Counterfeits, fraud, and theft: Why Silca changed its return policy
cyclingtips.com
cyclingtips.com
I previously posted about this on HN and one of the responses was “who cares? Az makes $100k/min”
You know what? It matters. Doing the right thing fucking matters. Have some integrity, don’t take what isn’t yours, give back what was a mistake. Don’t fall into the trap of relativism.
You don’t know the whole story either... I’d like to think by returning that item I saved someone from getting fired; or a saved a small low margin retailer from losing their shirt. I’ll never know, but at the end of the day I can sleep with a clean conscience.
If people stopped generously returning profits maybe they'd get their orders right more often?
You might be surprised how much people appreciate others doing more for them than is required.
Your awareness of their mistake doesn't obligate you to correct it, especially when the mistake is easily avoided and fixing is a non-trivial effort.
In the case of a business, I wouldn't be surprised if they count on exploiting that free labor in their cost projections.
by law no, but if this were a mom and pop operation, would you then return the TV? if so, then you know it’s wrong.
I'd actually be more lenient on this when it comes to a small business, but when a big faceless corporation can't (or rather intentionally doesn't want to) maintain a decent standard in their CS department - literally the only "escape hatch" for when things go wrong - they don't deserve respect.
The company literally makes it impossible to "just" send an email, and even if he could send an email, in his case the first advisor was an idiot that couldn't even understand the problem so he had to explicitly try again and talk to someone else.
Another time they refunded me for a product I had returned, and months later they refunded me another €6 for ‘shipping’ (I hadn’t paid for shipping). I called them and they told me to keep it, so I did.
https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/unbqtg/moving_to_a...
Here's another person who ordered 1 12U rack, got 12 12U racks:
https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/giaw1x/i_bought_1_...
Same:
https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/eemzef/so_amazon_s...
"When did you acquire this taste for luxuries?" - Sir Humphrey
>You know what? It matters. Doing the right thing fucking matters. Have some integrity, don’t take what isn’t yours, give back what was a mistake. Don’t fall into the trap of relativism. I’d like to think by returning that item I saved someone from getting fired.
Yes. As someone who once worked in Retail and E-commerce, a small action like this help people stay sane in a world where rampant fraud happens every single day. ( And I have been told it is only getting worse )
One day, the CEO of the company donated some of his old LL Bean clothing to a charity that accepts used clothing. One of the shirts he donated had his initials embroidered on it. In less than a month, that same shirt had been returned to Bean, stating the person was unsatisfied with his purchase, and requesting a full refund of the purchase price.
Like LL Bean, the internet kinda ruined it and when the management turned over to newer people who didn’t share the commitment that the founder had, it went away.
This was because people would grab something off the rack, tear off the tags, take it to the register, and request a refund. It wasn’t even shoplifting.
I'm not sure but I think it has a weight systém also to help with catching missed items but this I might be wrong on.
The red tag has a barcode (and nothing else). They have a strip of them, next to the register.
You hand them the item, they tear off the bottom of the price tag, stick on the red tag, then scan it.
I suspect you don’t need the tag, but you’ll need the receipt, otherwise.
One downside to sharing information easily is that attacks not only get better faster but also that it can hit the “everyone’s doing it!” norm where people start shifting how they feel about it.
Yeah. A lot of people won't do something that they think is sort of scummy if they only know one person who does it--and he's sort of an asshole.
But when there's a whole subreddit devoted to the behavior, they may start to think they're the sucker if they don't do what "everyone else" is doing.
And unfortunately with outdoor gear, I've definitely had fairly expensive outdoor gear fail catastrophically after a few years even though it had only been gently used a handful of times. That said, I suspect LL Bean and REI still have some flexibility. I did just have Patagonia credit me for a somewhat older jacket that had completely delaminated--of course their normal prices are so high I'm not sure I'll even use the credit.
That matched what I saw, too - I’m thinking especially of people like a few grad students I vaguely knew who treated it as a way to “upgrade” from their personal equipment for big trips. They wouldn’t have stolen something worth that much but the loss to REI is invisible.
Yes, some of this was built in to the price but not to the extent people stretched it.
Nordstroms, I guess when it was not a middling retailer, had similar policies.
But people have lost their moral bearings and it’s all about them, like there is no tomorrow.
It’s little different than looting. Looters sometimes loot immediately needed goods, but often it’s jewelry, TVs, electronics and sneakers. These chronic abusers of return policies are in the same moral category.
