[HN Gopher] Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty...
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Amazon refused to refund $7k after shipping an empty box instead of
a Sony A1
Author : luu
Score : 955 points
Date : 2021-05-30 06:32 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (petapixel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (petapixel.com)
| williw wrote:
| 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.
| aembleton wrote:
| Was that $700 just for two bath taps?
| throayobviousl wrote:
| I hardly trust Amazon to ship me authentic toothpaste. Who the
| hell buys a $7k item?
|
| I try not to buy anything from amazon since FBA is mixed in with
| knock offs and other garbage items. They have no quality control
| at all and don't care about knock offs.
| veselin wrote:
| I feel there is something universal about the phase in which the
| company enters and it is interesting to learn what moves
| companies in different phases.
|
| Growing market, good press around, apologists for your brand,
| regulation and anti-monopoly scrutiny seems far away. Then the
| company is risk-taking, 7k$ 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.
| hermitsings wrote:
| WTF "refused"? You're a fucking company. Return that shit.
| x0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| +1 BH. I've ordered entire palettes of camera gear, and every
| filter and end cap was accounted for.
| abhiminator wrote:
| 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.
| randycupertino wrote:
| 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.
|
| There are a lot of knockoff products on there, even benign
| things like birdfeeders are getting faked and sold:
| https://www.marketplace.org/2019/11/18/how-amazons-
| counterfe...
| petee wrote:
| 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.
| randycupertino wrote:
| > 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.
| x0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| justahuman74 wrote:
| I trust amazon 1st party store shipping
|
| I do NOT trust the million other people selling things on
| amazon storefront hoping that you don't notice they're not
| actually amazon
| mszcz wrote:
| 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.
| chx wrote:
| 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.
| number6 wrote:
| 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
| petee wrote:
| 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?
| totalZero wrote:
| 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.
| dilyevsky wrote:
| Recently i ordered something via newegg, after a week they
| canceled order bc seller didn't ship, then next day it arrived
| in amazon box
| philliphaydon wrote:
| 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.
| hardlianotion wrote:
| Rather amusingly, the article says that the couple that suffered
| this indignity are from Alabama. The video news report says they
| live in Colorado.
| mancerayder wrote:
| 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?
| 34679 wrote:
| Microcenter
| reikonomusha wrote:
| 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.
| randycupertino wrote:
| > 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.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| Gene_Parmesan wrote:
| 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.
| tompccs wrote:
| 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.
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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.
| chx wrote:
| 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.
| noja wrote:
| > the Japanese bag selection is truly something else.
|
| Got any tips?
| chx wrote:
| I left a link to a Japanese video but https://www.reddit.
| com/r/ManyBaggers/comments/aj6q91/travel_... https://www.
| reddit.com/r/ManyBaggers/comments/bl1plj/japanes...
| https://www.amazon.co.jp/s?k=xpac
| wott wrote:
| > 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.)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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.
| cbmuser wrote:
| I agree. I don't books on Amazon anymore here in Germany
| unless I cannot get the book anywhere else.
|
| As for Amazon Japan, their packaging is most often top-notch
| although that's more related to Japanese mentality than to
| Amazon's policy.
| tjpnz wrote:
| 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.
| robotmay wrote:
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| Lots of books on Amazon are now printed on demand. In theory
| a smart and possibly environmentally friendly practice.
|
| But you end up with smudgy pages from a bad printer, pages
| missing, and a book binding not lasting more than a day.
| erik wrote:
| This sounds more like you are getting counterfeit books,
| not print-on-demand.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| It's a real thing [1] - although you might think they
| were counterfeits on arrival if you weren't aware of this
| service
|
| [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Amazon-Print-on-Demand-
| Guide/b?ie=U...
| matsemann wrote:
| Yes, it sounds like it. Which says something about the
| quality of Amazon's product, heh.
| techdragon wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| reikonomusha wrote:
| 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.
| Anther wrote:
| That is depressing. I suppose it's a side effect of growing
| too large. I'd hate to receive scores like that.
| malwarebytess wrote:
| 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!
| hparadiz wrote:
| I went with eBay over Amazon for an international edition of
| a major android flagship for this very reason.
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| 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 EUR 500 piece of electronics paying a EUR 4.95
| shipping fee in the rare case that you return it isn't so
| bad.
| praptak wrote:
| Did they contest the chargeback though?
| 6nf wrote:
| In a case like this, without additional proof, the credit
| card company will just side with the customer.
| zerocrates wrote:
| 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.
| garmaine wrote:
| > 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.
| Reason077 wrote:
| > _" Amazon has no concept of "open box" vs "new,""_
|
| 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.
| garmaine wrote:
| Yet somehow returns end up back in the warehouse where
| they are picked as "new" sales to other customers.
| Strom wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 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.
| jpindar wrote:
| >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.
| MertsA wrote:
| >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.
| speeder wrote:
| 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.
| thebruce87m wrote:
| My general rule is: Do not buy anything electrical (plug in
| or battery) or anything that goes in to your body from
| Amazon.
|
| I would definitely not buy dog medicine.
| aydwi wrote:
| I think I could use your rule.
|
| 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| patd wrote:
| 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.
| robotmay wrote:
| 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!
