Meanwhile insurance fraudsters love AI, and its ability to manipulate photos!
It used to be you just email them a photo or video of the issue and they send you a replacement. Now companies won’t send one until they have received the defective one back.
Then again my last two online purchases, a pair of shoes arrived stained with somebody else's socks in the box and a cordless vacuum arrived with a mismatched brush head for a different model.
It's interesting how companies are now redefining things they explicitly encouraged their customers to do as "abuse."
Some also gets diverted into return resale stores where companies like Amazon will sell a 3rd party a pallet of miscellaneous returns they then sell.
Even then, the one clothes example (shoes - which had been returned stained and with socks in the box) mentioned in the above still wouldn't seem like a valid return by any stretch.
They sell clothes and also shoes.
Zalando very much is operating on the principle that you order things to try them out at home and return whatever doesn’t fit or whatever you end up not liking. Just like in a physical store you try out clothes and shoes inside the store to see how it fits and how it looks on you.
That being said, there are limits to what they consider reasonable:
> One key part of that experience, and something our customers deeply value, is the ability to make an order, try the items at home, and, if needed, easily return those they don’t want to keep. In short: bringing the fitting room to your home.
> […]
> Customers whose return activity reaches disproportionately high levels will receive an email warning. This proactive step gives them the opportunity to reflect on their behavior, discover the solutions we provide to avoid returns, and adjust before further measures are taken.
https://corporate.zalando.com/en/convenience/bringing-transp...
As someone with wide feet, I don’t buy shoes unless they specifically have width options. It’s not particularly easy to do unless you really like traditional men’s leather shoes and boots, but there are some athletic shoe makers that offer wide width shoes (NB and Hoka for sure).
Even given all of the above, I still own shoes in 3-4 different sizes because shoe sizes are not standardized between makers, like you said.
Dealing with returns is the tradeoff that online sellers make in order not to put a store in every city or to deal with retail arrangements.
Not so for consumer electronics
Oh yes it is. Buying something you know you don't plan to keep is abuse. If you ran a store, would you be fine with 2/3 of your orders being returned? A good litmus test for "am I being an asshole" is "what would the world look like if everyone behaved like me?"
Now whether it's a good thing wrt the environment etc...
Buying 3 new-in-box $1000 cameras and returning 2 of them covered with your smudgy fingerprints is abuse, no matter how you slice it. If everyone did it, those cameras would cost twice as much. I'm saddened but not surprised people are defending that behavior here.
I agree. What percentage of online returns do you think is similar to this scenario?
What percentage of "buy N and return N-1" return patterns (which you believe to be abusive) is people buying multiple $1,000+ pieces of electronics equipment, versus say 3 sizes of shoes or 3 colors of a dress?
My guess is the former case, which I agree is abusive, is <1% of such return patterns. Partially because it's a legitimately stupid way to shop for those types of items and requires significant credit, while buying multiple sizes/colors of items like clothing is a completely sensible way to shop.
Most online shops ToS say "we can ban you at any time for any reason", so their lawyers' definition of the word wouldn't be relevant here anyway.
That kind of argument only works where stopping the behavior is cost free, the main reason most places didn't do it before was because the number of people doing it was low so the cost of actually tracking returns rigorously outweighed the benefit of low friction returns for the 99+% of customer who weren't abusing the system. When more people start creating large numbers of returns suddenly the amount of losses they create become enough to care about stopping. (Or it becomes a low hanging fruit to squeeze more profit out of an existing business, spending customer preference/loyality for profit by cutting a small waste center)