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Comment by websiteapi | Hacker News Reader

Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare. In fact, it, along with free shipping were pretty rare before Amazon and Walmart.

If you travel and go to some random beach town and buy random item from random street merchant, they won’t give you a refund. Main issue to bridge is ensuring the item is expected as you can’t physically inspect prior to purchase.

It’ll be interesting to see how that’s solved. I participate in kickstarter which defacto doesn’t really offer refunds, so maybe it’ll be the same.

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> If you travel and go to some random beach town and buy random item from random street merchant, they won’t give you a refund. Main issue to bridge is ensuring the item is expected as you can’t physically inspect prior to purchase.

Depends on how large the beach town is, and what country. Whenever I've needed to return/change things in those type of places (in South America, South Europe and around East Asia), it's never been a problem even if I don't have a receipt, as usually the vendor recognize you, or the person who sold it to you is around somewhere.

I can remember one clear time (probably out of 10s) where someone refused to take back an item that clearly didn't work the way it was sold to us.

> Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare

Except where enshrined by law, eg in the EU

laws can change - eventually this scam described in the article will be ubiquitous and unavoidable.

Laws can change, sure, but probably business practices will change first, since it is easier. In EU, you are entitled to money refund for online purchased goods (with some caveats ofc), but the business can (and most do) require you to send the item back first, on your own expense. That reduces the risk of fraud like this.

hardly - go read up on eBay scams. it's never been easier to scam people online. all shipping the item do is force the scam buyer to make the defects so, which is why many if not most seller just pay the buyer partially to keep as-is

if you have to break the item and then send it back, what did you gain from the scam?

most of the time you would get partial refunds.

> Eventually the concept of refunds will become very rare.

I don’t think so—it makes the risk of purchase too high, and people will buy less. Which is not what the sellers want.

> it, along with free shipping were pretty rare before Amazon and Walmart.

Refunds were not rare before Walmart and Amazon.

Refund-without-return is what might fade out. I've had that with low value things like a lightbulb that had the wrong fitting.

free shipping even for returns were indeed rare, thus a refund was not free, nor complete

You just took it back to the store, there was no shipping involved.

we're talking about e-commerce here...

Are we? Your very next line was about buying something from a street merchant.

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