22 ms·

Newegg doesn't limit their fraud to selling broken open-box items. I personally saw them try to pass off an expensive mouse that was crusty and scratched as "n

Newegg doesn't limit their fraud to selling broken open-box items. I personally saw them try to pass off an expensive mouse that was crusty and scratched as "new" (I double checked and it was NOT marked as an "open box" on the product page or order page). Newegg support refused to process the return, so I had to contest it with the credit card company. Pro tip: the CC support rep told me to process it as "product never received." He said if you pay for a new item and you get a used item, then you never received the item you paid for. Hopefully I never have to use that again, but now I know (and now you do too).

chrischen 5y ago
Does the product not received work better? From the merchant side those seem to be easier to win since tracking is sufficient proof, and the case review probably doesn’t spend too much time looking into used versus new item.
- minerva23 5y ago
  I only have that sample size of one, so I have zero confidence of whether it's better or not. All I can say is I had no problems with it that one time. Newegg didn't even try to contest (as far as I'm aware).
ryandrake 5y ago
Is it me, or are retailers and service providers suddenly getting less and less reasonable about returns and disputes? I’ve had to do more credit card chargebacks in the last three years than I had done in the previous 20 years. Fortunately, AMEX heavily sides with consumers against merchants, so this route has consistently worked for me. I’ve always considered a CC chargeback the tool of last resort, but companies are more and more slamming doors and dodging responsibility to the point where that tool has to be used all the time now.
- nefitty 5y ago
  Companies are betting that you'd prefer a continued tentative transactional relationship with them rather than ban yourself over a charge back. That's definitely how Airbnb works.
  - johnebgd 5y ago
    Some ebay seller is fighting me right now saying they’ll block me if I demand a refund over them sending me a materially different condition item than what was pictured. I’m totally fine with never transacting again with them. I’ve never had a good AirBNB experience. I’d never miss them if they went away.
- ucm_edge 5y ago
  Same experience over the past couple years. It's also weird to me, for example I bought six items from Leatherman (some multitools plus accessories) and one of them showed up with some damage. No worries, Leatherman supports their product with a 25 year warranty so I just mail it back for a repair. There was a whole saga about Leatherman refusing via email and my bank charging back for the entire order (I asked for just the tool that Leatherman refused to repair, the bank was "Nah, we're just gonna do it all, we have an email where the merchant refused to honor a warranty, they have no leverage.") It's bizarre to me, because a relatively minor repair had to be cheaper than giving me three multitools and six accessories for negative dollars (since the bank tosses fees on top of the chargeback). The companies have no incentive and know they're going to lose (see all the articles complaining about 'friendly fraud' to reference chargebacks) yet they do it. Perhaps they over index on being paranoid that the customer wants to defraud them via chargeback, which in turn increases the odds a chargeback happens since the disgruntled customer feels they were ripped off?
  - turbinerneiter 5y ago
    Maybe the simply lack the manpower to do basic customer service and device repair?
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      I doubt so. When I bought my Leatherman Wave, the bundled leather pouch was a little too tight, and I emailed them about the issue. The response was "It's intentionally made that way. If it doesn't stretch to fit in a week or two, let us know and we'll send you a new one, for free. Have nice day and enjoy your tool".
  - eganist 5y ago
    > "Nah, we're just gonna do it all, we have an email where the merchant refused to honor a warranty, they have no leverage." From the bank's perspective, this makes sense: better you keep your money with the bank than it flow out to the vendor.
    - 5y ago
- oliwarner 5y ago
  It's happening to them too. Returns fraud is booming business. Not trying to excuse anything, just explain why some people are getting crappy used products (sloppy returns QA) or aggressive customer services denying consumer rights (burnt retailer). Ultimately it's all on the retailer, but it's also a cost we'll end up bearing. Criminals ruin things for everyone.
  - beebmam 5y ago
    Yep, and that's why fraudsters should spend decades in prison
    - gruez 5y ago
      Decades? Murderers get less than that.
  - throwaway3rr 5y ago
  - quantumduck 5y ago
    Yup, it's a business now on internet boards. Here is a link to one such telegram group: https://t.me/refundingclub https://t.me/refundingclub There are tons more. The basic philosophy is that they use a bunch of social engineering techniques that are specific to companies and use them to get refund for people and then take a cut (usually 20-35%). The likely picked up these techniques through trial and error or from other people running similar services. Their most common targets are amazon, PayPal, almost all electronics retailers, tons of clothing companies, Walmart, target, Costco, etc.