Very few people give a shit and care about themselves or society. It’s all a free-for-all, with few exceptions.
The above policy should be _combined_ with an equipment rental that is substantially cheaper but expects similar condition returns.
Particularly for apartment renters, the ability to not need to store a large bulky item used 2-3 times in their lifetime would be an upgrade.
Amazon does this all the time, and I have stopped buying from them. I try to get buy-for-life items. I don't return anything unless it's defective, but I don't want to get pre-owned things sold as new.
People double-dipping amazon products and saying they never got the package (or it was stolen) has been going on forever.
When you're being squeezed by every system, and housing/life goals become increasingly unattainable and wages stagnate - you better be sure that people will try to exploit every system they can.
Can't really even blame them for it, except for some egregious circumstances.
Clothing retailers and similar have seen this sort of thing a lot, even before online shopping was a significant part of their trade.
> Another issue, called ‘wardrobing’ is where a customer buys something to use once and then return
A colleague of mine some years ago used to wear designer shirts and such to company social events. At one point he asked me how I afford as much tech as I bought¹ and I referenced his designer clothes² with the notion that we just prioritise our spending differently with most of my clothes being relatively bargain basement stuff³. In response to this he told me that he wore most of it only once, and returned it within a week or two of purchase as unused, so it cost him relatively little. This was not just mail-order catalogue purchases⁴ but physical stores too where he sometimes had to return items to the same real person he'd bought them from and did so repeatedly. This coloured my impression of his trustworthyness considerably - I have no love for the retail industry but that seems rather low. He said a lot of people do it, which I doubted the scale of at the time but maybe I was somewhat naive there⁵.
My overly long-winded point being that this has been a thing for decades. The internet just makes it easier, makes learning the tricks to defraud the trade easier, and because open returns policies are often a selling point for an online retailer (for obvious reasons) makes those tricks relevant to a wider gamut of products & price ranges, which might not have had such returns policies in the past. The growth in social media and it's influence on how much we see of others outside of our close circles probably makes a big difference where fashion is concerned too.
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[1] it turned out part of this was that my salary was larger than his by more than either of us realised, another factor was how much he spent otherwise trying to impress marks when "on the pull" and how often this expensive hobby happened!
[2] and his taste for expensive whiskey, but that isn't relevant to this thread!
[3] no personal value judgement being made here, I understand what people get psychologically (and sometimes physically!) from improving their outward image, I just have different priorities which doesn't make me more or less right just different
[4] internet shopping proper was only just starting to be significant for everyday fashion at the time, assuming what little I know of such shopping is accurate
[5] he also pointed out, when I failed to disguise my discomfort in the idea, my habit at the time of downloading TV instead of waiting months/years for it to be broadcast or available to buy on tape/DVD in this country, which I admit was a valid comparison. I know my life has been some points sort of 100% morally clean!
How is that a valid comparison? You did what you had to do in order to be able to consume media because the media’s owner did not make it available to you in any form due to the geographic location you lived in.
The other person committed fraud and basically stole the “newness” of a seller’s clothes because they could to afford them.
It would only be sort of comparable if you had a reasonable way to pay the media owner for the media, but chose not to because you wanted to save money.
You don’t have a right to use other people’s work without their consent. If it’s not available, the only ethical choice is not to use it - we’re not talking lifesaving medication here, you can watch something else.
The return policy changes are just an excuse, the real reason is the new management (often private equity vultures) plans on performing Quality Fade, i.e. lowering the quality but keeping prices high as they run down the formerly deserved reputation into the ground. Of course that strategy won't work without also gutting the warranty.
1. > If an item is in good shape or really is new and just unwanted, the packaging is almost always damaged beyond what could be considered a new item, so at best we might be able to sell it in a damaged package sale, which we do twice per year.
It's generally difficult to open products without damaging the packaging.
This is an intentional design with consumer packaged goods, likely for a variety of valid reasons.
Doesn't seem like the customer's fault (and shouldn't be the customer's problem), as long as the customer is being honest and not pulling a fraudulent return.
2. > but the Pista has two little screws that you have to remove take the thing apart and when we looked, all of these returned pumps have had those screws unthreaded which you can see as deformation in the screw head, whereas a new in box pump has only had them installed.
Does this suggest the manufacturer is using sub-par zinc screws instead of stainless steel? So many products have cheap screws that basically can't be removed without stripping or deforming the head, it makes the product unserviceable and dooms it to eventually land in a landfill, prematurely. Seems unacceptable to call a product top-notch with these kinds of components inside.
