Like most people, I've ordered a lot of packages (hundreds?) on Amazon and almost never had a problem. In the rare case of a problem, Amazon would instantly refund me. But almost all those orders are under $1000. Everything changes when you have a problem with an expensive order. Amazon has a price threshold where the support system is different and the normal CS people are powerless.
During lockdown, I ordered a Sony camera and lens that was in the $5k+ range. The package went "missing" with the shipper with obvious fake tracking data, like multiple "customer not home" delivery attempts timestamped at 12am in the morning. The packages never showed up. Amazon kept saying it was the shipper's fault and the shipper said it was Amazon's responsibility. Lots of tweets, etc, got me nowhere.
In the end Amazon finally refunded me, but it was a nightmare. They wouldn't even talk to me until I waited a number of days after the package was late and even then all they would say is that it had to be escalated to management who would review the issue eventually. Even when they finally agreed the package was lost, I had to wait for another management review to actually get the refund issued. They had my money tied up for weeks with no recourse for a package they never even delivered. I can only imagine how bad it would be if the shipper claimed it was delivered.
My recommendation is to skip Amazon for anything expensive or at high risk of shipper theft/fraud. Your customer experience will not be the same as when they lose a $10 package. They will treat you like a criminal no matter what your past history with Amazon is.
Perfectly believable. The thing I really loved about Amazon is that they had their act together. But that has declined drastically over the decades; now whenever I actually have to deal with them it seems like there's a ton of internal chaos.
In June 2018, I ordered a soccer magazine, "Futbol Total", for my soccer-mad nephew. It said it would arrive in 4-16 weeks, which seemed weird. I waited it out, and no magazine. I contacted them and they said they were on it and it would arrive soon. At 5 months in I just canceled the order, only to get an email saying, "Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cancel the items you requested and these items will soon be shipped." I spent a bunch of time in chat and on the phone getting the runaround, complete with new ticket numbers, promises of personally following up, and even a $20 credit. But they were firm on saying, "Please be assured, we will ship this item very soon."
Occasionally I'd try again, insisting that they either cancel the order or actually ship it. Each time I was told it would be shipped. Long after I'd given up, in late October 2020, they finally canceled it, saying, "We regret to inform you that, due to a technical error, we will not be able to fulfill your order." For all of Amazon's vaunted customer focus, my impression was of a lot of unhappy, fearful customer service staff passing the buck so they could avoid bad metrics.
> The thing I really loved about Amazon is that they had their act together. But that has declined drastically over the decades
This seems to be a problem for all big platforms. When they’re small enough to not change the ecosystem, they can do what they do well. Eg amazon ships more conveniently and google returns better results and uber is less scammy. Then they get massive and become a viable,better understood target for fraud/manipulation, and suddenly their offering begins to suck. It’s frustrating as a consumer.
I suspect you're undervaluing the impact of monopoly on those businesses. Google and Amazon are barely competing with anybody - when they were trying to win their position, there was a lot of value in keeping you happy. Now, not so much
It's nothing really to do with them being massive and better understood. Google was heavily attacked (SEO) and massively used, long before their quality started going downhill.
so, at what point is legitimate to involve the Credit Card company? you don’t even need to actually do it, tell cs you will do it unless it gets here in x days.
Intriguing and horrifying.. What happens with a ban?
I assume all my not-downloaded Kindle books become unavailable. Does the Kindle app delete the ones I have locally? (I assume the result would be similar for movies/shows purchased.)
Does it ban my credit card, name, address, or a more abstract "buying profile"?
Amazon does have the ability to remove downloaded items from your Kindles (assuming they sync with Amazon, of course); they've publicly used it before [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...]. I can't confirm whether that happens when you chargeback, though.
No longer at amazon but I was in the appstore and charge backs were pretty common, you just lost access to the apps/iaps you charged back. Though I don't know what happens if you do it repeatedly or high value items.
And while they definitely deserve the ire for doing that with 1984, even in 2018 when I left preventing 1984 like issues were commonly brought up in design reviews, calling out 1984 by name.
Hope you don’t have any digital media streaming held with Amazon, or AWS, or Alexa, Kindle tablet, etc. So many horror stories get posted on hackernews regularly about what happens when one of these huge centralized companies decides to ban a customer with no recourse, no matter whose fault it is
I'd wager that, as with other digital "purchases" from companies like Apple, Google, Steam, etc, if your account is closed, you lose everything since you didn't actually buy it.
BB lost a part of an order, just a $3 thermal paste. Luckily the heat sink came with some. I couldn't dispute it with BB, post office blew me off, and since it was only about 10% of the order I couldn't dispute with cc.
To be fair, this is almost certainly an issue with whoever was selling the item on Amazon, rather than Amazon.
Which of course is nothing more than a convenient excuse for them to use when the only ones with the power to regulate what sellers end up on their platform is... Amazon.
> To be fair, this is almost certainly an issue with whoever was selling the item on Amazon, rather than Amazon.
This (soccer magazine case) does not seem like a 3rd-party seller issue. Third-party sellers only have a limited amount of time to ship (30 days in 2018) after which the order is automatically cancelled.
Also, the Amazon "we weren’t able to cancel the items" message only occurs with Amazon-fulfilled items.
The long "4-16 weeks" estimate also suggests it was not 3rd-party seller selling via FBA, either, but straight-up sold by Amazon.
There could well have been an issue with the seller; I can't tell. But my issue is more with how Amazon was a) totally unprepared to notice and fix seller issues, and b) absolutely unable to get it together even when brought to their attention repeatedly.
My first order with Amazon was May 6, 1997. It was worlds better than traditional mail order at the time, and also way better than most bookstores for niche things like technical books. And when I had to deal with customer service, they were really on top of things.
As many have testified here, they just aren't like that anymore.
I don’t like my dependence on Amazon but they have definitely improved my quality of life. I get everything I need other than groceries online. This has saved me a lot of time over the years.
I refer you to the my original comment: "The thing I really loved about Amazon is that they had their act together. But that has declined drastically over the decades; now whenever I actually have to deal with them it seems like there's a ton of internal chaos."
I actually had almost the same issue ordering a mattress from Amazon. The seller had created a tracking number so the order was showing as "shipped" even though there hadn't been any movement ever, which meant I couldn't cancel the order without escalating about 5 times to different service reps.
I'm afraid of being downvoted, but the algorithm for an Amazon return looks something like:
Your LTV = Forecasting total revenue
from your transactions so far
Revenue = The sum of your past
transactions
Refund? = LTV - Revenue - Refund Cost > 0
This is a much simpler, much more logical model. It appears everywhere, like with credit card disputes or when you get service discounts to not leave. Because when you don't get the refund for a $7,000 item, the assumption is you will "die" - quit using the service, stop buying, whatever - and your LTV - revenue is now zero.
What is frustrating to people is: it doesn't matter what happened to the package. You feel like you're this good person pursuing this great justice, but the simple facts are it doesn't matter what actually occurred. This is coming from someone who had two $3,500 computer deliveries stolen, probably because they had RTX 3080 written on them, but like, Amazon didn't care, it just refunded me. I didn't have to provide evidence or explain anything. Because my LTV was really high. Same with getting stuff refunded on my credit card. They simply did not care, and it was thousands of dollars of stuff where, obviously I was in the wrong, you can't just refund like airfare and such, but I asked for it and I got it because LTV.
Is this just? Like how else could it work? They investigate everything, spending more money than the cost of the refund? They would just not provide refunds, as was the case historically in e-commerce! And it's not Amazon, it's everyone. Indeed, the real innovation here isn't the strategy, it's that LTV forecasting has gotten really accurate. Otherwise I feel like these threads devolve into, people who don't know anything complain about stuff they keep using, and nobody critically looks into what's really going on.
There's an emotional desire, ironically, for this slow, legalistic, argumentative, plaintiff versus defense world. You know, when it suits you. The algorithmic approach, as soon as you open that Pandora's box, well of course it optimizes all that crap away - the LTV model of "justice" here is, in my opinion, a lot lot better.
It's just so inscrutable to a lay person, such a baffling reorganization of at least two decades of conditioning, I can see how the reaction is, "Oh my god, who is this blowhard, downvote." All I'm trying to do is share the facts of how remedies really work when you interact with giant, growing, successful companies.
This is 100% correct. Even our small business have rules like this: good customers will get refunds, discounts, etc. Bad ones (pathological ones) - we just try to get rid of them ASAP and no refunds. Because we do not want them to use our service anyway.
At the very beginning we were thinking that good vs bad should also include our support costs - not just LTV. But that is amazingly correlated: high LTV means that user has very low support cost (or at least a very nice people to work with).
> Bad ones (pathological ones) - we just try to get rid of them ASAP and no refunds.
A customer "not buying much" is not "bad". If you accept his money for cheap stuff, he is your customer. There's a difference between an honest customer who usually doesn't buy much and then buys something expensive and is getting sadly scammed and a customer trying to rob you.
If you accept the customer for cheap stuff but refuse to help him when he gets scammed on an expensive item, you are the bad, pathological, person/business.
> If you accept the customer for cheap stuff but refuse to help him when he gets scammed on an expensive item, you are the bad, pathological, person/business.
For every refund system you will unfortunately get people who attempt to game that system. They'll buy many negligible cost items without issue, then a single high cost item that they'll claim never arrived hoping they've outsmarted the store or algorithm. These bad actors are why honest consumers have a hard time. I don't know what a business can do to actually differentiate the two.
There’s probably a lot of money for the first person who figures out how to solve this problem instead of complaining about evil uncaring business owners.
Costco kinda figured it out, by charging a membership fee they got rid of most low LTV customers from the get-go. Unfortunately, their generous refund policy still got hacked by bad actors which is why they have a lot of restrictions around returning electronics. (People were returning laptops after a year of use just to upgrade). This is why we can’t have nice things.
source: I worked at Costco before they had restrictions on their electronics return policy, when they bragged about accepting returns on anything for any reason… before the cost of doing so became prohibitively high.
LTV refunding like Amazon is doing is a huge leap forward that lets every business kind of act like Costco.
That policy assumed good faith on the part of the consumer. The original thinking was likely 'OK, if they return it after <timeframe> it's because it was a lemon/never worked right/etc' rather than for abusive reasons like 'TV returned right after Superbowl Sunday' (because they had their party and no longer need it) or 'returned laptop after 6 months' (because the school/work project ended and they no longer need it) So the assumption baked into the policy was that buyers wanted to legitimately own the thing they purchased rather than using the refund policy as a way to get a free short/intermediate term lease.
You seem to be saying 'well they did say any reason' and that good faith on the part of the buyer didn't/shouldn't enter into it. Yes they did, and people behaved the way they did. Now the generous refund policy no longer exists. See how that works?
The policy even assumed some amount of semi-bad faith behavior, the thinking was their return policy was also a bit of a charity program for the needy and destitute[1] (a Costco member lost their job and so returns a bunch of items for cash, etc). What they didn’t anticipate was the sheer number of people who began acting in bad faith (and the deflationary nature of electronics making it especially tempting), it was too much to bear.
It’s a shame the policy is gone. There was really no peace of mind quite like it, knowing that if your device failed after years of use, but still due to a defect, you had recourse. And for poor people, it was a godsend of a program especially (and not because it could be abused, but simply Costco providing a service that anything you buy will work as advertised)
[1]source: some internal training I received back in 1998
Yep. The same thing happened with LLBean. They used to offer lifetime returns/warranty replacement on all items, which worked when people acted in good faith. After many decades of this policy, a gray market of used LLBean items emerged, people would buy multi-decade-old used LLBean items, then "return" them as worn out for a new one or even a full refund. It became a whole cottage industry, and they now have a one-year limit on their any-reason return policy.
People suck, especially when they are disconnected from the human side of business.
I love Costco return policy and we bought a lot of stuff there just because "well, if we don't like it we can just return it anytime" (and we did like it and never returned it) over the years, but I've seen some ridiculous returns there. From people treating returns as a zero-cost rentals to buying a tree, failing to water it until it's dead and then returning it. They still have very generous policy and I would hate to see it ruined by people who're just taking an unfair advantage of it and ruining it for everybody.
Yeah, this is a very real problem, and I've experienced both sides of it as a customer and running an ecom biz. It's very difficult to spot some of these people ahead of time.
It makes me sad. Ebay two decades ago was a lot different. I never got burned back then, and did a fair bit of buying and selling snowboard gear, including boards that get up to around $800 each. There's absolutely no way I'd do that today. Just impossible not to get ripped off on it.
Trust seems to be the main issue for large purchases, but individual retailers cannot (and probably should not) know enough about a customer to trust them.
Could the retail organization use a physically distributed escrow service to somehow tie payment to physical goods delivery? That essentially outsources the "brick and mortar" aspect to a third party and removes delivery risk. Amazon and Currency Exchange, for example, can have a much healthier economic relationship than Amazon and me.
Alternatively, this sounds like it could be addressed as a sort of "consumer protection" insurance similar to my homeowners or auto insurance. I file a claim so insurance covers legitimate large losses. Risk is pooled and the underwriter is the organization that is evaluating my trustworthiness, not the individual retailers.
Just ideas off the cuff, maybe there are huge holes here.
A particularly difficult con to detect and account for.
On eBay fraudsters buy large quantities of eg $1 seed packs, to build up artificial account ratings. Then they try to steal expensive things (didn't arrive, wasn't in the box, arrived broken, etc), and eBay shields the accounts heavily because they favor buyers to an extreme. All the thief has to do is be disciplined about it, buy $40-$50 of cheap items for positive feedback, then go after a $300-$500 item. Sellers can't even leave negative feedback on eBay, which further cuts off a mechanism for at least warning other sellers of a running con (sellers sometimes leave the negative language in the neutral/positive feeback segment instead, which rather points out the absurdity of eBay's broken system).
Sure. Amazon should equally value customers who buy $2 gadgets per year as ones who buys $2000 per year. But somehow business owners (restaurants, SaaS, retail, etc.) learn that complains and refunds from cheap customers are much more common and complaints are not polite. I really do not know why and I did not believe in that. But when you run business you learn fast.
Does this apply to things where it obviously went wrong? E.g. if someone bought a 5lb item, and they pointed out you shipped them a 1lb box-- no refunds even then, if they're an undesirable customer?
> Like how else could it work? They investigate everything, spending more money than the cost of the refund?
Is anyone actually arguing for fewer "easy refunds" and more investigation? I though the point was that given the fact that most of their refunds are handled algorithmically, they have plenty of time to handle the rest of the refunds quickly and with care.
If I don't get my order, I want my money back. If the algorith decides I can get that with no investigation required, sure, I'll take it. But if the algorithm thinks they shouldn't take the "shortcut", I still deserve my money back and a human should be dispatched to deal with it ASAP.
Algorithmically adjudicating in favor of the customer is fine - it's their money they're risking. But algorithmically adjudicating against the customer should never be allowed without a human looking things over.
This assumes that by investigating you will determine the truth. Often times, even if they spent a ton of time investigating, they aren’t going to be able to determine who was at fault.
Idk, if the tracking doesn't say "picked up by recipient", a refund should be given no questions asked. It's then up to the seller and shipping company to figure out who screwed up amongst themselves.
How do I purchase package insurance on something Amazon ships to me?
In theory, Amazon's T&C's attempt to pass on the risk of loss to me after delivery of the item to a carrier. In practice, this is far less clear, because of merchant agreements / cardholder agreements and overall FTC regulation of goods sold directly to consumers.
But it may be moot, anyways: if Amazon decides to screw me, they have a bunch of digital assets that they hold hostage and will remove my access to if I initiate a legal dispute or chargeback, even if I'm in the right.
Is there anything preventing you from having separate amazon account for digital assets and physical orders? That seems like almost a requirement give what I've heard about them in many comments throughout this thread.
Amazon routinely disables 'related accounts' when suspending an account. In practice, they know who you are on each, because of payment verification, etc. So I'm not sure how surefire of a solution this is.
I can't get package insurance as the recipient - only the sender can do that. And I wouldn't want to - the sender is the one picking the packaging, delivery provider and all of that, so it is their responsibility to get insurance. If they don't, it is their responsibility to cover for a lost package out-of-pocket.
And I'm not just using the term "responsibility" im a moral sense here - consumer protection laws in many places agree with this. The seller is an "informed market actor, taking on the risks of the transaction". The consumer is not an "equal market actor" and is therefore afforded protections from the risk.
No, signatures are a stupid relic of the past that needs to die out as soon as possible. But anything delivered in-person should be authorised with a one-time code that you get with your order confirmation and everything else (if small enough value) should be placed in a secure area (like a mailbox).
I don't know about you, but where I'm from, consumer protection laws exist specifically so consumers don't have to sue in these cases. Providing a fair refund process is their legal duty, not a courtesy.
Why is Amazon allowed to conflate inventory (Fulfilled by Amazon) without any legal issues? It almost seems they’re above the law. Why would they be legally required to follow customer protection laws?
The point is that it shouldn’t be the aggrieved consumer filing the lawsuit, it should be the powerful regulator with potential fines tied to a percentage of company revenue.
I wasn’t trying to suggest otherwise at all. I literally just don’t understand how consumer protection laws are supposed to work, and was wondering if the parent knew of some way to enforce what’s right without having to take them to court.
The law will oblige either of the two sides to carry the burden of proof. Either Amazon has to proof the package was delivered, or the customer has to proof it wasn't. If the other sides does not accept the proof received, it has to sue.
Nobody can really prove it. But each side can have some supporting evidence.
The shipper might be able to prove that the transport company picked up a package. Beyond that it's all hearsay if we are talking about fraudulent sellers.
The transport company might have evidence of a tracking number and thus most probably an actual package making it through the system. Shipments do get lost or stolen though. No way to prove anything really.
The customer can't prove it either. There are enough cases of packages with a tracking number having arrived at my and other people's doorsteps without the tracking ever showing that it happened. Why wouldn't the opposite be true? Driver just needs to scan package arrival not actually deliver. Of course there can be repercussions and I'd gather it's easier for a package to be stolen off other parts of the delivery chain. Anyway in this case both the shipper and customer have 'proof' / no proof to various degrees and in reality something 'fell off the truck'.
It's all about being convincing enough to whoever will be adjudicating this but 100% proof is impossible. The closest the customer could get I think would be 24h Video surveillance of their front entrance. No motion detection, just 24h continuous tape.