    - Gareth321 5y ago
      Every time these scumbags succeed it hurts all of us just a little bit. Society becomes just a little bit less trusting. High trust societies are so much better to live in. I wonder how countries go about engineering high trust cultures. I suppose the first step is actively finding these people and putting them in prison.
- hoseja 5y ago
  Don't you get blacklisted with prejudice at the vendor if you chargeback?
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    If I needed to go as far as to do a chargeback against a vendor, I probably don't want to use them ever again anyways.
    - viraptor 5y ago
      That works for an odd item, but it would be a pain if that was the issue where you don't have alternative providers. Steam is one of the companies where issuing a chargeback is a risky move. Sometimes it even happens without your knowledge: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_restricted_due_to_chargebacks_but_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_re...
      - runnerup 5y ago
        Steam, Amazon, Uber, Google...would all be quite painful. Personally I believe this forms a sort of litmus test for me personally whether I consider a company "too big to not regulate". I can imagine some additional CFPB protections which would be useful for these mega-corps. It's nothing like doing a chargeback to a local independent coffee-shop who double-charged you and refuses to refund the duplicate charge.
    - ryandrake 5y ago
      This is exactly my thought too. When I’m at the point where a chargeback is my only recourse, it’s a “burn the bridge” moment. The company has made it clear it’s intention to fuck me. I am totally fine with no longer doing business with that company. You can’t fire me because I quit!
  - davidwritesbugs 5y ago
    At the e-retailer I worked for, yes. If you did a chargeback you got your money back but we blacklisted you. I send several emails to that effect: "We told you to engage with CS & not just do a chargeback". Its a shame because we did good CS but people get used to being fucked about by other retailers and go straight to chargeback, plus we do get return fraud too.
- kingcharles 5y ago
  When I tried to get a chargeback from my bank they terminated my account as it was too much trouble. I bought some electronics, turned out it was a scammy company. After six weeks, nothing shipped, merchant agreed to refund me. Asked card company (Cash/Square/Block) for a chargeback. Week later merchant ships something, FedEx fails to deliver and it gets returned to merchant. 3 months later Square asks me for all documentation. I give it to them. They say I can't have a refund as the package was delivered. I tell them "yes, delivered back to the merchant". They say "sorry, our policy is that if it was delivered somewhere then we won't do a chargeback. I know that's not the outcome you wanted." Then they terminated my account. LOL
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    Thanks for this. It's a good thing warning to stay away from square. I've had to do chargebacks with two different banks and both were painless even though something was delivered.
    - technothrasher 5y ago
      I've done a number of charge backs over the years, and they most often are painless. I did have one not go my way though. A hotel I stayed at charged my credit card $100 for parking. I had taken a taxi to get to the hotel. They refused to listen to me, so I did a charge back. They sent my bank a copy of a parking receipt that had no identifying information on it, just basically said, "overnight parking, $100". My bank said that was good enough, and reversed the charge back, no appeal allowed. But at least the other time a merchant pushed back on a charge back, it worked out better. A South American airline charged me for a flight between two cities in a continent I had never even been to in my life. They used as proof a record that simply showed the flight did actually fly. My bank sided with me.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    If you wrote to square saying you are taking them to small claims court in the US, I bet they would have immediately buckled.
- beefee 5y ago
  Yes, and there are surveillance companies dedicated to tracking people and the returns they make [0]. Many retailers now demand personal information like ID cards to make returns. If their secret fraud detection algorithms flag you, you can find yourself suddenly unable to make returns. [0] https://www.theretailequation.com/ https://www.theretailequation.com/
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    There are federal mail order laws in the US. They better slow thier road.
- relevant1 5y ago
  I've had the opposite experience recently. Last month a fan failed on my 2080 Ti, which I bought in 2018, I contacted the retailer and they said they've started to replace fans on GPU's themselves because of the shortage situation. Great, works for me. A week later I got an email saying they're replacing it with a 3080. Slight upgrade at no additional cost.
  - Roritharr 5y ago
    "slight" got quite the chuckle out of me. You are quite lucky!
  - hotpotamus 5y ago
    Which manufacturer? I've had good luck with EVGA and terrible luck with MSI, but that's pretty anecdotal.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  I think it's because there's so much abuse going on. More and more I'm hearing about it becoming normalized to buy a product, use it once for whatever purpose, then return it again.
