well that BC had a weather event and that my items were damaged" which is another lie as I tracked them and they never left the Amazon processing center.

But anyways I assume what they are doing is clearing up space for new deliverable orders as the center is jammed full of packages that are for addresses cut off from the lower mainland. All new orders are being rerouted from the east rather than the south, but instead of reshipping the items at their southern warehouse, they just claimed they were all returns and placed the owness on the sellers for returned items.

I guess doing the right thing would have eaten into Amazons profit margins, and if those margins are not big enough...well I guess their billionaire owner wont be able to take another joy ride into space.

Dealing with Amazon customer support is felling more and more like dealing with an abusive partner.

View on HN

You know what Amazon did to me? They delisted my product claiming it was counterfeit. Then they started to directly promote and sell my own inventory.

I know it was mine because I contacted the brand to check if Amazon had bought from them. They hadn't. Also, I was the only one selling this item on Amazon so they couldn't have stolen from someone else. What's more, I was the only one importing it to the US. I know because I'm acquainted with the brand owners.

When I finally managed to get my stuff out of their warehouses, which took almost a year, they admitted that some of the inventory had been "lost" and compensated me pennies on the dollar.

It was a surreal, Kafkaesque, experience that still brings back painful memories. I avoid thinking about it but I hope that one day Amazon will crash, burn, and hopefully never recover.

This is fraud. If it's trivially provable the product is not counterfeit, then what they did is criminal. Not civil.

If so, it should be documented. All the evidence with relevant vendor contact information, accounts, dates, events. Each state has their own consumer protection laws, so as this involves interstate commerce who to report it to will vary, but you can start by calling local police. They can tell you about jurisdiction, and escalate to stat consumer protection division. And states work together with the FTC on such cases as well.

I doubt my local police would've been eager to take on Amazon. I think I've had enough after more than a year of misery exchanging close to a 1,000 emails and 2 appeals with Amazon, writing my congressmen and senator (stock reply lauding their achievements with the CARES act), and reporting to FTC (no reply). At some point you have to move on and continue living your life.

It may be worth contacting the federal prosecutor with jurisdiction in your area. There are a whole lot of government lawyers who would love to make a name for themselves by bringing charges or winning a settlement against Amazon

The magic ingredient you lacked was Lawyers. Letters from lawyers are rarely ignored. Of course this costs money, that why Amazon is not afraid to hurt small guys.

FWIW there are not many HN users for whom it would be cheaper to personally write 1000 emails than hire a lawyer to write one or two letters.

In some areas, small claims court might have been a reasonable avenue.

Keep trying some of the other 3 letter agencies for stuff at Amazon scale. Surely some bureaucrat would love to take on FAANG.

At least you got replies from your representatives. I faced an issue with rights violations and I couldn't even get responses. Unfortunately, the experience was similar to what you described. The system is fundamentally broken.

A quick question. How do you find manufacturers for a particular brand? I want to dabble in becoming a supplier (not for Amazon nor US) but so far I can't figure out the suppliers for brands you would find at Walmart, etc.

import yeti will allow you to search for atleast imported goods (and if its made in usa, then atleast it lets you fetch records of its sourced parts) , https://www.importyeti.com

This lets you search through the entire import records, and find out suppliers for various brands, note: some companies intentionally use a different name under which it imports the products (rare), but still is be a good place to start looking.

Good luck with your business !

How is this site free? The ladings data is quite expensive and there are a bunch of vendors charging a hefty fee for it.

Glad this site is free though :) I hope they stick around for a long time

Great site, thanks! wonder if we have something similar in Europe

That's the site! Unfortunately I don't see Covergirl, Maybelline, etc. I will keep looking

They are probably importing under a different name, keep looking

Search up where their product facilities are, is it outside or inside usa , if so then depending on that you’ll need to look up parts of the product.

If you need help looking through it, Ping me on “me at teitoklien . com” (klien is not a typo)

I’ll try to help you, search for it.

> Ping me on “me at teitoklien . com” (klien is not a typo)

If confusion is common enough to warrant the preemption, then why not just get teitokline.com as well? Seems to be available.

I own both teitoklein.com and teitoklien.com Due to that typo issue

people dont mistake it with kline, its usually with klein

Appreciate the suggestion tho :)

Alibaba

it surprises me every time a reverse image search turns up the same stock photo of the product on alibaba, so I second this and recommend pasting the products’ photo URL to tineye.com

Why didn’t you sue?

Forced arbitration and for the sake of my own mental health. I just don't want anything to do with this company anymore.

Forced arbitration that manages to paper over something like theft?

Yeah if the post here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29297139 ) is correct, I don't see how criminal fraud could be fall under forced arbitration. Criminal prosecution isn't even up to the private parties.