Yep, I think this is exactly how things work. My household buys pretty much anything it can from Amazon unless it's more expensive than we can get elsewhere because our Amazon credit cards automatically give a 5% discount (cash back). Since we pay our balance every month this is basically like having 5% more income proportional to the amount spent on Amazon**
We never have a problem dealing with customer service. A simple chat solves pretty much everything immediately, and when it's Amazon's fault they'll apply a courtesy credit towards our account. (Actually that hasn't happened a lot lately-- maybe something they don't do as much any more, or maybe they've calculated that we're solid enough customers that we're not quiting Amazon just because Amazon didn't give us free money)
*The first time we used Amazon Fresh was a complete epiphany for us. I was sick so couldn't go food shopping. Instead I gave Fresh a shot, and found out that on average their prices were 10% to 15% lower than I paid at the supermarket, and* we still got the same 5% cash back from using our Amazon credit card. Even after a good tip for the driver, we were still saving money. In terms of selection, they probably lack about 10% of the things we normally buy or they're much more expensive (meats especially) so I still do the occasional trip to the local grocery store to stock up.
If you're looking for an alternative, Target's store card also gives you 5% off and it is applied instantly at the time of purchase (you don't have to "redeem" the refund later or anything).
We actually do use them for some things, especially some low cost items Amazon doesn't sell directly and resellers mark up significantly because that's the only way they can make money on a $3 bottle of shampoo or whatever it is. Also for dry goods, Target often has things Amazon doesn't have. The only downside is they don't have free shipping unless you hit $35, so we try yo save up items until we have enough to hit that mark.
I think you’re right that is the core of the model. Good customers always get treated better than Joe Rando.
But Amazon has more information and uses that too. They know loss rates by zip code or by block by carrier.
Usually items I order for them that are higher shrink risk don’t go through their Amazon distribution network and come UPS or USPS. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed those returns are easier — they probably dump cost on the 3rd party shipper.
The model isn’t aware of that stuff. They feed groups into the model, it might be grouped by zip code. But there isn’t a variable for zip code in the model. The model just forecasts LTV and nothing else, from transaction histories.
While what you’re saying about how it works sounds extremely plausible, I am rather dubious about the idea that this is how it ought to work (and the inference that this is simple, therefore it’s how it ought to work).
Taken to the extreme (and I don’t see anything in the argument that prevents it being taken to the extreme) and combined with acceptance of utility functions (_i.e._ that the value of anything is comparable to anything else, including human lives) this seems to also reduce any and all rule enforcement to wergild or something radical in that vein. Which—I’m not sure how it worked historically, but it also seems to be the current state of patent law (it doesn’t matter if the patent has merit, the side with the better and more expensive lawyers will starve out the other), and the results look utterly miserable.
Vague generalities aside, the complaints (and hypothetical downvotes) seems to indicate that, however simple and transparent a rule this is from the inside, people don’t want to pay for what is not their fault (cf experiments where people rejected a $1/$99 split in favour of a $0/$0 one to punish the other guy). I’m reminded of people queueing up in droves to the first McDonald’s in Moscow nor for the food or the prices, but for the customer service, because that was literally the first time in their lives they could get that anywhere.
Unless it’s marketed as a luxury good, people will actually pay for decent customer service that, among other things, satisfies their sense of fairness. That a model which does not reflect this can be simple is not a virtue of that model, it’s shoddy model-building. Not providing that service might still be the better economic decision (with caveats), if few enough people end up bitter over it (and complain on HN, etc.), but that’s a much more involved claim than “but it’s so simple!”. It also has very little to do with its moral merit, and if the better economic decision is too far from the moral one, it may well be time to go tune the incentives again and not to give up on your set of morals.
I’m not convinced customer protection regulations are the answer here, but the results of no customer protection regulations also seem completely idiotic from the outside. The third option of piling upon the company online also seems revolting for entirely different reasons.
Interesting. I've bought most of my tech stuff from the same company for 20 years now. Their system actually lets me see all completed orders, and it tallied to about 50k AUD last time I checked (as an individual).
They're not always the cheapest, but the overall experience is great - and I just love that I can see all my orders for such a long time span.
Now, I've always had good customer support experiences with the company, and your model helps explain why I suppose; loyalty has a value of its own.
So what you are saying is instead of getting emotional, we should get even by reverse engineering the LTV algorithm and “lose” packages as often is still profitable for Amazon so we can buy things at near cost from them?
"LTV model of 'justice' here is, in my opinion, a lot lot better"
Sure, it is, when you're rich. If you're some poor bastard who's scrimped up a whole lot of money to buy an expensive item, and Amazon figures you won't spend much money in the future, you get ripped off.
There's a couple of externalities you've left out, too, because your LTV doesn't predict them:
* Reputational costs
* Risk of adverse legal outcomes, where you decline to provide deserved refunds after failing to deliver merchandise.
If a rich person went onto Amazon and bought something 50 times more expensive than anything else they’d ever purchased and claimed it didn’t arrive, Amazon would drop them like a hot potato.
You’re talking like there’s no legal recourse (or even financial, like a chargeback). There simple aren’t enough resources to track down the source of every sob story, the hard truth is this “inhuman” efficiency is a huge boon for the vast majority of us.
A bare minimum level of diligence is required before denying a claim. Else you -should- run into bad faith, punitive damages, action from regulators, etc. It's not some super magical extensive investigation to realize that you shipped a box that weighs much less than the item and that there's likely a big problem.
There may be very valid reason to shortcut claims and to grant dubious claims of high value customers. But you really shouldn't just ship an empty box and say "sorry, you're not getting your money back unless you sue us". (And worse, break the customer's existing digital content if they do, because you can hold it hostage).
I mean, I get that it's financially appealing to externalize the costs of in-warehouse and in-transit shrinkage to random low-value customers, but brah-- that's just not right.
Via media intervention? Eh. That concerns me and makes me worry that 99% of the time this happens it silently goes away from a customer who is not able to get media attention.
IMO this should be a flag for regulators to start taking a look, too, to understand how systemic this is.
Out of all things such as app store monopoly abuses and taxes, right to repair abuses in both devices and cars, search/ads monopoly power abuses, consumer protection is already reasonably and well regulated and not the first thing that needs additional regulation.
There's already decent regulation, yes. It may be time for the regulators to actually look at Amazon using those extant regulations, if they are declining returns in clear-cut cases like this.
I believe all of this, but isn't there some aspect where persistence has a different outcome than passivity? In your example where essentially you're saying the profit Amazon made off a customer is less than the refund cost and fallout of indifference. There are escalation paths that cost the company money, like stealing support time via repeatedly escalating, and eventually filing a dispute with the credit card issuer. These, too, cost Amazon money.
You're right, I just wanted to emphasize the innovative part of this system is forecasting LTV accurately. Specifically by forecasting LTV as a function of your personal and population wide transaction history alone, without any other secular considerations. Whereas it's pretty straightforward to enumerate your costs.
Not sure I follow, if this happens to some customer (who are in the right) they shouldn't get a refund? And this is considered just because it saves investigation spending?
If Amazon chooses to refund without question to save disputes money, that's their choice. But it's not the customer's problem. If you pay for something and you don't receive it, you must get refunded.
At some point Amazon shipped me 5 CPUs in five boxes in a larger branded box instead of just one. I sent four back and didn't even get a "sorry for your trouble".
I wonder if that factors in somehow.
I also wonder - since the box containing five CPUs looked like a "single product" box - how often that must have happened.
I think overall Amazon is making a mistake. When I interviewed with them a few years ago, they were well aware of the risk of short-term best choices being bad in the long term (can't elaborate due to NDAs).
For instance, in the short term it's better to take the loss instead of investigate. But that then makes your platform an easy pick for fraudsters, so you end up with way more fraud and way more costs overall. If you were a bit more thorough and spotted scammers better, you would have a higher cost _per incident_ but lower cost overall in the long term.
This is particularly true if you are such a big player that you are the market in practice (so general equilibrium effects cannot be ignored anymore). And reminds me a bit of what eBay did in the past (sided with buyers almost every time without investigating, and made selling much more difficult).
Of course this is the case. Business give better customers better treatment.
Where people haven’t seemed to have learned their lesson with this is with airlines and to a lesser extent hotels. People will just buy the cheapest ticket, which is completely fine if that’s what you want or need to do, but they then complain that the airlines don’t bend over backwards when things go awry.
Example: you have to check in to international flights 60 minutes or more before the flight leaves (from the US). This is a reasonably strict rule. I once arrived 45 minutes prior and they checked me in anyway. I give that airline a lot of business and they know it.
So I order a lot of packages from Amazon and have had zero problems with returns and cancellations but almost all my purchases are low end.
For, say, new electronics, I’ll just go straight to B&H or Adorama. Or even Best Buy.
In this context, people are basically saying it’s okay steal $7000 from a customer they don’t like, and upvoting each other for the sentiment. The only reason it’s not criminal is because it’s a powerful party doing it to a weak party. Imagine if a homeless man took $7k of amazons money - the police would be involved instantly and there would be jail time
Thanks for this, very informative. So LTV is forecasted "lifetime value". So, if I'm 30, they'll estimate ~50 years of revenue going forward from me and use this as LTV?
> So, if I'm 30, they'll estimate ~50 years of revenue going forward from me and use this as LTV?
No. If you're 30, they might (or might not) group you with other 30 year olds, if that's important, and run this model against you all as a group. But you don't punch in "he has 50 years left to live" in the model. The model doesn't know any of that, it just knows your transaction history, and it works better when the population of histories are more similar than dissimilar. Though it's also very effective when run against a large population too.
Basically, these models can pretty much predict whether you are pathological or good one. I know that models also include things like if you are a pet owner, number of pets, siblings, number of disputes in cc, etc.
You have a point, but if the company has a stated refund policy and its actual policy differs from that, then it can not in any way be regarded as just, IHMO.
(I have never bought anything expensive from Amazon, and so I have no idea what its stated policy is.)
I don’t think that’s the case. I spent tens of thousands of dollars on amazon over the years and had a similar bad experience than the author. I doubt they treat customers differently depending on how much they spend on the site.
While they may not do so exactly in the manner described by the GP, it's naive to think Amazon doesn't give differential treatment to select customers for reasons directly related to income from those customers.
Behaving otherwise would just be shooting yourself in the foot for weird ideas of fairness.
For expensive stuff I almost never go with Amazon now: too many counterfeit / fly by night sellers.
For "prosumer" items a store that serves professionals is likely to watch their suppliers very carefully and have customer-friendly policies when things hit a snag. For cameras and optics (and flash sticks) B&H is my go-to place. My 2c.
A customer service rep from NYC once called to personally answer some questions I had about a sub-$100 product. This happens often.
This week I ordered a display with free shipping that was scheduled to arrive 5 days later. I received it in 24 hours - 4 days earlier than expected.
Their return policy is also hassle-free.
For music or audio products, I buy from Sweetwater.
Same good points as B&H, but you have an assigned "sales engineer" which some people find annoying, but I really like - whenever I have a problem or question, I get the same person on the phone every time.
I don't order from Amazon if I'm not comfortable outright losing my money, getting it late, or receiving a counterfeit.
The one issue with B&H is that if something isn't in stock, their estimates are nowhere near accurate. Currently been waiting 2 months for an item that was being stocked in "7-10" days. But if it's in stock they're a good option.
Same. After getting clearly-open-box (used? counterfeit? returned?) Makita batteries on Amazon I only buy tools from Home Depot, only buy camera equipment from B&H, etc. No more pricey tools or electronics from Amazon, or food for that matter (years ago, bought box of protein bars, came expired!)
I bought an $800 winch from Amazon, shipped and sold by Amazon, in “new” condition. When it arrived, not only was it clearly used, but it had been damaged by improper use and would have been extremely dangerous if I tried to use it. If I hadn’t known what to look for, I probably would have used it and been at risk of serious injury. Amazon is clearly marking returns as “new” if their clueless returns staff thinks they can pass it off.
Yeah, me too. I imagine it's a process that is difficult to scale without error.
I like buying Amazon Warehouse deals when the item makes sense to me. With larger items I think their quality control is higher, and the saving tend be bigger. The box may arrive super beat-up, but item is just fine.
My motivation is probably less about overall savings, but more about me feeling like I'm doing Amazon a favor. Weird, isn't it? I'm conditioned.
As a tangent: I've also purchased used that ended up being a return of a similar looking, but much less expensive item. So I just re-return it. In this case I assume it was fraud on the original return. With my patterns I doubt Amazon thinks -I- returned them the wrong item. Without customer context their job figuring stuff like that out would be much more difficult.
That's not just Amazon though. I bought a band saw from Lowes that once I opened the box had clearly been used and dropped, so much that the base was bent.
Generally speaking my personal experiences with Amazon have been good. However, I’ve similarly shifted most of my online purchases elsewhere because (1) I don’t trust the reviews anymore and (2) I don’t trust Amazon’s suppliers.
Ironically, my purchases on Amazon these days are almost exclusively books and ebooks.
Same, but for books I've switched to my local bookstore. Mainly because I would like to continue having a local bookstore. Now that I don't have Prime anymore, cost and speed are about the same.
I've been meaning to check out alternative ebook vendors too. Anybody have something they like on Android?
I like Kobo out of the big players. Google feels like they could give up anytime. I've also had issues getting downloadable ePubs from them.
If you like SciFi/Fantasy, Baen sells ebooks direct with no DRM on their website in multiple formats and have for like 20 years. Some other publishers do this too like Image comics. Most don't though so you need to go through one of the bigger stores unfortunately.
Yes, B&H is always the place to go for things like that. I just bought 15k worth of camera equipment for my dad and with the new store card it's an instant refund on taxes. The 30 day return policy is the cherry on top.
I just generally avoid Amazon Marketplace (third-party sellers) because returns are always a hassle in some way (shipping not covered, out-of-country return center to mail to, no shipping label, need to contact through email, force you to give reason why you want to return even though that is illegal, ...).
Doesn’t matter with commingling of inventory, you’ll get counterfeit items. I don’t buy certain items off Amazon like SD cards due to issues with counterfeit items. Also food products has issues, you’ll get items a month or two away from expiration.
If you watch all the videos on how to make money on Amazon. It involves buying liquidation items from places like TJ Maxx or other retailers selling second quality items. These items are commingled into regular inventory. The consumer ends up buying a second quality item for the “new” price.
I too have had a similar experience, but it was for a series of bad deliveries by the same Amazon Logistics delivery driver. Almost every delivery was fucked up in some way or another: delivered late but marked as delivered, delivered on time but not marked as delivered until it was stolen, delivered to inaccessible locations, delivered to other residents drop boxes, etc.
I called amazon every time it happened. I told them the various things that their driver did, explicitly asking them to replace that specific driver. And after a while it was like they flagged my account as fraudulent (customer service began issuing canned responses with no follow up).
Eventually, after a few egregious cases, my property management company sued Amazon. Overnight, packages started being delivered correctly, and I haven't had to call CS since...but I now refuse to buy anything of value from Amazon anymore due to a combination of fraudulent marketplace items and the lingering fear that if something goes wrong I won't be able to get any compensation for it because my account has been flagged.
Funnily enough, Ali Express is now the more reputable company in my eyes.
I’ve found my credit card company, American Express to be great for getting refunds in cases like this and always use my credit card for larger purchases.
Like others have said - be careful with this option - there are a LOT Of examples in the Google Fi forums about people doing a chargeback with Google because of charges they felt were fair or fraudulent via Google Fi, and next thing they know their Google Account (Photos, Docs, Email, etc.) is disabled.
I would watch the same thing with Amazon (Music, Alexa, Photos, AWS, etc.)
Exactly. If you are at the point where your only recourse is chargeback, then you are at a bridge-burning moment. The company has treated you so badly that you’re willing to light the relationship on fire. Why on earth would you want to continue being a customer of that company? I’ve done a few chargebacks in my life and they were all against scum-of-the-earth companies I would never do business with again.
One thing I've always wondered: since credit cards generally have relatively pro-consumer policies, why didn't they just take the next logical step and write "retaliation for chargebacks isn't allowed" into their merchant agreements?
Because the companies might just stop accepting them or actually start fighting. Also the current state is good for both merchants and credit cards. Issues are quietly solved and problems go away, permanently.
This is why I do not use gmail or any other online services from any vendor which might restrict me from doing things I do. My online dependency is limited to Netflix and Amazon. Amazon is easily replaceable. As for Netflix - there are other services and as an alternatives I'll just read more books. I might miss Google Gearch and Youtube but from my experiments those can be used in anonymous mode. For people who earn money on Youtube it is of course very different.
A couple of years ago I migrated away from Gmail for just this reason. Before I did that, my life could have become very difficult if Google decided to deem me as a persona non grata, and I'd have little to no recourse.
This is one problem I face with centralization. If all stores handle purchases on their own, it's fine if your local camera shop refuses you as a customer because you also probably don't want to deal with them again, but if you are forced to use your CC company to dispute against steam, amazon, google, you are risking being banned from their service. You are risking access to your photos, documents, and emails. To using online features for other products you already own.
I agree, but we are far from centralized. Very far.
-edit-
If you think we're centralized and you're "downvoting to disagree" at least have some decency to explain how we're centralized. There is nothing that Amazon sells that I can't buy an alternative product at a dozen other retailers for comparable prices, for example.
Due to network effects, there often aren't good alternatives for social media like Facebook or collaborative cloud tools like Google docs.
For games, it's not unusual for indy games to only release on Steam. Even when there is a physical release, that option is becoming increasingly difficult (e.g. many computers no longer have a built in disc drive, many stores no longer carry PC games, etc.).
This is less common than the previous two examples, but it may be difficult to find niche products outside of Etsy. For example, I haven't been able to find another place to purchase this specialized martial arts equipment: https://www.etsy.com/listing/175827423/
So Steam and Etsy themselves trend toward some amount of centralization, but in the case of Stream for example you have Playstation, Microsoft's platform, Stadia (soon to be cancelled I'm sure), Switch, Epic game store, iOS, and others. They aren't all exactly 1-1 comparable but I think that's ok. Frankly, you can get games from a lot of sources. You might say you can't get an indy title from one of these sources that you can on Steam, but you can't buy Halo on Playstation either - that doesn't make things centralized. It's a very competitive market.
In the case of Etsy I think you're a little more right, but there's no reason that has to continue to be that way.
Steam and Etsy are actually two companies that, if I were unable to use them starting tomorrow, that would basically have zero impact on my life.
Whereas, although I do order from a variety of online retailers, going cold turkey on Amazon would be a fairly significant inconvenience for me--although some seem not to use them much.
Centralization is a float not a Boolean. I use Amazon a lot, am generally happy, but am slightly concerned with the amount of centralization that Amazon retail represents.
