Another fun “this decision is final” happened for me with Amazon recently.
We ordered two pairs of Beats. One was ordered by me, the other by my spouse. We’d discussed the purchase but we weren’t clear on who was actually going to order. Received both via Prime.
I setup a return. We return the item which was received on her Order ID against my return.
Amazon tells us we’ve returned a fraudulent item because the Serial # do not match. Multiple emails (5+) back and forth with Customer Service to explain fall on deaf ears. We give them both Order IDs. We ask for ANY option to solve this mess. We’re told repeatedly that this is their policy, their decision is final, go away.
Amazon won’t even send us the headphones back so we can send the correct ones — those have been destroyed.
“To protect our employees and customers, we have disposed the incorrect item that we received as per our policy.”
In a nutshell Amazon stole $250 from us, and is apparently creating tons of e-waste by destroying brand new, unused and perfectly good returns like ours.
I feel for you, but just banish Amazon everything from your life, and convince others to do the same. We lived fine without Amazon before they existed, and we'll live fine without them once they're gone.
I'm on the verge of getting banned
as they've warned me I'm returning too much, and have had enough negative interactions with their support that I'm in a similar boat.
It's been somewhat freeing giving them up. There's plenty of D2C out there we've been neglecting due to AMZs marketplace...
I've tried my hardest to eliminate any Amazon order from my life this year. Whenever I needed books, or a receiver, or a nose trimmer I've made sure to shop at the category leader instead of Amazon. I've resorted to them twice, for weirdo stuff I couldn't readily find anywhere else. Well turns out the weirdo stuff only Amazon carries is crap, and I'm two for two on returns this year with Amazon.
haven't ordered at amazon for many years. and I order a lot online. so, I confirm it is possible without any problem ... provided some IT-literacy. and that's usually why people fail at it. most people are unable to manage their emails or even organize passwords. heck, most people don't even know what an internet browser is ...
Why the fck shouldn't I fight for the rights of my disabled son/grandparents/friend? Just because something does not impact me personally (yet), it's ok to just ignore it? What you are really saying is that you don't want to be bothered by all those pesky plebs out there and that they should be happy with what the status quo deigns to give to them.
Because only roughly 5% understand what it is all about. The rest, roughly 95%, use opportunities like that to show what great justice warriors they are, but failing totally to represent the wishes of the disabled correctly.
I am sure you feel differently regarding your son. But as a person with a disability, I can tell you that this never worked in my family. My mother might be motivated to do all sorts of things, but most of them are not helpful or even subtly counterproductive.
To sum it up: If you speak for someone, you are likely patronizing them.
I'm conscious of that. But my son literally can't speak for himself so if I (or my partner) don't speak in his interest, who will? And while other people with disabilities can speak for themselves better than I could ever hope to, there is a difference between amplifying / supporting their concerns and being patronizing.
The sad reality is that the mainstream does not want to think about the challenges facing disabled people and they are all too happy to simply ignore the (perceived) minority which is directly impacted by them. All these absolute assholes who park on parking spaces for the disabled come to mind. Those people will only ever be convinced if they are not confronted by a broad section of society. It is simply not something that a minority can ever hope to achieve without the explicit support of at least some part of the majority.
Ha; I’d forgotten my experience with LIFX bulbs and Amazon Warehouse Deals back in 2017 when we originally moved to USA, this exact situation happened across 50+ bulbs.
They’d sold a LIFX to Customer A who bought a $0.69 BR30 from Home Depot, substituted into the LIFX packaging and then returned to Amazon, who refunded them, and listed the item on Warehouse Deals.
On that one Amazon CS was also somewhat useless but they did at least refund us.
When it eventually came to a senior leaders attention, Amazon got it sorted out properly. They ended up auditing all their stock in Warehouse Deals for this type of item and discovered widespread fraud. Sounds like they fixed smart bulbs but haven’t fixed GPUs though!
Is a credit card chargeback not possible? You case sounds very strong. If not possible, definitely try small claims court. It will make for a great blog post or Twitter thread.
No kidding. Catch-22, right? Damned if you do, damned if you don't. And if you don't, then Amazon just stole 250 USD from you. Where hell are the regulators on issues like this?
There absolutely needs to be some sort of law preventing companies of a certain size from being able to do this if customers decide to file a charge back.
It's a tough one. A lot of charge backs are fraudulent, so this would open retailers up to more fraud.
The ability to do charge backs will probably disappear in future. When the system was created we didn't have the same ability to authenticate cardholders that we do today and many jurisdictions didn't have small claims courts.
That's fine, it would motivate large companies to develop alternative techniques to mitigate fraud which could benefit smaller as they could implement them.
I'm tired of these giant companies having their cake and eating it too. These companies have structured themselves in such a way that it's win-win for them, and lose-lose for the customers and smaller businesses around them.
> When the system was created we didn't have the same ability to authenticate cardholders that we do today
The problem is that for any of the new security features of cards to drive any of those kinds of changes the old mag-strip style of card authentication has to be deprecated and removed - which is likely not going to happen in the next 20 years.