That said, I could certainly see why someone might want to avoid devoting their life to fighting Amazon over something like this.

Sue a 500-pound gorilla?

Sure. There are lawyers who would take a case like this on contingency.

Do you really think this is practical? My employer is suing a tiny operation for 50k USD that he owes them. We have all the paperwork etc. already spent 4K in lawyer fees, just for step one. This is after trying to get in touch with him for months. He doesn’t give a shit.

If it is this difficult to fight a tiny business, how does anyone take on Amazon? There are rare people who are willing to lose their shirts on principle, but most people are just trying to take care of their families.

Best long term solution is to not use Amazon at all. That is also very difficult. So we are all stuck with not much choice

If it's a fairly simple case, there are probably many lawyers who would happily take on the risk of losing the case.

They’d take $20-30k if they worked on contingency. Spending $5k to obtain a default judgment is a better investment. (A default judgment would be the outcome if this person has disappeared, but has assets in the same country, and the owed amount is documented.)

Easy statement, why did don't you find a good lawyer that will take the case for free and send them a referral?

It's much easier, and much likely to be worth spending time on, to fight a bigco than the tiny business that doesn't care.

Pretty sure when you sell on Amazon you commit to binding arbitration. Like amazons not gonna stack that deck.

Not a lawyer but I don’t think arbitration would apply to criminal fraud charges.

There are also plenty of lawyers who would take a binding arb case on contingency. Amazon wrote the contract, but that doesn’t mean the arbitrator is in the bag for them.

What are their names?

If you’re in Texas I know a few.

Open a ticket on the gorilla.

I can tell you a more likely story than "big conspiracy on Amazon's part".

Amazon has systems in place to say "We cannot ship from X to Y anymore", but they require manual intervention and maybe those tools don't get used very much. Until someone finds the right button and presses it, orders are dropping into the warehouse to be fulfilled. Ship this sprocket from Vancouver to Calgary since Calgary's site has none.

But the truck didn't show up, or maybe it did but now it's got nowhere to go.

Now the dock has one section slowly filling up with packages. It's been days. Dock doors are a limited resource, and here's a bunch of them with a mountain of packages blocking them. And the site leadership, well, they have metrics to hit. Just like every other cog in the machine, they will be fired if they don't make rate. What, you thought it was just the lowly associates who are running with dogs nipping at their heels?

What's a site leader to do? Well, there's a returns department right here. They've got tools that can handle the package being returned, allowing them to restock those items, refund the customers, clear the dock, and make everything go back to normal for the site.

Sounds like good 'Customer Obsession' to get those orders refunded as quickly as possible.

Sellers? Those aren't customers. Those metrics are not something the leadership needs to worry about, so they won't.

Sounds functionally equivalent.

This I 100% believe

"owness" => "onus"

I hate giving corrections, and this is a severe word misunderstanding, so I feel it's better to inform rather than leave it. I mean no disrespect by posting this, I intend only to inform and/or educate.

This is a most proper eggcorn [0] since OP's explanation is centered around "owe"...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

Thanks, I couldn't guess the right word/spelling from context, and the dictionary didn't help me.

Much appreciated, I do disagree with it being severe in this particular case as the Seller now technically now owes Amazon for shipping but yes I stand corrected and intended the word "ONUS" or "BURDEN". Maybe my friends gift that was "RETURNED" by Amazon will get replaced with a Scrabble game from Walmart!! +1 for You

PS: I guess I should spend more time in the LiBerry and Axe more questions ;P

Thank you. I didn't make that link and thought it was some rarely used English word that I hadn't heard before.

Problems like this are why my business partner and I started building Vendazzo (https://vendazzo.com/). My partner had been looking for a way to run an independent shop, outside of Amazon, and realized there was no central way to funnel traffic to independent shops. Each shop is left to figure out how to get their name out there and get users onto their site, whereas if you sign up for Amazon, users are given a central search to search across all sellers and find the item(s) they are looking for.

Our product is very much a WIP, and will likely fall over with even modest load, but feel free to kick the tires. We have a lot of work we need to do, but if anyone (buyer or seller) has feedback, we would love to hear it. We're currently only indexing ~140k shops, and ~90m items, mostly from shops in the US, Canada, and Europe, but its a start.

Heads up on your landing page. I didn’t know what I was supposed to type into the search box. Category, item, zip code?

Good to know! We'll have to add something in there to make it more obvious. At the moment, you can just search for the item you are looking for `red shoes`, `58 telecaster`, etc. The location filtering is after you search using the "filter" button, and it requires your location (currently). We plan to extend it to filter by ZIP as well, but we're not there yet. Also, of the 140k shops, we only have location data for ~20k of them. We're working on it.

