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I found Amazon historically has been very good about refunds and replacements, better than almost anywhere else. However nowadays its getting harder and their c

I found Amazon historically has been very good about refunds and replacements, better than almost anywhere else. However nowadays its getting harder and their chat service has been replaced with automation as has the phone service and while they exist you have to search quite hard to find them. The automation unfortunately isn't dealing well with this sort of problem. As Amazon is automating via web interface a lot of this sort of thing its also too narrowly defined the refund/replacement service and its bound to cause issues. Not having an easy fall back to a human is also the error which a lot of silicon valley companies seem to fall into. So I tend to use Amazon only for things I can't find elsewhere or relatively cheaper items, anything expensive is usually cheaper and better supported elsewhere.

mistrial9 4y ago
> Not having an easy fall back to a human is also the error which a lot of silicon valley companies seem to fall into it is explicitly cheaper and scales, to automate all response. Companies that paid humans to do customer service have been crushed by the scale of the new companies. A dozen hundred-year-old retailers in the USA are closing all their stores, they had hundreds of people making sales and doing customer service, while earning a living for themselves and their families.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  It's cheaper but ineffective. The trick is to use automation as much as possible and not a drop more. Excellent customer service agents are actually helpful for this. The agents you have aren't mindless drones, they're people and they don't want to do yet another stupid call where they explain that button X does thing Y, even though it's labelled X, they can gladly explain what needs improving because they're interacting with your customers all day - and then you can fix it. Cherish these people. My good bank (First Direct) has done really well at this. I can call them about anything 24/7, a human answers about as quickly as a person would answer their own phone, maybe 5-10 seconds, not long enough for one of those stupid "We're very busy" messages. But I rarely talk to them because all routine stuff just works correctly so I don't need to. I called them once to ask what happens if I need a whole lot of cash right soon (since they don't have physical locations, the answer was for very large amounts I need to give a lot of notice but a courier brings me the cash) and decades ago I called them because I wanted my debit card to work in the ATMs for other banks (remember when it didn't? Maybe you're too young). Also I called them to transfer money to buy my current home because that's too much money to be authorised by a web form apparently.
  - lupire 4y ago
    You pay your bank a lot more than you pay Amazon, on a margin basis.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Current accounts in the UK are pretty much always loss leaders to lure people into the bank’s other products such as credit cards or mortgages. The margin on the CA alone is most likely negative.
  - dazc 4y ago
    First Direct is a bit of a niche though.Customer service is expensive because 90% of it is dealing with the same stupid questions over and over again. You will get to the point in any business where it isn't feasible to pay human beings to cope with this.
    - waqf 4y ago
      The point is to find a way to have the 90% questions answered by a machine, and the 10% by an expert human. And LLMs are (another step towards) making it hard to argue that this isn't feasible or isn't a good experience.
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  > Companies that paid humans to do customer service have been crushed by the scale of the new companies. I agree in general, but Amazon is the exception—they've gotten to their dominant positions in online retail and cloud compute with strong support and great customer service. I'd go so far as to say it's their secret sauce. For them to go the route of all other megacorps and banish their paying customers to automation hell seems very "day two."[0] [0] https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon-defines-and-operationalizes-a-day-1-culture/ https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon...
- raverbashing 4y ago
  They were crushed because a lot of them didn't do the "minimum" > hey had hundreds of people making sales and doing customer service Yeah, instead of a website with prices and an easy way to order And yes I've known "mom and pop" stores that have just that.
- fatneckbeard 4y ago
  the other way to see this is that the "new companies" are doing loss leading, do not actually make a profit on their retail businesses, are trying to gain an illegal monopoly by putting competitors out of business by doing illegal business practices and dumping not just products and services but dumping entire industries on the market for below cost.
d23 4y ago
They also used to send a UPS pickup for free, but lately I've been having to take the return to the local UPS store. It definitely pushes me past the convenience threshold for impulse purchases where I'd rather not take the risk of having to unbox, find out something is broken or incorrect or a scam, repackage it, drive to the store, then purchase the product again elsewhere. Might as well just find the product literally anywhere else if possible.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  We definitely have to take the packages to our local DHL pickup location, but at least Amazon.de pays for the shipping. Seagate would've wanted me to send a broken hard drive with valid warranty to the Netherlands on my own dime. They would've also just sent out another hard drive of the same model, so I would've either had to wait for that to get to me in order to rebuild my RAID, or just buy a new drive and get shipped an unnecessary drive. Amazon just returned my money so I got a new drive immediately.
- singleshot_ 4y ago
  I find myself in the local UPS store from time to time and the amount of work the people have to do in there in order to deal with amazon returns is off the charts. One interesting tidbit I can convey is that when a person goes into a UPS store to return an amazon package, the UPS store is not compensated in any way (according to the owner of my local one). The UPS store employees are the customer service for the return part of the amazon customer lifecycle.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
    If you are lucky enough to live near a kohls it’s still easy as hell. You literally just take the unwrapped item, walk in there, scan the QR code on your phone, and done. 10 second transaction.
    - vinay427 4y ago
      This seems to be the case for UPS store returns as well. It was faster than any Kohl’s return due to the size of the store (and not positioning it near the back like multiple Kohl’s locations I’ve visited). I assume the GP comment was describing the work done by the UPS store employees behind the scenes to package and ship returns?
seaal 4y ago
