Hacker News Reader

Comment by TimPC | Hacker News Reader

I’ve reduced purchases on non-Amazon sites because they expect me to pay to ship a return back to them. Amazon not only pays all return costs they send someone to my door to pick up the return. Adding friction does lose customers.

View on HN

It's amazing to me how much stuff people return. I have seen people buy a ton of stuff and return half of it on a regular basis. I guess it's a time filler for you/them. I don't run a store, so it doesn't affect me, but just seems like a huge waste of time.

I know several people who will buy something from multiple retailers so that they ensure that they get what they want when they want and return the "slow" items.

The part that these people are completely oblivious to is that they then have to wait for these packages, figure out what they are, print labels, and get them to a return location. This ends up being a cost in time akin to getting a workout in, reading a book, or taking a walk that day.

This is an exageration. It comes in the packaging, it's just tape, and most of these places, especially Walmart and Amazon, have counters in stores you might have wanted to go to anyway to return them without packaging them right anyway. When you do a Amazon return it gives you like a month to do it in

Having a shipping fee actually leads to less returns and frivolous purchases(not even accounting for wasted packaging+cost+labor)

Amazon is not doing this out of charity.They know suckers love friction less experience only to buy stuff they don't need and then forget to return it.

> they send someone to my door to pick up the return

Where is this? I have never seen this as an option.

Depends on the size of the package. If it's large enough that it cannot be dropped off they'll send a UPS van.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com