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    Not new, really. I knew plenty of people who considered that acceptable behavior as far back as the 1970's. In fact it used to be an old TV sitcom trope that they'd buy the expensive TV for the "big game" or expensive dress for the "big dance". They couldn't afford it, but they could just return it the next day. Then they'd accidentally destroy it, and you were supposed to feel bad for them for now having to pay for what they bought.
- amelius 5y ago
  Question. Last week I ordered a keyboard (price around $120), but received two. What should I do? Returning it would take me easily 30 minutes of work, so I decided to keep it until they start complaining.
  - bool3max 5y ago
    Depends on the scale/size of the merchant. For some it's more hassle that it's worth to try and get it back. Chances are they won't bother.
    - technothrasher 5y ago
      I received two motherboards from Newegg recently. Because of a screw up in shipping, my first motherboard didn't look like it was ever going to show up, so they send me another one. A week later, the first one did show up. I contacted them and they definitely wanted one back, seemed genuinely happy I contacted them about it. They sent me a return label and it went off back to them that day.
  - scarface74 5y ago
    We bought two suitcases from Amazon They shipped it to the wrong house so we never received it. We sent them an email and they refunded our money and we bought two more. Two weeks later, our neighbor came back into town and brought us the two original suitcases that we never received. Trying to be honest, we started a return process. But we could not get them to understand that we didn’t want a refund. We were returning a duplicate. Since either way we were going to have “free” luggage, we just kept both.
    - willis936 5y ago
      I had a similar situation with a cat-proof trashcan ordered from amazon. After they messed up the delivery and issued a refund I got it from brick and mortar. Two weeks later it shows up on my doorstep. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Now I have a cat-proof recycling bin.
    - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
- koyote 5y ago
  Definitely noticed this as well. Five or more years ago I bought a kettle from Amazon and two months later it starts leaking. Turns out it's a design flaw and a lot of reviews on the kettle mentioned the same issue. I sent a support ticket and they refunded me immediately and told me I could keep the kettle. Then last year I ordered a knife on Amazon. A month later I receive a water flosser... I contact support (which is now next to impossible to find in the UI) and they tell me they can't refund me unless I send the item back and they also won't be sending me my actual purchase. This was during lockdown and as I do not own a printer I was not able to print out the return slip. They also refused to come and pick it up. I got nothing, not even a "we're sorry" coupon; my account is over 20 years old. So we went from automatic refund + you get to keep the item for an issue that was not their fault to them completely fucking up my order and then making me go through hoops, spend me own money to send their mistake back to them. The good news is that there are a lot of different and competitive online retailers around these days, and a lot of shops are now online due to Covid. So it was not very difficult for me to stop using Amazon altogether.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    2 weeks ago I contacted Amazon because a delivery reached the estimated time and was marked as possibly lost. Because the order was split into 2 deliveries half which arrived and the other half lost, they couldn’t create a new order. So they refunded the missing items and delivery costs. Reordered and arrived in 5 days. First time in like 10 years I’ve had to contact support and was happy!
  - datavirtue 5y ago
    Years ago I started using a Dot/Alexa. One day I needed to return something and asked Alexa for customer support and "she" responded by reading me the definition of customer support from Wikipedia or something. I tried numerous times in different ways before realizing there was no way to contact support through Alexa. That was the beginning of the end of our twenty year relationship.
  - vageli 5y ago
    > I contact support (which is now next to impossible to find in the UI) and they tell me they can't refund me unless I send the item back and they also won't be sending me my actual purchase. If you receive something in the mail by accident, you are under no obligation to return it. I would have issued a chargeback given that you never received the item you paid for. > By law, companies can’t send unordered merchandise to you, then demand payment. That means you never have to pay for things you get but didn’t order. You also don’t have to return unordered merchandise. You’re legally entitled to keep it as a free gift. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/what-do-if-youre-billed-things-you-never-got-or-you-get-unordered-products https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/what-do-if-youre-bille...
- indymike 5y ago
  Inflation causes retail profits to plummet... So we'll see this as managers try to protect their bonuses.
- ljm 5y ago
  I do wonder if a lot of companies reached peak growth in a legitimate way, but because the organisation's existential need to grow larger never goes away, they start turning to less legit methods to make it happen.