I just had an issue where I needed a human to talk to this weekend after purchasing a New Condition item and receiving a Renewed item. I spent 10 minutes trying to find it on my own, eventually just having to use Google to find the magic spell to talk to a human. Visit Contact Us -> Select 'Something Else' -> Select 'I need more help' This was the only way to get the help I needed, and I cant even be mad since the refund was given to me instantly and I got to keep the Amazon renewed item without having to return it.
- lupire 4y ago
  Are there not automated prompts to "I received a different item from what I ordered"? Amazon should be happy to credit those returns because you get a free used item, and they take the money back from the fraudulent vendor.
  - donalhunt 4y ago
    Isn't the issue here that the vendor is not committing the fraud?
  - RHSeeger 4y ago
    You also have to take into account the case of a fraudulent reporter.
  - seaal 4y ago
    I believe there was an option like that, but it required me to send back the item I received and they would ship me a new one.
- dcminter 4y ago
  I think the support in the EU may be better than the US, unless things have changed very recently. Perhaps because our consumer protection laws are stronger and have sharper teeth! I've actually been surprised with how good Amazon support has been. A notable example was trying to get an answer to "why were you saying 'en route' until 10 minutes before the delivery slot and then cancelled moments later?' where I expected the brush off but actually got a real explanation (the courier had dropped the parcel and damaged it!) Returns & refunds have been quibble free and prompt. All this via the support chat.
casenmgreen 4y ago
I may be wrong, but it seemed to me Amazon's customer support, historically, has been as bad as anywhere else, but, there was a high-level decision to offer refunds / small compensation payments by default.
- rcme 4y ago
  > there was a high-level decision to offer refunds / small compensation payments by default. Doesn’t that make the support way better?
  - Retric 4y ago
    No, if anything it results in worse support as things stay broken for much longer. Order X, get Y, get refund, order X, get Z isn’t good support it’s a huge waste of my time.
    - rcme 4y ago
      Fool me once...
      - Retric 4y ago
        Yep, there’s a reason I’ve stopped shopping at Amazon it’s simply more time consuming than going to the store in the first place.
casenmgreen 4y ago
I found when you actually talk to Support, to try and get something done or to actually fix a problem, it's the usual level of large company support; what you say is ignored, the questions you ask are ignored, the boilerplate replies do not in fact relate to the actual situation, you get a different person every time, and no one ever reads the prior conversation, so it's impossible to build up any understanding and every support agent makes the same mistakes and misunderstandings, again and again and again. I found I was getting small compensation payments, which I did not want and had not asked for, where the agent had not understood what was going on, but was actually just pushing that small-compensation button by habit and reflex. Any high-level support manager who thinks support can be provided by routing each email to an arbitrary support agent is utterly incompetent and should be instantly fired. As it is, I stopped using Amazon a few years ago, because of how they treat warehouse staff.
- toast0 4y ago
  As with many things Amazon, it seems like they're very good at optimizing, but they don't optimize for what I would want to be optimized. For customer service, they seem to be oriented towards 'make the customer happy' rather than 'fix the problem'. So they end up in about the same place as most corporate customer service; the agents have no agency to get problems fixed, although at least they've historically been able to try to make the customer happy.
  - casenmgreen 4y ago
    Exactly. It is of course entirely straightforward to make customers more happy by making small payments, than it is to create actual meaningful functional customer support.
nikanj 4y ago
What you’re describing is the first step of enshittification ( https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys )
voytec 4y ago
> I found Amazon historically has been very good about refunds and replacements, better than almost anywhere else. In my case this ended at the beginning of the COVID pandemic (so still during Bezos' cadence). I've ordered a frying pan and found it on my doorstep crushed, wrapped in cardboard which seemed to previously be a box. It was literally crushed as if a delivery truck went over it several times. Contacted Amazon and these assholes told me that I'll be able to return it after the pandemic. Account closed. Their prices at this point were already higher than with other stores, so their loss, not mine. Bezos has no moral values. No idea about the new guy but I suspect it's no better - Bezos had reasons to jump ship.
- salad-tycoon 4y ago
  Our moral values don’t align , Bezos and I, that was okay. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on everything. I kept using Amazon. Then he built a giant phallic rocket and started to blast off and wave his dong over the entire planet. That for me was the final straw. Maybe it’s a weird way to make a decision but it was just too much. I get that the billionaires are the movers and shakers and king and queen makers, I hold no resentment. Many of them deserve their prominent place but keep your dong out of my face. Is that too much to ask? \0/
- ckdarby 4y ago
  "these assholes", with statements like that I'm discouraged to take the post in good faith. I've used Amazon for 10 years and I'm beyond a 1000 orders with them and everything in OPs post runs counter to my experiences.
  - voytec 4y ago
    > "these assholes", with statements like that I'm discouraged to take the post in good faith. And you're right - I have absolutely no good faith nor assumption of honest intentions when it comes to Amazon. The number of your orders is however not impressive to me, as mine was similar. Not sure why you decided to bring it up.
BeetleB 4y ago
I keep hearing from people that they like Amazon due to the ease of refunds, but it's not been my experience. The last time I wanted to return an item as it was clearly used, but the automated system rejected my claim because I personally had used it (I really needed it the day it arrived, so I didn't have a choice - and I didn't want merely a refund, but a replacement, so this isn't like I got full use and didn't want to pay). Never had issues returning anything to Target. They just ask the customary questions ("Was there anything wrong with it?"). With Walmart the only issue I had is long lines. And if it was bought online it's pointless to return in person - the folks in the local stores aren't aware of the return policy for online purchases. But returning via mail - no problem. And getting a human on the phone was easy.
Madmallard 4y ago
Is it a problem they’re falling into or is it the same awful behavior most american companies are exhibiting—greed. Profits over prosperity. Disgusting.