Oh wow yeah, I really agree. GP - I think this is a great idea, and from your description here on HN it's really clear how to use it, and I thought parent commenter must be overstating it, but no it really looks like I might be supposed to enter where I want to shop, rather than what for.

It would help to preload some products (popular/trending at the moment perhaps?) I think or show some categories. So that it looks more like Amazon or any single shop, but the search gives you results from many.

I've wondered before why Shopify doesn't do this fwiw. Why isn't there a central shop entrypoint for all Shopify shops? Bit of crossover with Etsy perhaps, but probably the more serious end and beyond.

Thanks for the input! Ya, we are already working on getting featured items onto the main page to make it more obvious that its a shopping site and that you can search for the thing you're looking for. We will also look into adding a location filter right up front on the main page for users who specifically want to shop locally. Very small team at the moment, so changes take time, but we'll get there!

I would start fixing about page https://vendazzo.com/about

Amazon has really turned a little more hostile to Third Party Merchants in the last few years.

In 2012/2013, I was doing FBA on damaged cargo/insurance buyouts (If a truck gets into a wreck, 99.9%, they can't use the goods on the truck, so, Insurance companies will sell them for pennies on the pound. Yes, pound) when I found a company that was selling a trailer full of LG 27" monitors for what would equate to about $18/each. I had some office and self-storage space and a SUV, and would literally take 10 them from my self storage unit every day, take them to my office space, test the monitor out, open the back to inspect for damage, and then repackage everything in the box and sell them as Used/Tested/Refurbished depending on what I needed to do to get them working again.

My biggest complaint was that when someone would return a monitor, it'd never make its way back to me -- as in, it always looked like someone would never return the monitor. I'd set calendar reminders to follow up with Amazon Seller Support, and I'd always get the money credited back to my account.

I've watched the fees go up and up (when I was doing FBA, my Amazon fees would cost me around $10, shipping included, per piece. Today, the same fees would run me around $30/unit per device: my item is considered 'oversized')

As someone on the Seller Forums mentions a few different times -- you aren't amazon's customer, the end-user is. Amazon is just a channel for selling your goods. Unfortunately, dealing with Amazon as a channel partner is just basically russian roulette -- no matter how well you can describe your problem, you're working with a team that just doesn't care.

I've had offers from the same trucking insurance company over the last few years -- even a truck load of PS5's this summer -- but, didn't really want the headache of dealing with Amazon, so, I've turned the offers down.

Buy these trucks full of goods for cheap, and resell somewhere else? Even eBay, instead of Amazon, would be great for flipping these items.

Or even better, there's a need for an aggregator where people can offer to buy "their share" of the full truck of damaged items, and once you have sold 100% of the truck you send the items and collect the payment.

What actually happened? I'm having a hard time tying up the title with your description of it.

They cancelled an order on your behalf, then when you contacted to say you didn't cancel it, they claimed it was damaged in transit? And refused to honour the original price in sending a replacement?

They did not cancel the order, I ordered the items, they claimed I returned the items which did cancel the order in a round about way. This may make my issue more clear. Below is a copy of the email I sent a consumer protection advocate in my area explaining my personal issues with this situation. Beyond all that they are also taking advantage of sellers by processing items that Amazon had canceled as returns which has a punitive effect on sellers.

>>>>

Hello,

I recently made some purchases on Amazon.ca and because of the shipping routes being cut off due to the weather events my shipments are delayed. This is an understandable situation but what Amazon has decided to do is cancel my orders without any option of waiting or offering a rain cheque for the items at a later date. Instead they just send an email saying your money will be refunded in 2 to 4 days(Which 2 to 4 days is also seems unreasonable considering they initiated the cancelation)

I understand why they are doing this as their warehouse/shipping center is getting jammed up with items they can not deliver but with the current state of inflation and rising prices, I will be forced to pay more for the items which I already purchased due to their lack of capacity.

When I contacted Amazon I was connected with the rudest customer service rep I have ever had and was scolded because "I know full well that there is a state of emergency in BC and that my items were most likely damaged due to the flooding". Which if that was the case I still feel my order should be fulfilled by Amazon at a later date.

I am sure I am not the only one going through this in the North and I feel this matter should be investigated for the sake of others. I would expect that somewhere in the Amazon terms and conditions there is something that absolves them from making things right but just because something is legal to do, does not always mean it is fair.

Thank You

So you ordered something, they couldn’t get it to you, they’re going to fully reimburse you within a week, and you’re complaining about poor customer service? If that’s your idea of a big scandal then you’re living an unbelievably privileged life :)

A full refund doesn't necessarily make the customer whole. He also lost the prices he locked in at the time of purchase. This can easily be hundreds of dollars on high ticket items with transient sales.

