6 ms·

Banned by Amazon for returning faulty goods

76 points by eginhard 11y ago

merb 11y ago
Actually closing the account is dumb, it would be more fair to just stop the account from buying stuff (still allowing to see videos, etc..). And mostly in the current world I doubt it's useful to block them forever..
icebraining 11y ago
Sounds doubtful to me that under EU law, a company can simply deny access to funds in a gift card, even if it's not actual money. Sounds like something a small claims court should be able to resolve, has anyone tried it?
- tallanvor 11y ago
  I don't think that they could legally do that in many US states either - many states have laws regarding how long gift cards have be accepted, and some never allow balances to expire.
- dazc 11y ago
  > Sounds like something a small claims court should be able to resolve... Not worth the hassle unless the balance was more than a few hundred quid or purely out of principal. https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money/court-fees https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money/court-fees Just bear in mind there is the time of preparing your claim and a hearing fee to pay also.
- SyneRyder 11y ago
  I don't know about EU law, but in Australia we just had an electronics company (Dick Smith) go into administration and refused to honour all gift cards, even though they continued selling gift cards while they were searching for an administrator: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/dick-smiths-worthless-gift-card-sale/news-story/4cfea6656265f0936fbdf4b1d847ecd1 http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/dick-smiths-w... It seems that while it's a slimy thing to do, it's apparently legal. Gift cards aren't money.
  - roel_v 11y ago
    A company in bankruptcy is completely different from one in normal operation. Accepting gift cards during bankruptcy proceedings is against the law, even.
- beejiu 11y ago
  The article mentions a case where Amazon Prime membership wasn't refunded. The Amazon Prime terms state that it would be refunded on termination. However, it also has the following term: > However, we will not give any refund for termination related to conduct that we determine, in our discretion, violates these Terms or any applicable law, involves fraud or misuse of the Prime membership, or is harmful to our interests or another user. IANAL, but would that not constitute an unfair contract term under UK law?
  - joesmo 11y ago
    Prime memberships are not refunded upon termination.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
cm2187 11y ago
And it depends what they buy. A 5-10% return rate for hard drives isn't unreasonable.
- IshKebab 11y ago
  Within 30 days? Yes it is.
  - cm2187 11y ago
    DOA are very frequent with hard drives, particularly WD in my experience.
    - roel_v 11y ago
      Are you claiming here it is normal that one out of every 10 WD hard disks sold are defective by the time they reach the customer? That's a very bold and frankly ridiculous sounding claim.
      - covercash 11y ago
        Backblaze does a thorough hard drive reliability report, here's their latest: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-201...
        deelowe 11y ago
        Those stats quote AFR not IMR. The OP was talking about infant mortality.
        cm2187 11y ago
        For the avoidance of doubt, I count as infant mortality when a new hard drive would drop from a hardware RAID array during initial construction of the array (we are talking about NAS drives). Not just "the drive will not start".
1293712 11y ago
Books shipped by Amazon in Europe often have defects to the point that I suspected that Amazon has a deal with publishing houses to sell B-quality. I've had slight water damage, individual pages printed in light gray instead of black, scratched DVDs and so on. I'd estimate that 30% of Amazon deliveries had some defect that would warrant a return.
- nextos 11y ago
  That's also my experience. Horrible quality from some major publishers they sell.
Mithaldu 11y ago
Inconsequential fluff piece. Complaining, unverifiable claims, no mention of lawyer.
- DanBC 11y ago
  It's England. Lawyers are a measure of last resort here, not a first response.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    He's dealing with Amazon, an american company. They won't listen to anything else. Heck, according to the article they've explicitly said they won't listen to anything else since they've told him not to contact their support. Edit: Turns out the real content of the closure message is available online: http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/amazoncom-seattle-washington-c93533.html http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/amazoncom-seattle-... It includes the following line: "If you require additional assistance, or have any concerns, feel free to contact us directly at account-appeals@amazon.com." This was conveniently left out of the story, and there is also no mention of his appeal made in the article.
    - SixSigma 11y ago
      He's dealing with Amazon Europe Core SARL, and Amazon EU SARL which are not American companies. Their addresses are both: 5 Rue Plaetis, L-2338, Luxembourg.
      - Mithaldu 11y ago
        Their registered adresses don't matter when their policies are dictated by the american head company. They're not somehow magically free to make 100% their own decisions just because they're in another country.
        nolok 11y ago
        Their registered addresses matter because it dictates which laws they obey to.
jasonkester 11y ago
Seems entirely reasonable to shut off a customer like this. It makes sense for Amazon to eat losses in returns, since the goodwill it generates offsets the a comparatively tiny losses it has to eat. But at some point you have to draw a line with obviously abusive customers. 37 returns in 3 years in not something that happens to a regular unlucky guy. It's the pattern you see in the guy who buys the 50" plasma screen a week before the Superbowl then returns it the day after. It's a guy you don't want as your customer.