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| 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 (Zhuan Mai ya) means that they've lost a lot of
| the trust I had in them.
| robotmay wrote:
| Delivering in a Hokkaido winter sounds like an epic
| undertaking considering the amount of snow.
| rwmj wrote:
| Aomori, but yes it's amazing that everything keeps
| working in those conditions (in general, not just
| Amazon).
| 0xfaded wrote:
| 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.
| iagovar wrote:
| 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.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| 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 200EUR headphones I
| needed to pay 44EUR of taxes and handling fees that was
| shipped from Valencia.
| laurent92 wrote:
| 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 6EUR elsewhere instead of 10EUR 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.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| 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.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Camelcamelcamel.com?
| avereveard wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| willtim wrote:
| 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).
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Are you still buying CDs?
| __david__ wrote:
| Where do you get uncompressed, drm free music?
| willtim wrote:
| 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.
| Anther wrote:
| It's rather nice to buy unusual CDs and FLAC them. I like
| to do it from time to time.
| MikeDelta wrote:
| Or vinyl albums, adds an extra dimension to listening to
| music.
| Anther wrote:
| Absolutely. Bought Bowie's Blackstar on vinyl. Just
| seemed to fit somehow.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > 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.
| Covzire wrote:
| 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.
| cmckn wrote:
| 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.
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| cmckn wrote:
| 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.
| aydwi wrote:
| 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.
| distances wrote:
| Fair enough. I'm quite happy to take the used product if
| it's flawless, in my mind that's a bit less waste
| produced by my lifestyle.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I've never seen a decent price at a Best Buy. At least here
| everything is marked up.
| cmckn wrote:
| 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!
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Always keep in mind that everyone will price-match
| Amazon.
|
| The other side of that coin is that Amazon used to have
| relatively low prices. Not anymore.
| cmckn wrote:
| 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.
| beezle wrote:
| 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.
| sackerhews wrote:
| 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.
| zerocrates wrote:
| 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.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Once you've established a monopoly you can start degrading the
| service
| missedthecue wrote:
| Online retail has never been a monopoly. Doesn't matter any
| way you measure it.
| kar1181 wrote:
| 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.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| mft_ wrote:
| 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.
| atoav wrote:
| 3 out of 5 books I ordered there were what a regular
| bookstore would have called a "Mangelexemplar": folded in
| pages, accidentally cut corners, missing pages
| aurizon wrote:
| 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.
| fishmaster wrote:
| 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.
| onli wrote:
| Amazon in Germany can also go very wrong. This is why I
| stopped ordering there:
|
| I ordered a bunch of small electronics stuff, about 100EUR.
| 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.
|
| Never again.
| inapis wrote:
| Why would an order go through with an expired credit
| card? Is this something like cash-on-delivery or card-on-
| delivery?
| onli wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0]: https://www.onli-blogging.de/1832/Meine-richtig-
| schlechte-Su... (in german)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| This has happened to me. In some circumstances banks will
| still honour a charge even though the card is expired.
|
| You'll have to ask the banks why. In my case it wasn't a
| problem, but technically it _shouldn 't happen_ and it's
| strange that it did.
| onli wrote:
| 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 3x3EUR
| instead of 1x3EUR 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.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Amazon doesn't charge your card until it's about to ship
| your order. Thus an order with an invalid card will go
| through but won't ship.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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.
| comboy wrote:
| 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.
| loldk wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| You can request that in Amazon delivery settings if you
| have a safe location at home, but it's not the default.
| By default parcels go back to depot.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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.
| matwood wrote:
| 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.
| texasbigdata wrote:
| 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.
| dagaci wrote:
| 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.
| vt100 wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| hughrr wrote:
| 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.
| emerged wrote:
| 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.
| peteretep wrote:
| > Also depends on your reputation as a buyer on Amazon I
| think
|
| Probably. There'll be some people who can rely on their
| reputation with their CC company too to do a chargeback.
| Closi wrote:
| 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.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Off topic but I have seen interesting labels that break
| destructively.
|
| If you could turn that into a ribbon, then any box could
| be wrapped in such a way any tampering is evident.
|
| If you could also print a QR code on top, then you have a
| per shipment tamper proof
|
| I suspect it exists but i am sure there is a long way
| between that and cost effective useage
| squarefoot wrote:
| > 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.
| amelius wrote:
| Isn't it a basic consumer right to take items out of the
| packaging, try them, and then return them?
| Closi wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| 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).
| amelius wrote:
| Right, I didn't get that. But how often is an item
| returned without the box being opened by the customer?
|
| Also, how does Amazon prove that the brick they received
| came from the customer and not some employee?
| Closi wrote:
| 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.
| Closi wrote:
| 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.
| zadler wrote:
| The problem is not lack of tech, it's that consumers are
| easier to attract to a platform than vendors so the rules
| tend to favor the vendors.
| robotmay wrote:
| 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.
| tomduncalf wrote:
| 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 PS60 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
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| dan1234 wrote:
| It happens in the UK too.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/nm1mm1/i_got.
| ..
| iso1210 wrote:
| Amazon in the UK ships 228m a year in 2018 [0], that's
| going to have increased by now.
|
| If the chance of a problem worthy of complaining on reddit
| or a blog was a million to one that world be 4 problems a
| week.
|
| [0] https://tamebay.com/2018/09/amazon-established-as-3rd-
| larges...
| thathndude wrote:
| 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.
| kenjackson wrote:
| 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.
| klintcho wrote:
| 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.
| ed_elliott_asc wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _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.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| But isn't there textfield for you, where you can specify
| your specific reason?
|
| I mean, I am not sure, if anybody ever reads those, but
| you I would not have to lie this way.
| fennecfoxen wrote:
| Product Not As Described. (It was described as the actual
| product, not as a counterfeit.)
