I fail to see why there’s a penalty for a refund. A chargeback would be one thing, but a refund is a totally normal business process
If you use the credit card network not just once but twice -- once to process a purchase and then yet again to refund it -- you're using that infrastructure.
It makes sense you'd pay for its usage. If you drive to work on a toll road and then drive back home along the same toll road, you still have to pay the tolls even though you wound up in the same place at the end.
Funny you should use that example. On toll roads you get charged in both directions, but I've never seen a toll bridge that had tolls in both directions. Usually the argument is that you really can't go any other way so the toll in one direction covers the cost of both trips.
But I actually think you're right here -- most people won't make the "return trip" so it makes sense to only charge people twice that do.
Huh, I think I've only seen this once (the Tacoma Narrows Bridge). Other toll bridges I've driven have all had tolls in each direction, e.g., Ambassador and Blue Water Bridges to Canada, Lake Washington floating bridge. Maybe I need to start taking more bridges to nowhere!
That’s part of what I waa getting at with “infrastructure cost”, yes.
Here in the Bay Area all of our bridges only have tolls in one direction.
(late edit)
This is largely driven by the question "is a vehicle heading in one direction likely to return in the other?"
For trips from Oakland to SF, yes - it is very likely that the vehicle will go back across the bay bridge back to Oakland (rather than heading down to San Jose and then back up the other side).
On the other hand, a vehicle driving on the tollway through Chicago may be heading up to Minneapolis or to Detroit and then to other directions. Trips on the Illinois tollways are less likely to have a return trip and so both directions need to be tolled to capture the vehicles. It costs twice as much to do this (twice as many toll booths and staff) and so given the choice (trips to an island or other geographically isolated area) they only pay tolls in one direction.
It seems kind of a waste from my perspective to have to do the traffic bottleneck in two directions.
How else do you think credit cards are able to do things like pay 2% rewards?
So the argument still holds. Banks hold more risk on larger transactions.
Sweet. How do I negotiate with Amazon again?
In reality, negotiation is a relic of a long gone era and flea markets. Buyer agency in general has mostly disappeared in modern transactions.
So how did you determine salary last time you were hired?
(I last negotiated a price in a retail store about 10 years ago - if you call that a long gone era then I feel rather old).
Even vacation has been non-negotiable. It's disheartening, but typical for tech (and ironically largely enabled by tech).
As a seller? You set up your own website and don’t use Amazon. There are literally thousands of mom and pop sellers that use Shopify and advertise on Facebook and Instagram
Source: I was director of digital marketing for a payments company a few years ago.
Or, to put another way, someone selling handmade goods at a fair using Square will never have more negotiation power than "if you don't like it, leave".
> In practice, [switching vendors] is an extremely weak signal, is swamped out by market changes, assumes zero cost of switching, ignores network effects, etc. One of many reasons why I distrust economist’s assertion of fairness.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999021
I'd also pedantically point out that this isn't really a negotiation tactic - negotiation generally involves communication.
"to confer with another so as to arrive at the settlement of some matter"
You very likely will find amazon is not willing to engage in much negotiation, unless you happen to have a unique offer. But nothing requires amazon to engage.
There is absolutely logic in pricing in terms of setting a pricing floor, which often comes from a combination of fixed and variable costs.
Of course you are right that there is flexibility above that, but again there's absolutely logic there as well in terms of price discrimination mechanisms.
None of this is just arbitrary. These companies put a lot of thought, and logic, into their pricing mechanisms. Get it exactly right and you make a lot of money, get it a little bit wrong and you go out of business.
> Additionally, we offer a number of resources and tools to assist sellers in accommodating this change. Our Return Policy Guide & Templates provide sellers with guidance on how to create a return policy that best suits their business, while Square’s free eGift Cards can serve as an option for providing store credit to buyers with no additional processing fees.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
When it comes to credit card merchants, a chargeback always dings a transaction fee, and the merchant may additionally tack on a chargeback fee. So a full refund process will incur two transaction fees, plus possibly a chargeback fee.
I've seen more companies offering a reverse debit now (not sure of the actual term). Is this not through a different mechanism? Funds are available instantly same as how they're drawn via debit vs credit.
No, this is not true. The opposite of a charge is a credit.