Reasonable options would include reaching out to customers and saying "ETA is in N weeks, do you want to wait, or refund now" or including a raincheck with the refund, so you can reorder once the crisis ends without penalty.

I had a similar crisis recently: spent a fortune on a graphics card that was defective out of the box. I was very concerned the vendor would just straight refund it because the same card is $300 more today.

In a state of emergency (which British Columbia has announced) generally it's considered that a refund/cancellation is legally sufficient to make the customer whole, and any extra costs e.g. penalties / costs of delays / locking in of prices are just going to be ignored; it's considered acceptable to just break contracts which can't be exactly executed because of a state of emergency. In ordinary circumstances what you say would apply, but an official state of emergency does change things.

I sure would like to see this legislation, I suspect You just made this up. I am aware that the declaration of a state of emergency provides special powers and protection for governments when dealing with private entities but it is not a blanket mandate for companies and individuals to break contracts to their benefit.

Here is the actual Act incase anyone is interested in some dry reading.

https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/stat...

Anyways the short of the long of it is Amazon made a decision to cancel my purchases, obviously I am not happy with that. Amazon processed the cancelation as a return which is fraudulent and unfair to the sellers. Those items will most likely end up at a liquidation center and create a loss for the seller.

Even if You feel I am being unreasonable because of the "State of Emergency", Amazon is still shipping non essential items to customers in the lower mainland and burning up our fuel and resources while the rest of us are suffering fuel rations.

Don't be so quick to discount my situation as selfish as one day soon You may very well be the one being dismissed.

It's unclear how much the state of emergency affects these items, though. If they have stock in an unaffected warehouse, and OP's location isn't affected, and they are willing to send new orders to OP, then the state of emergency isn't a very good justification for cancelling the old order. Similar if they could just reroute the items.

How exactly does this affect you? As far as I can tell, your complaining seems entirely unreasonable.

One can be concerned about things that do not directly affect themselves personally.

The OP says he reported it to the consumer protection advocate in his area. Who are the consumers affected by this?

The best arguments here have been that maybe this fucks over the sellers (not from the OP, and no evidence to support that). How would that be an issue for the consumer protection advocate?

Maybe you should actually try to read OPs comments? They make much less sense if you try to read them instead of just skimming and letting your imagination fill in the blanks.

Perhaps making assumption like you have isn't conducive to having a discussion? There is little need to assume such a combative tone. This is in reference to the first sentence of the last line.

It’s not combative, it’s simply pointless to have a conversation with someone who isn’t actually paying attention.

It’s also a perfectly reasonable assumption, as explained by the first two lines of my comment.

I was affected by the cancelations, the fraud may not have affected me directly but when a company makes a unilateral decision to not fulfill a contracted purchase to enable it to conduct commerce with others it does fall into the purview of a consumer advocate.

Anyways, I posted this to inform others of the actions taken by Amazon and how they affected myself and others that are currently cut off from all supplies in the North. I feel like Amazon just wrote us off with no regard to our current situation.

Perhaps you should have tried asking if I had read the comment, which I have. I just interpreted it differently than you did. The principle of charity would have most useful if we had applied it to this discussion.

You are embezzling them with fraud because the item was shipped and damaged in transit?

Not at all, the fraud occurs when an order regardless of damage or not is processed as a returned item to the detriment of the seller. These items will now be sent to a liquidation outlet and disposed of resulting in a loss to the seller.

if that is not fraud what would You call it?

I have also viewed the tracking information and these items were not damaged due to any weather event, the items never left the warehouse and there was no flooding within 100KM of it. If an Amazon employee drives a forklift over my package is it acceptable for them to not fulfill the order and claim that I returned it? Maybe so, but in this case I suspect the items are perfectly fine just in the way of other incoming orders.

It would kind of be the same as if the Ports just decided to dump all the containers in the way of the incoming ones into the ocean just to clear up congestion. Then tell the customers sorry, here is a refund for your items, please reorder them at higher shipping rates and or prices(including shipping and inflation). Sorry about that..there was a state of emergency declared and we can do whatever we want now.

Except in my case there was not even an apology, just a notification of an incoming refund for the items I supposedly returned. Then when I contacted customer service to find out what was going on I was abused by a nasty person telling me that I "know full well what is happening and that my items were damaged".

But I guess I'm just a crazy, privileged, selfish person living outside of reality. OK

I don't know if you have experience with package carriers but for us we always get a returned label from dhl/ups/fedex even if the item is returned because of damage during shipping.

You gotta get over this. Buy what you need somewhere else.