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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."
| thathndude wrote:
| 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.
| mqus wrote:
| If you order that much then Amazon has little reason to loose
| you as a customer, so of course they will not bother you.
| hrktb wrote:
| 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.
| Natsu wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Well, some common sense is needed. Anything at too-good-to-
| be-true prices are nearly always a scam, for example.
|
| I buy about everything from Amazon, since the beginning,
| and have had nearly zero issues. A screw-up now and then is
| forgivable.
| Natsu wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Of course Amazon needs to do better. But the point
| remains - to-good-to-be-true prices should always arouse
| suspicions, as they are a tell for scams.
| Natsu wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| amelius wrote:
| I have to agree with damaged books. It seems Amazon is using
| lower quality packaging material today than they did a few
| years ago.
| massysett wrote:
| 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.
| jurassic wrote:
| 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.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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.
| polack wrote:
| 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.
| cool-RR wrote:
| Maybe people just like to complain about anything that
| doesn't meet their impossible standards.
| aristophenes wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| dboreham wrote:
| 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.
| felixfbecker wrote:
| 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.
| macintux wrote:
| > 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.
| CRConrad wrote:
| > 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?
| macintux wrote:
| 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.
| avianlyric wrote:
| 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
| Semaphor wrote:
| 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.
| verall wrote:
| 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.
| joeberon wrote:
| The dirty book thing is so weird, often covered in some weird
| kind of glue-like "stuff"...
| toss1 wrote:
| 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)
| _xerces_ wrote:
| A box? You must be a favorite, premier customer! Most of my
| stuff comes in a flimsy paper bag these days.
| hermitsings wrote:
| "The most customer-centric company on Earth"
| 02020202 wrote:
| the only way to asses anything is when things are not working
| well. then you'll see if it was all just a house of cards.
| pjmanroe wrote:
| 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.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| >I did buy a 4TB external drive from Wish.com
|
| I, too, like living dangerously, but only to a certain extent.
| thekyle wrote:
| 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.
| iamgopal wrote:
| Amazon is for USD items, not KUSD items.
| huitzitziltzin wrote:
| No one else read this headline as "Sony AI", rather than "Sony
| A1"?? I was excited to learn about this product but it's just
| some camera ??
| Firehawke wrote:
| 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.
|
| Because it most certainly will, sooner or later.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I have an always recording CCTV camera outside my door. I just
| unbox it in view of that camera, and then show the goods to the
| camera in detail.
|
| Then any claims of missing/wrong/damaged goods go through
| smoothly.
|
| Most security cameras don't have autofocus, so showing closeups
| of scratches doesn't work...
| sneak wrote:
| This isn't going to help with the cc dispute, or with Amazon.
| They're going to decide without any information from you.
| kristopolous wrote:
| You can also get a nice YouTube channel out of it as well
| anti-nazi wrote:
| nazis refusing to refund other nazis? i am all for it
| lower100 wrote:
| I have the best online shopping experiences with merchants that
| are primarily B2B but also allow private customers on the side.
|
| Bonus points if they have a proven billing system that still runs
| on AS/400 and produces nice invoices in Courier font sent by
| physical mail.
|
| I either buy at these merchants or offline.
| anonu wrote:
| 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.
| kevingadd wrote:
| 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?
| morpheos137 wrote:
| I don't know if it happened in this case but very high value
| items like this should be sent via "registered mail."
| avalys wrote:
| How does Amazon protect itself against unscrupulous buyers
| ordering $7k cameras and then claiming they received an empty
| box?
| justahuman74 wrote:
| Next week: Opt-out for the cameras on amazon devices to inspect
| your package opening process and send it for internal review.
|
| Data sent over neighbors wifi via another amazon device
| zorpner wrote:
| One prong of an approach would be to maintain a reputation that
| didn't make this seem instantly plausible.
| sumedh wrote:
| Check the package weight when its shipped.
| herpderperator wrote:
| You can ship dirt that weighs the right amount. It's happened
| before. [0]
|
| [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/22-year-old-mud-filled-
| boxes...
| cbmuser wrote:
| Well, it was pretty clear in this case as even UPS confirmed
| the package was way too light to actually contain the TV.
| gnicholas wrote:
| TV? This was an order for a mirrorless digital camera.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| I mean, their Sony OLED TV series is literally called the
| A8, so I'd also guess an A1 is a TV
| a012 wrote:
| 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.
| Jiocus wrote:
| The Sony Alpha (a) camera line was introduced in 2006.
| Predecessors to the Sony a1 mirrorless camera includes
| the Sony a9 and a7 (no a8 though).
|
| The TV you speak of belongs to a literal latin _A_ line
| of products.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Fair enough, though TVs don't weight 3 lbs!
|
| 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.
| _-o-_ wrote:
| > Fstoppers is an online community aimed at educating and
| inspiring photographers, videographers, and creative
| professionals.
