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There is no way to ship $71 Billion of product and get every product and every shipment perfect every time.Yes, exactly. But they don't explain it to the customer. They ship right-away another packet. Why? Because what they are actually doing is either saying to the courier "You failed to deliver in our crazy-efficient time table, we won't pay you" or to the third party seller "You failed to meet our standards, we have sent a replacement but you'll cover all expenses".
> I've returned a product for not meeting the description, and within 15 minutes of me getting the email saying they'd received the product, credited my card the full amount
Again, as above. They usually do this with marketplace products. What they did behind the courtains is saying to the seller "The product didn't meet customer expectations. We refunded it, you will pay all related expenses".
> everal days later, the description was corrected and the product was again orderable. That violates the "[they] still make nothing to fix them" claim I think.
This was probably the third party seller who fixed the description to avoid paying again.
Note: At this point you say "Wow, they are just pushing sellers for quality" WRONG. Because customers are not always right :) Most of the times they are dead wrong actually (or they are just abusing the fact that they know that Amazon consider them always right). It is rotten ethic to just dump all expenses on sellers without even giving them (most of the times) the chance to reply or to take action.
> I think you're ascribing a mercenary "screw it, it's cheaper to not fix" mentality when an alternative and more likely (IMO) possibility is "look, we can't fix everything, so when we fail our customers, we need to be very good at making it right".
No, i'm saying that they place crazy efficiency requirements and while they understand - as you said - that shit might happen, all they do is dumping all costs of their policy on partners. And partners can't do literally nothing. Why? Because Amazon pays out every 2 weeks, they will just keep the money from your wired amount. Because if you don't comply they just ban. And if they are the only marketplace, you are shut down.
This isn't even considering the amount of stress and pressure that this 0 tolerance policy is causing on their own employees and connected partners employees.