The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize. As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.
"Market Power"
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.
I didn't claim that Amazon was or wasn't a monopoly so I'm not following the point you're trying to make here. Centralization is not the same thing as monopoly.
Downvoting on HN sucks, doesn't it? It's a feature designed without empathy, even though it directly affects human emotion. Which is extra bizarre considering it's on a forum that prides itself on respectful human behavior.
I don't care too much about the karma itself, it's more so I want to know why something I said is worthy of this little down arrow thing. Am I completely incorrect? If so why? What specifically is wrong. I want to learn and have discussions about these things. Sucks to see people downvoting you too - they're just proving your point.
Best thing to do is buy straight from manufacturer if possible require insurance on the shipment—that way the post has to deliver it or they are paying you!
At least where I live it's the shippers (i.e. the manufacturers in your example) problem if the package doesn't arrive, not mine.
If they want to purchase insurance on their package, that's their choice. On the flip side if they want to "self insure" by not doing so, and assuming that on average they would pay more for insurance than insurance would pay them, that's also their choice.
Either way I'm certainly not going to purchase insurance myself, paying extra money to mitigate their risk.
In fact, it seems pretty insane to me that they ship items worth thousands of dollars, but skip the few dollars on insured shipment. It not only protects against missing/"missing" packages, but also against transport damage (at least in Germany).
And a place like Amazon that sends out lots of orders will get a good idea of where the risks are high and where they are low. They know that of the hundreds of packages they have shipped us none have gone missing, it would be a waste of money to insure things they are sending us.
They even screwed up and shipped a cancelled order, I was on the other side of the world when I saw the e-mail and by the time they were satisfied I really was me their attempt to intercept the package failed. $500 worth of stuff sat on our front porch for 10 days and was still there when we got back. (We live in a low-crime area and our front porch makes it basically impossible to see a package from the street unless it's large. A porch pirate would have to come to within 10' of the door to see most things, they'll go elsewhere where they don't have to be so obvious.)
I don't know how this works in general but I assume that there are some heuristics as to whether shippers require delivery signatures or not. Because of where I live and how isolated my house is the only real dangers are misdelivery and damage.
One of the early-on Prime benefits for me was fairly deterministic delivery. At a time when I ordered lot of physical books, CDs, and DVDs, the minimum amount for free shipping wasn't a big deal. But random order arrivals when I was traveling much of the time were.
Amazon is simply not prepared to deal with this. Because of their "shady seller" and "comingled inventory" problem, they can't tell easily if a buyer or seller is trying to scam them.
Electronics I buy from either Best Buy or B&H Photo.
For non-electronic "Name Brand" items where counterfeit is likely, I'll go to Target.com, etc.
Amazon is great for stuff that is neither valuable, critical, subject to counterfeit, or perishable. But if health or a large amount of money is at stake, avoid it like the plague. It's not worth the risk.
In the end, it probably took 3-4 weeks to get my money back for a $5k 1-day delivery package that wasn't ever delivered. I would have gone the bank route next, but since Amazon did eventually give me my money back, it wasn't needed.
I'm sure the shipper was who lost/stole the package. But my point is that you can't take your great support experience with Amazon buying $50 sheets and expect that you get the same experience when they lose something expensive. For expensive or specialist items, you can often get the item faster and cheaper going to a different retailer despite how all your experience buying cheap stuff on Amazon tells you otherwise.
As I've moved more of my shopping away from Amazon I've noticed that lots and lots of online retailers are now competitive on the logistics side. Fast shipping is now table stakes.
I'll go one further and say that some are actually quicker than Amazon. I've recently bought two different items from bestbuy.com that I would have normally bought from Amazon when prime shipping actually took two days.
In both cases bestbuy's free shipping could get the items to my house 1 day quicker than amazon so I went with them.
Amazon is also I think still trying to push prime on people. It used to be that stuff arrived basically overnight for me when I bought early enough the day before. When they started prime we suddenly started waiting for our regular free shipping packages. And you can't tell me it's because of volumes and they had to introduce prime. This literally started overnight when prime was introduced, not slowly getting worse until you could pay for priority.
They basically just have the order sit around, sometimes with the tracking number already created and in the system but it takes 3 or 4 days before the shipment actually leaves their facilities. They basically have an incentive not to be fast now unlike when they started out and the fast an free shipping was one of their great selling points over other online retailers.
Best Buy, in some cases, fulfills using Geek Squad folks delivering locally. Was very cool to order two SSDs in the morning and have them show up a few hours later.
Unfortunately many have also opened the doors to so-called third party marketplace sellers. It's making the experience of looking for items online worse. Some label this poorly, some offer no easy way to filter to only items sold by the actual company.
The only problem I've had over the past year or two was with a headset that didn't work properly. I returned it via a UPS will pick up the box and slap on a shipping label option. They never did. But there was eventually a tracking number in the system anyway. UPS basically shrugged and said that the computer says it was picked up. But the refund went through anyway. I assume Amazon decided that UPS had picked it up and lost it.
I'm guessing it's more price-dependent. I'm sure Amazon would refund a headset and not really care if they got it back or not. But try getting a refund on a $5,000 studio microphone and you will probably have an entirely different experience.
Somewhere around $1,000-ish seems to be the magic threshold where their rules change and you get lost in the management void.
I'm actually surprised people buy expensive audio/video/photo equipment on Amazon, since usually their prices aren't good on those, and their packaging is very bad. That's okay for random consumer garbage, but I wouldn't order anything high-end from them.
I bet the reason people do it is because they had good experiences buying dozens of sub-$100 items in Amazon and don't want to risk trying out a new online store. Amazon support is great for cheap stuff, so most people assume it's the same for expensive ones.
Also, people new to a hobby won't know that B&H, or Thomann, or Sweetwater, etc, also have great customer support like Amazon.
Sorry. I realize that. I just think the comparison gives the wrong impression because of how much more you can get in service from Sweetwater, that most people would never realize were possibilities if Amazon is what they are used to.
Was only trying to improve the info you offered a bit more.
I presume the “their” and “them” in this comment refer to third party sellers, which could be anyone. I would rather order from the brand directly, or Home Depot or Best Buy or any other established business that does not try to pawn me off as a customer to someone else.
Especially for audio/video/photo stuff there's a bunch of dealers just for that, which tend to be quite good (in terms of prices, packaging, customer services), and also specialized distributors ("sells small numbers to professionals"), that's why I'm surprised people go for Amazon.
Some examples:
Random camera: Amazon: 2000 €, any photo dealer: 1800 €
Random high-end lens: Amazon: 2500 €, photo dealer: 2000 €
Random microphone: Amazon: 275 €, A/V distributor: 220 €
Studio microphone: Amazon: <not authorized to sell>, A/V distributor: 600 €
And that's before considering that Amazon is probably going to ship more slowly (even on prime) than most other "pro" dealers, and that Amazon is probably going to throw a box in a more or less empty parcel, while someone at a proper dealer will actually bother to package the stuff correctly.
For my last camera purchase of about $3500, Amazon had it on sale for a couple hundred bucks less, and I was going to buy from them because it was a big enough difference to overcome my loyalty to B&H.
I decided to think on it for a day, and sure enough by the next day B&H had the same price. Pretty sure it was a manufacturer discount but in general I think they try to match prices.
That's entirely possible as well. Which is one reason that, although I have used Amazon for fairly expensive electronics, they're not my default. (I also expect some people live places where thefts from porches, etc. are more common than in my case where I'm at the end of a long driveway.)
They lost my 15$ package and even though they promised refund and a gift card, they never came through.
Now I don't use amazon anymore than I really have to.
If I were to decide that I wasn't going to use Amazon starting tomorrow, I'd be spending a whole lot more time checking a bunch of online stores, paying for shipping, driving around, etc. So, yes, they are for a lot of things. While I certainly ordered from them pre-pandemic, the pandemic has brought home to me how many things I can just order rather than put on a shopping list and drive around to stores to find and purchase.
I've found Walmart.com to be about as good as Amazon for my online shopping (in the US). I particularly find Walmart to be a lot better for some dry goods like cereal and Clif bars. They can mix delivery from their warehouses and from local stores.
This is not me shilling Walmart. I've been pleasantly surprised by it in the last year, and find it to be a real competitor to shopping at Amazon.
If you don't care too much about the price, the time difference is low: you spend some time looking at an online retailer (maybe typing in your address), but you save the time you would waste searching Amazon for the correct listing amongst all the knockoffs, sent-from-Hong-Kong etc.
If you care a lot about the price, you already need to consider other shops, since Amazon isn't necessarily the cheapest anyway.
I have ordered one thing from Amazon in the past five years, where the manufacturer only sold to consumers through Amazon.
People don't "want a monopoly." But they do want to order things in a way that is by no means a "minor convenience." Just going back to when Amazon was getting started, finding a book that wasn't in stock at your local store was a massive hassle and could take months. Today, not spending an hour running errands is not really a minor convenience. Again, I'm good with there being more competition--and, in fact, I order things from multiple places--but Amazon is often the easiest choice.
There was a time when that was definitely not the norm. You looked a book up in a big Books in Print volume and an order could take quite a long time to come in. Yes, the situation improved over time with certain big city bookstores and then Barnes and Noble prior to Amazon. But I can certainly remember a time when getting things generally that weren't in local stock took considerable effort and time.
Sometimes they have something that I want but other stores that offer it are even shadier and then I use amazon because I know that even though they have crappy customer service, at least they have it.
Ordered something twice this year from amazon.
It's a lot easier than not using Google anymore. But the one thing that's hard for me to buy without Amazon is best seller ebooks. There just aren't that many alternative ebook sellers apart from indy books.
I don't know if all shipping companies do this but my experience with Amazon in the UK is that they track and keep records of the whereabouts of their delivery vans.
Once I had an order "delivered" without trace and Amazon asked my to check with neighbours first as, according to their records, the van has stopped at my house. On another occasion I knew that the van never came despite order again listed as "delivered" and they refunded instantly.
Based on some personal experience with "lost" packages, and discussions with delivery drivers, this is also the case in the US. This makes it even more egregious when the carriers quibble because surely they know the package was stolen in transit.
A tiny corollary/anecdote: Every time the person who used to live here forgets and ships a book to my address, I call Amazon, they say “oh sorry”, and they instruct me to recycle/dispose of it and won’t accept a return of the still-unopened envelope. I’m not sure how this ties into LTV on the refunds side, but it feels like a sort of hidden incentive that’s not well known.
Strange I would assume that $5k to them is still nearly nothing. I've never ordered anything over $1k from Amazon and never had an issue with refunds due to issues but I guess they have a cutoff somewhere. I'll keep that in mind if I ever need to order something expensive like that.
I haven't had any issues with orders still in progress, but Amazon has replaced/allowed me to return a $1200 tv that was 6 months old after it randomly stopped working/broke after moving apartments. They sent someone out and picked it up--which I seriously doubt BestBuy or NewEgg would have been willing to do.
I had a similar issue to what you describe ordering a vintage item on Etsy and the tracking info provided was fake and delivered to a different address. That was a huge hassle to prove and get refunded for.
It took me months to get a fraudulent refurb phone refunded. I've also had several purchases where I didn't want to fight just slide. So I stopped using Amazon.
This is basically the reason that I've continued to purchase electronics in-store despite generally being (slightly) cheaper to buy on Amazon: when I buy it from Best Buy/REI/etc., I can pick the box with the factory seal, and if necessary even open it up in store (after paying for it) to confirm that said item is in the box.
I’ve been buying from B&H for many years, and had a wrong item shipped to me once. They made an exchange without any big hassle. The only issue I have now is they’ve switched away from UPS as default shipping—-UPS ground NY to Boston is basically next day, FedEx Ground service is two days. I liked going to the store in NY when I lived there.
I have bought various electronics and camera accessories from B&H with no issues (related to B&H).
However, I buy all my new camera bodies and lenses direct from the manufacturer. I have found the price to be identical (or nearly so) to B&H, shipping to often be free and from time to time, without a local tax. If Nikon, Sigma, etc are selling as 'new' what are returns/refurbs then there is no hope in the system at all.
I buy expensive electronics from B&H Photo Video, when possible.
In the 1980's, B&H was the queen of the "grey market". Now, I trust them to deliver authentic goods with legitimate warranties, and I'm profoundly suspicious of unnecessary transactions with Amazon.
I apply the same policy myself after a similar incident. I ordered a bunch of hard drives, when delivering them to my porter, the (dedicated) amazon delivery guy got an error on his tracking machine and took the parcel back. But then it was marked as delivered, and amazon refused to bulge, despite me receiving multiple emails the days after that delivery attempt, notifying me that the parcel would be delivered the next day (which I interpret as someone scanning the parcel they claimed has been delivered at their warehouse). A few weeks later they finally agreed to reimburse me.
Between this experience and my lack of trust in their supply chain, I now never buy anything expensive on amazon.
I dislike buying from Amazon and I don't doubt you had a frustrating experience here.
That said, how would you have expected this to go? I assume everybody is in agreement that this wasn't going to be sorted out the next day. I think you might be overestimating how smoothly this would go when dealing with another company, although obviously there would be exceptions to that.
Honestly, I would expect it to be sorted quickly and by one person. If I’m paying thousands of dollars for a high end product, especially with a company I’ve (presumably) spent tens of thousands of dollars with, I expect to be taken care of when something goes wrong.
> My recommendation is to skip Amazon for anything expensive or at high risk of shipper theft/fraud.
Based on this, as you say, "rare" experience? That seems unwise when aiming for the best average outcome.
Also what would be a better alternative (provided you still want to shop and pay online)? I suspect that, while the rate of problematic experience might be slightly lower with smaller dealers, the average lost value for the customer is not (since there is no Amazon middleman that has any financial interest in keeping the customer around for future shopping, and hence their money is probably just lost when something goes wrong that the dealer is unable or unwilling to resolve)
I do not trust Amazon to ship anything safely and securely anymore. Almost everything I receive is damaged, late, or mis-delivered. Books are especially abused somewhere in Amazon’s fulfillment. (They’re always bent, creased, or dirty.) Items that are supposed to be 1-day shipping typically take >=3, and Amazon’s tracking mostly says “oops! it’ll come trust us”. (Not verbatim, obviously.)
Amazon’s return process is becoming incrementally more obtuse as time goes on. While they’re still decently good, it’s getting harder to do easy, no-nonsense returns. Typically—if they don’t just tell me to dispose of the item myself—they demand I drive to Amazon lockers or Whole Foods or Kohl’s to drop stuff off at no charge, and pressure me into just getting Amazon credit.
I would never buy a $7,000 item on Amazon under any circumstance.
I'm genuinely surprised that people have such vastly different experiences with Amazon. I made 231 orders with them last year(lockdown....) And haven't had a problem with a single one. Couple times I wanted to return something they just refunded me without asking to send the item back. Everything arrives next day, always(here in UK anyway), and the customer support is stellar compared to literally anywhere else. Anyone who has ever had to contact Currys customer support should know what I'm talking about.
Like, I see all of these comments on HN all the time but I have the exact opposite experience - they just have no competition over here. I'm at a point where even if something is slightly more expensive on Amazon I'd rather buy from them as I know their CS Support won't try to screw me over.
It really is location dependent, since most of the problems are caused by the shipper. Amazon will use multiple shippers, and in some areas will use what ends up being people driving around in their personal cars to deliver packages. If you have unreliable shippers in your area, it’s hard to deal with Amazon when things go wrong. In one place I lived, Amazon would use the US Postal Service, UPS, and Fedex. I had no control over which. The local FedEx team was horrible, they never figured out how to deliver packages to my building. So they would pretend to deliver, say customer wasn’t home and no secure place to leave the package for 2-3 days, then stick a notice on the outside of the building somewhere that I could use to drive to the FedEx warehouse in the next town over to pick it up. Maybe it’s different now, but there was just no way to do anything about this.
Another location and I’d get these local people delivering packages in their personal cars and that was really hit or miss. Seems like anytime they were busy they just report that they tried to deliver but no one was home. They could steal whatever they wanted, it’s a matter of trust. How does Amazon know who is lying? Maybe I’m scamming them, maybe the shippers, maybe someone else is stealing packages off my doorstep.
There was just no way to choose a shipper or report problems with one. Don’t have any problems where I am now, so I don’t know if they’ve fixed that. They should be able to tell, statistically, if packages have more problems with one shipper over the other, but smart shippers who want to steal could probably game the system.
I don't get why Amazon doesn't allow the customer to chose between multiple available shipping carriers. They do for returns, which is fantastic and one of the reasons I love buying on Amazon, because I can always chose to pick the carrier that has the office 1 minute walk away from my home that is never busy, instead of being forced to drive to some remote store and stand in line.
If Amazon gave these choices to customers for shipping, it would apply pressure to shipping carriers to improve their service, as people would experiment and pick the best ones and stop picking bad ones. Eventually a bad carrier is forced to improve to not lose revenue. And Amazon would get way happier customers, who can pick what is best in their region, and they would have a massive advantage over smaller shops.
> I don't get why Amazon doesn't allow the customer to chose between multiple available shipping carriers. They do for returns...
I assume because the volume of returns is much lower than the volume of sales, plus Amazon isn't responsible for coordinating the return.
In essence, my suspicion is that at Amazon's scale they literally can't afford to let customers pick their own shipper. That's one variable too many to manage for their massive logistics problem, and the expense of building out the support for that would never be recouped.
> In essence, my suspicion is that at Amazon's scale they literally can't afford to let customers pick their own shipper. That's one variable too many to manage for their massive logistics problem, and the expense of building out the support for that would never be recouped.
I don't get it. All the alternative carriers are obviously in their system already, since deliveries obviously get routed via all of them, and (presumably) some algorithm selects which one that is in each case. All it takes is to put one more selection field on the order (and I guess in the customer profile, for a personal default value) and then use that if provided and the algorithm only if not provided. What's so hugely complicated about that?
I suspect the wield this lack of choice as a weapon against the carriers. They go to each carrier and say, "that a healthy looking Amazon contract you've got there. Shame if we suddenly stopped sending packages your way", then squeeze them for price. Harder to do that if Amazon let their customer pick the carrier.
I've certainly been part of something very similar, where a company has multiple suppliers providing the same service. Near contract renewal time we would move our volume on their competitors to remind them that they needed us more than we needed them. It was a very effective way to get them to keep lowering their prices as the years went on.