Visa and Mastercard (and the layers between them and the merchant) have tried pretty hard to apply financial pressure (extra fees) to promote chip-only transactions and it still hasn't stopped mag-stripe from reigning supreme.
We're basically in an IPv4 and IPv6 situation in the payment industry =/
I agree that small claims court is a viable venue for attacking large companies, especially if it's a coordinated effort between many people in many jurisdictions but can a small claims court force a big company to continue to do business with a customer that has conducted a charge back?
You need a country with strong consumer protection laws, such as Australia. In NSW, I’d go straight to the Department of Fair Trading, and they’d fix the issue.
Possibly? We’re in Washington State, but honestly unless it’s literally point-click-done and without a need to drive and appear in a courthouse, it’s just not worth it for $250 (to me).
I expect this has been considered when creating policy at the largest companies — what’s the ease of obtaining recourse for unhappy customers?
What’s additionally interesting is I thought Amazon CS had a degree of goodwill factored into policies based on LTV or some other calculation. We saw zero goodwill here despite having spent >$100k on Amazon.com in the last 5 years.
Both this and the YouTube example seem like bad business; you’re disincentivizing your most ardent users from continuing to tolerate your services. They hadn’t looked at shopping on Walmart or B&H with every purchase previously and now will. They hadn’t considered Twitch or other places to serve video and now will.
People buy beats??? But they are expensive for such poor audio quality…
I don’t understand Amazons destruction policy. I ordered some stuff a few years ago and it never arrived. Amazon replaced the order for me which arrived in 4 days. About 5 months later the original package showed up… I tried to contact Amazon about it and they just said keep it…
Yet when my kindle stopped working after a month they sent a replacement and asked for the old one to be destroyed…
Beats Fit Pro are decent exercise headphones for me. They’re largely immune to sweat and behave like any Apple earphones — easy pairing. They’re also less prone to falling out for my ears than the AirPods Pro.
I once had a very annoying problem with a DHL parcel station (in Germany). at some point I was so fed up that I looked up the names of the C-level management, guessed their email addresses and sent all of them a message. didn't really help much in the end but I got a response and it was internally escalated apparently.
I did similar when I was planning to move. The new place was just a block away from my old address and my ISP told me my new address does not exist. After more than a month of arguing with their customer service people and being told there is nothing they can do, and with time running out for my move date, I got lucky. I somehow found the email address of a vice president at the company. After one thoughtfully crafted and well targeted email, 45 minutes later I had a supervisor and a technician at my house to do a site survey.
I did a similar thing. We had two identical pairs of AirPods. One pair had a bad battery on the right earbud.
I thought those were mine, which had a specific extra warranty purchased from the store (Not Apple's own). Returned those to the store to get it fixed. Turns out they store and check the Device ID and I found out we've switched pods with my SO at some point.
They wanted a "spurious return fee" that was more than the value of the AirPods. I just didn't pay it and they destroyed them.
I'm sure there are plenty of problems at Amazon caused by badly used models, but this problem is probably a lot more to do with hiring X number of drone workers to do Y amount of support work and providing incentives all around to cut corners and solve the most basic 95% of problems as fast and cheap as possible while more-or-less just writing off the failures of the remaining 5% as "the cost of doing business at scale".
Let's say they integrate chatgpt like AI and are able to resolve most cases to customer satisfaction.
But, because of their scale and the number of fake items on the platform I think their number of returns will also increase along with their costs. I'm sure some executive will then try to minimize costs by "fixing" or retiring the AI.
I'll not be surprised if this has already happened in one way or another.
If it's oh so difficult for Amazon to properly handle this function of a business, that is AMAZON'S fucking problem.
Neither the customer nor any other outside entity forced Amazon to construct itself as the operation it is. They very deliberately and actively did that of their lwn volition and over the sustained course of decades.
Back up and revisit just what is and is not a sane perspective here. Poor Amazon can't be expected to deal with all the scammers they created for themselves? But can still rake in the benefits of their scale and insane staff:customer ratio 100x more than any normal shop?
They absolutely CAN deal with their fraud, the same way every other business in the world before them had to, by actually having whatever number of employees it takes to service their number of customers.
They just can't do that and still have 1% of the normal overhead every other businesses has.
Incredible that anyone is even for a second considering the plight of poor Amazon in a case like this.
We ordered two pairs of Beats. One was ordered by me, the other by my spouse. We’d discussed the purchase but we weren’t clear on who was actually going to order. Received both via Prime.
I setup a return. We return the item which was received on her Order ID against my return.
Amazon tells us we’ve returned a fraudulent item because the Serial # do not match. Multiple emails (5+) back and forth with Customer Service to explain fall on deaf ears. We give them both Order IDs. We ask for ANY option to solve this mess. We’re told repeatedly that this is their policy, their decision is final, go away.
Amazon won’t even send us the headphones back so we can send the correct ones — those have been destroyed.
“To protect our employees and customers, we have disposed the incorrect item that we received as per our policy.”
In a nutshell Amazon stole $250 from us, and is apparently creating tons of e-waste by destroying brand new, unused and perfectly good returns like ours.