Already did, Your right. Still sucks though!

I suppose most users here didn't actually bother to read your screed, because it really doesn't seem to describe any real issues.

What's supposed to be the problem here? Amazon just cancelled some orders that they couldn't deliver, you got a refund.

Calling this "fraudulent"? That just makes you sound like a crazy person.

You’ve obviously never read The Amazon Business Services Agreement. The nuance here is Amazon charges sellers for _Returns_. How is it a return when it never left the warehouse?

OP is not writing from the perspective of a seller, he has absolutely no idea how this looks for the sellers.

Having been both a seller and customer on Amazon, I think OP’s writing is from the perspective of someone who has also been both.

He cannot possibly know how this is being handled on the seller side.

Actually, he can. If they say it is “retuned” then it has been marked as a return and all the “return” business rules are applied. Otherwise it would show as “cancelled”. This same information is available to both seller and consumer via their respective dashboards.

Again, you don’t know this unless you literally work for amazon. This is obviously an exceptional situation and could be incorrectly displayed on the customer side, and correctly displayed in the seller central.

They’re complaining because pre-pandemic, when shit broke, bitching got you your way. Now, there are just some things that aren’t gonna happen. No amount of influence or wealth insulates you from supply chain impacts of COVID.

Pre-pandemic they never had to learn how to take the L and move on. Now that the Ls are piling up, privileged people are losing their collective shit.

The OP isn’t even taking a L, he’s just not getting the stuff he ordered (but is getting a refund).

You are a customer. There was a big issue in BC, your package from amazon was delayed and they refunded your money in full.

You are complaining because

1) the refund took two days to process, which you claim is unreasonable.

2) You are also complaining based on your emails that they didn't offer you a "rain cheque", depsite the fact that amazon does not offer rain cheque's, and in fact changes prices of item you have put in your cart.

You have now contacted a consumer protection advocate with this claim of fraud.

Good luck! This is the MOST ridiculous consumer complaint I have seen.

Are sellers treated like crap? For sure, that is a given. Sellers are not amazon's customers, there is no seller obsession, their is a customer obsession, and for the metrics amazon is watching what they did here probably makes sense, they can restock and reship these items to places they can deliver to.

The first time I read this I thought you were a seller (due to your references to hypothetical return fees to be paid by sellers). After reading through the comments it seems that this is not the case —- you are a regular customer, you purchased some items, then the order was cancelled. Is that correct?

If so, is that really such a big deal? Aren’t you making a mountain out of a molehill?

I posted a review that their amazon basics batteries leaked within a year just sitting on a shelf. They flagged my review as not meeting community standards and didnt post it.

Almost everyone selling on Amazon knows that they have almost no recourse.

It seems like blatant fraud to me but I'm not a seller, just a shopper who is currently reevaluating their relationship with Amazon(unfortunately not for the 1st time either). I feel that the fact they canceled my order without offering me a raincheck for the items they already charged my credit card for or at the keast give me the option to wait for reshipping. Now every item on the store is 15% to 250% higher if it is even available anymore...well is unfair especifically so close to Xmas. It just seems any response would have been better than the brow beating served up by an angry customer service rep.

Heres the FOAD letter they just sent me.

>>>>Hello,

As you are likely aware, unprecedented weather events across British Columbia have resulted in road closures and damage to infrastructure that is severely hindering transportation into and out of Western Canada.

Unfortunately, because of these events, we can no longer provide an estimated date for delivery of your package. If you do not want to wait for your package, please contact our Customer Service team to discuss other options.

Thank you for your understanding. We wish everyone affected a safe and quick recovery. Please know that we also continue to prioritize the health and safety of our Amazon associates while we work through these challenges.

Sincerely,

Customer Service Amazon.ca

SINCERELY? Pfft! At keast they are not canceling the items that real carriers fedex, canada post picked up....unlike the amazon contract carriers they use and abuse.

> shopper who is currently reevaluating their relationship with Amazon(unfortunately not for the 1st time either)

How many more times before you start acting on it for real? I had two bad experience Amazon France and never used since then. This company is crap, not only for buyers but for employees and traditional retail too. Also evade taxes. If you want things to change it's time to stop using it for real.

Would you mind giving some details on your issues?

As a French user of Amazon, I've always watched these topics with a bit of concern, but never had myself any issues. I figured their practices might be different for whatever reason in the EU as compared to the US / Canada. Even deliveries fulfilled by Amazon have been great experiences, with the people coming to my door (I live in an apartment building with a concierge not accepting packages).