Fraudulent returns are still bad, as are shoddy products falsely marketed and sold as top-notch gems.
3. > Folks think they’re pulling one over on Jeff Bezos but don’t understand Amazon doesn’t own that inventory, it belongs to companies and when you think you’re screwing Amazon you’re actually screwing directly with some smaller company behind the product.
This is 100% on Amazon, due to marketing things as "Amazon Prime" and "Sold and Fulfilled by Amazon". Nasty, because the customer signals get to be ignored by Amazon as they reap the profits and offload the problem downstream onto Little Companies.
They use non-reusable package on purpose, because customers try to scam them. It’s not that they can’t make reusable packaging, this is a feature for them.
I imagine the screws in question just show extra tool marks from being backed out. Not that they’re stripped, just show obvious use.
To the sibling comment about it being run by hipsters, I’m not sure what to make of that. Poertner has an established background in product management in the industry. The stuff is expensive, orders of magnitude more than much of the competition. So, it’s going to appeal to a similar group as Pinarello, or Rapha, etc. A brand for dentists and other MAMILs, maybe (I say knowing full well I’m in that target audience).
And assuming that the scammers take any care at all to do the job right when disassembling for fraud.
That... isn't how it's labeled?
They clearly state "Sold by XYZ Company, Fulfilled by Amazon" on 3P sellers. The only time a product would say "Sold and Fulfilled by Amazon" is when it's actually Amazon selling a product.
Even though I know where the text is, I still have to search for it because there is so much information that can appear in that area and many variations that it’s difficult to tell at a glance who’s selling it.
Or maybe they want the experience to look the same whether you’re buying from amazon or a 3p? Perhaps to avoid confusing people by changing the layout? UX?
You're right, but the damage is not squarely due to customer or the packaging design. Some of the boxes arrive at my doorstep (from Amazon or what else) has clear shipping wear on it. It has banged around in the box, thrown around in an envelope, etc.
The box is worn, but the product is not damaged. Even I return the box unopened, the seller can't ship it back out. It needs to be renewed again.
Unlikely that Silca does that. What they probably were saying that they could see the tool marks where the screws had been removed. Tightening the screws leaves marks on one side of the screw, and loosening would leave marks on the other side.
Related: If you're buying a used car that uses rubber timing belts, and don't have solid documentation¹ that the belt was ever changed, you can look for tool marks on the timing cover bolts.
¹ There are people who will buy the timing belt parts kit then return it, in order to have a receipt to show prospective buyers that the work "had been done".
You can also just check the condition of the belt. Checking timing bolts for wear is not going to be an accurate measure of if the belt was replaced. (what if they had a head gasket replaced?)
They could have added lock-tite or other thread adhesive. The person removing the screw used the wrong size bit or did not apply pressure perpendicular to head when applying torque allowing it jump out of the screw head (drive angle is important!!!) Similar to a wrong size bit, screw driver bits do wear out. A worn out screw driver will act like a wrong sized bit, and this wear is likely to happen faster if the tool is cheap.
No. It suggests people are removing the screws and leaving tool marks in the process.
I bet the bank providing their mortgage would love to have that information
That's why you counteract with something that is also "cheap" to do (one lawyer letter is expensive, having a template is cheaper. Sending to collections is cheaper)
Home inspection isn’t like retail sales - almost anyone buying a house can easily pay with cash or check, you’re not a big fraud risk since they’re not getting something they can resell, you can explain the problem in person, and a longer processing time doesn’t matter because you’re not doing a ton of transactions or any where someone expects to get the product in 30 seconds. I’m sure it’s convenient for customers but if you’re the inspector looking at paying 5+% of your revenue you’re definitely going to ask how many customers would walk if you don’t accept a credit card.
It withered on the vine.
It is starting to become stupid to reject it. Even the smallest mom-and-pop places I go, now take ApplePay. It's built into the processors. I think they have to consciously turn it off. Last time I got a haircut, I used it. They didn't even know they took it.
They don't take ApplePay. Don't know about other services.
“Unfortunately, Lowe's does not accept Apple Pay as an option for payment at any of its 2,200 locations around the continental United States nor online. The core reason why Lowe's doesn't take Apple Pay is simply that they do not have the core NFC payment infrastructure to make this possible.” https://www.gotechtor.com/does-lowes-take-apple-pay/
This is very much not true. In fact when I’m buying something that I think there may be a need to charge back I mostly use my debit card, or a particular CC. Both are VISA.