- 1293712 11y ago
  Have you actually used Amazon in Europe?
  - samastur 11y ago
    Yes, regularly. Never had to return a thing.
- anon1385 11y ago
  There are categories of products on Amazon where the majority of the listings are counterfeit products. One could easily face returning a product 3 or four times before finding a listing that is what it claims to be (or before giving up and finding a retailer that isn't trying to defraud you). Examples include oral-b toothbrush heads and "genuine" apple laptop batteries.
  - dazc 11y ago
    Are these sold by amazon or marketplace sellers?
    - anon1385 11y ago
      >Dispatched from and sold by Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-TriZone-Electric-Toothbrush-Replacement/dp/B007WSAB1Q/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-TriZone-Electric-Toothbrush-R... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-Precision-Clean-Toothbrush-Replacement/dp/B003U9V7NM/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-Precision-Clean-Toothbrush-Re... See the various reviews about them coming apart and cutting people in the mouth. Being able to scrape off the logo with a fingernail is the usual giveaway.
happywolf 11y ago
Amazon doesn't have the best PR lately. A few months ago it was in the news on the harsh working condition, and now it is shutting down customer accounts. Most likely Amazon has its own reason, but the information so far doesn't shed any light on if the customer has indeed abused the system.
- dazc 11y ago
  Also there is a campaign against amazon in the UK. Politically motivated in the case of the guardian and some other reason (maybe 'top gear' or a general fear of future competition) from the bbc.
jinushaun 11y ago
I've encountered so many defective or questionable products on Amazon lately. I basically have no trust what I receive any more. I even had issues returning items. I've started buying directly from companies, or offline in real stores more often.
- glup 11y ago
  Same here (Prime customer for the last 6 years). Their drop-down menu for the reason for a return doesn't have an option for "is complete crap, but couldn't tell from the reviews because of all the Vine Voice and company shrills." I end up paying the shipping back, when I could almost always return the equivalent item to a brick-and-mortar store without a charge. It seems to me that there are certain kinds of items where, like toasters and countertop dishwashers, where Amazon has a dozen lazily branded versions of the same (low quality, guaranteed to fail in a year) OEM product, no mid-range, and then 1-3 high-end ones for 5* the price of the low quality tier.
  - rhexs 11y ago
    Thank you. I've e-mailed support/Jeff asking for a way to disable Vine Voice reviews from showing up, but no dice yet. Most of the Amazon reviews already game the system trying to get as many upvotes as possible (the latest trend is posting some 10 page meaningless "comparison" of X product and Y,Z,T competitors), but Vine Voice is even worse. Have yet to see anything under 4 stars.
  - JohnTHaller 11y ago
    I'd like a way to report items I don't buy as bogus/fake/spam to help eliminate all this noise: https://twitter.com/JohnTHaller/status/648883968201355264 https://twitter.com/JohnTHaller/status/648883968201355264
- camel_gopher 11y ago
  Me too, I bought a $1k cycling trainer that turned out to be defective. Bought my replacement directly from the manufacturer. After returning that, I got a warning email from Amazon telling me to read the return policy. I think I was close to being banned. I've also bought a number of items that turned out to be defective on arrival. Returned all of those.
BogusIKnow 11y ago
If you follow electronic forums or photo forums, for many people it's common practice to order new electronic or photo toys and return them, with no intention to ever buy them. They boast how clever they are. All the rest of us then receive "new" articles from Amazon that have been opened, played around and returned by these people. Tell tale sign in the article: "[..] said the majority of items he returned were high-value electronic items that had failed. He had chosen to cancel problematic purchases rather than wait for Amazon to simply exchange the item." He had no intention to get an exchange, because he had no intention to ever buy those articles.
- forgetsusername 11y ago
  Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine buying a large TV, having it fail or arrive DOA, then, rather than getting a replacement, saying "give me my money back". Maybe once or twice. I used to hang around Caraudioforum years ago, and it was a "thing" to buy cheap subwoofers from Walmart and experiment with them, like plugging them into an electrical outlet. Then return them, no questions asked. This is not new.
  - CydeWeys 11y ago
    Yeah. The only things I've ever returned and didn't want replacements for were cheap junk. I took a gamble on a $5 pair of touchscreen gloves, and of course they were worthless (didn't work at all, and weren't even that warm), and I got my money back. For parts like electronics, I of course want a replacement. I've had to RMA a motherboard and a hard drive in two separate instances over the past decade. In both cases I really wanted the replacements to ship quickly, because I was waiting on them to finish a build!
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  I can count on one hand the number of online orders I've had to return in the past five years. Usually it's RMAing an electronic device that was DOA, or a product that looked iffy on the order page and ended up being complete junk. Now, to Amazon's detriment, there's a lot of things I don't even attempt to buy on it anymore because there's so much low quality junk being sold. Who returns dozens of items in a year?! That's like the picky customer that no restaurant wants to have to deal with.
tyingq 11y ago