- api 5y ago
  This kind of thing happens when the bottom falls out of an industry. Amazon, Walmart.com, and Alibaba/Aliexpress are totally destroying independent retailers. Overall across the economy most fraud is committed on the way down, not the way up. The same happens as economic bubbles collapse and financial entities scramble for some way to inflate the books.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > This kind of thing happens when the bottom falls out of an industry. Amazon, Walmart.com, and Alibaba/Aliexpress are totally destroying independent retailers. This makes no sense. Amazon has famously good customer service. I don't deal with walmart often so I don't have an opinion either way. Finally, you bemoan aliexpress, which is comprised of independent sellers, but complain how they're destroying "independent retailers"?
- sandworm101 5y ago
  >> Fortunately, AMEX heavily sides with consumers against merchants No. AMEX heavily sides with AMEX against merchants. AMEX, via chargeback penalties, turns a net profit every time a customer complaint is filed. They aren't being nice out of the goodness of their hearts. They are leveraging their market dominance to extract penalty money from users. Just be happy that we customers are on the winning side ... for now.
  - Bluecobra 5y ago
    This is true for Visa/Mastercard as well. I used to work in merchant processing and sat near the chargeback department and would frequently overhear conversations with irate merchants having to pay a $25 chargeback fee regardless of the outcome. This was almost 20 years ago so not sure if that fee has been lowered or got higher.
    - rootsudo 5y ago
      Higher, and more strikes per merchant would mean the merchant is drop. $25 is the minimum. 1% used to be the minimum for what was acceptable per monthly volume, but now it's much less, I've seen guidelines on risky categories go to .5%.
- throw1234651234 5y ago
  I think people abuse the return system. I am a "minimalist" in the sense that I buy only stuff I need, so I barely ever return anything. But I see friends ordering 20 boxes and then returning 19 as standard operating procedure.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  About a month ago I ordered some ice cream from postmates and they delivered it completely melted, like it was never frozen. I assumed it would be an easy refund because it wasn't even safe to eat, so I sent them a photo and... they adamantly refused? Charged that back and deleted the app. I was kind of flabbergasted.
- sva_ 5y ago
  I've been trying to send back an SSD to Samsung for over a month now. They keep postponing sending me the shipping label. You have to request it by phone. That is, after I received the product with over 4 months delay (after which I didn't need it anymore - hence trying to return it.) I'm not sure if it's because the German Samsung store might just be too incompetent though.
- mindslight 5y ago
  Over the past decade+, retailers have been giving up on scrutinizing returns. You used to need a reason for returning something, then it morphed into just "didn't like", then they stopped asking questions, and now it's common for them to not even ask for the item back! This has been widely lauded as customer friendly. And evidently the math worked out that losing a bunch of money on the occasional return wasn't a big deal. But while this is customer friendly, it completely forgoes the idea of individually judging returns! So now retailers are looking at the absolute amount of money they're losing to returns, and attempting to optimize that. They can't discourage returns outright (by changing their policy) because that would break customer expectations, and it would be extremely hard to inspect/adjudicate returns better because that would require skilled workers, so all they can do is adjust the false positive/false negative ratio. Another black box approach is the use of surveillance databases like Retail Equation, to track whether an individual has made "too many" returns based on the amount they've spent - a totally irrelevant and unjust metric when you think about it. It also could be "just you" due to getting tripped by these databases, perhaps even because of your first chargeback. Who would know? The "unfixable" waste also ties into the hollowing out of other business departments too. Many food items are not packed very well and are put in the same box without regards to density, so items arrived dented, crushed, or destroyed. Rather than the return process feed that failure back to the packing department, it's just treated as another "no fault" return. So now as a customer I've just got to accept that many times the items I've ordered are going to arrive damaged, and meanwhile I'm sure I'm building up a record in their surveillance database as a less profitable customer - when it all stems from their mistake.
bluedino 5y ago
It it fraud or just laziness? 10 years ago I stopped buying open-box items from NewEgg. They never, ever worked. I had a theory that it was cheaper for them to ship it to another customer, and then if it got returned a second time, mark it as defective, vs doing actually DOA checks etc on their side.
- thedougd 5y ago
  For computer components, especially, this must be true.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  That lately has been my experience with Amazon's "tested and refurbished" outlet items. The last three items have all been defective or missing parts despite Amazon's claim that they were thoroughly tested and checked for quality. The funny part is one of the items was bulky and would cost $45 to ship at retail rates. I know Amazon gets a bulk discount but it still couldn't have been cheap for them to process the return. They paid that $45 (or whatever is their discounted rate) at least four times on the item that cost under $200. Wonder if it went on a returns pallet, sold to a liquidator, who then sold it on Craigslist or someplace similar.
pc86 5y ago
Big +1 for talking through the actual issue with your CC rep and asking them how to best process the claim. 9 times out of 10 the answer is pretty straightforward but that 10th time you can really get saved by getting the advice of someone who knows the system and is as "on your side" as they can be.