mistrial9 4y ago

> Not having an easy fall back to a human is also the error which a lot of silicon valley companies seem to fall into it is explicitly cheaper and scales, to automate all response. Companies that paid humans to do customer service have been crushed by the scale of the new companies. A dozen hundred-year-old retailers in the USA are closing all their stores, they had hundreds of people making sales and doing customer service, while earning a living for themselves and their families.

tialaramex 4y ago
It's cheaper but ineffective. The trick is to use automation as much as possible and not a drop more. Excellent customer service agents are actually helpful for this. The agents you have aren't mindless drones, they're people and they don't want to do yet another stupid call where they explain that button X does thing Y, even though it's labelled X, they can gladly explain what needs improving because they're interacting with your customers all day - and then you can fix it. Cherish these people. My good bank (First Direct) has done really well at this. I can call them about anything 24/7, a human answers about as quickly as a person would answer their own phone, maybe 5-10 seconds, not long enough for one of those stupid "We're very busy" messages. But I rarely talk to them because all routine stuff just works correctly so I don't need to. I called them once to ask what happens if I need a whole lot of cash right soon (since they don't have physical locations, the answer was for very large amounts I need to give a lot of notice but a courier brings me the cash) and decades ago I called them because I wanted my debit card to work in the ATMs for other banks (remember when it didn't? Maybe you're too young). Also I called them to transfer money to buy my current home because that's too much money to be authorised by a web form apparently.
- lupire 4y ago
  You pay your bank a lot more than you pay Amazon, on a margin basis.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    Current accounts in the UK are pretty much always loss leaders to lure people into the bank’s other products such as credit cards or mortgages. The margin on the CA alone is most likely negative.
- dazc 4y ago
  First Direct is a bit of a niche though.Customer service is expensive because 90% of it is dealing with the same stupid questions over and over again. You will get to the point in any business where it isn't feasible to pay human beings to cope with this.
  - waqf 4y ago
    The point is to find a way to have the 90% questions answered by a machine, and the 10% by an expert human. And LLMs are (another step towards) making it hard to argue that this isn't feasible or isn't a good experience.
ericbarrett 4y ago
> Companies that paid humans to do customer service have been crushed by the scale of the new companies. I agree in general, but Amazon is the exception—they've gotten to their dominant positions in online retail and cloud compute with strong support and great customer service. I'd go so far as to say it's their secret sauce. For them to go the route of all other megacorps and banish their paying customers to automation hell seems very "day two."[0] [0] https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon-defines-and-operationalizes-a-day-1-culture/ https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon...
raverbashing 4y ago
They were crushed because a lot of them didn't do the "minimum" > hey had hundreds of people making sales and doing customer service Yeah, instead of a website with prices and an easy way to order And yes I've known "mom and pop" stores that have just that.
fatneckbeard 4y ago
the other way to see this is that the "new companies" are doing loss leading, do not actually make a profit on their retail businesses, are trying to gain an illegal monopoly by putting competitors out of business by doing illegal business practices and dumping not just products and services but dumping entire industries on the market for below cost.