Not enough info here to really render an opinion. Since Amazon won't discuss it, you're hearing only one side of the issue. What if those 37 returns were mostly in a row? Or mixed in with questionable chargebacks? Or ? There is one thing Amazon says that seems like a clue here "In a tiny fraction of cases we are forced to close accounts where we identify extreme account abuse."
0xmohit 11y ago
Amazon also happens to close seller accounts with equal ease (and no explanation, of course): http://aaron.kavlie.net/amazon-com-just-closed-my-seller-account-no-warning-no-details/ http://aaron.kavlie.net/amazon-com-just-closed-my-seller-acc...
junto 11y ago
I'm guessing that Amazon suspect that the user is doing something that they feel is deliberately untoward, but that they cannot prove. Therefore, rather than feel that they are being cheated, they decline to have the person as a customer any longer. Whilst I find it hard on the customer if they have unused gift cards on their account, I have no problem with Amazon choosing not to deal with a customer that deliberately is trying to exploit the company. It is no different to a physical shop declining the custom of any walk-in customer. That is their right, as it is our right to spend our money there or not.
joesmo 11y ago
"He emailed Amazon to point out the unfairness in closing accounts based on unpublished limits of legitimate returns, but says he received a standard response refusing to reopen his account." Note, that he did nothing wrong, he violated no Amazon rules, violated no laws, and still got fucked by Amazon. This is how Amazon treats its loyal customers. I had about ~$100 of returns when they closed my account after I had been doing $10-20k of business with them for years on a paid Prime account opened in the late 90's. There are a lot of defective products that Amazon sells and the mere nature of online commerce dictates that there will be a lot of returns. To randomly close people's accounts, stealing their products, money, and even AWS computing resources, that's fucking criminal. "How easy it is to set up an alternative account remains to be seen." No, it doesn't. You cannot set up another Amazon account (you can but they will close it) and neither can your family or I assume anyone living at your address, ever agin. In fact, your family's accounts will also be closed if not at the same time, soon thereafter. Just in case Amazon didn't fuck you hard enough, they will also fuck your family over too. If this is how Amazon wants to continue doing business, fine. They can continue to fuck over their customers because they're big enough and we can't do anything about it. It makes Walmart look saintly in their practices. Fuck Amazon. I hope more people realize what's happening and boycott this piece of shit company. And if you have AWS resources, you should really think to yourself if this is the kind of company you want to trust with all your computing resources, a company that will for no reason and without warning close your account and likely kill your company in the process?
hippich 11y ago
I see a lot of complaints about how Amazon dealt with this customer. I will tell you story from other end - I sell few private labeled products via Amazon as a third party seller. I had instances where people return supplement bottle with reason "Do not match description on website". Bottle is unopened, picture is exact picture of the product, description is the same. The only reason for return is - "Changed my mind", but it will cost $5.5 to ship back in that case, that's why "Not as described". As a result this costs amazon few bucks for return shipping, it costs me few bucks for "pick and pack" fees. So do not assume automatically customers are always right. There are people who takes advantage of it. We all need to work together: 1) sellers needs to listen to customers and bring high quality product 2) amazon needs to weed out sellers with poor quality of service 3) amazon needs to weed out buyers who either take advantage of the system, or just never learn a lesson about "if it look cheap, it is probably a junk" (and this is because buyer can take an advantage) 4) buyers - be responsible and think about consequences of you actions. And not blame everybody else. Also, try to work out with amazon/seller - there is no shame in reaching out and explaining problems. Most likely you problems will be solved. Only via such iterative way whole ecosystem can grow into convenient and efficient thing of tomorrow.
- tyingq 11y ago
  I don't see an easy solution here. Sellers end up raising prices to compensate for these kind of buyers. Then, what happens is that new sellers enter the market and undercut you...until they figure out they are losing money. The trouble is, there's no end to the pipeline of new sellers :)
  - hippich 11y ago
    And there is no end to the pipeline of new buyers who expect miracles to happen, i.e. quality product, which normally cost $100, to buy with shipping for $10. Also, sellers already get kicked out from Amazon quite often for not being responsible. Now we see other side to be forced to be responsible. If anything - this is good tendency, unless government or media will intervene.
viperscape 11y ago
I returned 20 items in 2015 alone. Half were shit products returned shortly after purchase, the other half were probably unused still in packaging. Only one was electronic. They have tightened up return policy, often you must choose "wrong description" just to get it returned fairly. I'm pretty sure this person abused the return policy. I'll also say the QC on items sold has gone down significantly. There is so much shit on there now, it really ruins the amazon experience.. I really don't enjoy returning stuff, it stresses me out every time.
j-c-m 11y ago
Amazon doesn't like to ban customers. Chances are, banned customers are buying expensive products with no intention to ever keep them to: - "Test" the latest gadget for a few weeks. - "Review" for their "Youtube review" or forum friends.