There is also probably also a logistics piece as well. Amazon will be shipping products to carriers last mile hubs or similar themselves, rather than having a carrier handle the entire distance. Which makes it cheaper for Amazon. So carrier will also be picked based on which hub is nearest to one of Amazons warehouses, how full the Amazon truck going there is, which warehouse has the product etc
Again, without any real knowledge, this is all speculation on my part, but: I’m assuming multiple shipments for different customers are combined at different points en route, so Amazon is optimizing for cost by choosing the shipper that makes the most sense (for them) for all of those customers.
Maybe it’s in fact trivial, but at Amazon’s scale I find it hard to imagine that any changes to their shipping algorithms are that easy, at least compared to the increased revenue that goes along with it, which in this case presumably is zero.
If you’re willing to put up with all of Amazon’s other crap in exchange for convenience, you’re unlikely to drop them because they won’t allow you to pick the shipper, at least until someone else starts taking business away from them.
I don't get FedEx much but had a terrible experience with them on a few orders. One package left way out by my mailbox on a busy road. Another tossed to the side of my long driveway (????). Then things were fine again. Assume there was some driver who was, shall we say, not good at their job.
Periodically I do have shipper issues (including USPS on occasion). I have a long gravel/dirt driveway and some shippers obviously don't like to come down it. (I also have a neighbor with a large dog that likes to bark and that sometimes scares off drivers too. Oh yeah, that was FedEx too. Saw their truck and they claimed online not to have been able to deliver due to local regulations.)
FedEx is bimodal: they have "real" FedEx like Tom Hanks in that movie, and then they have contract drivers who bid for delivery routes on a short term basis and are not FedEx employees.
I was in urgent need of a spare part a couple of years ago and paid Amazon UK a lot extra to get it the next day. It was a heavy and bulky thing so I got really surprised when I got a simple envelope in the mail the next day.
It contained a simple SD-card adapter worth less than a dollar.
When calling Amazon about it they said I needed to ship the adapter back before they would send me the part I ordered. I told them it was totally unreasonable for me to have to wait many more days to get the thing I paid for when they obviously made the mistake and adapter wasn't worth anything compared to what I ordered. They could easily see that the weight of what they shipped was less than 1/1000th of what I ordered too but they refused to handle my case before they got their adapter back and they ended up hanging up on me.
Migrated my company off AWS after that and haven't used Amazon since. I value other things higher than saving an occasional dollar here or there.
I wonder if there are regions (or countries) which are worse? Amazon in Germany is also great, so far.
I’m like you - I’ve ordered so many things from Amazon this last year or so (new circumstances plus pandemic lockdown) and literally not one problem of the sort described. I can think of two items out of hundreds which weren’t on time (one, Amazons’s logistics made it a whole day late, and one was the seller’s issue). And the (very rare) returns were dealt with without a hitch.
For other reasons, I actually want to not be so reliant on Amazon, but their combination of Prime delivery, reliability, and customer service is unbeatable for many/most non-specialist items.
Amazon in Germany can also go very wrong. This is why I stopped ordering there:
I ordered a bunch of small electronics stuff, about 100€. In the order process Amazon selected an expired credit card (which I'm sure I had replaced in the settings already). They then split the order in parts and for each order part demanded an additional late pay fee, because the card was expired. This is despite me calling them to stop the order or to correct the payment method, before the package had arrived.
They couldn't help, I was promised a call back, never arrived. The chat support deleted the expired credit card from their system, only to cut the connection as soon as I asked for a solution for the fees and to know why the wrong card was selected. Later, that expired credit card turned up in my settings again.
In the electronics stuff that arrived, a converter I bought was evidently fake. It was also a converter, but it had different markings than the one on the product photo (including a missing CE symbol). I sent that back. A short while later, Amazon accused me of not having sent it back and wanted me to pay again! I still had the proof of having sent a package, which made them shut up.
Fulfilled by Amazon.de screwed up my last micro-order. I ordered an 8-pack of something and got a 5-pack.
Trivial for small items, but doesn't bode well for high value orders.
It's a confidence issue. Amazon has become a logistics giant but is steadily losing customer confidence.
A combination of fake reviews, fake items, high-friction or just plain missing consumer support on high-value items, and a hopelessly confused mess of a shop front all add up to a mediocre and untrustworthy experience.
Valid question. I was switching bank accounts at that time, so it's possible the card was not expired but linked to an account that did not exist anymore. Might also have been the account itself and not the card that was listed (Lastschriftverfahren, where they take money directly from the account). I'm fuzzy about the details, not really because it was particularly long ago (~2 years), but because it was confusing back then.
Edit: Had a look at my writeup in my blog [0], Lastschrift it was. Amazon picked a bank account that did not exist anymore to pay for the order. When that bounced came the fees - and while one fee for that would have been normal if I had given the wrong bank account (which I'm pretty sure I only did, if I did, because their system did not save when I changed the bank account before), to take multiple fees for one order was in no way okay.
That actually could have been a problem. If the bank had accepted the charge, the fee for that would have been high, as far as I read when closing the account. This way - by Amazon just getting a bounce - my annoyment was just about the unreasonableness of the fee (to pay 3x3€ instead of 1x3€ just because Amazon decided to split the order), if the bank would have charged me instead it could have become a money problem.
That added to my concern with Amazon just using the wrong bank account, and that old account occuring again and again in my profile. Even if I wanted to order something at Amazon it would be too risky now.
It's enough that they screw up 0.01 - 0.1% of orders. They are big enough, those people will be loud and not those without issues.
On HN I put comment below because I had some issue - if I had not, such comment would have too little value to post.
I did receive many things without issues and have also received books that looked way worse than if you gave them to a toddler. It's bizarre - they started with books and books are items that are trivial to pack securely.
3 out of 5 books I ordered there were what a regular bookstore would have called a "Mängelexemplar": folded in pages, accidentally cut corners, missing pages
Those are books damaged in printing that the printer is supposed to destroy, some enterprising employee grabs them from the scrap to be recycled and Amazon stands ready.
Publishers and authors lose the entire amount.
I have seen books like this at weekend swap meets (flea markets) near major printing ecyclers where the recycler employee does the diversion when they see good books(to their eyes) in the scrap.
I cannot remember when I have last received a pristine book from Amazon in Germany. There is always at least one minor damage that I wouldn't get from a store book.
Chiming in here as well; I always trust Amazon to refund me if something is missing or broken without any hassle. A lot of other retailers always gives you a hard time even though they are at fault.
They have a huge problem with counterfeit but again always easy to get your money back.
I never had a problem with counterfeit goods until I received a fake board game - took me a while to realise it was fake (horrible quality) - when I did they refunded and I got another one that was real - fine.
Since then though I won’t use Amazon for anything remotely safety related, think child car seat - nope, some equipment for rewiring house, nope.
This also makes me think about higher end purchases, whereas before I was like 100% Amazon, they have lost the trust I had for them and doubt they will get that back.
My main issue is that by the time I realised it was fake the game had been stopped and seller removed so they probably knew the game they sent me was fake (because of other complaints) but they made zero attempt to put it right. It seems if customers report fakes, customers who potentially also received fakes are not alerted and that is a real problem for me.
This is the most bad thing I’ll say about amazon is that the counterfeits are becoming an issue. I saw one person who, perhaps wisely, said they won’t buy anything to eat or drink on amazon because one bad counterfeit could be catastrophic. Your point about safety equipment is a similarly good point.
> It seems if customers report fakes, customers who potentially also received fakes are not alerted and that is a real problem for me.
Amazon doesn't even bother to collect that data. If you want to make a return because you received a counterfeit, you need to lie about the reason for your return, because "I received/believe I received a counterfeit product" isn't a choice they let you choose from when filing a return.
At best, this sounds like a euphemism to me, and at worst, it seems like Amazon doesn't want to log such information. If Amazon cared to keep track of counterfeit returns, they'd make it an explicit option.
Honestly, it feels like Amazon is intentionally not keeping explicit records of the counterfeits they sell because of their potential liability and the fact that such records would make Amazon look bad in depositions.
That doesn't distinguish between "I ordered a book and got a plant mister" and "I ordered a book and got a stapled photocopy with greasy fingerprints."
Same with roughly the same package volume annually over 8+ years. Literally the only thing lost was due to a historic weather event and Amazon still took care of it.
Maybe with commodity household goods it’s different than with higher value items or with electronics.
Electronics is certainly more of an issue - Nobody is shipping empty boxes of toilet paper.
The main issues you get are when returns are put back into stock but haven’t been sufficiently checked.
I used to work for an online retailer who sold things like games consoles and the amount of return scams we got was absolutely shocking. If you sold a games console with a free game (usually a code inside the console) people would take the game code out, or copy it, and then return the console and have the game. Other times they would take an iPad out, put a brick in the box and then shrink wrap it. Or buy counterfeit AirPod pro’s and swap them for the real ones and return the fakes.
The problem is compounded because people want to buy “new” items with shrink wrap around them, so it’s harder to check returns aren’t scams when the scammers have shrink-wrap machines.
> Off topic but I have seen interesting labels that break destructively.
I don't know if it has been invented yet, however here's the idea: a RFID tag that normally returns a valid code, but any removal attempt would not simply destroy it, but rather change the code (for example through bit changes by peeling conductive parts of it) into one that would return a tamper warning at next readings. That would also make possible to track when the box was opened (therefore potentially also finding by whom) since all boxes must be scanned at every step. The tag however should be put in a place where the user would not stick a cutter blade; it should peel off for example as the result of pulling a string to open the box, removing a piece of cardboard, etc.
You are right - there are definitely things that can be done (what you are describing used to be done on Xbox games for example).
The main thing is making sure that these things are ubiquitous, that there isn’t a workaround and that systems are in place to do the specific checks which are different for each item at every return point.
In the example with the Xbox games, not all games had the seal, or the same game SKU might sometimes have the seal and sometimes have a standard case. Then there was the workaround where people could lever the case open at the top and still take the game out.
The danger of seals is sometimes they can provide a false sense of security, but they probably do help when implemented well.
The issue here is people returning it in a state where it is still sealed - as if an item is sealed it will go back into stock straight away and the retailer can’t open it up to check that it is in there.
If it’s opened you can still return it, but once that happens usually electronics have to be sent back to the manufacturer to refurbish/reset.
It’s not about stopping people returning items, it’s about making sure the correct returns channel is used and detecting fraud (which happens when people return the item pretending it’s unopened so it goes back into stock unchecked, but the item has been replaced with a brick).
I can’t answer the first question, other than to say “often enough to have a process to handle it”.
As for the second one, with bin/lot tracking you can identify if the item had previously been returned. Employee theft doesn’t usually involve putting bricks in it within a DC - it’s usually easier and less risk to take the whole box (and maybe get rid of the packaging in the toilet, at a warehouse I used to work at someone was found to be stealing iPods because a lot of packaging was found behind a toilet ceiling tile). If the item hadn’t previously been returned, this would usually infer that the customer was lying about receiving it with a brick in it (although obviously there is the possibility that it came in that state from the supplier).
The usual assumption is that the supplier didn’t send it in with a brick, because otherwise customer fraud is too easy - but occasionally that assumption is wrong, which is probably what happened in this case.
They probably checked there was no return in the history, made the assumption it wouldn’t have come empty from Canon, and figured it was the customer that lied.
Also depends on your reputation as a buyer on Amazon I think. If you order lots of high value items and one goes missing they treat you differently than if you made one high value purchase.
I’ve run a huge pile of apple kit through them in the last two years and when a Mac mini disappeared from my doorstep they refunded without question.
The Mac mini did make a reappearance a week later as it was dumped in someone’s porch down the road and they brought it back round. Spoke to customer services and they sent me a return label to send it back.
yea I’ve spent an absurd amount on Amazon and now they don’t bat an eye on returns. I reported that my expensive ultra wide monitor hadn’t arrived, they sent another and then the first arrived. I had to contact support and tell them I got two because they had already refunded me. They won’t risk losing their whales.
Same here, i have been ordering with Amazon (Uk & occationally Us) for 21 years and can count on 1 hand the number the number of times i've had delivery issues.
ALL other delivery outfits are horrible in comparison, and i actually dred using any other service.
The UK has many horrible delivery services. DPD and Amazon are two that are acceptable. I dread trying to receive a delivery from any other service. Incredibly there are more than a few that are actually worse than Royal Mail.
UPS is 100% solid for me too. Been shipping with them within the UK and I know they can be trusted. DPD provides much better delivery tracking though, not only they provide an accurate 1 hour slot, they also take a picture of the parcel being delivered so there's no doubt where it went.
What’s changed is that they don’t care about packaging books anymore. Previously they would ship books inside of an airgap in a box, or at least inside of a tight box that would prevent damage. Now they will just throw it into a Mylar envelope that offers no protection against bending.
Agreed. Bubble envelopes can work okay if they are the correct size, but I often get normal-sized books shipped to me in XXXL size Amazon envelopes. These mailer envelopes are big enough for the book to rotate freely in amy direction inside of the packaging. So it’s inevitable that it arrives with creased or torn pages and jacket. I even had one where the cover separated from the pages. Horrible.
My preferred approach now is to use niche-retailers for things I care about arriving intact on the assumption that if your entire business is about that product category then you should be knowledgeable about how to ship those items safely. Barnes & Noble for books, B&H for camera, BestBuy for consumer electronics and video games, etc.
Yeah, Amazon loves those bubble bags and even just the mylar ones. They aren't careful enough about what sort of items go in them. Many items are fine that way but more than once I've gotten completely destroyed packaging around an intact item. Fine if I was simply going to use the item anyway, not so good if I was ordering it for someone else. I've also had a couple of cases where I was surprised it survived.
I suspect they are playing the odds, accepting that they will have to refund a few items that got smashed from inadequate protection.
I mostly get what I order, but I don't order much in the way of electronics or things where scams are common, though I did have to be careful when ordering a simple micro SD card as there were many incredibly cheap, off-brand products that were likely to be scams.
I have also seen a few deliveries with pictures that went to what was clearly the wrong address, had a box of chocolates arrive totally melted where the ice pack exploded and left me with a wet, melted box of chocolates, and during early Covid, I did end up getting scam toilet paper rolls shipped in from China. Oh, it was actually toilet paper, but the rolls were incredibly tiny and nothing at all like the pictures.
So... definitely hit or miss and it depends a lot on what you order.
Yeah, but I can hardly blame non-technical people who don't know the prices of things and who haven't heard about the cheats that off-brand memory cards can pull. I mean, many of them advertise to the computer that they are the listed size. But... when you fill them up, it becomes clear that's a lie.
I wish Amazon could randomly test and delist some of those products or whatever. Or maybe do some random testing before listing them for sale, it's not some obscure scam after all.
Oh, I definitely look for those as well, but I'm just saying this is often difficult because people don't know what brands are trustworthy or what a "too good to be true" price is in the first place.
I’m in the same boat as you. I’ve had a couple of misorders, but they were 3rd party sellers.
And I love the ability to take items back to our local Amazon depot without having to box the item. Just give it back to them and they handle all the shipping.
People keep mentioning the price, the real problem is never buy camera equipment on Amazon. Use Adorama or B&H. I've bought tons of stuff on Amazon over the years, and have only had issues with camera equipment. After the last issue I had a few years ago, I realized it's just a waste of time to deal with camera equipment on Amazon.
Why camera equipment? IDK. Even before Amazon was a thing, buying camera equipment online was always a bit shady. I assume those same people just move to Amazon.
I should add that I've never had a problem sending back or replacing the item even when it was over 1k.
For cameras in the UK I usually buy from WEX instead, who have excellent customer service and specifically sell camera equipment. I quite like Scan for computer components too. But for general “stuff” or tech, Amazon are so much better than places like Currys, it’s not even funny any more.
I have had issues with Amazon in the past, but if you do have a poor support experience you just need to persevere until you get someone more flexible. Which is somehow still better than most of our other stores here in the UK.
The same for me. I had one damaged product, a pack of pork rinds that opened up because it was too tightly packed next to 5L of olive oil. Because of my experience with their customer service (and delivery service which is second only to DHL for me), other merchants need to be substantially cheaper.
Yup, my track record with them is excellent, also.
I have received one wrong item (refunded, told to keep) and one item I didn't order. The only hassle I've ever had was a damaged item they were trying to talk me into accepting a discount rather than returning (a very heavy item, I'm sure shipping was an issue.)
There very definitely is an issue with counterfeits and their comingled inventory system needs to be nuked from orbit. I have once seen a product where it was pretty apparent *every* offering was garbage or counterfeit. I even reported one of the counterfeits to Amazon as the image revealed it was one of the garbage things, not the name brand it purported to be.
I think it vastly depends on what you are ordering.
We passed a ton of orders for valuable goods that were processed by small companies who used amazon as an alternative storefront to boost their sales. Communication was finnicky but everything went fine.
Then we also order a ton of cheap, little convenient stuff that we could have ordered on aliexpress but went to amazon for faster delivery. It was a lot more hit or miss, with pure junk coming in from tjmes to times.
We never hit the level of scam described in the article, but we'd also pay a lot more attention on where it’s coming from before forking 7k.
Hedonic adaptation. I love amazon. I probably place 200+ orders a year, and I have plenty of issues. But that doesn’t make it vastly superior to the alternative.
For example, I bought a projector on BestBuy. They had the dimensions wrong and it wouldn’t fit where I needed it. With amazon, that would be a simple return. With BestBuy, a simple return and a 15% restocking fee. Good luck reaching someone at BestBuy to explain why that fee should be waived. With amazon, it would be a simple chat.
Amazon is infinitely better than most other retailers. People just forget how good we have it.
The commingled inventory problem is seriously a United States thing, from what I have heard. It is a frustrating situation here in the US where lots of spoilable goods are available on Amazon but if you purchase them, they are spoiled. Deodorant, cereal, protein bars, tape, everyone has stories.
A Japanese friend said he could Amazon order a particular variety of candy and it would arrive next-day in good condition and I felt jealous. In America there really is no such service for ordering food or spoilable items online.
Yeah, I’m in the U.K. and I don’t think I’ve ever had a real issue with Amazon. Deliveries are on time 99% of the time and returns are simple (they even covered a £60 Post Office return of a heavy product I decided to return, because their only option required a printer and this was mid-pandemic so I had no way to access one).
Based off this thread I might think twice before ordering expensive stuff from them though - however I usually find other places are better value for expensive electronics etc. anyway
In the US, I tend to favor one or the other of the big US NYC "camera stores" for electronics. (Or a local Best Buy.) The prices are usually the same and I feel they're probably a bit safer if there's some sort of problem.
I don't know if I'm lucky and some other people are just unlucky. But I also sometimes suspect that some people buy things at prices that are "too good to be true" or that always go for the lowest price. (I admittedly also tend to go elsewhere for certain types of items. For example, I always buy my Apple stuff directly from Apple.)
