> People in India are surely learning the same thing.

Flipkart from circa 2012 had that. The story should probably more about how they lost that trust.

I used to order things on Flipkart regularly (during my WFH years in Bangalore) because the couriers were employed by them, had multiple delivery attempts in a day and items in general came in a day or two to my doorstep.

At that point, it was as if they treated "shipping" as their primary product rather than the box they were delivering.

For my vantage point, the whole process starts to unravel with "WS Retail" and Flipkart's schism.

Suddenly, it looked there was a split-brain between buying, shipping and delivering.

Completely agree -- BUT -- that's why they need to take the counterfeit items problem that is invading their site very seriously. They've bought a lot of good will with putting the customer first. But humans are easy to forget the good when bad things happen to them. Amazon could easily lose its hard won good will from the fake goods problem it has on its hands now.

I am confident they will handle it based only on the history I have with them. Killing the golden goose to protect a bunch of thieves makes zero sense.

But companies have made worse mistakes, so who knows.

I wonder what the trust looks like in the other direction: if you can get free stuff by lying to customer service, what happens if that becomes popular in the customer base?

Meh, that doesn't seem a huge risk. Lying to customer service isn't a life hack. It's unethical and a crime. Depending on the specifics, it could be mail fraud, a felony.

Maybe I'm naive, but I believe most adults are not actually willing to commit fraud in writing. And besides the risk of prosecution, most people like to think of themselves as honest people. It's hard to continue that narrative if you're proactively engaging in fraud.

I was wondering if this varies by country; both the expected extent to which one should game the system (e.g. prevalence of bribes) and actual ability of the authorities to prosecute people.

Ah, yeah, I bet you're right.

They are learning that very fast. See this : http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-techno... . People were abusing their customer service and they killed the goose. Now the whole return for mobile phones also factors in your buying history and is evaluated on case by case basis.