Il y a quelques années j'avais commandé des livres sur Amazon pour des cadeaux, à différents moments si je me souviens bien. Un gros livre de cuisine d'un cuisinier célèbre : les bords étaient abîmés. Je demande un changement, le nouvel exemplaire est abîmé aussi. Du coup, demande de remboursement et j'ai fini par l'acheter à la Fnac... C'était embêtant d'avoir à faire ça et la personne a eu son cadeau en retard. Un autre livre, moins sensible au niveau de la couverture, là aussi pour un cadeau est arrivé abîmé. Donc voilà, surtout pour des cadeaux c'est vraiment la loterie et ça ne vaut pas le risque. Autant payer quelques euros plus chers et acheter un exemplaire sans défaut à la librairie du coin.

> I live in an apartment building with a concierge not accepting packages

What kind of a concierge is this? How do you not get into fights over this?

> What kind of a concierge is this?

Apparently they only take care of the building. "Public hours" are very restrained, so basically the delivery guy has next to no chance of finding it open.

> How do you not get into fights over this?

I rent, so I can't really complain about it effectively. But I was surprised to find this was the case, since I was looking for a building with a concierge for this exact reason, and it's the first time I've seen this. Guess I'll know for the next time...

Oh, so it’s the same scam as in Spain where they like to refer to the security guy as “the concierge”.

I rent too, I’d just print out some flyers about the subject and drop them in all the neighbours mailboxes. This kind of stuff is just petty.

Living in a small town has placed me in a rock and a hard place situation when it comes to shopping. I said in another comment it feels like an abusive domestic relationship and although You are correct that I should just leave them, the situation is more complicated than just a binary choice.

Seems like price gouging if they're cancelling your original order but still allowing orders at the updated higher price.

PS: I also puchased a Laptop through BestBuy around the same time that got caught up in this mess, they used FedEx as their carrier. There package was held up at the FedEx warehore in Richmond for 5 days but they have now rerouted it through Calgary and I expect I will recieve it eventually. Far better decisions in my opinion.

This seems like pretty normal behavior actually... they attempted to deliver the order, there was a failure to deliver, and so they are refunding it. I think it comes off weird just because of Amazon's kind of lazy implementation.

I've had a nearly identical experience and I believe the reason is some shortcuts in Amazon's integration with UPS. In my case, I ordered a fairly expensive item from Amazon, it was late on delivery, and then I saw (via MyChoice) that the UPS tracking had been updated with a note along the lines of "merchandise missing, returning carton to shipper." It seemed like either someone had stolen it in shipping or something had happened that broke the box open. In any case, this decision by UPS to "return to sender" seems to have automatically triggered return processing on Amazon's side, as I got a "We couldn't deliver your item" email from Amazon followed a couple of days later by a slightly incongruous email telling me that my return had been received and a refund issued.

They did not hold back any return fee, I got the full amount back. Overall I have no complaints about their handling, other than that the item was sold out so I'm now waiting on a restock which is slightly annoying... but that's the chip shortage for you.

As for what the seller faced, it's sort of hard to know... while not the friendliest in the world I can imagine Amazon holding back some funds from the seller in this case because the risk of things being lost in transit (or stolen after delivery) is well-known to online sellers and something they presumably price in.

On the other hand, around a year ago I had a series of Amazon orders all get stuck in the tracking and ultimately cancelled... at the same Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Southern California. They must have been having some kind of serious problem there, but it was annoying that they just kept trying to fulfill my orders out of the same place.

I’m sorry that you had to be personally impacted to realize that Amazon is willing to screw you over rather than improve their processes.

I wish that more people realized that Amazon’s retail operation is a flea market before they suffered. I hope that your story inspires more people to realize they’re vulnerable, re-evaluate the risks of using Amazon, and cancel Amazon Prime.

This isn't fraud. Or if it is fraud it's not fraud against you and you don't have the information to see if it is or not.

They can't get you your item because of the weather. Whether or not you personally feel that they should have worked harder or not isn't really the issue; that's not your call to make. They tried, they decided they couldn't do it[1] so they cancelled your order and refunded your purchase price. That's good customer service, not bad.

[1] One likely reason is that they probably don't have the local warehousing space to store everyone's in-transit items; it needs to go back to a main shipping center anyway. And if they do, they should ship it to a customer they can reach from there promptly instead (which again is good customer service on the whole: ship as much stuff as you can as fast as you can).

Many things they do now days is fraudulent. 90% of my orders over $100 are open-box or straight up used items, but they still charge full price on these items. If you're even more unlucky, you might get counterfeit products too despite ordering from the genuine manufacturer on Amazon's page.

Another anecdote from someone with ~20k orders: I bought two pairs of Airpods Max, returned one of them but mixed up the boxes with the two serials. Amazon disposed[!] the brand-new returned model and still charged me for both.