Someone here half joked about the LTV calculation determining how easily they accept returns. Amazon would be incredibly incompetent not to have an A-list who get priority treatment. If they don’t put people like you who make 200+ orders on it, that would be odd.
You must have a very secure delivery location, and I'm willing to bet that you probably live in a more affluent community, if what you're saying is even true. That and/or you're having stuff delivered to Amazon locations.
Not to mention not everything is shipped from seller / manufacturer to you via Amazon.
Uhm.....I don't see how living in an affluent community has anything to do with that - few years ago I lived in the dodgiest part of town and never had any issues with Amazon either. I'm guessing you have that view because Amazon in US leaves parcels on your doorstep? Literally never heard of that happening in the UK. If you're not in it goes back to the depot, maybe they'll leave it with your neighbour if you're lucky. So....if you count my own front door as a "secure delivery location" then...yeah? Where else would it be delivered? I guess you could have it delivered to a locker, but if it goes back to the depot I just have it redelivered on Saturday or Sunday when I'm definitely at home.
I would find that horrible. In normal times, I'm most definitely often not at home on Saturday and Sunday. As it happens, I live in a relatively rural area but I absolutely expect deliveries to be left at my front door without me signing for them except for the very odd high value item. If I had to deal with drop-off/pickup arrangements for every order, I'd use Amazon a whole lot less.
Anything over a few hundred bucks is playing with fire. I bought an iphone through them (Amazon sold, not 3rd party) last year and had to do the same thing the couple did: chargeback on credit card. They refused to investigate and flat out accused me of fraud. Gee, maybe it's the low paid disgruntled employees from warehouse worker to contracted out Prime delivery guy stealing shit? Nah, it's the guy who spent tens of thousands at your business and you never had a problem with!
I wonder actually where this stuff happens typically. Clearly some seems to happen before things even get to Amazon, that whole counterfeit commingling thing you hear about, where the 3rd-party stock gets used even if you buy from Amazon directly. (How this could be worth it to do at all vs. the reputational damage is unclear but I guess they're always chasing the small efficiencies... still you'd think it would be easy for Amazon to track the actual source of fake/nonexistent items even when they're mingled like that.)
I'd have to think theft by the warehouse workers is pretty rare, it feels like the kind of thing they'd surveil and police quite zealously.
You can tell they're increasing the scrutiny on drivers as well with them having to take photos of the delivered item, and they've clearly always been closely tracked on time and location.
> You can tell they're increasing the scrutiny on drivers as well with them having to take photos of the delivered item, and they've clearly always been closely tracked on time and location.
Some time ago, my wife ordered something from Amazon, and it was reported as “delivered,” but the photo was of someone else’s doorstep.
She had no problem getting them to ship a replacement, but it added a few days to the process.
The “last mile” stuff is crazy. I sometimes see two Amazon Prime Sprinters on the same street, at the same time.
It was much worse, when it was done by independent contractors. We would see these folks driving around, with so many boxes in the cab of their vans, they had to make a hole to see through.
Looked like an episode of Hoarders.
I’m not surprised they have issues. The system is basically strained to the max. It’s a miracle that it works as well as it does.
>Some time ago, my wife ordered something from Amazon, and it was reported as “delivered,” but the photo was of someone else’s doorstep.
This happens to me about every third time I get something from Amazon. Fortunately, the wrong house they keep delivering to is in my neighborhood and I recognized it in the picture.
I report this every time, but I don't expect it to do any good.
> I wonder actually where this stuff happens typically. Clearly some seems to happen before things even get to Amazon, that whole counterfeit commingling thing you hear about, where the 3rd-party stock gets used even if you buy from Amazon directly.
This is actually largely Amazon's fault, as far as I understand it. People buy obviously counterfeit items, then buy the real thing on Amazon, and return the counterfeit item. Amazon does ~zero verification of the return and puts the counterfeit item back on the shelf/bin with the official SKU.
Amazon has no concept of "open box" vs "new," and they don't want to be the arbitrator of returns.
Yes they do. There is a large section of the website ("Amazon Warehouse deals") devoted to open-box items. I've used this a few times and got great prices on perfect items, just with opened or damaged packaging.
This is true. I've had Amazon send me clearly used and damaged items although I ordered new. They also always block my negative review pointing this out, claiming that reviews are about the product and not about my experience of ordering it from Amazon.
>You can tell they're increasing the scrutiny on drivers as well with them having to take photos of the delivered item, and they've clearly always been closely tracked on time and location.
Not really, I'm currently living out of an apartment with a mailroom and it seems like half of the orders are correctly marked as "Left in mailroom" with a picture, less than half the time they actually put it in the parcel locker, most of the time it's just dumped on the floor even when it would obviously fit, and when it's not marked as "Left in mailroom" it seems that delivery drivers are exploiting the fact that they don't have to take a photo if they select "Left with receptionist". We don't have a receptionist, so every time they select that not only do I have to try and figure out where in the mailroom my package is, I have to do it immediately because now I have no clue if they correctly put it in the parcel locker where it's safe or if it's just lying in a stack of boxes out in the open.
Not to even mention all the times packages are marked as delivered the day before, presumably to hit some delivery quota. Currently if you open up a case with Amazon for a package marked delivered that you haven't received they make you wait at least 2 days because odds are it's still in transit.
In Europe at least the dedicated electronics retailers are clearly cheaper than Amazon, and of course do not commingle. Returns may be a bit more cumbersome, but honestly who returns electronics anyway? Usually you know pretty well what you're getting.
Europe also has laws that require a mandatory "No questions asked" minimum 14 day return period after delivery date. Doesn't mandate free return shipping, but for a € 500 piece of electronics paying a € 4.95 shipping fee in the rare case that you return it isn't so bad.
Amazon arrived in force kinda recently in my country. My parents are amazed by it and started making expensive purchases...
And now are surprised at how shitty their delivery is.
The worst case was when they bought some medicine for their dog and a expensive screen to use in their business.
The dog medicine arrived on a friday, I was present and heard a car horn, went to check, and it was a random normal car, a lady climbed out, said it was a delivery. when I said I was son of the person that made the purchase, she just shoved the package through the gate opening and drove away, didn't even said hi or bye or whatever, didn't check my identity properly, didn't take a signature, didn't even tried to deliver the package safely, she almost threw it at me.
Then saturday my parents had a meeting with someone, and left, but on that day the city hall sent some workers to do some work on the sidewalk.
Seemly Amazon deliverd it to these workers, Amazon claims they delivered, and claims some dude we never heard of accepted the delivery, we believe the dude in question is some random city hall employee that was doing sidewalk maintenance.
Amazon delivery is outrageously atrocious in my (poor) country. As an instance, this was the condition of an assorted pack of fruit juices that got delivered to me just yesterday: https://imgur.com/a/sSMmgot
To top it off, (rather poorly trained) Amazon support encouraged me to consume the contents of the pack with no understanding of what a health hazard means; at which point I hung up and cancelled my Prime membership.
Likely to be Amazon Flex (https://flex.amazon.co.uk/). Anyone can download the phone app, go to the Amazon warehouse, and start delivering packages.
As you can imagine, quality of delivery is pretty variable. I had an Amazon Flex worker steal a phone that I'd ordered - Amazon refunded with no questions asked and as far as I know didn't bother to investigate the theft.
I bought a new 32" monitor about 2 years ago that when I unpacked it, it was clearly an open box item. The way it had been packed was extremely unprofessional, tape was haphazardly wrapped and twisted around the stand and cords and things that normally come in plastic bags weren't bagged.
They've been shipping the wrong items lately too, twice in the last year when I order something that has multiple selections like color, scent or flavor etc I'll sometimes get the wrong item sent. I've done more Amazon returns in the last 2 years than my previous 15 combined.
The open box thing is a huge issue. I bought probably 5 things last year >$100 sold as “new” that just weren’t. Returns have always been easy, I live near an Amazon Go and they even have an attendant that helps. But not being able to trust that a new item is actually new is…shitty. I would never buy electronics from Amazon, just get it for the same price at Best Buy and wait a couple more days (plus they often have same-day pickup available, which Amazon can’t compete with). Target is another good option for the same reason. Always keep in mind that everyone will price-match Amazon.
They do still occasionally have flash sales that I’ve gotten brick-and-mortars to match. But yeah, their business model has shifted away from undercutting everyone; makes sense but it’s disappointing.
Is open box always a return for you then? I got a coffee scale with obvious usage stains on it from Amazon, but honestly it works fine and a quick cleanup was much easier than a return.
It is for me. I am quite conscientious and I expect others to do their jobs at least as per the prescription, if not scrupulously. "New" means "new" to me, no exceptions.
As a matter of fact, I would go to great lengths in order to return or replace the coffee scale if that happened to me. It places my mind at peace to have things exactly as I expect them to be.
I’ve just kept a couple things, yeah; but usually I could have gotten a better deal if I purposely bought used or “renewed”, so the return is more about the price than the principle. For some things, I’d return anyway because the practice feels scammy and user-hostile.
It’s generally the same price that anyone else has, with the exception of small items like cabling or accessories. It can be hard to get a price-match on that type of thing, because the brands are more niche/whitelabel.
I think Best Buy is the absolute best ;) place to buy a TV; good prices, huge selection, always handled carefully. YMMV!
I’m in Europe. Earlier this year, I ordered from Amazon Japan, the package arrived quicker than things I had ordered earlier on a European Amazon and it was insanely well packaged.
Amazon Japan is incredible. I ordered a Japanese book from them and it arrived the next afternoon (to the UK!) Another time I was in Japan and I needed a specific bluetooth keyboard for the tablet I was using, delivered to a convenience store pick-up point in the deep north of the country in the middle of winter, ordered with my UK credit card, and no problem, it was there the next day. I can't imagine the amount of organisation both of these things take.
Amazon Japan used to be in a league of their own, but a mix of their home-rolled delivery service being objectively bad and them allowing their platform to be dominated by scalpers (転売ヤー) means that they've lost a lot of the trust I had in them.
Amazon Japan even in 2013 was amazing. My host family ordered an out of print trail guide to the hiking trail between Osaka and Tokyo after I had failed to find it in every major book shop in Osaka. If memory serves it was delivered in about 6 hours.
I ordered from Amazon Japan for the first time last week and the delivery speed was excellent. I would say the packaging was sub-par compared to other Japanese retailers though. CDJapan is just as fast and ships me books in better condition than any UK store, and proxy shipping from Buyee.jp redefined what packaging means to me. Seriously, it’s almost worth using them just to get some top quality cardboard!
I guess a lot depends on who and how they pay to deliver. I got an internal x260 battery (that can't configure properly in Linux, if anyone knows about it) a few days ago and has been a disaster.
In the case of Spain their customer support is fine, but it falls flat because delivery is a shitshow.
Even more so in the Canaries where we need to pay a lot of handling fees to receive the packages unless you want to do the customs process yourself. On a 200€ headphones I needed to pay 44€ of taxes and handling fees that was shipped from Valencia.
The winning strategy for Amazon is to segregate by loyalty: Have an absolutely stunning experience until you are addicted, then let you have bad products and focus on newer clients.
In fact, nothing tells us we all see the same prices either. I suspect they only show me more expensive items, because I can find my A4 paper at 6€ elsewhere instead of 10€ on Amazon. And same goes for most other stuff. Maybe after a few years, Amazon profits off us with a hefty margin. Price segmentation by (reverse) customer loyalty.
never thought of this but this is has been my experience exactly, lot of past bought cheap version of item disappear from the amazon own search and I either have to get them from the reorder interface or straight up use google to search the amazon's item page and buy it coming from the direct link.
Maybe we need a service were we can all upload our online merchants screenshots of products and prices, that can then tell us if particular customers have been segmented into the pay more forever bin.
Definitely has not been my experience. I've been an Amazon customer since 1999, and I got Prime pretty much as soon as it started (I think they had a promo for students back then). I've spent tens of thousands of dollars with them, easily. I continue to have very few problems with orders or deliveries, and on the rare occasion when I do, it's resolved quickly and easily.
> Books are especially abused somewhere in Amazon’s fulfillment. (They’re always bent, creased, or dirty.)
Interesting that you bring this up- I have noticed over the past year and a half that all my Amazon books have been showing up with damaged corners and smudge marks all over the covers.
I buy directly from the publisher and have never had any issues. They might take a little longer to arrive, but they're always in perfect condition. Sometimes they even throw a free e-book my way, which I appreciate the hell out of.
I understand purchasing from other categories on Amazon, but with books it's so easy to avoid Amazon all together. Plus you know you won't receive a counterfeit (https://twitter.com/nostarch/status/1183095004258099202) if you order directly from the publisher.
Soooo many counterfeit books on Amazon, especially textbooks. Nothing quite like dropping > $150 on a big book only to get an obvious inkjet job in the box.
This might not be foul play - lots of textbooks are formally out of print and printed on demand by the publisher. The quality is lower for that reason.
It's genuinely astonishing how bad Amazon is at shipping books now. It used to be their Thing, and now basically any book you buy from them arrives damaged. You can complain and get them to send a replacement and the replacement is damaged too.
In my experience Amazon Japan still knows how to pack books correctly, but I haven't ordered from them since the start of COVID... they properly secure books to a bit of backing cardboard (with shrink-wrap and/or rubber bands, usually) and then mount the backing cardboard inside of the packing box so that the books don't slide around and get damaged. I'm sure it costs like an extra 50 cents per package to do this, but presumably their customers demand quality in other countries where Amazon doesn't have a de-facto monopoly.
Let me emphasize something here: Amazon Japan ships globally. Not just books -- bags too. And that's big because the Japanese bag selection is truly something else. Alas, many are very expensive. However, since I didn't travel for more than a year now (guess why) I have shuffled the travel budget over to the bag budget and bought a bag from Amazon Japan. Here's the most important part, watch just thirty seconds: https://youtu.be/g6uSpuN2uT8?t=346 ideal size for me, incredible flexibility. I combine it with https://youtu.be/oaRyVuLuWOw?t=160 because I like flexibility :)
Previously I was buying electronics and I needed to use proxies which are added cost and hassle.
Provided the items are fulfilled locally (as in Japan) the packaging and delivery tends to be pretty much flawless. I'm honestly surprised by the number of English books they stock locally.
I find it especially galling when for a document title search, I’ll see public domain reports (NASA NTRS PDFs for instance) ranking higher in Google results for buying a print on demand copy via Amazon at significantly inflated prices, or honestly just what is plain disgustingly greedy, the many charlatans selling them as kindle ebooks, sometimes as multiple skus with different prices, trying to profit from people that don’t know any better.
I order lots of printed musical scores. The higher quality scores are $45+ a pop. Amazon frequently renders them completely useless as a work you’re supposed to be able to sight-read with your instrument. After all the folding, bending, and creasing, the books don’t even stay open properly, and the bent pages make for terrible and distracted reading. It’s depressing and an absolute shame.
> they properly secure books to a bit of backing cardboard (with shrink-wrap and/or rubber bands, usually) and then mount the backing cardboard inside of the packing box so that the books don't slide around and get damaged.
That's how they used to do in France when they started (15-20 years ago): a base cardboard plate at the right size for the box, the stuff stacked on the cardboard, and both united by a shrink wrap. That was both simple and extremely effective, or otherwise said: great.
I don't know why they stopped. And I don't know why nobody else copied that system.
(I used to order from 2000 miles away, now I don't order books from Amazon no more, except second hand foreign language books I couldn't get otherwise.)
Here in California, I used to get books from Amazon that came in a box with appropriate bubble padding added. This worked.
If I try to order a book on Amazon today, it gets shipped in a manila envelope (with bubble padding built into the envelope). The tightness of the envelope damages the book.
I have no idea who thought this was a good idea, or even an acceptable idea.
I think the competition from local retailers is important in this. I’ve bought books from other Japanese stores, like CDJapan, and the packaging is excellent. In the UK all retailers seem to ship books poorly now. Waterstones is no better than Amazon sadly.
I don't return that much stuff to Amazon, but I've generally found their setup for returns to be about the best and easiest around: typically I have the option to drop off several places or to print a shipping label.
My experience is that books are mostly still OK (US based) but the frequency of getting a new book that is slightly damaged has increased significantly. Even books that are shrink wrapped by the publisher sometimes come with corner or other damage (which may or may not have happened once in Amazon's hands, but I should not have to tolerate).
What I can say with certainty is that the attention to shipping the books has plummeted compared to the early years of Amazon. Back then they would put the book(s) on a piece of cardboard and shrink wrap that and then put some of the bubble stuff in the box.
Now you are lucky if they even put any filler in the box and best hope its not a rainy day and delivery leaves the package outside your door as boxes are flimsier and not always sealed tightly.
Amazon used to be my #1 shopping place (save for groceries), years ago but I rarely use them anymore.
Last hard drive I ordered from them came wrapped in factory issued static plastic bag, and NO padding inside the Amazon issued cardboard box. I of course returned it after confirming it was broken.
That's not the only reason I gave up on them. Searching is getting really hard, reviews are meaningless due to fake ones, counterfeit products, ...
To me it looks like they've decided to run the business to the ground and cash in a monumental amount of money.
Don't forget expired, misleading, or a knock-off. There's so many pitfalls to Amazon orders it reminds me of EBay back in the day.
Lots of brick and mortar stores improved their curbside flows during the pandemic, and this is the sweet spot for me. Same day pickup of items you could have grabbed yourself off the shelf, and humans around to dispute problems with.
Yup, ironically, books coming from Amazon are far more likely to arrive damaged - two decades later, and they still can't get it through their heads that they can't just toss a book in a box and expect it to be not crunch the corners every time. I don't think that it is even smart enough to be a scheme to encourage Kindle and Audible sales...
For returns, I was surprised to see only drop-off options, but I found that they actually just bury the pick up option on another page. I usually find it now under a small faint "more options" link. Good luck.
(And yes, despite being a multi-decade Prime customer, I now avoid Amazon for many categories, including books, & especially batteries)
I would never buy anything expensive from Amazon, the customer service is not adequate when things go wrong. I even stopped buying CD's from them as they would almost always arrived with cracked/broken cases. Specialist sellers, e.g. Prestomusic, actually wrap and pack them properly (and often have much better websites for buying music).
Yes I still do and I FLAC them. I've been collecting CD's for 35 years, so it's difficult to stop. I am sometimes envious of the high-res downloads, but whenever I hear digital clipping in the 16-bit CD version, the clipping has always been present in the 24-bit version too.