|
| Their regulars are bound to know what Sony A1 is, but it
| sure can be confusing for new readers.
| Namidairo wrote:
| Slightly off topic, but Sony do have pretty confusing
| naming schema, externally.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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".
| matsemann wrote:
| By stopping it from happenings o often. Since they have no
| control and it clearly happens all the time, it's on them.
|
| It's such a common scam to buy stuff and return an empty box.
| If they've deemed it not worth the cost to check returns it's
| again on them.
|
| But now those returning empty boxes will probably add rocks to
| match the weight or so.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The USPS shipped weight of the package was less than the weight
| of the camera. There actually was evidence.
| paxys wrote:
| It was in this story, but there have been cases of people
| shipping rocks or sand to match the product weight.
| KirillPanov wrote:
| Dry ice is even better. No evidence.
| totalZero wrote:
| ....except for the Class 9 DOT hazard warning label on
| the outside of the box.
| boomlinde wrote:
| By packing the box with the sold item they can rule out error
| on their part.
| cunidev wrote:
| > 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 >300EUR purchase I make
| online. Otherwise, refund without "video evidence" becomes
| impossible for the majority of platforms.
| jtbayly wrote:
| I don't understand why video "evidence" which is easily faked,
| makes an ounce of difference.
|
| Open a package, empty it, tape it up, and then film yourself
| opening an empty package.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| 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.
| metaphor wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/N-boHgrQ6QQ?t=102
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| kmonsen wrote:
| If you buy on the Amazon.com website it's on Amazon to deliver
| your order and provide a good shipping experience.
| herpderperator wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| herpderperator wrote:
| 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.
|
| If I misinterpreted the comment, then my mistake.
| kmonsen wrote:
| We agree when it sends like we disagree, and I guess both
| could have worded it clearer.
|
| I state what I as a consumer expect when shopping.
|
| You state what is actually happening today.
|
| I think we both agree with both points.
| a3n wrote:
| 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.
| function_seven wrote:
| 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.
| IshKebab wrote:
| 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 PS5!" 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.
| [deleted]
| rkalla wrote:
| 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.
| jeeva357 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Vox media Podcast How amazon became giant and dominates the
| Indstry https://www.vox.com/land-of-the-giants-podcast
| luke2m wrote:
| At first
| metaphor wrote:
| 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"?
|
| https://www.ups.com/track?loc=en_US&tracknum=1Z9X26374278728...
| [deleted]
| cbmuser wrote:
| > 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.
| thedufer wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| 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.
| thedufer wrote:
| 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.
| kube-system wrote:
| > (a 2-pound empty box? c'mon)
|
| 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.
|
| The math checks out.
| sneak wrote:
| They're just following the script.
| robk wrote:
| This is not trustworthy. They dont really confirm at all. I've
| had them be off with label weight by multiple pounds before.
| matsemann wrote:
| 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.
| suifbwish wrote:
| 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.
| dalbasal wrote:
| 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.
| gpvos wrote:
| You may be right, but this is the strongest indictment of
| business and capitalism that I've read in a long time.
| aristophenes wrote:
| 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.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > Thus is life.
|
| 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.
| aristophenes wrote:
| 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.
| Shacklz wrote:
| > 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _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.
| dalbasal wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > 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.
| dalbasal wrote:
| 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.
| Fargren wrote:
| I understand this is hyperbole, but people do a lot worse
| things than automated fraud, if we are looking for reason
| to send someone to hell...
| mikro2nd wrote:
| 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.
| plank_time wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Contracts require consideration - as long as they didn't
| charge you they don't have to fulfill their end of the
| contract.
| CPLX wrote:
| That's wildly incorrect.
|
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| 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).
| matsemann wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_(law)
| [deleted]
| gruez wrote:
| No?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract#Consideration
|
| >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.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Seems to me that this would be true mostly the other way. $7k
| is a gigantic amount of money, most people would not let that
| slide.
| KyleJune wrote:
| 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.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| 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.
| long11l wrote:
| Spam Twitter within reason
|
| I had a 2 week contract. They cut it should. I went on a bender
| and low and before the CEO wants it take ln care of.
|
| I made a compromise and cut off a week but added a 500 "don't be
| a dick fee
|
| Hi @nfty-labs
| [deleted]
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| 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)
| joelbondurant wrote:
| Typical Bezos.
| fnord77 wrote:
| I had two expensive cameras stolen in transit - Amazon replaced
| both.
| williesleg wrote:
| Amazon diversity has done the needful. Expect them to go the same
| way as the rest of the companies invaded by foreign agressors.
| vishnugupta wrote:
| 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.
| ixacto wrote:
| 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.
| blzaugg wrote:
| > differently-housed
|
| Can you explain what you mean?
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| I think he means person without a home.
| [deleted]
| beezischillin wrote:
| 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!
| dstaley wrote:
| 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.
| techdragon wrote:
| 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".
| adimitrov wrote:
| 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.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| You don't have the right to expect company to do business
| with you. Shop elsewhere or start your own.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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...
| Dayshine wrote:
| So, say you live in a rural area but have one local
| supermarket (5-10 mins away), and the next supermarket is
| 30-45 minutes away.
|
| You keep finding the food you're buying is mouldy so you
| complain/return it.
|
| They ban you.
|
| So, now you need to spend significantly more money and time
| on petrol and driving in order to do you weekly shop.
|
| That's OK?
