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Comment by forgingahead | Hacker News Reader

It's a scam, certainly, but it's actually great customer service policy. If the only risk is the loss of value of a product to Amazon, and there is no personal data loss for a customer directly, then it's actually an acceptable loss policy to Amazon.

They (and most good businesses) would prefer the majority of their customer base be able to get refunds and deal with order issues swiftly than have to jump through hoops to prove who they are. Certainly an SMS PIN or other authentication method would make it more secure, but there is no further customer benefit. The monetary loss to Amazon is basically a rounding error so why make things more complicated?

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It surely appears a great customer service policy. Unfortunately, the cost of fraud, waste and loss is passed on to honest consumers in the form of overall higher prices.

It's probably true that Amazon can still offer generally competitive prices despite scams like this; but in principle, I agree with the OP. And not necessarily because it would mean slightly lower prices for myself or slightly higher profits for Amazon; but simply because I dislike knowing that I'm complicit in the scam for the sake of my own convenience. Especially when that convenience means having an item re-shipped to a different address that I never used before, which happens to be the address to a 're-shipping' organization.

> Unfortunately, the cost of fraud, waste and loss is passed on to honest consumers in the form of overall higher prices.

In Amazon's case it's also possible to argue that the cost of fraud, waste and loss is passed on to honest consumers in the form of overall lower prices.

Customer service policies like this are a significant part of what allowed Amazon to grow to be the company it is today, and Amazon has used that power (some would say abused it), to drive prices lower than they would otherwise have been on many items.

> Especially when that convenience means having an item re-shipped to a different address that I never used before,

I'm personally very glad that they allow this, having had to had a broken Kindle replaced whilst on holiday in a different country.

>having had to had a broken Kindle replaced whilst on holiday //

What would the negative repercussions of Amazon only shipping to the original verified shipping address have been - waiting a week to get your free replacement kindle?

I'd say it's ridiculous to re-ship to a different address based on an unverified claim of non-delivery; especially for high-cost items.

No; waiting 9 weeks to get it.

And as I read much more when I'm on holiday, and one of the reasons I bought a Kindle in the first place was so I didn't have to carry dozens of books on such a trip, I'm very glad that they were willing to ship it to not only a different address, but a different country.

> I'd say it's ridiculous to re-ship to a different address based on an unverified claim of non-delivery; especially for high-cost items.

It is. But Amazon is a ridiculous company that doesn't follow the rules of common sense. Amazon would rather lose a little (in the scheme of things) to fraud and continually amaze its customers than to stick it to thieves and Amazon customers. The customer is king.

It's especially genius with the Kindle because even if it's sent to a thief they will probably make money on it from the Amazon purchases of whoever ends up with it.

It certainly sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but without knowing the level of this fraud it's difficult to actually judge.

If these are two of a tiny handful of instances where this has ever happened, and there's many thousands of people who have had replacements shipped to alternate addresses (e.g. work, or a holiday location) then the cost of implementing additional checks for this - even if that's just the man-hour cost of asking additional questions - could be far more than the size of the loss.

And that's ignoring any less tangible customer experience angles - there's several people in this thread alone who have said they are more likely to buy from Amazon again as a result of this kind of customer service. I had to chase a missing order up last week, and the simplicity of the interaction was amazing compared to the hours (or even days) of battling I've had with some other internet businesses when things have gone wrong, and that definitely has at least some impact on my future decisions to use the respective companies.

"If the only risk is the loss of value of a product to Amazon"

Unfortunately, that's externalizing the real cost to the customer of having their account flagged as "possibly fraudulent".

It's great customer service, but what happens when the scam takes off and starts impacting their margins? Profits go down, prices go up, and customers start leaving.

This exactly. The net benefit to Amazon from improved customer service is likely worth the potential for a few lost products. Sure may be wrong, but to them it may just be a cost of doing business. It's not unlike many department store's policy of not targeting a shoplifter-in-action in a mall, especially once they've left the store (mostly for liability reasons).

"many department store's policy of not targeting a shoplifter-in-action in a mall"

Citation? I've never heard of such a policy. Every mall I've had knowledge of had a very extensive security organization that was pretty effective at targeting shoplifters-in-action.

Apart from personal experience working in grocery stores, where nobody really cares, there is this: http://marga.voxpublica.org/2012/08/shoplifting-and-magnetic...

Depends on where you go and which mall. Strip malls are a lot less effective with countering shoplifters than the 'real' malls.

Interesting. I was at a mall last week where a security guard had caught a shoplifter, and the guard was downright friendly with the guy. It appeared that he was just going to let him go. The guard was asking the guy whether he'd shoplifted before, why he did it etc, but in a very relaxed conversational way. I hadn't thought of it as a customer service policy (both not to scare customers and keeping a potential future customer).

I also talked to a science-fiction / hobby store owner years ago, who mentioned that most of the shoplifters they caught had also been their best customers. (His policy was to ban them from the store, though.)

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