> Almost everything I receive is damaged, late, or mis-delivered. Books are especially abused somewhere in Amazon’s fulfillment. (They’re always bent, creased, or dirty.)
Strangely enough, a company whose employees have to piss in bottles and use crying booths may have staff that are not especially engaged in the highest quality work.
Ironically I do not buy books from Amazon due to the atrocious quality of their 'print on demand' titles. These look like they are printed with a 5 year old heavily abused inkjet.
Part of the appeal of reading deadtree is the paper feel, smell and type quality. Majority of paper backs from amazon are nigh unreadable.
I always seem to get a boot prints on the books I buy on Amazon. I don’t really buy from Amazon any more but the amount of boot prints I’ve received over the years is a lot!
The latest book I ordered came unbelievably spotless. It was about $4 AUD including shipping for a book that would usually cost me $50+ shipping from USA (it was sheet music) so I was very happy. The original delivery date they gave me was delusional so I paid it no mind when it passed. Two days after it, I get an email saying they’re refunding me $3 for the inconvenience, and my spotless book arrived the next day. Three days late is a rounding error in postage delivery timelines where I live. I’m still bewildered by the whole experience to be honest, but hey, almost free expensive sheet music book. Definitely low risk for that purchase.
> This was despite the fact that when boxed the Sony a1 weighs 3.22 lb (1.46 kg), and the Chiles’ package was listed by UPS as weighing only 2 lb (900 g).
Not sure why Amazon was still arguing at this point. If UPS confirms the package was basically empty, then Amazon has no reason to believe the customer was lying.
Probably like in "The Rainmaker". Automatically deny every claim above $X. If there's a complaint on the denial, automatically approve or deny based on a new number $Y. Most people give up before you finally get a real human to actually check the case.
This is what Tesla is doing with their solar roof product. They raised prices by 50% even though people already had signed contracts. All their communication is incredibly insidious, telling people that they need to sign the new contract, when in fact that’s false, in hopes of convincing customers to cancel their order. I can’t wait until a class action lawsuit rips them a new asshole at this point.
This isn't true. Any promise is sufficient for consideration. Cash doesn't actually have to change hands for a contract to be in effect.
If this wasn't the case then every single financial futures contract or swap would be null and void. These contracts incur no cash flow on day one. They're merely a promise by one part to pay another based on some event in the future. If your legal theory was true, then one party could simply cancel any losses by voiding the contract as soon as the position moves against them.
then you would only be able to sue over damages, and with a roof maybe your only damages are the time spent planning and getting the permits to get the roof done, but if TSLA hadn’t even started ripping off the roof then I don’t see what damages you could claim against them (TSLA’s legal team surely weighed the possibility of a class action lawsuit).
The damage is one had a deal to pay X for a roof. If they can't fulfill their end of the deal, the damage is the difference between X and what have to be paid to get what was promised (either from them or a different provider).
A failure of a contract for lack of consideration would be if there’s no exchange of value contemplated, ever. For example if I made a promise to provide you a valuable service for nothing in return.
In this situation both sides agreed to exchange something of value so there’s obviously consideration.
They could make an argument that no damages have occurred and claim you have no credible allegation of being harmed, but that’s a different thing and far from automatic.
I realize I phrased that incorrectly, I meant that a contract is only worth something if you can sue over it, and with $0 in damages (maybe not given the homeowner might be able to be comp’d for time or for money spent getting the permits) it wouldn’t make sense to sue Tesla over it.
>Anything of value promised by one party to the other when making a contract can be treated as "consideration": for example, if A signs a contract to buy a car from B for $5,000, A's consideration is the $5,000, and B's consideration is the car.
I once ordered a DSLR camera kit from Amazon for around $750. It had a bunch of lenses but the lens adapter it was suppose to come with was missing. The adapter cost about $15 so I reported it was missing the adapter and asked if they could either send me one or refund me $15 so I could buy one off Amazon. They gave me 2 choices instead of reading my request, return it or accept a partial refund of 30%. I accepted the partial refund because I didn't want to return/re-order the camera kit and hope that it doesn't happen again. I felt kind of bad accepting such a large refund for a small problem.
If I was a god I would never send anyone to hell to burn forever in fiery torment. For this situation I would be very very tempted to make an exception. Anyone who sets up an automated system designed specifically to hassle people for seeking recourse for being wronged, deserves every form of torture they get.
Hell would be full before you got very far. Intentionally or unintentionally, this is how most such systems work... even ostensibly noncommercial ones... at least to some extent.
Business systems are a chain of events. Every event has x% chance of happening and leading to the next one. If the next event makes money, it's optimized up. If it costs money, it's optimised down. Efforts to pay unclaimed rebates are never as enthusiastic as efforts to claim unpaid receivables. Thus is life.
How do you think any other system would work. At least we get to vote with our wallets about which companies should live or die, it’s been working pretty well. At least greedy people will treat us well to get our money. Other systems select for people who love power, and they tend to not be kind once they get it. Fear is a pretty effective way of keeping people in line.
No, such is full-blown neoliberal capitalism, where the only thing that is considered worth optimizing for is profit.
Once you accept that there are other variables that deserve consideration and cannot just be abstracted by price and profit alone (most prominently customer and workforce satisfaction), other optimizations will come into play, which will reduce the amount of crap people have to deal with, and will ultimately lead for a better experience for everyone involved - except for the very few at the top, which are currently reaping all the profits.
The main thing to watch out for is monopolies. If customers always have enough choice then the customer and workforce satisfaction will get sorted out eventually, as those organizations will be selected for and companies won’t be able to exist without doing that right. It works really well, and is actually a strength of our free markets. Governments and committees stepping in and trying to fix the system tends to make it worse because the people who fall through the cracks have no recourse, and they also inadvertently create monopolies by making the system more complicated and expensive for new entrants. For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been, and the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing. Amazon is getting there. But even so, reading through these comments, there’s plenty of discussion of how Amazon is so much better than the previous experience of many people. Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better. It has raised the standard to a new level, which we will happily now complain about until someone else figures out how to do it better.
> For all the complaining, “neoliberal capitalism” has made it the best time to be alive there has ever been
That really depends on your point of view. For the average person on HN, upper middle class income or above? Sure thing, 100% agreed. Especially in the US however, if you're not part of that group, it would have been better to live 40-something years ago. Yes, you did not have all those fancy devices and cool tools that we have nowadays, but neither did anyone else, irrelevant of income.
> the remaining problems tend to be around choke points where there is some kind of monopoly power and proper competition is missing
Irrelevant of whether this might be true for Amazon - what about health care? Telco? Public transport? Basic utilities like water, electricity?
The US is a prime example on why "neoliberal capitalism" (at least if we're speaking about it in the Reagan/Clinton sense) is a complete and utter failure - it is the only developed country with a declining life expectancy, the richest country on earth with a sizeable amount of the population having multiple jobs and still living from paycheck to paycheck.
Don't get me wrong, I get your point. But it is really important to try to take the perspective of those who are the losers of the system, and for those people the current time is _for sure_ not the best to be alive. They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time?
> Amazon got to where it is today because overall the customer experience is so much better.
Relative to what? Compared to the "old experience" of having to go to a physical store - sure. But that's a damn low bar; everyone who can write a webpage can beat that these days. Amazon got where it is today because they straight-up ate the market, but not by being the best, but by being the ones who had the capital to sink everyone else before they went belly-up themselves (for how long is Amazon actually turning a profit? Not that far back, I reckon). In short, they played the market instead of letting the market play. And that's exactly my main gripe with what I'm calling 'neoliberal capitalism' here: The way Amazon played is not a bug of the system, it's a feature. It will continue to happen, until regulators kick in and set boundaries that go beyond anything what we can call neoliberal capitalism. It might still be a 'free market', it still allows for competition, but most definitely not in the barely-regulated sense that the neoliberal capitalism envisions.
> They are so desperate, so disassociated from the current state of affairs that they're willing to listen to snake oil peddlers like Trump, that they're willing to storm the Capitol or at least look the other way when others do, to disparage Science in the face of a pandemic because the class of the educated has left them behind earlier already, so why not this time
The majority of people making over $100k a year voted for Trump, and those numbers jump even higher if we look at race and income, where white people making over $100k were much more likely to vote for Trump.
Similarly, look at the economic demographics of the people who were able to afford to travel to DC on or before January 6th, and the people who attacked the Capitol. I saw a lot of relatively wealthy business owners break into the Capitol, even some IT company owners.
I really wish the term capitalism hadn't been invented. Maybe it was useful in the 1840s, but in my lifetime it always seems to yield a thin hand wavy way of looking at things... whether your pro or con. The mental equivalent of shouting to win an argument.
Whatever your definition of capitalism, I'm sure you can find examples outside of it. There are an infinite number of variables besides profit. Profit isn't the only possible motive for such systems, and it only takes one.
A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
> A system of people is a system of people, whether it is a church, company, municipality, whatever.
Different systems of people behave very differently with different kinds of motivations, stimuli and sanctions, on the individual and collective level.
And while there are many variables besides profit, it is money (and capital in particular) which enables most activities of a commercial corporation - not voluntary willingness to work or serve for some purpose; and it is Amazon's profit which the organization is designed to promote and maximize, over anything and everything else.
True, though I don't see the contradiction. There are similarities and differences, also within such categories.
In almost all cases though, they're not going to be as motivated to pay as they are to receive payment. Take subscription antipatterns for example. Charities do this too. They both also create similar self deceptions to justify the more onerous examples. It's not even just about money, convenience is a pretty big motivator.
Again, I'm not saying that everything is the same, or being reductive. Quite the opposite. I'm saying that reducing everything to "capitalism," "greed" or whatever is meaningless. It's just normally the case, that people and groups are more cognizant of their own goals and wants than they are of others'. Altruism exists, but it's not uniformly distributed across everything an altruist does.
Agree that "burn in fiery torment" might be going a bit too far. Instead I'd suggest "listen to their own on-hold muzak for the rest of eternity" as a more appropriate punishment.
That doesn't seem to prove anything at all? It's a 1.6 lb camera. Weighing in at 1.2 lbs short is either a bad scale or a lot of accessories missing, but it definitely does not corroborate a missing camera.
Scales used for commercial purposes in the US are required to meet accuracy standards and to be calibrated by law. While it’s not impossible for them to break, they’re a heck of a lot more rigorous in design and regulation than Amazon’s notoriously problematic inventory management.
Your comparison to Amazon's inventory implies that this is a weights vs Amazon issue, but what I'm trying to point out is that there are three sides, and none of them agree. If the weights are accurate, that means that the customer lied about getting an empty box (a 2-pound empty box? c'mon) despite actually not getting what they ordered, which is just really weird and hard to explain.
Yes, 2 lbs of packaging. It’s a $7000 camera. It’s well packaged. Even my $300 Canon was double boxed. (As are the customer’s photos of the packaging in the article)
The spec sheet of the a1 lists it as weighing 1.6 lbs. it lists the boxed weight as 3.22 lbs. This means the Sony packaging is 1.62 lbs.
The remaining 0.38 lbs is the packaging that Amazon put the Sony box in.
This this a clear cut case and amazon should process the refund, however, in general refunding is a hard problem for Amazon to solve due to the sheer volume fraud that occurs.
For anyone unaware, go to telegram and do a public search for 'refunding'. There are hundreds of channels where you can pay someone to refund >£10,000 of stuff for you for a 10% fee. Afaik, the main method that 'refunders' use to defraud amazon is to (1) initiate a return (2) modify the return label so UPS accepts it into their system but (3) deliver it to the wrong address. So it looks to amazon as being successfully delivered to the return warehouse, but what actually got delivered was a brick, to some random house.
I wouldn't be surprised if >1% of macbook and iPhone refunds are fraudulent in this way. Someone in a cybercrime lab they should write a paper about this whole ecosystem because it is a huge black market.
What you described is not a hard problem, it is an expensive problem because Amazon does not want to hire human labor to deal with returns. Almost all other retailers do it, and they all have 3% profit margins.
> So it looks to amazon as being successfully delivered to the return warehouse, but what actually got delivered was a brick, to some random house
but how amazon does not check the quality of the return?
I mean, even if UPS confirms that the package arrived to right address, wouldn't someone from amazon warehouse check if the package is valid?
Well there is nothing for them to check. From what I've read, they wait two weeks then mark the package as 'lost in transit'.
I think for the last-mile of delivery, couriers rely on the actual address written on the package, not the address that the barcode scans to. I might be wrong though.
For returns you have to print a barcode and put it in the box. You don't get your refund until they physically scan the code in the box. Maybe it's not standard everywhere, but this process has been around for some years now. If the package never gets to the return center, no refund would be processed…
That's interesting, maybe it's different per country or perhaps even city/region? The two times I've ever returned something, I had to put a little printed barcode thing into the box with the returned item. Just did this a couple months ago.
Hmm, maybe I'm wrong then. Though I could imagine that if this happened to you legitimately that you would have some legal recourse to get your money back; you fulfilled your end of the return by posting it, its not your fault the courier screwed up.
Amazon UK usually refund you as soon as the package is scanned into the shipper's tracking system. I've dropped off a return at a Hermes point and received a refund notification while walking back to my car.
There is the caveat that they will recharge you if the item isn't in good condition, but if they never receive it, I guess they can only assume the shipper lost it.
Happened to me as well. I got a Asus ROG Strix G15 laptop on 13 May(this month) and upon clearance from Sri Lankan customs (where I live) the UPS agents discovered that the contents was missing. UPS notified me this and report this to Amazon. They(UPS) held the package with them and didn’t deliver it to me as it was empty.
Even in the commercial invoice the gross weight of the laptop package was just 1.81KG! The laptop itself weighs about 2.3KG!
When I connected Amazon support they basically said that the package was delivered and they did an investigation the the weights are correct as well.
The UPS has filed a claim with Amazon and Amazon is not responding to UPS even and insists I obtain a police report. I didn’t even receive the package. Shouldn’t UPS and Amazon sort this out?
We are under lock down due to COVID and I can’t go to a police station to make the complaint.
Now I don’t have the laptop or a refund…
This costed me about 1700 usd with shipping. It’s not a cost I can afford to just write off.
Chargeback time! Hope you don’t have any Audible/Kindle/etc accounts, you’ll probably lose access to content you’ve bought, errm, licensed-with-no-binding-arbitration-clauses
I've placed approx. 15k orders with Amazon Germany in 20 years and have probably had less than 100 issues, mostly with FBA sellers. I get an answer from CS within 10 minutes and 1-day shipments are on time ~98%. Refunds are issued as soon as I drop the package in the return box. Call me a fan.
The best experience is still Amazon JP but returns are a little more complicated (Even within Japan) — Obviously b/c you more or less do not return stuff in JP [Hansei (反省].
It also surprises me how triple platinum status customers are in disbelief that some people who don’t make hundred or thousands of orders don’t get the kid-glove experience and are treated less well.
Amazon can both treat a large number of people well and treat other customers badly, there’s enough customers to do both to millions.
I think some of us are just cursed. I have trouble with at least 1/3 of all online orders. It's not my address: These problems have persisted in 5+ countries with different companies.
It'd never occur to me to make online ordering an integral part of my personal logistics and avoid it as much as I can.
Amazon is an easy target. Plus, I think many are referring to Marketplace and non-Amazon shipped orders where buyers lacked some basic common-sense. (E.g. 50% off cameras from a seller who just signed up...)
Maybe the reason for this is more consumer friendly laws? In the EU you can return any* online/telephone ordered purchase within 14 days (among other laws).
More a matter of business practice in general — The fact that Amazon makes it easier than any other shop is just one reason why I prefer peace of mind over the cheapest price. And yes, the law is in place but most shops make it way too difficult (Acknowledging the reason, time to refund, "Lost" returns, Direct vs. Marketplace, etc.).
You're right. That doesn't mean that some shops won't ask and expect an answer though. So even though you're legally not required to do so, you'll have to go through an argument about that with the shop, which is annoying and time consuming.
This is not a thing. At least in Germany I never once had anyone ask me why I want to return before I could. 90% of the time you already have a return label in the package. Worse case you don’t and you cannot even request one through the website, you send an email and get the label.
I was only ever asked about my return _after_ it was issued by Charles Tyrwhitt after I ordered and returned a good number of items (due to their fit being all over the place). That was fair IMO.
On the other hand Amazon has numerous times shown that if you return too much (or don’t behave due to some other opaque metric) your account can get suspended. Even my account was suspended once, though I am only a moderate shopper and have returned less than 10 items over my 18 years membership.
I raised the issue with support and asked why (there weren’t even any returns around that time) and they could not tell me but reinstated my account.
Good demonstration of power and a reminder to move away from using kindles.
Amazon returns may be easy until you cross some threshold and end up on their bad side.
I did not mean that EU laws make returning on Amazon easy in general but that these laws may make Amazon less likely to behave the same in a way they do e.g. in the US.
It's not mandated anywhere in US law, but the vast majority of reputable retailers (e.g. Walmart, Amazon, Target etc.) have very generous return policies. They're usually far more generous than 14 days. As you might expect, there are of course reasonable limitations (e.g. customized products, digital products, etc.).
Yet very often they charge restocking fees which is unheard of here. And also these policies are up to their discretion. As you can see in e.g. Walmart’s policy they reserve the right to decline the refund. Better to have a guarantee by having it in the law. Again as stated before, Amazon is known to shut down accounts for returning too often.
Privately or as a business? If privately, I'm very curious what kind of things you order.
Even if I'd replace all my store visits (grocery store, hardware store, electronics store are the main ones) with online orders, I'd probably still not oder more than once every five days (or maybe once every 10 days during covid, now that I go to the grocery store less often).
Or are you talking individual items, like you buy groceries from Amazon and every item is a separate order because they all ship from different sellers?
90% private, 10% business. Literally anything from iPhones to a single duct tape. Food only for shelf-stable stuff since I live next to a grocery store.
> Literally anything from iPhones to a single duct tape.
I think this explains it. Cheapest ducktape on Amazon is like $3.48 with free shipping for Prime users. Ordering one such tape every other day only costs $52.20. At some point you stop caring how much externalities it might be causing by clicking "Order Now" in Tuesday 3:40 AM just for a single M4x20 screw you forgot to add earlier in the day.
Amazon JP got a little worse ever since they started having their own delivery, which is not great compared to Yamato or Sagawa, which they were using before (and are still using sometimes, it's not clear under what conditions). But the difference is almost at the level of nitpicking. When you're used to top-notch service, and you suddenly get a subpar experience, that's kind of disappointing.