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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?
| trulyme wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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?
| crooked-v wrote:
| 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.
| subhro wrote:
| 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.
| therein wrote:
| This happened to me as well.
|
| I was sent a A7sII box with a ziploc bag with the exact amount of
| cat litter to make the box as heavy as it should be.
|
| I had sent Amazon photos back when this happened. They refunded
| me no problem. But I think they wouldn't do it today.
| gsich wrote:
| 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.
| dawnerd wrote:
| 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.
| sneak wrote:
| Bringing a civil suit against Amazon will cost you several
| multiples of $7k in legal fees.
| ant6n wrote:
| Isn't it a small claims court case?
| yumraj wrote:
| This is why I never buy certain kind of stuff at Amazon, or at
| least check others first.
|
| Camera and so on, check B&H first.
|
| Other electronics, check Best Buy first.
|
| TV, check Costco, they have 7 year warranty and great prices.
|
| Food items, check Walmart first and maybe Target.
|
| Home improvement stuff, check Home Depot.
|
| N95 masks, never buy on Amazon, you never know what you'll get,
| check office stores and Home Depot first.
|
| And so on...
| marban wrote:
| 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 (Fan Sheng ].
| glandium wrote:
| 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.
| marban wrote:
| When did they make the switch? I've mostly had Yamato same-
| day in Tokyo or remote areas like Okinawa.
| numpad0 wrote:
| They didn't switch completely, but started using "Delivery
| Provider" as baseload bearer and use Japan Post/Yamato when
| makes sense.
| aikinai wrote:
| 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.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| 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.
| missedthecue wrote:
| It really does surprise me how many people online claim have
| trouble with them. My experience has been essentially entirely
| positive as well.
| marban wrote:
| 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...)
| tazjin wrote:
| 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.
| wang_li wrote:
| 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.
| sleepy_keita wrote:
| I've never had a problem with returning stuff in JP (granted
| all of the stuff I returned were DOA so...)
| donkeyd wrote:
| > Obviously b/c you more or less do not return stuff in JP
|
| Not so obvious to me. Could you elaborate on what you mean
| here, sounds intriguing.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Can't back up with data other than with random howto
| articles, but _you just don 't return_ items in Japan without
| a "valid" cause like product defects.
| 55555 wrote:
| He appears to reference a Japanese cultural principle called
| Fan Sheng 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.
| bjeds wrote:
| 15k orders over 20 years is on average 2 per day or 750 per
| year. Is that a typo?
| marban wrote:
| No, it's correct.
| Aachen wrote:
| 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?
| marban wrote:
| 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.
| goodpoint wrote:
| It still does not explain the amount of orders, by far.
| numpad0 wrote:
| > 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.
| ruph123 wrote:
| 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).
|
| *Exceptions are software, digital products, etc.
| kevindong wrote:
| 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.).
|
| Amazon: 30 days https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/displ
| ay.html?nodeId=...
|
| Walmart: 90 days https://www.walmart.com/cp/returns/1231920
|
| Target: 90 days: https://help.target.com/help/subcategoryarti
| cle?childcat=Ret...
| ruph123 wrote:
| 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.
|
| E.g.: https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-
| shoppers...
| marban wrote:
| 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.).
| ohmaigad wrote:
| You don't have to have a reason to return online order
| within 14 days.
| marban wrote:
| It makes a difference as to who's responsible for return
| fees.
| donkeyd wrote:
| 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.
| ohmaigad wrote:
| If the shop is giving you hard time report them to the
| necessary authority and never shop there again.
| ruph123 wrote:
| 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.
| donkeyd wrote:
| This is a thing, at least in the Netherlands. Especially
| if you order from smaller shops. I hardly ever do that,
| but it really does happen.
| ruph123 wrote:
| 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.
| ageitgey wrote:
| 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.
| sporedro wrote:
| 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.
| ptero wrote:
| 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.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| > B&H is my go-to place
|
| I will also throw in a vote for B&H.
|
| 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.
| simonsarris wrote:
| 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!)
| wyager wrote:
| 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.
| procombo wrote:
| 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.
| jschwartzi wrote:
| I wouldn't buy anything I need to trust on Amazon.
| BostonEnginerd wrote:
| The rule in our house is to not order anything that goes in
| or on our bodies from Amazon.
| thehours wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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?
| salamandersauce wrote:
| 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.
| sparc24 wrote:
| 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.
| felixfbecker wrote:
| 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, ...).
| dhosek wrote:
| Except that with inventory commingling, you might think
| you're ordering from amazon (non-marketplace) and get a
| third-party seller's crap instead.
| adrr wrote:
| 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.
| nebulous1 wrote:
| 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.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume it must be location-dependent.
|
| 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.
| ageitgey wrote:
| 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.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 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.
| ratww wrote:
| 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.
| jtbayly wrote:
| Sweetwater is nothing like Amazon's customer support.