And VISA handles the transaction, this is why their name is on the card.
When you go into a store and they ask you to run it as debit or credit and you say debit, it uses one of these other networks. The fees are usually much lower than running it through Visa.
This isn’t a think where I’m at anymore, it all runs as VISA or one of the other networks. There isn’t a prompt to select card type and network selection happens based off the card number prefix.
Also I'm not sure getting rid of chargebacks completely makes sense - there's a good reason they were introduced in the first place.
For online merchants, CCs are the only thing that allow most of them to stay in business. For something where the transaction was irreversible (mailing cash, bitcoin), as a consumer, I would almost never take a chance on ordering from an online merchant that wasn't large and established.
That's not to say that the CC companies don't abuse their position. However, most/many businesses have 'done the math' and realized the pros outweigh the cons.
I'd also argue that friendly fraud is just as if not more egregious than fraud fraud.
And even normal SEPA Push doesn't have money-claw-back, the charge back process for that after the money has reached the recipient (usually next bank day) starts with asking for the money back and escalates into a lawsuit if the recipient doesn't give in.
That’s exactly how iDEAL works, which handles 65% of e-commerce volume in the Netherlands (vs. 13% credit cards).
https://www.thuiswinkel.org/media/w1uapsyz/infographic_thuis...
Circa 1999 I ran a small retail anime shop. I also had a mail order catalogue and was one of the first to do ecommerce for anime as well.
After a pleasant 20 minute call a customer bought a Gundam kit. It was around $100 the most expensive one in my shop.
I was shocked to receive a chargeback request 40 days later. Puzzled I called the contact and the very same person claimed that their kid placed an order.
Per the CC merchant rules I had to grant the chargeback request and ask for the kit back. I never got the kit.
At least for clothing, this behaviour is officially supported by Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...
They sell a variety of high-end bicycle accessories including pumps, bottle cages, fancy lubricants (including chains pre-treated with hot wax lubricant). It's quality stuff with a pricetag to match.
A few years ago I needed a new pair, checked my size from my current pair, and ordered the exact same off Amazon. My old pair still fit, maybe even a tad big at the waist.
Then, perusing the catalog, I figured I'd also spice things up a bit, and ordered a 501 in a color I don't usually wear, for variety.
When I received them, the sizing was a complete joke.
It was absolutely impossible for me to put on the 511. My upper thighs would not fit inside the jeans without pulling on them, and after that it was impossible to button them.
The 501 was the opposite: much too big, could have probably went two sizes down.
I sent them both back, ordered a single 511 one size above, which was, you guessed, too big.
Frustrated, I sent them all back and went to my local brick and mortar store and ended up with a pair of 514s – one size below my regular one.
Specially with Silca being a cycling company, I think a lot of people here will be all too familiar with the phenomenon of "chicken legs" and how to find a pair of trousers to fit them into :-)
I'm not really built like a cyclist, so I usually have the opposite problem when buying cycling shorts :)
Although, to the point of this thread, I've found that actual sporting goods brands (as opposed to "lifestyle" or "sportswear", or whatever they're called) tend to stick to one set of measures.
I used to love my Gore biking shorts, so when I was in the market for a pair of running shorts, and saw Gore made those too, I ordered the same size and fit was the same.
I have similar experience with Decathlon, a French sports goods store, that also make their own products.
Ditto for Nike, where my basketball shoes are the same size as my running shoes – bought several years apart.
I would go one step further than just filtering. Production is usually still far too much manual labor (cheapest available). With significantly improved automation everything would change. Even just automating the cutting of cloth would allow to tailor to fit, not just standard sizes, with no significant increase in net effort.
Combined with sewing in cheap parts of the world and any kind of returns policy it becomes a logistics nightmare of course.
The solution is even higher automation.
I think you are seriously underestimating how big of a change in effort that would be. Just tracing and keeping track of a particular garment through the production would be a huge effort.
For a robot/computer.
Now what changes if you have an orderbook of 500 shirts all with custom sizes? You (or a robot or whoever) cuts out the pieces for order number 1. You can’t just grab any lefts and sew them to any backs. You need to sew that specific left with that specific back. After cutting do you mark the pieces? If so how do you remove the marks later? If not how do you QC that there were no mixups? After a shirt is done how do you make sure it ends up with the right customer?
These are all solveable of course. The thing I am disagreeing is that all you need is a robot to cut the pieces and then you can offer custom tailoring for little or no effort.