This is pretty much the same as the US; except our postmaster just obliterated our mail service to try to rig an election so Amazon is actually better than them now.
I think it was a year or two ago? It was a pretty big deal and in the news for a while.
I get a combination now of Amazon's own service or one of the big third-parties. All of them are great I think. I might prefer Amazon's since they're willing to just leave the package in front of your door.
I've done hundreds of orders on Amazon JP. I rarely return products but there are two cases:
Panasonic's microwave is dead on arrival, then Amazon shipped replacement one soon before I sent broken one.
Sony's headphone's bone is broken after a few month, so I sent it to Sony's service center but the shit support said that it's broken due to me, not product's fault even though it never taken out. They tried to charged me repair cost before repairing, so I tried to return the product to Amazon JP because it's faulty product. They accepted refunding with exactly same argument wrote here. I believe it won't happen on other Japanese shops.
From this experience, I sometimes buy from Amazon for products that possibly fragile and manufacturer's support is not reliable. (Or add extended warranty that covers my fault)
My friend often buy Chinese cheap electronics from Amazon JP (a.k.a. AliExpress Japan branch) and often return crap. He said it work flawlessly.
I've never lost my package, thanks to high quality delivery company and secure place.
He appears to reference a Japanese cultural principle called 反省 which means something like "self-reflection". I believe he means that in Japan people do not return things often, they take the blame and learn from their mistake.
Bought a 55” tv from Amazon. The UPS driver came a knocked on my door saying, “it’s very large, please help me bring it in.” I went out with them to the truck where the tv was sitting on the pavement. Helped carry it to my house. Driver left. I opened it up, took it out of the packaging, pealed the plastic off the front, plug it in and turned it on. LCD panel was cracked internally. Went to the website and requested a replacement. It arrived the next morning. Was fine. I packed up the broken unit, stuck the UPS label on it, scheduled a pick up. UPS came by and grabbed it. Took a month but eventually the website acknowledge receipt of the return. Zero issues with the return.
Once preordered a Blu-ray from Amazon JP. It arrived on release day. My only complaint is they won’t ship Blu-ray’s from adult video producers even if the title isn’t hardcore porn.
This sounds like what should happen, irrespective of the seller?
You can claim you got an empty box, but everyone's on the internet here, and pictures of an empty box with indignation as guide text gets you fake internet points on every social media site.
That alone isn't enough for any seller to take your claim as true until you take the necessary steps that come with "I've been defrauded", like filing that credit card dispute and police report. Which they did, after which Amazon accepted the dispute, so... where's the news angle here? "Store honours a $7k claim without questioning it" would almost be more newsworthy.
>The Chiles filed a credit card dispute and made a crime report, and after The Denver Channel made its own inquiries and the Chiles tried emailing Amazon owner Jeff Bezos directly, Amazon relented and said that the $7,000 will be refunded once the credit card dispute had been resolved.
It sounds like Amazon refused to refund their money until the media got involved.
Also, even if that were not the case, a big part of what Amazon sells is convenience and (supposedly) great customer service. If you pay $7,000 only to receive an empty box, and you provide Amazon with evidence from UPS that the box's weight was less than the weight of the actual product, that should be all it takes to get your money back.
Jumping through hoops with your credit card company and filing a police report should be the last resort for dealing with shitty companies that won't listen to anything but threats. There is no reason that the buyer should have to do that when dealing with a reputable company, especially when they have evidence from the shipper that the box did not contain the product they ordered.
Let's be clear: emailing the CEO and pretending that was a smart move is just idiotic. The article reads like they followed the standard resolution process, and got nowhere. Which makes sense, because at $7000 this needs a police report. The CC dispute can help a little, but that police report is what allows a seller to go "okay, you've committed to claiming to tell the truth, with jail time if it turns out you lied. We can now proceed in good faith".
Because remember: the refund process for products that have vanished isn't "you complain, then you get money", it's "you complain, the seller files an insurance claim with their insurance company, they get the (promise of) insurance compensation, THEN they pay you". You get paid with that insurance money, so: no insurance compensation, no refund.
And that's the only thing the police report does: it lets the seller go to their insurance company and go "here's the paperwork you need so you can justify honouring our claim", and then the insurance company will pay the seller, and if the amount is large enough, and its worth their time, the insurance company will do an investigation.
(and note that this is specifically the process when it comes to fraud or theft, where the law has been broken. It has, obviously, nothing to do with the refund process for a defective product)
Yes, and without a case file that evidence counts for exactly nothing. When it's this much money, you get to go to the police, report fraud, and back it up with the UPS shipping information. Now you now have case number and legally recognized evidence that you can take to the seller, so that they can be reasonably sure you're not just trying to get free money.
Because again, it's the internet, just doctoring a UPS web page and printing your own shipping label is trivial for anyone who stands to me $7000 if they get away with it.
Around here, the police just shrug at theft saying there’s nothing they can do and that they have higher priorities. They’ve taught us that filling a police report is worthless.
They don't have to do a single thing other than open a case, so that you have proof that you are willing to stake legal repercussions (fines, jail, possible even prison) on the validity of your claim.
The sellers don't care whether the police is going to investigate, they only care that you have the legal paperwork that they can give to their insurer so that THEY can get that money back, too. Because you don't get paid "by the seller", you get paid with dollars that the seller gets from their insurer.
Until they have the evidence that the insurer will accept, you're not getting paid.
I don't know how we ever got to the point of accepting that shipping is some equal third party in the transaction.
Shipping is a subcontractor to the company that sold the product. It is 100% the responsibility of the company to make right.
Imagine if you bought a TV at a store and they said, "want us to bring it out to your car?" And they did. And it got destroyed in the parking lot. And the company said, "you'll have to take it up with the parking lot parcel company. They don't technically work for us."
Especially when the retailer is the one choosing the shipper. On some sites you can at least choose UPS vs FedEx, then it would be a slightly different story.
I think what they're saying is that it's especially ridiculous given you don't even get a say in courier. And yet _you_ are made responsible for clawing back money from the courier if they screw up.
I agree that underlines how especially ridiculous it is.
I feel there is something universal about the phase in which the company enters and it is interesting to learn what moves companies in different phases.
Growing market, good press around, apologists for your brand, regulation and anti-monopoly scrutiny seems far away. Then the company is risk-taking, 7k$ that somebody occasionally may cheat is nothing in comparison to a possible blog post saying how awesome the company is. I think miraculously Apple is still here now, Google and Amazon were here 10 years ago, now AWS is here, Microsoft came here again recently, etc.
Then times come that bad press is there regardless of what you do, regulators watch you carefully. Then the user support becomes some scripts to follow, revenue over the next months (or launch before the next promotion cycle) is all you care about. Here I think how Verizon were super greedy and tried to milk the Droid brand within the 1st year, essentially killing it. I think the problem is once you enter this phase, it self-reinforces to stay here.
I have a theory why Google moved from one to the other and I have no view on the others, but at least here I think it was majority external factors not withing the company.
I used to live for many years in a "bad" area of Berlin, where my packages were constantly disappearing, not arriving, taken by neighbors (who put an X as a signature), or left by the delivery people outside our building door.
After a few such accidents, each of it super tiring on its own to get things reshipped or reimbursed (and often I failed), I decided all this modernity is not for me. Nowadays I rather buy whatever I can physically in a store, even if it's a bit more expensive.
But again, that's an experience from a "special" part of Berlin, not the standard one I guess.
When I order stuff online, 95% of the time it goes to my local supermarket. They have a little post office desk. Then I just collect it the next time I go grocery shopping. They make you show ID when you sign for it, so it's never happened that it got stolen.
I find this super convenient and it has to be less expensive for the delivery service too. I just can't understand why door to door delivery is the norm in some countries.
To me it's just annoying when I get sent a UPS package.
In Germany you can also have them ship to a Packstation or directly to the post office - at least most of the time. This has worked well so far.
The only problem I had was that sometimes they drop them off at a neighbor even when I am at home. At least nowadays the name of the neighbor is printed on the notice they leave in the mailbox (and is also included in the email notification) so X instead of signature doesn't work - at least for DHL and my area.
In Berlin, if you live in the ground floor of a residential building, you're stuck being the building's personal packstation. No mail man will bother ring all the bells of the building.
I did some research and you don't have to put up with it. Contact Amazon DE customer service and tell them to put a note on your account that you do not consent to any changes to the delivery address. Legally you don't even have to do this but it makes the next calls go easier.
If DHL leaves your package someplace else, like with a neighbor, that is between DHL and Amazon has to sort out.
When next package was left with at a nearby building, I immediately contacted Amazon and informed them my package was not delivered to the correct address. I refused any and all suggestions that I go look for the package. I just repeatedly asked when I can expect delivery to the correct order address. They ended up shipping a replacement.
After standing my ground on this a few times with Amazon, DHL stopped leaving my packages with other people.
DHL doesn't their best to push last mile delivery costs onto you but you don't have to accept it.
This doesn't work consistently (in Berlin at least), especially with Amazon and DHL. There is no guarantee over that the package will be shipped via DHL / Deutsche Post, and I am at this moment dealing with Hermes and DPD refusing to deliver Amazon packages to a DHL Packstation.
On top of that, DHL refuses to deliver to their own Postfiliale locations at times, DHL express even explicitly say they cannot do this.
Have you explicitly selected delivery to a Packstation through their locker picker, not just put the Packstation address in as a normal shipping address?
Amazon DE at least consistently allows to ship stuff to a package locker (which are now really common in Berlin). Much prefer that for things that are not extremely bulky/heavy.
Maybe give “Packstationen” a try? Most retailers in Germany reliably ship to these parcel boxes that can only be opened with a code that is sent to you via mail/text.
I live in an “up and coming” neighborhood in a major US city and it’s the same. Amazon has package lockers within a half-mile (~1 km) walk for the small ones, and the big ones are usually expensive enough I’ll just WFH for the day.
Part of the problem at least in the US is that retail stores don’t have the selection or availability that Amazon does, never mind the price. There are also some things that just aren’t sold in retail stores very often — I’m a competitive sport shooter and parts / supplies were hard to come by locally even before the pandemic.
That's definitely a Berlin experience. I used to live in a shady corner of Mitte and it was common for the delivery notes to be stolen from the front doors (naturally for people to go and pickup the package from neighbours etc).
I never ordered there, always to my employer's office. I had my neighbours ringing me multiple times, looking for their package (that naturally wasn't there).
This is certainly one of those instances where I'd raise hell, but I actually avoid trying to file lost item claims with Amazon for smaller ticket items. I know they have automated systems in place to prevent fraud, and I'm terrified that reporting for smaller ticket items will get my Amazon account banned. I've had a friend have this happen with his Doordash account; the sushi place he orders from a lot was pretty bad at sending everything he ordered, and after reporting this to Doordash every time, they eventually disabled his account. To this day, the restaurant is still on Doordash.
That's perverse. You shouldn't have to self-censor out of fear. The fact that Amazon (Doordash, Google, ...) can get away with just cancelling people's accounts willy nilly and they'd have no recourse is a gaping hole in regulations.
BTW, it's off-topic, but this right here is the among best arguments we can make for strong privacy, and against mass surveillance. If people are willing to swallow monetary damage out of fear to upset an algorithm that may cut back their privileges, imagine what happens to political free speech when you have to fear govt surveillance and black vans.
Why companies should not have right to cancel their relationship with person for non-discriminatory reasons? And constant complaints and errors on aggregate sounds entirely reasonable reason.
If same thing kept happening inside non-online business I think we would find it pretty okay...
If you keep buying mouldy food maybe there is need to change your habits... Or stop buying from that store in first place.
On other side, let's say customer violently attacks other customers or staff. Or causes substantial property damage intentionally, maybe attempts arson. Would you still disagree with them banning such customer?
It's a cost of doing business, not really a fear. I can't recall this happening to me, but if Amazon did make an error or damage a minor thing or whatever I wouldn't object because I would object if it were a major thing and I want to maintain a good record to make it more likely I automatically win any major objections in future. The cost of this strategy is accepting any minor loss from Amazon and the benefit is an increased likelihood of good service for major items.
The only error I can recall from Amazon is they once included an exacto knife I didn't order in a package to me.
While I get the frustration, I also don't understand the logic of continuing to order from a restaurant when you have frequent bad experiences with them. Is it really surprising that after a while Doordash just doesn't want to be in the middle of that relationship?
Given that they banned the customer, not the restaurant, they obviously do want to be in the middle of that relationship, but only with the customers who won't rightly complain about it.
I once got banned from a pizza place for this. I had some fussy eating friends and would order pizza, but they would frequently screw up orders like “no cheese”, sometimes even multiple times in succession, as in I’d order it, tell them they screwed up, they would send a replacement and it too would be screwed up… eventually I “wasn’t allowed to register any more complaints”.
That doesn't sound like a good strategy. If they are bad at fulfilling their orders, why would you care if they are also stupid and cancel your account instead of fixing their problems? They are not the only merchant online.
As a rule I don't order from Amazon beyond a certain price point. I purchase from a physical retail store. First couple of years of Amazon in India was really good. Good collection, low prices and good customer experience. But as their orders and catalog has shot everything about them has become a shitshow, at least from what I've observed. Also they have significantly ramped up 3rd party sellers and given extremely high density of retail stores in India I might as well go visit those stores and cut out Amazon. If I run into problems I can "physically" visit a store and talk to someone; with Amazon I might as well have better chances of talking to God.
Happened to me with a phone. Lego can check the completeness of packages by weighting grams, Amazon can't check the weight of a package with a phone ? Only could solve the problem with the help of the police. Then they would not cancel the attached carrier contract (which does not make sense without the subsidized phone) because they said Amazon's systems can create contracts but not cancel them. Again only the police helped.
In the past I've got sent sometimes used electronics sold as new - recently I got 3 times used electronics as new in a row. Isnt that fraud?
I don’t live in a country where Amazon operates but I do live in the EU. I’ve had good experiences with them regarding refunds and getting items the courier firm messed up with. I once ordered some stuff to the UK to a friend who shipped it to me with alongside some stuff from other places. My wait time for the whole package was a month due to this and when it arrived I noticed that one of the items I ordered was missing. I contacted them and they offered me a refund. I wasn’t expecting that!
Another time DPD messed up my package and never delivered it, they just shipped it again and it I finally got it. The only nuisance was the wait time.
That being said my trust for Amazon is at an all time low due to their marketplace listings. The discoverability has gone awfully bad, I generally end up searching for stuff elsewhere, researching stuff on Google and if I find something I need that’s only available through Amazon, then I have to and dig deep to see if it’s okay.
They simply allow through all sorts of dubious items, knockoffs and scams that clearly just ship from China. Whenever I can, I just order straight from smaller, specialty shops that deliver abroad, instead. It’s not an Amazon-unique situation, however. A local giant online e-tailer started a marketplace and they pretty much instantly started having very similar issues.
I still dislike having to spend lots of extra time just to not to accidentally buy something else instead of what I wanted. Frustrating, to say the least!
Haven't had any problems with Amazon shipping, but I'm thinking I might need to record every unboxing just to make sure I can prove what happened the first time it DOES hit me.
I order electronics from Newegg (which is starting to feel Amazon-like with third parties).
I generally use Amazon as a search engine to see what exists, look at reviews, then buy locally and physically if at all possible. Especially books, after they folded, spindled and mutilated too many books and their replacements.
This is kinda funny. About 5 years ago or so, the prevailing comment was the opposite of yours. ("I go to Best Buy to compare widgets, then order the one I want on Amazon.")
But I'm in the same boat. A lot more often I'll find myself looking at things on Amazon's site, then seeking out the manufacturer's own site, or another retailer, to make the actual purchase.
I just don't trust Amazon anymore. So much rebranded Alibaba shit on there, or counterfeit hazards.
Me too but reviews on Amazon are starting to get very untrustworthy. Not because of fake reviews, but because of products that unexpectedly come with a "Give us a review and we'll refund £5!" card in the box.
The latest one I got specifically stated they didn't need a positive review (presumably to get around Amazon's rules?) but it's still a bribe even if it is via an implicit debt.
Amazon has different face masks for different countries even though Same Executives handle multiple countries. As far my interrogation with one of Amazon's customer care executives most the calls with language setting to English all over the world to amazon has been handled mostly in India due to cheap labor workforce.There customer care exectives has some base limit for refunds apart from which requires approval from Manager and authorised representatives after Investigations. However there are many allegations that the amazon is not treating with same level of gentleness to all other developing countries like India.
> Given the risks associated with buying online, some customers are resorting to filming the process of unboxing expensive gear in order to create proof in the event that an order has not been correctly fulfilled.
That is exactly what I do for every >300€ purchase I make online. Otherwise, refund without "video evidence" becomes impossible for the majority of platforms.
This is what chargebacks are for and even if you get banned over it for this much money I’d say it’s worth it, heck for 7k I’d take it to court. Would be an easy judgement based on the label weights alone.
I hardly trust Amazon to ship me authentic toothpaste. Who the hell buys a $7k item?
I try not to buy anything from amazon since FBA is mixed in with knock offs and other garbage items. They have no quality control at all and don't care about knock offs.
Amazon (EU) is garbage. I ordered a high-end laptop from the Amazon Warehouses and they cancelled my order after 2 months. I kept calling them in the meanwhile many times and they were bs me with "everything ok" "your order will be shipped" "won't worry" until they cancelled my order without a reason.
I just bought a new gaming chair last night, $172. So it's not that expensive. But I've never had a problem with Amazon. I did buy a 4TB external drive from Wish.com, and when I got it, it was only 2TB. They refunded me the money and I got to keep the drive. But it's never worked right.
Did you verify that the drives holds 2 TB of data? From Wish.com I wouldn't be surprised to order a 4 TB drive and get a fake 2 TB drive that actually only holds 500 GB.
Did they buy it used from Amazon? Id say 9 out of 10 used item, fulfilled by Amazon, has something wrong with it: broken, missing critical parts... And in one case a 24 inch monitor when I ordered a 27.
I think it's just normal operating procedure unfortunately: checking and confirming every returned item is expensive. Simply turning around and delivering to the next chump is probably more profitable, even with the high error rate.
Yeah, I had one of these, but at a much lower threshold.
I bought one of those blind spot mirrors for like $10. I received an envelope (think the old white and blue envelopes) that had nothing. Since the package was "delivered", the only option was to "return the items" but since I didn't have anything to return, there was nothing Amazon could do for me. It was almost funny.