|
| You can't call Amazon and ask them what equipment you
| need to accomplish a task. Among many other
| differences...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| 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 EUR, any photo dealer: 1800
| EUR
|
| Random high-end lens: Amazon: 2500 EUR, photo dealer:
| 2000 EUR
|
| Random microphone: Amazon: 275 EUR, A/V distributor: 220
| EUR
|
| Studio microphone: Amazon: <not authorized to sell>, A/V
| distributor: 600 EUR
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| I haven't really found Amazon to be consistently more
| expensive or slower, but yes I normally order that kind
| of thing from B&H (or Adorama).
| FpUser wrote:
| Different here in Canada. For example particular lens I
| am looking for is $1,900 on Amazon and $2,200 from other
| retailers.
| free652 wrote:
| anytime I order anything, but amazon the package takes 3
| to 5 days at minimum. Amazon is 1 day most of the time.
| biztos wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| yreg wrote:
| Didn't you dispute it at PayPal/your CC company/your bank?
|
| Or were you afraid of getting banned from Amazon?
| ageitgey wrote:
| 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.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| 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.
| bfdm wrote:
| 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.
| s_fischer wrote:
| 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.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| 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.
|
| (not expensive items, though)
| dboreham wrote:
| 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.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| 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.
| oort-cloud9 wrote:
| They did refund you. And you should not complain because it
| takes them time to verify things It could be the shoppers fault
| or the vendor's fault. This kind of verification is not a
| simple affair, and you are not the only one of their customers.
| Next time buy expensive items from BH and open the box in the
| presence of the mailman. Also BH has PayBoo credit card that
| pays the sales tax. I just bought from them Canon R5 and 2 RF
| lenses, and the huge tax was taken care of by PayBoo.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| 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.
| darksaints wrote:
| 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.
| fortran77 wrote:
| 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| 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.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > 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.
| kennywinker wrote:
| 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
| jfrunyon wrote:
| 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.
| rantwasp wrote:
| 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.
|
| issue a chargeback and move on.
| sbarre wrote:
| As others have also said, doing a chargeback risks Amazon
| closing your account permanently.
|
| So if you're prepared to take that risk and never buy from
| Amazon again, sure.. go for it..
|
| But given the centralization of vendors this can have
| bigger downsides than upside.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| 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"?
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| 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.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| 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.nyt
| imes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...]. I
| can't confirm whether that happens when you chargeback,
| though.
| ender341341 wrote:
| 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.
| rantwasp wrote:
| at what point do you call it a bad experience and just
| walk away?
| pnutjam wrote:
| 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.
| jfrunyon wrote:
| I am fairly sure that you actually _can_ dispute partial
| amounts with your issuer.
| pnutjam wrote:
| Probably, but the whole thing took about 4 months to
| shake out, and it was only $3.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| 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.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Declined over the decades? Decades?
| Hemospectrum wrote:
| The company is over twenty years old. What's the problem?
| DSingularity wrote:
| Because I doubt anybody complaining about decline used a
| feature available for two decades and saw decline in it.
| danaris wrote:
| Dunno about anyone else here, but I've definitely been
| using Amazon since the late '90s when it was primarily
| for buying books.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| <conspicuously defensive voice> Two is plural!
| jfrunyon wrote:
| 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.
| Syzygies wrote:
| 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.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| 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.
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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.
| bjornjajayaja wrote:
| 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!
| gpm wrote:
| 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.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| 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).
| ghaff wrote:
| Someone makes money on insurance. So, for a large company,
| self-insuring basically lets them save on what would
| otherwise be someone else's profit.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 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.)
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| an_opabinia wrote:
| 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.
| dingosity wrote:
| Meh. I ordered over $6k from amazon in 2017 and in 2018 they
| stiffed me on a $69 part. I think this algorithm is probably
| "mostly true," but there are corner-cases where they just
| mess up and don't refund small lost purchases from people who
| buy a lot of stuff.
| chakhs wrote:
| 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.
| timwaagh wrote:
| Thanks for explaining how refunds work on Amazon. Ive been
| using them a lot lately
| ncfausti wrote:
| 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?
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > 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.
| tlogan wrote:
| Don't forget there is also this:
| https://www.theretailequation.com/
|
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| It's a lot better for those with the highest LTV's (ie, the
| richest), that's for sure!
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > at least two decades of conditioning
|
| I'd say three centuries, but who's counting ...
|
| (or whenever printing got cheap enough to use for
| advertising)
| mancerayder wrote:
| 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.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| > 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.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| At the end of the day your remedy is to sue someone.
| Everything else is a courtesy shortcut.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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.
| asimpletune wrote:
| To me about how these infractions can be enforced without
| suing though?
| chongli wrote:
| 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.
| miracle2k wrote:
| I don't see regulation being the issue here.
|
| 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.
| macintux wrote:
| You can't prove a negative. There's effectively no way
| for a customer to prove a package wasn't delivered.
|
| Update: I should be clear, the _shipper_ can prove it.
| The customer themselves can 't without the shipper's
| acquiescence.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| You report them to the relevant regulatory body.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Most states' Attorneys General offices have Consumer
| Protection branches, as well.
| mlyle wrote:
| If they make you sue when the case is clear-cut, good
| regulatory regimes charge punitive damages to discourage
| the customer-hostile behavior.
| r00fus wrote:
| 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?
| cortesoft wrote:
| 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.
| franga2000 wrote:
| 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.
| jquery wrote:
| You can purchase package insurance if you're willing to
| go that far.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| So you are saying all deliveries need to require
| signatures?
| [deleted]
| birdyrooster wrote:
| 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?