I mean, you messed up in a way that appears to Amazon like you tried to get one over on them. Mistakes happen, but the customer rarely wants to admit when they were the ones to make the mistake.

This is a common scam in retail. Buy something, keep the something, fill the box with something else, return the item under extremely lenient return policies, get something for free. Next buyer shockingly gets box of rocks.

But, that doesn't sound like what happened. The way I'm reading it, they bought 2 Air Pods (call them AP1 and AP2), that each came in their own respective boxes (BOX1 and BOX2). Then, they mistakenly returned one of them in the wrong box (maybe AP1 in BOX2). No box of rocks here, just an honest mistake that seems like it might have been easy to recognize, since Amazon has a record of selling both items to them.

Yeah, sorry, wasn't trying to accuse that's what happened. The mistake was still on the original poster for putting the wrong item in the wrong box.

I was just trying to make the conenction how Amazon could see it as potentially being scammed by claiming a return for AP1 but receiving AP2 in AP1 box. That's not the item agreed to accept as a return. Whether by mistake or knowingly, it was not what was agreed upon for the the return.

What is the right thing to do? Eat the costs? Sure it's Amazon, they can afford. So let's ignore it is Amazon and think in more general and hopefully neutral tones. Is the person making the mistake willing to pay for the shipping to return the incorrect item? No? Then what is retailer suppposed to do? Put it on a shelf, or just chunk it as it is trash to them.

I would say what you choose to do in this scenario as a retailer depends on whether you want your (now possibly former) customer going on a web site and telling thousands of people about their bad experience. Surely that's worth the cost of shipping, isn't it?

Another perspective: they've made 20k orders already. Surely, over that time, they've made you enough money in retail margin to make eating the cost trivial. Even without the 20k orders, we're still talking about someone who's bought two pair of $120 earbuds. The expected lifetime value of that customer probably exceeds the shipping cost. Hell, even the gross margin on one sale probably exceeds the shipping cost.

I think it's pretty clear that not only should the retailer assume it was a good faith mistake, but they should also step in to help make it right.

Okay, fair points.

A company the size of Amazon will not feel the repurcussions of someone going online trying to make hay about some slight received from evilCorp (however wrongly/rightly that justification is). They just won't even notice.

For a legit serious customer that made a mistake, who's going to look that up? The poor warehouse employee whose job it is to receive the returns? Do you honestly feel like these employees are taking the time to look up the returner's purchasing history? Do we think that's even a good idea for that employee to have access to that data? I'm not trying to do free work for Amazon, not that they'd ever listen to feed back from randos on a website, but there are further questions arising from this logisitcs exercise.

Who needs to look up anything? They already have to scan the box and note the serial number of the item. Most of the time, these will just match and there's nothing to be done. Likewise, the box of rocks scenario doesn't impose any additional burden. The only time there's any additional work that may need to be done is if there's actually a set of Air Pods in the box that don't match the serial number. In that case, the system can automatically check itself for a previous and recent order of AirPods, pop up the serial number and show the person receiving the return, and they can compare just like they did when the box was scanned.

This would probably take a whole 30 seconds extra, but it would be an edge case. And, as you said, unless they stand to lose this person as a customer, it won't make a damn bit of difference to Amazon whether this particular edge case doesn't work. But, then, so much for "customer obsession," right?

The fact that literal boxes of rocks or brick make it through shows that the least bit of effort the returns department could do is not getting done. Seems hard to miss an opening of a box to find a brick/rocks rather than what is pictured on the box getting passed by anyone that actually opens the box. "Hmmm, a box of rocks. I guess Amazon does sell anything. I wonder why the customer didn't like these rocks? I guess they didn't have the original box so they used this Norelco Electric Shaver box instead" says no Amazon employee ever (too much credit??).

Then, how did they determine the wrong AirPods were in @marban's box? How does the situation they describe even arise? If nobody's looking in the boxes, this is a non-problem from the customer perspective.

Just to clarify: We're not talking about small Airpods, I've bought ~2x €490 AP Max. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. Despite the loss, it feels outlandish that Amazon has regulations in place to literally destroy such returns.

It's fine to refuse the return.

It's not fine to steal the refused return.

What are the logisitcs for majorCorp? Eat the cost of shipping the item they didn't authorize to send to them in the first place? It's not their fault user did wrong thing. To them, they are still out 2 items. According to the terms of the return, if you don't follow the terms, you eat the cost of both items. The terms were not followed to the point that it will cost seller even more money to return the unqualified item. Maybe a bit rambly mambly, but hopefully you can at least see the situation from a neutral point of view.

It's logistically annoying if you're sent something by mistake and now need to deal with it in some manner.