(And I'm not talking high-end clothes).
I only tried it once but it worked very well. Suggested a smaller size than I would have purchased and they fit perfectly.
Clothes are probably significantly more difficult than shoes though.
It's even worse. Some manufacturers have a single rough sizing table for an entire product category, like all shirts or pants. They will happily ignore different fittings and styles like slim fit, oversized, loose fit etc.
A little research and review-reading goes a long way.
I recently got a weightlifting coach and was required to buy specialized weightlifting shoes. I live in Houston which serves 7-8 million people, but there was nowhere in town to try on or buy any weightlifting shoe:
- Nike Romaleos - Adidas Adipower - Rogue Do-win / Classic
This is despite there being quite a few Nike and Adidas stores here - standalone, typical mall, and outlet malls. So I bought 3 sizes and am returning two sizes.
For Silca, maybe they have 3 different pumps and there's no way for me to stop by a local REI / bike shop to try them out. Is it worth getting a portable pump and a garage pump or can I just get by with the portable? Who the fuck knows. But I can buy both and return one if the value isn't worth the price.
Or Silca can put a store in Houston where I can try out the products.
Want to reduce return fraud? Make customers bring back items to your local store where knowledgeable salespeople can inspect it at the time of return. My guess is that eating return fraud is a lot cheaper though.
Do you think about the environmental impact of shipping around all your crap because you can't figure out what size or brand to pick?
The real option here is to pick a shoe, and pick a size. If the size doesn't fit, return it for the larger or smaller? If shipping is next day, or two day or whatever, can you really not wait that extra time?
I get that the local stores don't stock specialty items, and you may think my comment is misguided, but I look at all the thousands of people who behave similar to you, and how much waste that creates.
Is that waste larger or smaller than brick and mortar solutions? Maybe the solution is to both tax externalities and charge properly for shipping.
For non-specialty items, I'd suggest brick and mortar is better.
The challenge when we think about 3 pairs in order to keep 1, is that it isn't just the shipping on the 3 pairs, or 5 pairs of shoes shipped total.
The extra 2 pair take up extra space on each delivery van, each way. You reach a point where many people take this approach, and the company needs to be sending out 5 times as many vans to your neighborhood. That's just the end of line delivery as well.
I don't know enough about stock and warehouse, landfill, etc, but these things do add up.
We all need to be aware of the externalities and issues this cause, aside from just directly on the business profits/costs.
Unfortunately, because this has become common practice, the attitude seems to be "everyone else is doing it, so..."
The big waste with returns comes from the fact that retailers can't trust them nearly as much. With in store shopping, no one is suspicious about about taking clothes left in a changing room and putting them back on the rack. With returns, you run into all of the issues talked about in the article.
Regardless, any system which inherently favors businesses over individuals is wrong. Businesses have the option of building the known cost of fraud into the products, whereas individual customers can easily get screwed without any recourse. What good is a gift card if the store turns out to be a bad actor?
Ideally neither side should be favored and the process should be impartial and difficult to game. Dunno how to make such a system though, humans are a crafty bunch.
"Better a thousand guilty people go free than imprison an innocent."
There is the Exploding Nash Equilibrium [1]. Some related research is also linked from there. If you are fine with trusting a third party then you don't need the blockchain, and you can use an escrow service who mediates disputes. But my understanding from the article and the comments here is that credit card companies effectively fill this role, but they aren't neutral mediators.
You’ve obviously never done a chargeback or are intentionally being hyperbolic and disingenuous. The “buy” part might be close to one click, but the chargeback process certainly isn’t for most (all?) US credit card companies.
As a customer I found getting the charge reversed and then unreversed as not much different experience than the bank telling me to go fuck myself to begin with. It's actually laughably easy for the merchant to fight a chargeback by just providing any arbitrary tracking number to your zip code as full satisfactory proof they fulfilled their agreements. The writings of this article do not anywhere near match the reality I've seen with chargeback process and appeals process, which seam to heavily favor the merchant.
I've still been screwed by AirBnB to the tune of $2k even when I used an Amex card. Caveat emptor (buyer beware), I'll never use AirBnB again, got totally ripped off by a creepy and deceptive house host in Pebble Beach who claimed we damaged his house, even though I'd taken pics of a lot of the oddities. Live and learn.
On the other hand your own citizens scam the businesses over there.
You're in between a rock and a hard place.