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.)
| sundvor wrote:
| 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.
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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.
| musingsole wrote:
| 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.
| cletus wrote:
| 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.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| 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
| ineedasername wrote:
| _Because my LTV was really high._
|
| 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.
| MrRadar wrote:
| 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).
| ineedasername wrote:
| 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.
| chmod775 wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| "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.
| jquery wrote:
| 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.
| tunesmith wrote:
| I have a vague sense this overlooks inelastic demand and
| living wage somehow but I can't put it into words.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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.
| vl wrote:
| It worked as it should have been - situation got resolved
| and on top of that Amazon got reputational damage.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Do you know this because you work on the model?
| m0dest wrote:
| That sounds like an unanswerable question.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Should be a yes or no answer? Either you worked on the
| algorithm or you didn't.
|
| I asked the question because they spoke with the
| assurance of an insider... so I wondered if they worked
| on it.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| 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.
| zzleeper wrote:
| 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).
| tlogan wrote:
| 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).
|
| It is very simple.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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.
| eeegnu wrote:
| > 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.
| adventured wrote:
| 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).
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| 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.
| jquery wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| Well said. And "This is why we can't have nice things"
| sums up this whole thread pretty neatly.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| If their refund policy was literally "accepting returns
| on anything for any reason" how is it "hacking" to return
| a laptop after a year?
| blihp wrote:
| 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?
| secabeen wrote:
| 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.
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| ycombobreaker wrote:
| 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.
| tlogan wrote:
| 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.
| mlyle wrote:
| 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?
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 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.
| pinkfairy10 wrote:
| That is why you buy things with a credit card. I would have
| disputed the charged right away. Did you try this?
| nigerian1981 wrote:
| 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.
| rkalla wrote:
| 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.)
| FpUser wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| 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.
| nigerian1981 wrote:
| That's a good point. I hadn't really considered that.
| menzoic wrote:
| Backup everything elsewhere regularly
| https://zapier.com/apps/dropbox/integrations/google-drive
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You'd want to use frequent Google Takeout for backups of
| all of your data.
| dsomers wrote:
| All the more reason to not use these companies for anything
| that's even moderately important.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| 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?
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| malka wrote:
| That's one of the reasons I degoogled my life. I want to be
| able to tell Google to go screw itself in such events
| chrisseaton wrote:
| A problem with this is that it's a nuclear option. Companies
| you use it against may decline to trade with you again. That
| may be a problem or not.
| JCharante wrote:
| 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.
| ericmay wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Monopolization Defined"
|
| _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._
|
| https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-
| guidance/guide-a...
|
| What you may think has little relation to governing
| regulatory law.
| ericmay wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| "Centralisation" in the context used is synonymous with
| monopolisation.
| ericmay wrote:
| Not in the context of my comment which you replied to.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| 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.
| ericmay wrote:
| 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.
| harimau777 wrote:
| I think that it varies.
|
| 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/
| ericmay wrote:
| Sure, kind of.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| People clearly differ.
|
| 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.
| Peaches4Rent wrote:
| You'd just create a new account for Amazon.
|
| But what about your gmail? You'll lose all access to your
| email
| ericmay wrote:
| Right but you wouldn't be able to make the claim that the
| market is centralized based on these factors.
| sokoloff wrote:
| 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.
| ericmay wrote:
| Centralized in what way?
| SN76477 wrote:
| Why not charge it back with your bank?
| dnautics wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway45209 wrote:
| How about bhphotovideo?
| protomyth wrote:
| We've had good experiences with them. They even have
| Educational pricing and PO acceptance. They are our number
| two behind cdwg.
| Finnucane wrote:
| 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.
| beezle wrote:
| 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.
|
| edit: grammar
| Freestyler_3 wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I don't understand that. The 'than I really have to' bit, is
| Amazon now so entrenched that you can't get around them
| anymore?
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| Symbiote wrote:
| 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.
| lightcatcher wrote:
| 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.
| rvba wrote:
| It is sad to read that people want a monopoly for a minor
| convenience.
|
| Same with steam (that takes a big money cut and their
| buggy launcher is awful)
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| ectopod wrote:
| > finding a book that wasn't in stock at your local store
| was a massive hassle and could take months.
|
| Or you could just ask your local store to order it for
| you and you would have it in a week. It's not like this
| was an unusual situation.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| beezle wrote:
| I would be fine ordering from a local store and waiting
| but not if they are going to charge me full price as if
| they had to keep stock on the shelves.
| ectopod wrote:
| Back in the day (round these parts anyway) books were
| always full price [1].
|
| Nowadays, I'm not going to pay full price to wait for a
| week either, but there are alternatives to Amazon.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement
| yosito wrote:
| 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.
| Freestyler_3 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > 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)
| ______- wrote:
| 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.
| itsbits wrote:
| 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.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| For large purchases you really need to use an escrow service.
| aari711 wrote:
| hello
| FpUser wrote:
| 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.
| Kiro wrote:
| 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.
| petee wrote:
| 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?
| Kiro wrote:
| Obviously not by judging by the replies. People are not
| upvoting that comment because they can relate, but because
| they love to hate on big companies.