chrischen 5y ago

Does the product not received work better? From the merchant side those seem to be easier to win since tracking is sufficient proof, and the case review probably doesn’t spend too much time looking into used versus new item.

minerva23 5y ago
I only have that sample size of one, so I have zero confidence of whether it's better or not. All I can say is I had no problems with it that one time. Newegg didn't even try to contest (as far as I'm aware).

ryandrake 5y ago

Is it me, or are retailers and service providers suddenly getting less and less reasonable about returns and disputes? I’ve had to do more credit card chargebacks in the last three years than I had done in the previous 20 years. Fortunately, AMEX heavily sides with consumers against merchants, so this route has consistently worked for me. I’ve always considered a CC chargeback the tool of last resort, but companies are more and more slamming doors and dodging responsibility to the point where that tool has to be used all the time now.

nefitty 5y ago
Companies are betting that you'd prefer a continued tentative transactional relationship with them rather than ban yourself over a charge back. That's definitely how Airbnb works.
- johnebgd 5y ago
  Some ebay seller is fighting me right now saying they’ll block me if I demand a refund over them sending me a materially different condition item than what was pictured. I’m totally fine with never transacting again with them. I’ve never had a good AirBNB experience. I’d never miss them if they went away.
ucm_edge 5y ago
Same experience over the past couple years. It's also weird to me, for example I bought six items from Leatherman (some multitools plus accessories) and one of them showed up with some damage. No worries, Leatherman supports their product with a 25 year warranty so I just mail it back for a repair. There was a whole saga about Leatherman refusing via email and my bank charging back for the entire order (I asked for just the tool that Leatherman refused to repair, the bank was "Nah, we're just gonna do it all, we have an email where the merchant refused to honor a warranty, they have no leverage.") It's bizarre to me, because a relatively minor repair had to be cheaper than giving me three multitools and six accessories for negative dollars (since the bank tosses fees on top of the chargeback). The companies have no incentive and know they're going to lose (see all the articles complaining about 'friendly fraud' to reference chargebacks) yet they do it. Perhaps they over index on being paranoid that the customer wants to defraud them via chargeback, which in turn increases the odds a chargeback happens since the disgruntled customer feels they were ripped off?
- turbinerneiter 5y ago
  Maybe the simply lack the manpower to do basic customer service and device repair?
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    I doubt so. When I bought my Leatherman Wave, the bundled leather pouch was a little too tight, and I emailed them about the issue. The response was "It's intentionally made that way. If it doesn't stretch to fit in a week or two, let us know and we'll send you a new one, for free. Have nice day and enjoy your tool".
- eganist 5y ago
  > "Nah, we're just gonna do it all, we have an email where the merchant refused to honor a warranty, they have no leverage." From the bank's perspective, this makes sense: better you keep your money with the bank than it flow out to the vendor.
  - 5y ago
oliwarner 5y ago
It's happening to them too. Returns fraud is booming business. Not trying to excuse anything, just explain why some people are getting crappy used products (sloppy returns QA) or aggressive customer services denying consumer rights (burnt retailer). Ultimately it's all on the retailer, but it's also a cost we'll end up bearing. Criminals ruin things for everyone.
- beebmam 5y ago
  Yep, and that's why fraudsters should spend decades in prison
  - gruez 5y ago
    Decades? Murderers get less than that.
- throwaway3rr 5y ago
- quantumduck 5y ago
  Yup, it's a business now on internet boards. Here is a link to one such telegram group: https://t.me/refundingclub https://t.me/refundingclub There are tons more. The basic philosophy is that they use a bunch of social engineering techniques that are specific to companies and use them to get refund for people and then take a cut (usually 20-35%). The likely picked up these techniques through trial and error or from other people running similar services. Their most common targets are amazon, PayPal, almost all electronics retailers, tons of clothing companies, Walmart, target, Costco, etc.
  - Gareth321 5y ago
    Every time these scumbags succeed it hurts all of us just a little bit. Society becomes just a little bit less trusting. High trust societies are so much better to live in. I wonder how countries go about engineering high trust cultures. I suppose the first step is actively finding these people and putting them in prison.
hoseja 5y ago
Don't you get blacklisted with prejudice at the vendor if you chargeback?