d23 4y ago

They also used to send a UPS pickup for free, but lately I've been having to take the return to the local UPS store. It definitely pushes me past the convenience threshold for impulse purchases where I'd rather not take the risk of having to unbox, find out something is broken or incorrect or a scam, repackage it, drive to the store, then purchase the product again elsewhere. Might as well just find the product literally anywhere else if possible.

Hamuko 4y ago
We definitely have to take the packages to our local DHL pickup location, but at least Amazon.de pays for the shipping. Seagate would've wanted me to send a broken hard drive with valid warranty to the Netherlands on my own dime. They would've also just sent out another hard drive of the same model, so I would've either had to wait for that to get to me in order to rebuild my RAID, or just buy a new drive and get shipped an unnecessary drive. Amazon just returned my money so I got a new drive immediately.
singleshot_ 4y ago
I find myself in the local UPS store from time to time and the amount of work the people have to do in there in order to deal with amazon returns is off the charts. One interesting tidbit I can convey is that when a person goes into a UPS store to return an amazon package, the UPS store is not compensated in any way (according to the owner of my local one). The UPS store employees are the customer service for the return part of the amazon customer lifecycle.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4y ago
  If you are lucky enough to live near a kohls it’s still easy as hell. You literally just take the unwrapped item, walk in there, scan the QR code on your phone, and done. 10 second transaction.
  - vinay427 4y ago
    This seems to be the case for UPS store returns as well. It was faster than any Kohl’s return due to the size of the store (and not positioning it near the back like multiple Kohl’s locations I’ve visited). I assume the GP comment was describing the work done by the UPS store employees behind the scenes to package and ship returns?

seaal 4y ago

I just had an issue where I needed a human to talk to this weekend after purchasing a New Condition item and receiving a Renewed item. I spent 10 minutes trying to find it on my own, eventually just having to use Google to find the magic spell to talk to a human. Visit Contact Us -> Select 'Something Else' -> Select 'I need more help' This was the only way to get the help I needed, and I cant even be mad since the refund was given to me instantly and I got to keep the Amazon renewed item without having to return it.

lupire 4y ago
Are there not automated prompts to "I received a different item from what I ordered"? Amazon should be happy to credit those returns because you get a free used item, and they take the money back from the fraudulent vendor.
- donalhunt 4y ago
  Isn't the issue here that the vendor is not committing the fraud?
- RHSeeger 4y ago
  You also have to take into account the case of a fraudulent reporter.
- seaal 4y ago
  I believe there was an option like that, but it required me to send back the item I received and they would ship me a new one.
dcminter 4y ago
I think the support in the EU may be better than the US, unless things have changed very recently. Perhaps because our consumer protection laws are stronger and have sharper teeth! I've actually been surprised with how good Amazon support has been. A notable example was trying to get an answer to "why were you saying 'en route' until 10 minutes before the delivery slot and then cancelled moments later?' where I expected the brush off but actually got a real explanation (the courier had dropped the parcel and damaged it!) Returns & refunds have been quibble free and prompt. All this via the support chat.