| craftoman wrote:
| 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.
| cerved wrote:
| I always record unboxing anything I buy online, it's a convenient
| way of proof of something is missing out damaged
| rkk3 wrote:
| 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.
| wyattpeak wrote:
| > 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.
| rkk3 wrote:
| > 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.
| wyattpeak wrote:
| I think it's an extremely generous assumption towards
| Amazon that all they did was fail to refund "in the first
| customer support call".
|
| I don't know about you, but I've never filed a police
| report because someone made me call twice to resolve
| something.
| rkk3 wrote:
| 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.
| wyattpeak wrote:
| Fair enough, I'm sorry to have implied otherwise.
|
| 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.
|
| Edit: cooled it a little
| cerved wrote:
| tbf I mostly do it for EBay type stuff
| bartvk wrote:
| 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.
| texaswhizzle wrote:
| 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.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I stopped buying anything over $200 from Amazon for this reason.
| Just not worth it. Amazon wants to sell cheap Chinese junk and
| nothing more.
| diogenescynic wrote:
| 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).
| Vake93 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| nikanj wrote:
| 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
| amatecha wrote:
| "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.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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."
| bootlooped wrote:
| 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.
| CRConrad wrote:
| Not really. Doesn't matter if the TV breaks in the store's
| front or back parking lot, it's still the store's parking
| lot.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| 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.
| neiman wrote:
| 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.
| detaro wrote:
| 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.
| konha wrote:
| 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.
| dalai wrote:
| 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.
| rkachowski wrote:
| 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.
| detaro wrote:
| Have you explicitly selected delivery to a Packstation
| through their locker picker, not just put the Packstation
| address in as a normal shipping address?
| toper-centage wrote:
| 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.
| heckerhut wrote:
| Lol, so true.
| fooblat wrote:
| This drove me crazy when I lived in Berlin.
|
| 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.
|
| edit: typos
| colonwqbang wrote:
| 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.
| carstenhag wrote:
| You can register at ups (even in Germany) and also get email
| similar to dhl's where you can have the package rerouted
| letitbeirie wrote:
| > "special" part of Berlin
|
| A few years ago this could have described half of Mitte tbh
| odiroot wrote:
| 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).
| wayoutthere wrote:
| 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.
| letitbeirie wrote:
| > retail stores don't have the selection or availability that
| Amazon does
|
| Largely the same situation in Germany, except stores in the
| US are much more likely to be open past 18:00.
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://fstoppers.com/news/amazon-refused-
| refund-7000-after-..., which points to this.
| harryvederci wrote:
| Outrageous company does something outrageous. The people respond
| in outrage.
| villgax wrote:
| 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
| thread_id wrote:
| 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.
| odnes wrote:
| 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 >PS10,000 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| confiq wrote:
| > 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?
| odnes wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| amatecha wrote:
| 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...
| odnes wrote:
| 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.
| longwave wrote:
| 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.
| texaswhizzle wrote:
| I've never been asked to print a barcode and put it in the
| box. I just returned a $300 item last week, and all they
| wanted me to do was ship it back.
|
| This is also true for Amazon business purchases. I have
| returned items around $600 and have never been asked to put a
| code in the box.
|
| But I've never returned anything over $1,000.
| muststopmyths wrote:
| Same. I return stuff frequently and they stopped the
| barcode-in-the-box practice a couple of years (at least)
| ago.
|
| In the USA FWIW. And no super expensive stuff.
| draw_down wrote:
| I can't relate to people that have never had a problem with
| Amazon. Years back I had a string of 3 or 4 purchases that I
| would hear nothing about, until they would just refund me one day
| without ever sending the item. I also bought an air conditioner
| right before a heat wave and they just never shipped it. (I live
| in a west coast city, not a place that's hard to ship to.) I was
| done after that.
|
| Amazon just isn't worth dealing with. You can buy it from someone
| else.
| cgtyoder wrote:
| 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.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| 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?
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| 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.
| dingosity wrote:
| 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.
| ck2 wrote:
| 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.
| mdoms wrote:
| Stop giving Amazon money.
| vixen99 wrote:
| 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.
| strenholme wrote:
| 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.
| garmaine wrote:
| > 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.
| Tabular-Iceberg wrote:
| I consider Amazon a malicious website. Just take the books being
| deleted off of peoples' Kindles.
| marcodiego wrote:
| I remember when PS3 was launched, some vendors announced "PS3
| BOX", put the price around 10% lower than the real price and sent
| only the box.
| aembleton wrote:
| Same thing happened with the original Xbox. Xbox box were being
| sold on ebay.
| hammock wrote:
| Credit card chargeback...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| 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.
| celeritascelery wrote:
| But the shipper (UPS) had a record of the package weighing only
| 2 pounds. That is hard evidence that the device was not present
| when shipped.
| LeCow wrote:
| And that's why they won their fraud dispute...
|
| There will always be a generic and broad policy first. Then
| it will - and did - get resolved on further investigation.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| 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.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| >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.
| ArtDev wrote:
| As Amazon's prices have risen, the minimum order for free
| shipping on other companies has lowered.
|
| For human rights reasons, I am avoiding Amazon unless the price
| is clearly much better. The funny thing is, it usually isn't
| (except for books).
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