76 points by eginhard 11y ago

merb 11y ago

Actually closing the account is dumb, it would be more fair to just stop the account from buying stuff (still allowing to see videos, etc..). And mostly in the current world I doubt it's useful to block them forever..

icebraining 11y ago

Sounds doubtful to me that under EU law, a company can simply deny access to funds in a gift card, even if it's not actual money. Sounds like something a small claims court should be able to resolve, has anyone tried it?

tallanvor 11y ago
I don't think that they could legally do that in many US states either - many states have laws regarding how long gift cards have be accepted, and some never allow balances to expire.
dazc 11y ago
> Sounds like something a small claims court should be able to resolve... Not worth the hassle unless the balance was more than a few hundred quid or purely out of principal. https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money/court-fees https://www.gov.uk/make-court-claim-for-money/court-fees Just bear in mind there is the time of preparing your claim and a hearing fee to pay also.
SyneRyder 11y ago
I don't know about EU law, but in Australia we just had an electronics company (Dick Smith) go into administration and refused to honour all gift cards, even though they continued selling gift cards while they were searching for an administrator: http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/dick-smiths-worthless-gift-card-sale/news-story/4cfea6656265f0936fbdf4b1d847ecd1 http://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/dick-smiths-w... It seems that while it's a slimy thing to do, it's apparently legal. Gift cards aren't money.
- roel_v 11y ago
  A company in bankruptcy is completely different from one in normal operation. Accepting gift cards during bankruptcy proceedings is against the law, even.
beejiu 11y ago
The article mentions a case where Amazon Prime membership wasn't refunded. The Amazon Prime terms state that it would be refunded on termination. However, it also has the following term: > However, we will not give any refund for termination related to conduct that we determine, in our discretion, violates these Terms or any applicable law, involves fraud or misuse of the Prime membership, or is harmful to our interests or another user. IANAL, but would that not constitute an unfair contract term under UK law?
- joesmo 11y ago
  Prime memberships are not refunded upon termination.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

cm2187 11y ago

And it depends what they buy. A 5-10% return rate for hard drives isn't unreasonable.