But if they don't accept the return then it's not their property. Throwing it away is theft.

Um, it was given willingly if perhaps mistakenly. Amazon did not sneak into their home and grab the wrong thing without the owner knowing. There were no weapons brandished, no threats made, nor any other menacing to provoke the taking of something unwanted to be given.

I think your definition of theft is in need of adjustment. You might have something against Amazon, and might even be justified in that feeling, but it is misguiding your judgement in this case.

If you send the wrong item, or send an item to the wrong address, it's not a gift.

Amazon taking possession isn't theft. Destroying something they don't own is theft. Specifically, it's conversion.

At most, they could charge reasonable shipping costs for shipping it back.

I also had an amazon seller not shipping anything and then claiming the item was returned last week (in Europe) fwiw.

I am guessing they're trying to game some metric so they don't get in trouble with amazon itself.

Did they do this with Ida too? I ordered a book that got stuck in Dallas and never showed up and I'm still not sure about the refund...

Although Bezos is a shareholder he is off of the project. There is a different CEO.

OpticsPlanet has similarly slimy practices, some worse. The FTC should be involved by now. Don't hesitate to make a report ~ it takes a lot to budge them, but the more the merrier

What's the slimy practice? Amazon refunded orders that they weren't able to deliver. OP is upset because there's a display bug involving the cancellation reason.

It’s onus not owness

Shopify?

Yep, but then you have to work harder to drive traffic to your shop, since Shopify doesn't have a central marketplace or search feature.

For a company of that size, this must be trivial for Shopify to implement. Have a search engine that can search across all their stores, let stores to opt-in, curate/categorize the products very well, let users search with very narrow parameters, and above all, don't do "sponsored" listings (charge a $10 fee per store per month, or something like that) . The only tricky thing here would be the order of listings - which product comes first among competing stores? That would require some thought.

Imagine a brand new, tiny, unknown seller. This feature alone might be worth it for the seller to sign up with Shopify.

Yes, we were surprised as well, but since they didn't seem interested in building it, we started building one! ;)

https://vendazzo.com/

How does this work? Are you crawling the stores or do you have a relationship with the stores to display their products?

Have you tried dealing with Uber or AirBnB support recently? It's beyond bad, you basically have to use these services, amazon, airbnb, uber etc at your own risk. 70% of what I buy on amazon either isn't as advertised or breaks after an hour, 70% of my uber drivers don't know the city, 70% of my airbnb experiences in the last 5 years have been awful and support has been there in no instances.

I can't believe I'm saying this but... google of all people, have better support than most tech companies these days.

Amazon support is great. With Uber drivers you get what you pay for, all Uber Lux drivers I've interacted with have been at the level you'd expect from a professional chauffeur company (which they usually work for).

Amazon used to be great. They used to refund, or replace an order immediately. The other day I literally had a chat support agent tell me to call the shipper to check status and then gave me the Amazon support number, because Amazon was the shipper. This was after the website showed it as probably lost. They have decided that they don't need to care anymore. Oh, they also have started hiding the late order in your order history... imagine hoping you'll forget.

I've had the opposite experience. They've refunded things that didn't arrive, no questions asked. The only annoyance I've had with them is that a driver left a package at someone elses house and said it was delivered, and support said to walk around our neighbors houses and see if we could find it before they would refund it.

Did you try speaking to another agent before declaring that Amazon support has gone bad? This is not consistent with my (recent) experiences.

I recently discovered that uber lux/black thing, during the day it's been showing only 4/5 $ more so I tried it a few times and boy o boy, the drivers are a zillion times better. I feel very uncomfortable riding around in an SUV because I'm a hippie but I tell myself "it's on the road anyway, may as well use it" (although I'm well aware of how ridiculous that argument is).

I think the way Uber has handled this is truly excellent.

In London we have a huge range of service levels to choose from:

- UberX: The cheapest option, truly a mixed bag.

- Comfort: Drivers with 500+ trips, average 4.85 rating and mid-size cars starting from 2015

- Exec (Black): 1000+ trips, avg rating of 4.9 and a “mid-tier luxury vehicle” manufactured after 2016

- Lux: Basically only drivers from professional chauffeur companies, 90% of the cars are new S-classes. Occasionally you’ll see a Rolls Royce.

You get exactly what you’re willing to pay for, the prices are very competitive at every service level.

> if those margins are not big enough...well I guess their billionaire owner wont be able to take another joy ride into space.

It's fun to shit on Bezos for doing what he wants with money he earned, but I was humbled recently listening to his various talks from around 2006-2010, when AWS was just taking off.

Yes. I've had this happen when I order "politically incorrect books". They are literally censoring idea they don't like.

Which ones? I want read them.

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