- Hamuko 5y ago
  If I needed to go as far as to do a chargeback against a vendor, I probably don't want to use them ever again anyways.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    That works for an odd item, but it would be a pain if that was the issue where you don't have alternative providers. Steam is one of the companies where issuing a chargeback is a risky move. Sometimes it even happens without your knowledge: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_restricted_due_to_chargebacks_but_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/2inknm/help_steam_re...
    - runnerup 5y ago
      Steam, Amazon, Uber, Google...would all be quite painful. Personally I believe this forms a sort of litmus test for me personally whether I consider a company "too big to not regulate". I can imagine some additional CFPB protections which would be useful for these mega-corps. It's nothing like doing a chargeback to a local independent coffee-shop who double-charged you and refuses to refund the duplicate charge.
  - ryandrake 5y ago
    This is exactly my thought too. When I’m at the point where a chargeback is my only recourse, it’s a “burn the bridge” moment. The company has made it clear it’s intention to fuck me. I am totally fine with no longer doing business with that company. You can’t fire me because I quit!
- davidwritesbugs 5y ago
  At the e-retailer I worked for, yes. If you did a chargeback you got your money back but we blacklisted you. I send several emails to that effect: "We told you to engage with CS & not just do a chargeback". Its a shame because we did good CS but people get used to being fucked about by other retailers and go straight to chargeback, plus we do get return fraud too.
kingcharles 5y ago
When I tried to get a chargeback from my bank they terminated my account as it was too much trouble. I bought some electronics, turned out it was a scammy company. After six weeks, nothing shipped, merchant agreed to refund me. Asked card company (Cash/Square/Block) for a chargeback. Week later merchant ships something, FedEx fails to deliver and it gets returned to merchant. 3 months later Square asks me for all documentation. I give it to them. They say I can't have a refund as the package was delivered. I tell them "yes, delivered back to the merchant". They say "sorry, our policy is that if it was delivered somewhere then we won't do a chargeback. I know that's not the outcome you wanted." Then they terminated my account. LOL
- akvadrako 5y ago
  Thanks for this. It's a good thing warning to stay away from square. I've had to do chargebacks with two different banks and both were painless even though something was delivered.
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    I've done a number of charge backs over the years, and they most often are painless. I did have one not go my way though. A hotel I stayed at charged my credit card $100 for parking. I had taken a taxi to get to the hotel. They refused to listen to me, so I did a charge back. They sent my bank a copy of a parking receipt that had no identifying information on it, just basically said, "overnight parking, $100". My bank said that was good enough, and reversed the charge back, no appeal allowed. But at least the other time a merchant pushed back on a charge back, it worked out better. A South American airline charged me for a flight between two cities in a continent I had never even been to in my life. They used as proof a record that simply showed the flight did actually fly. My bank sided with me.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  If you wrote to square saying you are taking them to small claims court in the US, I bet they would have immediately buckled.
beefee 5y ago
Yes, and there are surveillance companies dedicated to tracking people and the returns they make [0]. Many retailers now demand personal information like ID cards to make returns. If their secret fraud detection algorithms flag you, you can find yourself suddenly unable to make returns. [0] https://www.theretailequation.com/ https://www.theretailequation.com/
- datavirtue 5y ago
  There are federal mail order laws in the US. They better slow thier road.
relevant1 5y ago
I've had the opposite experience recently. Last month a fan failed on my 2080 Ti, which I bought in 2018, I contacted the retailer and they said they've started to replace fans on GPU's themselves because of the shortage situation. Great, works for me. A week later I got an email saying they're replacing it with a 3080. Slight upgrade at no additional cost.
- Roritharr 5y ago
  "slight" got quite the chuckle out of me. You are quite lucky!
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  Which manufacturer? I've had good luck with EVGA and terrible luck with MSI, but that's pretty anecdotal.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I think it's because there's so much abuse going on. More and more I'm hearing about it becoming normalized to buy a product, use it once for whatever purpose, then return it again.
- technothrasher 5y ago
  Not new, really. I knew plenty of people who considered that acceptable behavior as far back as the 1970's. In fact it used to be an old TV sitcom trope that they'd buy the expensive TV for the "big game" or expensive dress for the "big dance". They couldn't afford it, but they could just return it the next day. Then they'd accidentally destroy it, and you were supposed to feel bad for them for now having to pay for what they bought.
amelius 5y ago
Question. Last week I ordered a keyboard (price around $120), but received two. What should I do? Returning it would take me easily 30 minutes of work, so I decided to keep it until they start complaining.