IshKebab 11y ago
Within 30 days? Yes it is.
- cm2187 11y ago
  DOA are very frequent with hard drives, particularly WD in my experience.
  - roel_v 11y ago
    Are you claiming here it is normal that one out of every 10 WD hard disks sold are defective by the time they reach the customer? That's a very bold and frankly ridiculous sounding claim.
    - covercash 11y ago
      Backblaze does a thorough hard drive reliability report, here's their latest: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-201...
      - deelowe 11y ago
        Those stats quote AFR not IMR. The OP was talking about infant mortality.
        cm2187 11y ago
        For the avoidance of doubt, I count as infant mortality when a new hard drive would drop from a hardware RAID array during initial construction of the array (we are talking about NAS drives). Not just "the drive will not start".

1293712 11y ago

Books shipped by Amazon in Europe often have defects to the point that I suspected that Amazon has a deal with publishing houses to sell B-quality. I've had slight water damage, individual pages printed in light gray instead of black, scratched DVDs and so on. I'd estimate that 30% of Amazon deliveries had some defect that would warrant a return.

nextos 11y ago
That's also my experience. Horrible quality from some major publishers they sell.

Mithaldu 11y ago

Inconsequential fluff piece. Complaining, unverifiable claims, no mention of lawyer.

DanBC 11y ago
It's England. Lawyers are a measure of last resort here, not a first response.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  He's dealing with Amazon, an american company. They won't listen to anything else. Heck, according to the article they've explicitly said they won't listen to anything else since they've told him not to contact their support. Edit: Turns out the real content of the closure message is available online: http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/amazoncom-seattle-washington-c93533.html http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/amazoncom-seattle-... It includes the following line: "If you require additional assistance, or have any concerns, feel free to contact us directly at account-appeals@amazon.com." This was conveniently left out of the story, and there is also no mention of his appeal made in the article.
  - SixSigma 11y ago
    He's dealing with Amazon Europe Core SARL, and Amazon EU SARL which are not American companies. Their addresses are both: 5 Rue Plaetis, L-2338, Luxembourg.
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      Their registered adresses don't matter when their policies are dictated by the american head company. They're not somehow magically free to make 100% their own decisions just because they're in another country.
      - nolok 11y ago
        Their registered addresses matter because it dictates which laws they obey to.

jasonkester 11y ago

Seems entirely reasonable to shut off a customer like this. It makes sense for Amazon to eat losses in returns, since the goodwill it generates offsets the a comparatively tiny losses it has to eat. But at some point you have to draw a line with obviously abusive customers. 37 returns in 3 years in not something that happens to a regular unlucky guy. It's the pattern you see in the guy who buys the 50" plasma screen a week before the Superbowl then returns it the day after. It's a guy you don't want as your customer.

1293712 11y ago
Have you actually used Amazon in Europe?
- samastur 11y ago
  Yes, regularly. Never had to return a thing.
anon1385 11y ago
There are categories of products on Amazon where the majority of the listings are counterfeit products. One could easily face returning a product 3 or four times before finding a listing that is what it claims to be (or before giving up and finding a retailer that isn't trying to defraud you). Examples include oral-b toothbrush heads and "genuine" apple laptop batteries.
- dazc 11y ago
  Are these sold by amazon or marketplace sellers?
  - anon1385 11y ago
    >Dispatched from and sold by Amazon http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-TriZone-Electric-Toothbrush-Replacement/dp/B007WSAB1Q/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-TriZone-Electric-Toothbrush-R... http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-Precision-Clean-Toothbrush-Replacement/dp/B003U9V7NM/ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Oral-B-Precision-Clean-Toothbrush-Re... See the various reviews about them coming apart and cutting people in the mouth. Being able to scrape off the logo with a fingernail is the usual giveaway.

happywolf 11y ago

Amazon doesn't have the best PR lately. A few months ago it was in the news on the harsh working condition, and now it is shutting down customer accounts. Most likely Amazon has its own reason, but the information so far doesn't shed any light on if the customer has indeed abused the system.

dazc 11y ago
Also there is a campaign against amazon in the UK. Politically motivated in the case of the guardian and some other reason (maybe 'top gear' or a general fear of future competition) from the bbc.

