Absolutely don't do a chargeback. Try to settle it with the package carrier.

Google's algorithm can flag a chargeback as suspicious, leading you to be locked out.

This is a delightfully horrifying response... "Don't poke the trillion dollar bear, he might bite you and lock you out of your account!"

(GOOG's market cap as I write this is $985B...)

It is horrifying and it should be illegal to provide so little customer service when you encourage deep, irreplaceable investments into your platform.

At least have all your account recovery lined up before you try a chargeback. It is taken as an extremely strong signal that the account has been compromised and is being used to fraud the rightful owner.

Source: I work there.

Also: I would exhaust all my escalation options before going the cc route. With any retailer.

Having thought about this some more, I really can't recommend doing a chargeback with any company you want to keep taking your money. Afaiu this doesn't cancel the contract, so you owe them the money unless you manage to void the contract, in which case they should send the money back anyways. Then, teaching all the fraud detection systems that your exact usage pattern leads to fraud seems unpleasant too. Just too many ways for this to backfire, even if the company doesn't play offended.

This is a response from a dystopian anti-consumer future that we seem to be living in because Google thinks customer service has no value.

> Afaiu this doesn't cancel the contract

There is no contract if Google didn't send the phone. The commenter doesn't owe them money for something they failed to send.

> Then, teaching all the fraud detection systems that your exact usage pattern leads to fraud seems unpleasant too.

Or (hear me out, this might sound insane): a fucking human could talk to the customer and flag it as "not fraud". This is how every other company does it.

The solution to getting screwed by an algorithm is not to give in to the algorithm. It's to talk to a human to override it.

The ultimate solution, I hope, is that the next iteration of the federal government is pro-consumer and enforces our UCC rights and/or breaks up Google.

> There is no contract if Google didn't send the phone. The commenter doesn't owe them money for something they failed to send.

Don't know about your jurisdiction, but in most countries I lived in the law works otherwise. The moment you checked out you have a contract. Seller not sending out the goods is failing their contractual obligations. But that failure does not cancel the contract, only allows you to execute the appropriate clauses of it (some of which usually lead to refund and cancellation). On the other hand, the delivery of goods doesn't usually prevent you from cancelling the contract (you usually have an obligation to return the goods in that case). The clauses injected by laws tend to make this very consumer friendly... But the ones I remember require you delivering a notice of cancellation and I'm not sure if failing payment counts as such (IANAL, I don't even know your jurisdiction, Yadda Yadda).

Just contact them and they'll send you another one, like pretty much any retailer.

Packages get lost all the time. They have a process to file it with their shipping partner.

Same thing happened to me once. I called google support and they send me another phone.

Same here. It seems very unlikely they would not resend a phone lost in delivery. When it happened to me, they immediately ordered a replacement device.

Absolutely don't do a chargeback. They will lock out anything that requires payment, and possible more.