- bool3max 5y ago
  Depends on the scale/size of the merchant. For some it's more hassle that it's worth to try and get it back. Chances are they won't bother.
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    I received two motherboards from Newegg recently. Because of a screw up in shipping, my first motherboard didn't look like it was ever going to show up, so they send me another one. A week later, the first one did show up. I contacted them and they definitely wanted one back, seemed genuinely happy I contacted them about it. They sent me a return label and it went off back to them that day.
- scarface74 5y ago
  We bought two suitcases from Amazon They shipped it to the wrong house so we never received it. We sent them an email and they refunded our money and we bought two more. Two weeks later, our neighbor came back into town and brought us the two original suitcases that we never received. Trying to be honest, we started a return process. But we could not get them to understand that we didn’t want a refund. We were returning a duplicate. Since either way we were going to have “free” luggage, we just kept both.
  - willis936 5y ago
    I had a similar situation with a cat-proof trashcan ordered from amazon. After they messed up the delivery and issued a refund I got it from brick and mortar. Two weeks later it shows up on my doorstep. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Now I have a cat-proof recycling bin.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
koyote 5y ago
Definitely noticed this as well. Five or more years ago I bought a kettle from Amazon and two months later it starts leaking. Turns out it's a design flaw and a lot of reviews on the kettle mentioned the same issue. I sent a support ticket and they refunded me immediately and told me I could keep the kettle. Then last year I ordered a knife on Amazon. A month later I receive a water flosser... I contact support (which is now next to impossible to find in the UI) and they tell me they can't refund me unless I send the item back and they also won't be sending me my actual purchase. This was during lockdown and as I do not own a printer I was not able to print out the return slip. They also refused to come and pick it up. I got nothing, not even a "we're sorry" coupon; my account is over 20 years old. So we went from automatic refund + you get to keep the item for an issue that was not their fault to them completely fucking up my order and then making me go through hoops, spend me own money to send their mistake back to them. The good news is that there are a lot of different and competitive online retailers around these days, and a lot of shops are now online due to Covid. So it was not very difficult for me to stop using Amazon altogether.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  2 weeks ago I contacted Amazon because a delivery reached the estimated time and was marked as possibly lost. Because the order was split into 2 deliveries half which arrived and the other half lost, they couldn’t create a new order. So they refunded the missing items and delivery costs. Reordered and arrived in 5 days. First time in like 10 years I’ve had to contact support and was happy!
- datavirtue 5y ago
  Years ago I started using a Dot/Alexa. One day I needed to return something and asked Alexa for customer support and "she" responded by reading me the definition of customer support from Wikipedia or something. I tried numerous times in different ways before realizing there was no way to contact support through Alexa. That was the beginning of the end of our twenty year relationship.
- vageli 5y ago
  > I contact support (which is now next to impossible to find in the UI) and they tell me they can't refund me unless I send the item back and they also won't be sending me my actual purchase. If you receive something in the mail by accident, you are under no obligation to return it. I would have issued a chargeback given that you never received the item you paid for. > By law, companies can’t send unordered merchandise to you, then demand payment. That means you never have to pay for things you get but didn’t order. You also don’t have to return unordered merchandise. You’re legally entitled to keep it as a free gift. https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/what-do-if-youre-billed-things-you-never-got-or-you-get-unordered-products https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/what-do-if-youre-bille...
indymike 5y ago
Inflation causes retail profits to plummet... So we'll see this as managers try to protect their bonuses.
ljm 5y ago
I do wonder if a lot of companies reached peak growth in a legitimate way, but because the organisation's existential need to grow larger never goes away, they start turning to less legit methods to make it happen.
api 5y ago
This kind of thing happens when the bottom falls out of an industry. Amazon, Walmart.com, and Alibaba/Aliexpress are totally destroying independent retailers. Overall across the economy most fraud is committed on the way down, not the way up. The same happens as economic bubbles collapse and financial entities scramble for some way to inflate the books.