jinushaun 11y ago

I've encountered so many defective or questionable products on Amazon lately. I basically have no trust what I receive any more. I even had issues returning items. I've started buying directly from companies, or offline in real stores more often.

glup 11y ago
Same here (Prime customer for the last 6 years). Their drop-down menu for the reason for a return doesn't have an option for "is complete crap, but couldn't tell from the reviews because of all the Vine Voice and company shrills." I end up paying the shipping back, when I could almost always return the equivalent item to a brick-and-mortar store without a charge. It seems to me that there are certain kinds of items where, like toasters and countertop dishwashers, where Amazon has a dozen lazily branded versions of the same (low quality, guaranteed to fail in a year) OEM product, no mid-range, and then 1-3 high-end ones for 5* the price of the low quality tier.
- rhexs 11y ago
  Thank you. I've e-mailed support/Jeff asking for a way to disable Vine Voice reviews from showing up, but no dice yet. Most of the Amazon reviews already game the system trying to get as many upvotes as possible (the latest trend is posting some 10 page meaningless "comparison" of X product and Y,Z,T competitors), but Vine Voice is even worse. Have yet to see anything under 4 stars.
- JohnTHaller 11y ago
  I'd like a way to report items I don't buy as bogus/fake/spam to help eliminate all this noise: https://twitter.com/JohnTHaller/status/648883968201355264 https://twitter.com/JohnTHaller/status/648883968201355264
camel_gopher 11y ago
Me too, I bought a $1k cycling trainer that turned out to be defective. Bought my replacement directly from the manufacturer. After returning that, I got a warning email from Amazon telling me to read the return policy. I think I was close to being banned. I've also bought a number of items that turned out to be defective on arrival. Returned all of those.

BogusIKnow 11y ago

If you follow electronic forums or photo forums, for many people it's common practice to order new electronic or photo toys and return them, with no intention to ever buy them. They boast how clever they are. All the rest of us then receive "new" articles from Amazon that have been opened, played around and returned by these people. Tell tale sign in the article: "[..] said the majority of items he returned were high-value electronic items that had failed. He had chosen to cancel problematic purchases rather than wait for Amazon to simply exchange the item." He had no intention to get an exchange, because he had no intention to ever buy those articles.

forgetsusername 11y ago
Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine buying a large TV, having it fail or arrive DOA, then, rather than getting a replacement, saying "give me my money back". Maybe once or twice. I used to hang around Caraudioforum years ago, and it was a "thing" to buy cheap subwoofers from Walmart and experiment with them, like plugging them into an electrical outlet. Then return them, no questions asked. This is not new.
- CydeWeys 11y ago
  Yeah. The only things I've ever returned and didn't want replacements for were cheap junk. I took a gamble on a $5 pair of touchscreen gloves, and of course they were worthless (didn't work at all, and weren't even that warm), and I got my money back. For parts like electronics, I of course want a replacement. I've had to RMA a motherboard and a hard drive in two separate instances over the past decade. In both cases I really wanted the replacements to ship quickly, because I was waiting on them to finish a build!
CydeWeys 11y ago
I can count on one hand the number of online orders I've had to return in the past five years. Usually it's RMAing an electronic device that was DOA, or a product that looked iffy on the order page and ended up being complete junk. Now, to Amazon's detriment, there's a lot of things I don't even attempt to buy on it anymore because there's so much low quality junk being sold. Who returns dozens of items in a year?! That's like the picky customer that no restaurant wants to have to deal with.

tyingq 11y ago

Not enough info here to really render an opinion. Since Amazon won't discuss it, you're hearing only one side of the issue. What if those 37 returns were mostly in a row? Or mixed in with questionable chargebacks? Or ? There is one thing Amazon says that seems like a clue here "In a tiny fraction of cases we are forced to close accounts where we identify extreme account abuse."