The biggest problem I have with Amazon is USPS theft. I have had dozens of packages delivered in my mailbox despite the fact that my mailbox is 3” tall. Amazon doesn’t care, USPS doesn’t care. But Amazon always make me wait at least a week to verify that this obvious theft is real. Photo evidence of my mailbox does not move the needle.
To be fair to the person above, the article is really confusing by always referring to the product as a "Sony A1" as if it was completely obvious to everyone what it is.
I thought it's a weird super expensive smartphone until I read the author's bio.
Count me too, I've thought it to be a TV for a minute if I didn't know the sites and their citation (PetaPixels) are for photo(video)graphy. But then item weighs just 1.4kg is no way a TV.
The thing that confirmed for me that this was a camera was the domain of the article, which relates to photography. As others have noted, Sony’s naming scheme is confusing.
I imagine they do some type of internal checks to see if it is a residential address and if there have been similar issues in the area. If they feel like the buyer may be lying then I'm sure they have some way to turn the matter over to investigators who may monitor their financial records and may even send police or FBI to surveil them.
So if my neighbour is abusing their Amazon account, if I get an empty box instead of a $7000 camera I get FBI to surveil me? What a fantastic idea, and it absolutely won't lead to any sort of discrimination whatsoever. I can already see the house listings "in a good neighbourhood, Amazon parcels arrive without a police surveillance van".
It's good news for them that the box was empty instead of filled with sand - that way the weight in the USPS shipping data made it obvious they weren't shipped the camera. I wonder if this was a Fulfilled By Amazon purchase or whether Amazon directly bought this empty box from a wholesaler to stock in their warehouse?
At the end of the day most big companies have found its a better strategy to trust/not dispute customers in these situations. If they wanted to I don't think that would hold up, it's not as though you are opening it in a controlled supervised environment.
> At the end of the day most big companies have found its a better strategy to trust/not dispute customers in these situations.
The article we're responding to, not to mention the comments, is evidence that that is at minimum an unreliable assumption.
Re your second point, the seemingly standard way of resolving these issues after the company refuses to comply is to make it a PR problem for the company. Videos are going to help for that.
> The article we're responding to... is evidence that that is at minimum an unreliable assumption.
They were already refunded before the story was even published. Yes, Amazon didn't refund them 7K in their first customer support call, that ruffled their feathers but it is not at all surprising. At that $ obviously they need to be be escalated.
I am not a fan of Amazon. They sold (Amazon Choice, so they bought and then resold) me a chair that had a staple sticking out of one of the feet, that caused significant damage to my hardwood floors. Fuck them.
At the same time, I think it is naive to expect a customer support rep in the Philippines to handle this sort of situation. They do not make 7K in a month. If they bought the empty box at a brick and motor store, I wouldn't expect a cashier to be trained in dealing with a 7K fraud issue, and the general manager may not be able to resolve it on the spot either.
My guess is they eventually did a google search, and thats how they found advice telling them to email jeff@amazon.com. They have a large team of people managing that email and advertise it for situations exactly like this. Its hard to interface with a 2 Trillion Dollar entity but I think it's fair to say they do a ok job.
I agree with you about the frontline rep, that's not the person I have a problem with. I don't expect a low-level customer support rep to be able to approve such a thing. I expect Amazon to, in the event that a rep can't handle a complaint, proactively solve it in a different way, not try to fob the claimant off.
It would be just as easy to, say, bump any refund claim over 1k to someone who is paid enough to make such a decision. Amazon have decided they don't want to. And I don't really think that's acceptable. Just look at the comments in this thread of people self-censoring to avoid getting on the wrong side of the algorithm.
This is a situation Amazon has engineered, because it's cheaper to run these things through automated systems, or only frontline workers. I'm not inclined to accept what I think is pretty bare minimum as good enough on account of their size. If anything, I think their size allows them to afford and amortize better systems than a small company.
> people self-censoring to avoid getting on the wrong side of the algorithm
Not sure what you mean by this.
> This is a situation Amazon has engineered
I agree but I disagree with you as to why. I see two distinct issues.
1. Amazon marketplace reliability/integrity.
2. Customer support escalation process.
_________________________
1. I think Amazon does an abhorrent job, it's the wild west with regards to quality, fraud. & counterfeits. I personally don't trust it.
2. Unfortunately almost everywhere cuts costs and uses automation & frontline works but I think Amazon has a significantly above average process for a large company. The jeff@amazon.com is a very publicized escalation option/safety valve, which worked in this case & I am not aware of for other large brands. It's unfortunate they had a bad call the first time, but that happens. If this sort of thing happened with another retailer (although it's less likely to), I doubt they would have handled it until they went to twitter or was generating press with the story.
Yup, me too. It's so incredibly easy to do if you have an iPad with a kickstand, just hit record and unpack. If all is fine, delete. If not, then you are covered.
I went to NewEgg (in the U.S.) for electronics item orders but some of the complaints about electronics, like expensive Nvidia cards going missing or whatnot, I've seen complaints for with NewEgg. Third party shippers, quality control issues are rife in reviews. In fact I ordered almost 3K of computer equipment from NewEgg that got stolen on my stoop as USPS threw it on a sidewalk in a giant city here, which was promptly stolen by a miscreant. NewEgg made me go to the police a couple of times but they did issue a replacement. So it's a mixed bag - they should have forced signature required.
NewEgg > Amazon for computer equipment but the jury seems out. Any other alternatives for expensive PC parts?
Decade ago I overnight-primed a $200 power supply because it cut out and needed 1000+ watts for mining back then.
Box had someone's old power supply inside with all the cables cut off.
And it was "sold and shipped by amazon"
Was furious and then really worried amazon would not believe me but they overnighted another one to my surprise.
I mean that's got to be a felony on an expensive item and Amazon has to know who returned the item to them previously?
I still don't understand with all their automation and integration why they do not photograph the item as it is being packed so you know what it looks inside the shipping box and then the outside of the shipping box itself? Just out a camera over the packaging station right over the box.
I actively try to get things outside Amazon as well but most of the time end up buying from Amazon anyway. And people have rightfully said quite a few times, stuff is listed cheaper than on Amazon. However for most independent stores, manufacturers I notice that either they charge for shipping, or has a 50$ minimum to get free shipping. I have tried to bounce off cash back portals to cover for some of the shipping, but most of the time it is not enough.
In addition, I have a Amazon card from Chase that offers 5% of cashback on amount spent at Amazon. Most of the time factoring in shipping and cashback seals the deal for Amazon and covers for the price difference.
I actually have never had a bad experience with Amazon. Then again, I pay about $300 a year to have my items shipped to a rent-a-mailbox store, mainly so I can have a public mailing address for things like domain registrations and my online resume.
Also: I usually buy the really expensive stuff from B&H, mainly because they have lower prices than Amazon (they have an in-store credit card which pays the tax for you), and have never had a problem with them.
Who I have had issues with is eBay; I have at least twice received counterfeit lower-quality goods from them, such as the time I got an obvious pirated and burned Blu-Ray when ordering a movie.
I have had problems. I use this thing called keepa.com and it tells me when the prices of hard disks fall.
So over the past year I had tried 4 times to buy and three times I didnt even get the order.
So I was told "well because you didnt get it,we cant send a replacement so get a refund "
the last time I bought a 5tb external disk and I got, I kid you not, a 500 GB internal hard drive that was patched with tape. When I complained, I was told to get a refund because, again, cannot send you a replacement.
They really do not honor their prices if you get a good deal or a slip up.
My biggest gripe with Amazon is the low level substitution they do or allow sellers to get away with. Sometimes you buy something that shows 15 ounces but receive something that is 12.5 ounces or something is swapped out for a cheaper version (California olive oil for some global mix olive oil). Then you have to waste your time for requesting a refund or discount or whatever. Amazon is great for certain things, but I've found their service is way different from major metros like the Bay Area to other smaller metros (like Sacramento).
This is scary as people working at the shipping companies figure out that stealing packages is actually a DMZ of inter-mediation and for the most part they can get away with it.
I'm sure this refund kicked off a serious investigation inside of Amazon/FedEx/UPS as this has been getting pretty bad - so for us to notice theft with SOMEWHAT regularity, I imagine it has to be an insanely pervasive problem.
The Google Fi forums seem to mention the phone-then issue regularly... "I ordered Pixel 6 and never received it", etc. etc.
Sadly I have a me-too experience in ordering English books from Amazon UK for shipment to Romania. Packages don't arrive & surprisingly, Amazon seem to have no idea as to the carrier responsible. On two occasions, books arrived and Amazon had marked them down as 'lost' until I told them otherwise. Time to look for another UK bookseller but finding one who's learnt from the positive side of the Amazon phenomenon is difficult.
I wouldn’t order a camera from a store that doesn’t specialize in photography (B&H or moment.com). You can ship things to any FedEx office store and pick it up with your ID. The package is insured by FedEx in that case until you show them ID and receive your package. I’ve done this frequently for jewelry and just picking up mail when visiting USA (I’m an expat at the moment)
"some customers are resorting to filming the process of unboxing expensive gear in order to create proof in the event that an order has not been correctly fulfilled"
Yeah, for years I've been taking photos and/or video during the process of unboxing expensive items received via mail. Heard too many horror stories over the years.
FWIW I would never purchase a $7000 camera on Amazon.
I was under impression that their return policy has some intelligence added. I mean how many items customer have returned/refunded, what are sellers saying about returned item kind of ML. After reading all the stories in comments, feel this is what Amazon should be prioritising. Already some local online stores are competing them across the globe.
I bought two bath faucets. Amazon shipped the wrong color, I returned them but Amazon refused to refund me. They just kept them, wouldn't refund or return. Talked to several people including managers. Still owe me $700.
Amazon works great when it does, when it doesn't the whole system collapses.
> Given the risks associated with buying online, some customers are resorting to filming the process of unboxing expensive gear in order to create proof in the event that an order has not been correctly fulfilled.
I don't know why this never occurred to me, but I will be doing precisely this in the future.
I once had my $180 Amazon order not delivered while it was marked as delivered by Amazon. After filing complaint I got "sorry" directly from the actual seller (they're in the US and I am in Canada) and they shipped me replacement.
Back in 2018, I ordered a JeVois A33 camera for (I think) around $99 (maybe it was $69). And they sent me an empty box. After arguing with JeVois & Amazon, I finally did a credit reversal. I don't use Amazon for anything over $50 now.
Seems like a good thing to do for high-value items is video record any unboxing. That will certainly go a long way in helping to prove the correct contents were in the box when first opened. I will be doing that from now on.
I never buy anything over $150 on Amazon, because the pricier the thing(s) you want, the more it hurts when it doesn't arrive at all. Not that I would be happy losing $150, but it's better losing that than $1500 (or more!).
I also drip feed items to my doorstep instead of doing one huge order with many items in it, that way I compartmentalize the order so that if a small order doesn't arrive, I can live with it. This should be common sense, but some people are so impatient that they have to have everything in one big order rather than span the items out over time.
Also if I want some expensive gadget like a laptop / iPad or whatever, I go to my local brick and mortar store for that. Buying high-spec luxury goods on Amazon is a bad idea.
There is a common theme in most of these stories: UPS. It would be interesting to know the annual dollar value of "loss" (read as theft) that occurs at the hands of Brown Truck Pirates.
Anything over 1K I just film the package opening ("unboxing" style). All with timestamp and stuff, just to be safe. No problems so far, but one can never know.
My shock here is that someone would order something that costs $7k from amazon! Buy that from BH, newegg, some specialty retailer, etc. Not American alibaba.
I'd argue the opposite -- why not order from Amazon?
Lots of folks have come to trust Amazon's reliability and customer service over the years, so it does make sense for customers to order expensive things from Amazon or any other online store, especially with a pandemic going around.
This incident in particular does seem to be an outlier, and we'll have to see how Amazon resolves it.
I stopped trusting amazon when they removed the ability to report product issues, like knockoffs or scams.
Removing the links just affirmed they don't care whats in their marketplace, and they just backed that attitude up with their recent lawsuit claiming they're not responsible.
I've even reported people who include the "$5 for a review", but they don't ever do anything about it. What trust have they earned except from a few people not complaining?
It's not an outlier. I've ordered things from Amazon and gotten completely wrong things- like 1 latex glove in the box instead of the makeup I ordered.
Irony is the bird feeder story originally came out before we knew amazon was using their market insight to steal and knockoff their own sellers products. Likely amazon was the one making the knockoffs.
> before we knew amazon was using their market insight to steal and knockoff their own sellers products. Likely amazon was the one making the knockoffs.
I have not heard that, but holy cow. Just so incredibly shady.
For what it's worth, I bought that same birdfeeder directly from the manufacturer's own storefront on ebay (I've found ebay to be easier to find real sellers than Amazon and don't have to deal with figuring out who is doing the shipping etc) and it's awesome.
Don't use Amazon all that much but from the comments here and in other articles that seem to pop up more often recently I figure now time has come for Amazon to finally milk that sweet sweet trust relationship.
I've recently used newly opened Amazon.pl, first purchase and I had to wait +5 weeks for a small item. I'm not used to navigating the labyrinth of checking whether something is fulfilled by someone or whatever. I just had the displeasure of buying something from a dropshipper.
Because Amazon has allowed their store to be filled with buyer-beware scams. Much of their electronics are knockoffs - good luck buying legit batteries, chargers, etc. You're shopping, with inventory commingling, from who knows who. Is the device actually new, or is it a refurb or return? Etc.
For any substantially expensive device, they can also void the warranty by not being an authorized dealer. Or at least create a hassle for the person attempting to use that warranty.
The one thing Amazon provides is trust and this is their main asset. All of their wares you can buy anywhere, buy on Amazon you have reviews and a third party (Amazon) who mediates.
Now the big BUT. Amazon integrates every step and thus loses the mediation ability and they are losing the trust with fake reviews.
Nowadays I research items on Amazon and search specialized shops to get them from and maybe get someone to chat with about the stuff I am going to buy. Because I can't trust the reviews on Amazon
A specialty retailer is more likely to know exactly how to package the item to avoid damage. They are likely to have experience with delivery errors that are specific to that specialty product, and thus will be better able to rectify those errors. They may have better customer service, as is the case with B&H. Lastly, a dispute with a specialty retailer is unlikely to affect other services, like Prime Video or grocery delivery.
Because Amazon co-mingles inventory from sellers by UPC. So if one crook ships in empty boxes and you buy from someone else you still can get shafted and the honest seller eats the costs.
I ordered via newegg, a NZXT case for my computer which was S$180, it seemed to be less than retail, and in Singapore it was $350 at the time. What was strange tho was other cases were listed for: S$2##.## Shipping...
This 1 case was listed as free shipping. So I ordered it, was charged S$180, and 2 weeks later received a brand new, unopened, case, with glass panel all intact no issues.
A bit tangential, but can anyone in the know of UPS inner workings explain why the applicable tracking number[1] would reflect a "Shipped" status 3 minutes before "Label Created"?
Such situations can be avoided if Amazon keeps updating us with weights & x-ray images of good from the very first step until delivery/package opening being done on camera
Whenever there's an article about an obvious outlier case (still outrageous in its own of course) you can assume that the top comment will be general complaints about said company's decline, often not representative of people's experience as a whole.
The only outlier here is the cost. General complaints can be assumed to be reprensentive of these people's experiences, or they wouldn't be here complaining, no?
I literally had an Amazon delivery person (err..1099 contactor?) throw a package over the fence at my apartment complex last year and hit my window. They do not care, add to this the piles of amazon boxes the differently-housed are grabbing off of porches and it's a real mess.
I don't see anywhere that says the item was shipped and sold by Amazon.com. If it was, then I can see how Amazon.com bears responsibility, but if not then it seems more like an issue with a third-party seller.
Most users don't know it's a marketplace. And Amazon tries to hide that. If they want to own the shopping experience, they also have to own the returns, fraud, bad reputation etc.
At 1:42 mark of the news broadcast[1], a snapshot of order details shows Sold by: Amazon.com Services LLC for both a $398 memory card and $6,498 camera.
That's not true for every item. Items can be shipped and sold by a third party even if bought on Amazon.com. It's up to the buyer to check this when purchasing. The easiest way to tell is to check if the item is 'Prime' or not, but even then it's better to check who is selling and shipping.
Edit: I am describing the process as it is now. I am not saying that it should be this way.
No, if you buy an item on Amazon.com then it's on Amazon.com to make sure you have a good experience. As a customer I literally don't care who is fulfilling the purchase, I'm making the purchase on Amazon.com and my money is clearly going to Amazon.com according to my bank statements. If they decide to work with unscrupulous 3rd parties then that's on them, not on me.
There's obviously a misunderstanding with my statement. I am not talking about what should or shouldn't be happening, or what is morally right, or what the ideal experience is. I'm warning people that unfortunately Amazon does not operate the way many people think. Of course I do agree that Amazon should be the sole seller and that if you buy something from Amazon you should expect to receive it from Amazon.
I am simply stating facts as to how the website operates today. Right now, it's possible to order an item on the Amazon.com website that does not come from Amazon.com at all. It can be "shipped and sold" by a complete third party. Most items are shipped by Amazon, but it's not difficult to find items that are just listed on Amazon but the entire sale/shipping process is done by the third party.
The parent comment:
> If you buy on the Amazon.com website it’s on Amazon to deliver your order and provide a good shipping experience.
is simply false, because that's not how Amazon operates today. It is literally wrong because it does not apply to all items on Amazon. That statement is only true if something is fulfilled by Amazon, which includes items "Shipped and sold by Amazon.com" and "Sold by <some_third_party>, fulfilled by Amazon". Fulfilled by Amazon means it's located at one of its many warehouses and Amazon ships it in their Amazon boxes.
During lockdown, I ordered a Sony camera and lens that was in the $5k+ range. The package went "missing" with the shipper with obvious fake tracking data, like multiple "customer not home" delivery attempts timestamped at 12am in the morning. The packages never showed up. Amazon kept saying it was the shipper's fault and the shipper said it was Amazon's responsibility. Lots of tweets, etc, got me nowhere.
In the end Amazon finally refunded me, but it was a nightmare. They wouldn't even talk to me until I waited a number of days after the package was late and even then all they would say is that it had to be escalated to management who would review the issue eventually. Even when they finally agreed the package was lost, I had to wait for another management review to actually get the refund issued. They had my money tied up for weeks with no recourse for a package they never even delivered. I can only imagine how bad it would be if the shipper claimed it was delivered.
My recommendation is to skip Amazon for anything expensive or at high risk of shipper theft/fraud. Your customer experience will not be the same as when they lose a $10 package. They will treat you like a criminal no matter what your past history with Amazon is.