- gruez 5y ago
  > This kind of thing happens when the bottom falls out of an industry. Amazon, Walmart.com, and Alibaba/Aliexpress are totally destroying independent retailers. This makes no sense. Amazon has famously good customer service. I don't deal with walmart often so I don't have an opinion either way. Finally, you bemoan aliexpress, which is comprised of independent sellers, but complain how they're destroying "independent retailers"?
sandworm101 5y ago
>> Fortunately, AMEX heavily sides with consumers against merchants No. AMEX heavily sides with AMEX against merchants. AMEX, via chargeback penalties, turns a net profit every time a customer complaint is filed. They aren't being nice out of the goodness of their hearts. They are leveraging their market dominance to extract penalty money from users. Just be happy that we customers are on the winning side ... for now.
- Bluecobra 5y ago
  This is true for Visa/Mastercard as well. I used to work in merchant processing and sat near the chargeback department and would frequently overhear conversations with irate merchants having to pay a $25 chargeback fee regardless of the outcome. This was almost 20 years ago so not sure if that fee has been lowered or got higher.
  - rootsudo 5y ago
    Higher, and more strikes per merchant would mean the merchant is drop. $25 is the minimum. 1% used to be the minimum for what was acceptable per monthly volume, but now it's much less, I've seen guidelines on risky categories go to .5%.
throw1234651234 5y ago
I think people abuse the return system. I am a "minimalist" in the sense that I buy only stuff I need, so I barely ever return anything. But I see friends ordering 20 boxes and then returning 19 as standard operating procedure.
micromacrofoot 5y ago
About a month ago I ordered some ice cream from postmates and they delivered it completely melted, like it was never frozen. I assumed it would be an easy refund because it wasn't even safe to eat, so I sent them a photo and... they adamantly refused? Charged that back and deleted the app. I was kind of flabbergasted.
sva_ 5y ago
I've been trying to send back an SSD to Samsung for over a month now. They keep postponing sending me the shipping label. You have to request it by phone. That is, after I received the product with over 4 months delay (after which I didn't need it anymore - hence trying to return it.) I'm not sure if it's because the German Samsung store might just be too incompetent though.
mindslight 5y ago
Over the past decade+, retailers have been giving up on scrutinizing returns. You used to need a reason for returning something, then it morphed into just "didn't like", then they stopped asking questions, and now it's common for them to not even ask for the item back! This has been widely lauded as customer friendly. And evidently the math worked out that losing a bunch of money on the occasional return wasn't a big deal. But while this is customer friendly, it completely forgoes the idea of individually judging returns! So now retailers are looking at the absolute amount of money they're losing to returns, and attempting to optimize that. They can't discourage returns outright (by changing their policy) because that would break customer expectations, and it would be extremely hard to inspect/adjudicate returns better because that would require skilled workers, so all they can do is adjust the false positive/false negative ratio. Another black box approach is the use of surveillance databases like Retail Equation, to track whether an individual has made "too many" returns based on the amount they've spent - a totally irrelevant and unjust metric when you think about it. It also could be "just you" due to getting tripped by these databases, perhaps even because of your first chargeback. Who would know? The "unfixable" waste also ties into the hollowing out of other business departments too. Many food items are not packed very well and are put in the same box without regards to density, so items arrived dented, crushed, or destroyed. Rather than the return process feed that failure back to the packing department, it's just treated as another "no fault" return. So now as a customer I've just got to accept that many times the items I've ordered are going to arrive damaged, and meanwhile I'm sure I'm building up a record in their surveillance database as a less profitable customer - when it all stems from their mistake.

bluedino 5y ago

It it fraud or just laziness? 10 years ago I stopped buying open-box items from NewEgg. They never, ever worked. I had a theory that it was cheaper for them to ship it to another customer, and then if it got returned a second time, mark it as defective, vs doing actually DOA checks etc on their side.

thedougd 5y ago
For computer components, especially, this must be true.
Mountain_Skies 5y ago
That lately has been my experience with Amazon's "tested and refurbished" outlet items. The last three items have all been defective or missing parts despite Amazon's claim that they were thoroughly tested and checked for quality. The funny part is one of the items was bulky and would cost $45 to ship at retail rates. I know Amazon gets a bulk discount but it still couldn't have been cheap for them to process the return. They paid that $45 (or whatever is their discounted rate) at least four times on the item that cost under $200. Wonder if it went on a returns pallet, sold to a liquidator, who then sold it on Craigslist or someplace similar.

pc86 5y ago

Big +1 for talking through the actual issue with your CC rep and asking them how to best process the claim. 9 times out of 10 the answer is pretty straightforward but that 10th time you can really get saved by getting the advice of someone who knows the system and is as "on your side" as they can be.