casenmgreen 4y ago

I may be wrong, but it seemed to me Amazon's customer support, historically, has been as bad as anywhere else, but, there was a high-level decision to offer refunds / small compensation payments by default.

rcme 4y ago
> there was a high-level decision to offer refunds / small compensation payments by default. Doesn’t that make the support way better?
- Retric 4y ago
  No, if anything it results in worse support as things stay broken for much longer. Order X, get Y, get refund, order X, get Z isn’t good support it’s a huge waste of my time.
  - rcme 4y ago
    Fool me once...
    - Retric 4y ago
      Yep, there’s a reason I’ve stopped shopping at Amazon it’s simply more time consuming than going to the store in the first place.

casenmgreen 4y ago

I found when you actually talk to Support, to try and get something done or to actually fix a problem, it's the usual level of large company support; what you say is ignored, the questions you ask are ignored, the boilerplate replies do not in fact relate to the actual situation, you get a different person every time, and no one ever reads the prior conversation, so it's impossible to build up any understanding and every support agent makes the same mistakes and misunderstandings, again and again and again. I found I was getting small compensation payments, which I did not want and had not asked for, where the agent had not understood what was going on, but was actually just pushing that small-compensation button by habit and reflex. Any high-level support manager who thinks support can be provided by routing each email to an arbitrary support agent is utterly incompetent and should be instantly fired. As it is, I stopped using Amazon a few years ago, because of how they treat warehouse staff.

toast0 4y ago
As with many things Amazon, it seems like they're very good at optimizing, but they don't optimize for what I would want to be optimized. For customer service, they seem to be oriented towards 'make the customer happy' rather than 'fix the problem'. So they end up in about the same place as most corporate customer service; the agents have no agency to get problems fixed, although at least they've historically been able to try to make the customer happy.
- casenmgreen 4y ago
  Exactly. It is of course entirely straightforward to make customers more happy by making small payments, than it is to create actual meaningful functional customer support.

nikanj 4y ago

What you’re describing is the first step of enshittification ( https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys )

voytec 4y ago

> I found Amazon historically has been very good about refunds and replacements, better than almost anywhere else. In my case this ended at the beginning of the COVID pandemic (so still during Bezos' cadence). I've ordered a frying pan and found it on my doorstep crushed, wrapped in cardboard which seemed to previously be a box. It was literally crushed as if a delivery truck went over it several times. Contacted Amazon and these assholes told me that I'll be able to return it after the pandemic. Account closed. Their prices at this point were already higher than with other stores, so their loss, not mine. Bezos has no moral values. No idea about the new guy but I suspect it's no better - Bezos had reasons to jump ship.

salad-tycoon 4y ago
Our moral values don’t align , Bezos and I, that was okay. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on everything. I kept using Amazon. Then he built a giant phallic rocket and started to blast off and wave his dong over the entire planet. That for me was the final straw. Maybe it’s a weird way to make a decision but it was just too much. I get that the billionaires are the movers and shakers and king and queen makers, I hold no resentment. Many of them deserve their prominent place but keep your dong out of my face. Is that too much to ask? \0/
ckdarby 4y ago
"these assholes", with statements like that I'm discouraged to take the post in good faith. I've used Amazon for 10 years and I'm beyond a 1000 orders with them and everything in OPs post runs counter to my experiences.
- voytec 4y ago
  > "these assholes", with statements like that I'm discouraged to take the post in good faith. And you're right - I have absolutely no good faith nor assumption of honest intentions when it comes to Amazon. The number of your orders is however not impressive to me, as mine was similar. Not sure why you decided to bring it up.

BeetleB 4y ago

I keep hearing from people that they like Amazon due to the ease of refunds, but it's not been my experience. The last time I wanted to return an item as it was clearly used, but the automated system rejected my claim because I personally had used it (I really needed it the day it arrived, so I didn't have a choice - and I didn't want merely a refund, but a replacement, so this isn't like I got full use and didn't want to pay). Never had issues returning anything to Target. They just ask the customary questions ("Was there anything wrong with it?"). With Walmart the only issue I had is long lines. And if it was bought online it's pointless to return in person - the folks in the local stores aren't aware of the return policy for online purchases. But returning via mail - no problem. And getting a human on the phone was easy.

Madmallard 4y ago

Is it a problem they’re falling into or is it the same awful behavior most american companies are exhibiting—greed. Profits over prosperity. Disgusting.