As long as people have the attitude to commit fraud, they would. Maybe it's time to take a few steps back and try to understand why people do this?
The result of that policy will probably just be that European companies are under more fraud pressure and will go out of business sooner than companies that have more tools to combat fraud.
If Silca goes out of business, someone will buy the brand, like Motobecane and Schwinn.
I got a good pump at Target. I was able to confirm that it works before buying.
This is what has already happened. Silca was an Italian brand that went out of business when the owner died.
Josh Portner (the guy behind using dimples to market Zipp wheels) bought them[1].
As far as I know all the pumps and other accessories are now made in Taiwan or China by contract manufacturers.
I have some of their stuff. It’s OK but no better than stuff from, say, Leyzne or Topeak.
I would wager it’s come from the same contract manufacturer.
1. I believe they were friends. There’s a nice write up of the story online. Came across as a personal project to continue the brand.
(And interestingly, by TFA Amazon actually helps dealing with the frauds - though I'm thinking they should start engaging lawyers on this)
"the result of that policy" this is not a new thing, but yeah, please preach how some basic customer service is bad
If the company gets dragged in front of a tribunal, or needs to provide evidence, what could they do in the situations where someone received a normal item, pilfered it for replacement parts, and then sent back the rest. How could one show that this is fraud and not the company just sending out an incomplete product? I suppose they could just ban the customer(can they?), but dedicated fraudsters would have no problem using numerous fake identities in order to conduct their fraud.
A company trying to scam people like this by claiming return fraud would likely find itself in expensive hot water once the pattern became obvious though.
Avoiding the risk of having to deal with this is one of the reasons why people buy via Amazon (aside from convenience and fast+cheap shipping).
I imagine the manufacturer does some kind of QA, right? This seems like a pretty easy thing to prove. Sure, defective parts happen. But totally incomplete parts, that may be impossible in some cases, depending on the manufacturing process.
I have reported fraud many times, even had fraudsters on camera and all their details, Police huffed and puffed and said they won't do anything and complaints got me nowhere.
We voluntarily have a 30-day return policy anyway instead of the required 14-day in the EU, but a lot of what the interviewee brings up rings painfully true.
I have returned items twice in the last five or so years (one was an obvious packaging error and for the other I'm was never sure if it was an innocent mistake or if the seller tried to scam me ... but the law worked as intended). And I buy online a lot and have no reason to believe other people's experiences are too much different from mine. It just seems the law worked in a societal level.
But I always try to be safe on my side: when receiving expensive products, I always record the unboxing in a full Dogme 95 style, filming from the labels on the sealed box down to serial numbers on the product. I never actually needed to use any of these videos, but if I got scammed for real I will have enough evidence for a lawsuit and stand my ground in the card company questions my chargeback.
They changed their policy, but this won't prevent chargebacks.
Anyone in the US who buys online with a credit card basically has up to 90 or even 180 day free returns.
They just need to say the magic words. Product misrepresented/defective, merchant won't respond, or I don't recognize the charge.
For example, they can poke a hole in the shirt they want to return and do it 1000% legally.
Except the average consumer rarely reverses charges. Someone doing this regularly is going to stand out and will get legal attention.
> For example, they can poke a hole in the shirt they want to return and do it 1000% legally.
Except now they’ve damaged the good. Will they wear the shirt with the hole?
If someone stole all the parts of a thousand dollar bike start by suing them for the thousand bucks and then add all the employee time burned dealing with the matter. If they don't want to settle burn them for the entire cost of the litigation to recover those funds. If they can't pay then go to court and take absolutely anything that the court will late you take and attach their wages for eternity. Publish their names on a fraud page along with evidence of the crime and how much they paid you this month until its paid off.
Threaten absolutely every person who commits an obvious crime against your company and pick 1 a year and ruin their lives. The obvious fact is even a small crime like a $50 fraud is a multi thousand dollar bill if a lawyer ends up being a required step to collect.
Change the expectation that you will trivially get away with crime to an expectation that you will likely be hit with bill for your misbehavior.
But I've been here almost 30 years, and seen both for-the-top run-amok police-state law-and-order in the red states, AND a passion for doing anything possible to avoid imprisoning repeat (felony!) offenders in many blue-state urban jurisdictions. The official explanation for the latter relates to penal system overcrowding and lack of capacity, and of course, there's something to that. But somehow this doesn't doesn't hinder the law-and-order "red" jurisdictions from "throwing the book" at some poor fellow who had a few too many ounces of weed on him or whatever.