0xmohit 11y ago

Amazon also happens to close seller accounts with equal ease (and no explanation, of course): http://aaron.kavlie.net/amazon-com-just-closed-my-seller-account-no-warning-no-details/ http://aaron.kavlie.net/amazon-com-just-closed-my-seller-acc...

junto 11y ago

I'm guessing that Amazon suspect that the user is doing something that they feel is deliberately untoward, but that they cannot prove. Therefore, rather than feel that they are being cheated, they decline to have the person as a customer any longer. Whilst I find it hard on the customer if they have unused gift cards on their account, I have no problem with Amazon choosing not to deal with a customer that deliberately is trying to exploit the company. It is no different to a physical shop declining the custom of any walk-in customer. That is their right, as it is our right to spend our money there or not.

joesmo 11y ago

"He emailed Amazon to point out the unfairness in closing accounts based on unpublished limits of legitimate returns, but says he received a standard response refusing to reopen his account." Note, that he did nothing wrong, he violated no Amazon rules, violated no laws, and still got fucked by Amazon. This is how Amazon treats its loyal customers. I had about ~$100 of returns when they closed my account after I had been doing $10-20k of business with them for years on a paid Prime account opened in the late 90's. There are a lot of defective products that Amazon sells and the mere nature of online commerce dictates that there will be a lot of returns. To randomly close people's accounts, stealing their products, money, and even AWS computing resources, that's fucking criminal. "How easy it is to set up an alternative account remains to be seen." No, it doesn't. You cannot set up another Amazon account (you can but they will close it) and neither can your family or I assume anyone living at your address, ever agin. In fact, your family's accounts will also be closed if not at the same time, soon thereafter. Just in case Amazon didn't fuck you hard enough, they will also fuck your family over too. If this is how Amazon wants to continue doing business, fine. They can continue to fuck over their customers because they're big enough and we can't do anything about it. It makes Walmart look saintly in their practices. Fuck Amazon. I hope more people realize what's happening and boycott this piece of shit company. And if you have AWS resources, you should really think to yourself if this is the kind of company you want to trust with all your computing resources, a company that will for no reason and without warning close your account and likely kill your company in the process?

hippich 11y ago

I see a lot of complaints about how Amazon dealt with this customer. I will tell you story from other end - I sell few private labeled products via Amazon as a third party seller. I had instances where people return supplement bottle with reason "Do not match description on website". Bottle is unopened, picture is exact picture of the product, description is the same. The only reason for return is - "Changed my mind", but it will cost $5.5 to ship back in that case, that's why "Not as described". As a result this costs amazon few bucks for return shipping, it costs me few bucks for "pick and pack" fees. So do not assume automatically customers are always right. There are people who takes advantage of it. We all need to work together: 1) sellers needs to listen to customers and bring high quality product 2) amazon needs to weed out sellers with poor quality of service 3) amazon needs to weed out buyers who either take advantage of the system, or just never learn a lesson about "if it look cheap, it is probably a junk" (and this is because buyer can take an advantage) 4) buyers - be responsible and think about consequences of you actions. And not blame everybody else. Also, try to work out with amazon/seller - there is no shame in reaching out and explaining problems. Most likely you problems will be solved. Only via such iterative way whole ecosystem can grow into convenient and efficient thing of tomorrow.

tyingq 11y ago
I don't see an easy solution here. Sellers end up raising prices to compensate for these kind of buyers. Then, what happens is that new sellers enter the market and undercut you...until they figure out they are losing money. The trouble is, there's no end to the pipeline of new sellers :)
- hippich 11y ago
  And there is no end to the pipeline of new buyers who expect miracles to happen, i.e. quality product, which normally cost $100, to buy with shipping for $10. Also, sellers already get kicked out from Amazon quite often for not being responsible. Now we see other side to be forced to be responsible. If anything - this is good tendency, unless government or media will intervene.

viperscape 11y ago

I returned 20 items in 2015 alone. Half were shit products returned shortly after purchase, the other half were probably unused still in packaging. Only one was electronic. They have tightened up return policy, often you must choose "wrong description" just to get it returned fairly. I'm pretty sure this person abused the return policy. I'll also say the QC on items sold has gone down significantly. There is so much shit on there now, it really ruins the amazon experience.. I really don't enjoy returning stuff, it stresses me out every time.

j-c-m 11y ago

Amazon doesn't like to ban customers. Chances are, banned customers are buying expensive products with no intention to ever keep them to: - "Test" the latest gadget for a few weeks. - "Review" for their "Youtube review" or forum friends.