Here in Georgia, that's the difference between, say, Fulton County (which encompasses inner-city Atlanta) and one of the Metro ATL suburban counties, or for that matter, just about any other random county in Georgia. The outcomes vary immensely. You can find both extremes, allowing one to say in the same breath both that the state is cruel and vindictive toward criminals, and has let them run amok.
It doesn't quite make my top 5 list of "things most maddening about America", but it's probably in the top 10.
It’s a criminal issue anyway. The state should really be prosecuting these people somehow but I can’t see us ever willing to spend the political and financial capital to actually do that in this country.
Return fraud is orders of magnitudes smaller and as it involves physical goods changing hands spoiling anonymity. A single user committing a single act of fraud might yet retain relatively good odds but a massive portion of fraud as with retail theft is perpetrated by a minority of offenders which could well be correlated by requiring an ID for all returns and dealing with a tiny number of major offenders very harshly.
An environment in which you hear news about fraudsters facing prosecution or financial ruin would be perceived as riskier further dissuading offenders.
Spoken like someone who has never filed a lawsuit in the US. If that fraudster has ANY resources, that case you filed is going to be anywhere from $250K to $500K.
Even if you win, you will bleed money. The opposition can hire a shitty lawyer that does the bare minimum and practically ignores everything while you have to file all the proper paperwork in a timely fashion.
Because lawyers protect one another, that shitty lawyer won't suffer one iota, either.
Yeah, I'm speaking from experience here ...
So, referencing the original company, you can spend the revenue of one thousand pumps (in reality, probably more like the profits of ten thousand pumps) in the hope of getting back the value of one pump, or you can suck it up and deal with it as cheaply as you can.
Now, as for a solution, is it too much to expect Amazon to test goods they then go on to sell again? I would previously have assumed they did this, but apparently not.
Luckily, the returns process is quite easy, which both leads to this issue in the first place but makes it easy to resolve.
I once bought some expensive eyeglass frames from Amazon. When they arrived, it was pretty clear that they were not factory new. I returned the product and gave the company a bad review. The CEO of the company actually sent me an email apologizing, saying that this was an on-going problem. He said people order new frames identical to ones they currently own, swap out the lenses, and return the old ones. Amazon will often accept these returns, repackage them, and ship them as new, and the company which sells the frames has not control over this.
My wife and I do this, although not with small retailers. Very few brick and mortar companies carry clothing in our sizes, so if we want something we have to order a few options to find the right one. It's worse for my wife because she, according to clothing manufacturers, shrinks a full size every couple of years, making it nearly impossible to predict what size to buy.
Do the kids still say sorry not sorry?
That’s a huge drain. Especially with something like clothing that can’t be refurbished and re-sold or stripped for parts.
I entirely blame the manufacturers and online stores for not having proper measurements for each article of clothing. Just that alone would ensure a lot fewer returns. There are several brands that I can't even trust that a 38/32 will be the same in two of the same "exact" pair of pants.
Owner's first reply (joshatsilca) is page 2, more detail about credit card transactions for direct sales on page 3.
Time to bring back retailers sharing a list of names of those bad actors and just refusing to do business with them.
For the people who buy one of each color and then return all but one, a solution is to only ship one at a time.
I'm surprised that Amazon doesn't have (or perhaps has it in secret) a "score" for each customer, and certain kinds of transactions are simply rejected for them.
Amazon's "try before you buy" encourages people to do just this, so I'm guessing Amazon has figured out how to make this shopping pattern profitable.
Zappos, which is owned by Amazon, essentially encourages people to order multiple sizes and return the ones that don't fit. Presumably there are people who take advantage of such policies to an extreme. There are presumably also people who just wouldn't shop for certain things online otherwise.
This does not scale. It also isn’t worth it for low margin or low cost items. While it’s nice to hear this brand has a positive experience with Amazon, my experience as a third-party brand much lower down the totem pole is Amazon seldom investigates or respects such reports, and inevitably sides with the customer. ‘Customer delight’ is the dogma they preach 24/7, even though customers make mistakes or sometimes commit fraud.
Also, as an honest customer, I absolutely hate to receive a clearly used / defective / wrong item when ordering new. Sure, Amazon will accept my return and send me a new one, but I still have to go through the hassle of sending it back and waiting for the new one. There's nothing delightful about that.
Making it not worthwhile to engage in shady returns is actually beneficial to "customer delight".
The push-on chuck, beautifully braided and flexible hose, and general height and ergonomics combines for a nearly a zero-to-one improvement over the rest of the market. It removes almost all cognitive and physical friction to getting the job done (filling a tyre), short of just automating it with an air compressor — which has its own complications for filling bike tyres.
Off-topic (but on-topic): REI also has a notoriously forgiving return policy. Generally, just about anything can be returned after years of use, abuse, wear, and tear, and it typically ends up getting sold. I know many REI shoppers who first run upstairs (or wherever) to the “Returns” racks to see what they can find at a discount. Granted, it’s a hit REI is taking, but it’s clearly not a total loss as the “Returns” section turns over pretty quickly.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/rei-now-limiting-retur...
Before that there was no time limit though. I remember becoming a member in 2011 when I moved to a city with a local REI and that was one of the main benefits they pitched. I don’t miss it because I never returned anything after a year (or even a few weeks).
REI started a trade-in program that serves a similar function and probably manages to foil most of the people who would have abused the system in the past. I think it goes well with their overall “earth friendly” ethos and brand identity as well.
Is anyone aware of such a tutorial for people selling software, online services?
It would be nice to be able to accept payments without having to just take as a cost of doing business all the fraud, customer service headaches, etc. that come with it.
There's a space for adverts that is set to take up the whole height of the window, and only gets resized when the advert loads in. If you've got an adblocker on, it never gets resized.
I purchased a open-box Apple Pencil from Best Buy a couple years ago. What I got was someone else's returned pencil with totally shot battery. I took it back to BB and showed how the S/N on the pencil didn't match the box and they believed me, but I guess they could've thought I was the one pulling the scam. Anyway, they gave me a new opened Apple Pencil.
Now here's the weird part. The brand new pencil didn't work. I was sure BB was going to think I was scamming them, so when I returned it I asked them to verify the S/N matched the box and that it didn't work, but they didn't care, they gave me another new un-opened Apple Pencil which I verified worked there in the store.
Last year I purchased a 65" Hisense from Best Buy. Got it home, opened the box, before I even get it out of the box I see the upper-right corner of the screen is shattered. Take it back to BB, they swap it out for me. They have nothing but my word that I didn't drop it myself (I hadn't).
Last month I purchased a Westinghouse inverter generator. I was nervous it would be damaged during shipping, so I purchased it from Home Depot and had them ship-to-store. It turns out that they just FedEx it to the store. It doesn't go on a truck or pallet with a bunch of other items, so this doesn't reduce the chance of shipping damage. I pick up the generator at the store and notice the box is pretty beat up, but I bring it home anyway. Take it out of the box and it looks okay outside, but I pull the maintenance panel off and sure enough, the plastic air filter housing is cracked. Back in box, back to Home Depot. They order me a new one, no questions asked. When the new one arrives, I take it out of the box and inspect it at the store. Fortunately, no damage.
Which is all to say: yes, sometimes it's customer fraud. But sometimes the customer, like me, just gets unlucky. Most bulky goods I purchase these days are not adequately packaged.
I'm sure my "customer returns too much" rating has gotten dinged lately.
Edit: on the other side of the equation, customers have to deal with fraudulent merchants:
"8TB External SSD" for $89:
https://www.amazon.com/External-Solid-State-Drive-Portable/d...
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/wgepyv/im_assu...
Fake 5 TB drive:
https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/wh1s9z/fake_wd_bla...
I'm the one paying that 5-10% on their loss!
Some interesting rabbit holes to explore if you google that phrase.
One of my favorite small(er) Saas ERP vendors has a good 101 on the topic:
https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/inventory-...
Interesting: With Amazon, it’s amazingly a bit easier, as Amazon has massive leverage with the credit card companies, and they also know that this is a big problem. Up to half of our returns through Amazon are fraudulent or at best unethical, and so when fraud does happen at Amazon, they are actually great about it.
Maybe don't chase everyone, but go after just a handful of fraudsters, and once you've won get your PR department to ensure everybody on Earth realizes this is one company not to be messed with.
But this would severely slow scaling.
I'm sorry sir we can't take your order because our records show that you already ripped off 6 other merchants in the last 5 years and we aren't willing to deal with you.
They track customer’s returns and calculates a “risk score.”
I once moved to USA as a student and didn't know anybody for a while. And being the introvert that I am, I had trouble making friends.
(Off topic: years later I returned "back to your (my) country”)
You can get to know someone enough to know they're not a scammer.