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?

>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.

From where I'm sitting (business owner who handles my own customer support), this seems like a classic case of the business's incentives not aligning with the employee's.

Minor complaints are often much harder to deal with (and care about) than major ones, and far more likely to explode into something nasty. Couple that with the fact that the support rep doesn't see a cent of that transaction, and I can see why they would want to shut down the interaction ASAP.

The support rep is following a script cooked up to follow a directive from an MBA. Support is a cost center, subject to optimization for P&L. Reputation isn't in the analysis so the customer hostile solution is best.

Exactly. The rep gets yelled at for a “cost” repair. He gets no telling about a chargeback, that’s eaten somewhere in finance.

Oh wow it's the guy that built the open source dog USB Oscilloscope! Great product :)

I'm surprised that you have to do your own customer support, though. I had always assumed that Crowd Supply would take care of that.

Labrador is my side project; my main business is actually in used video games down here in Aus. :)

I think Crowd Supply handle certain support issues specific to orders through their platform (as does Amazon), but there's still technical information that people need/want and so I help where I can.

> 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.

For every person that does a chargeback, 10 of them don't know or don't bother. A lot of companies & services rely on that.

Oh man, Leatherman has really gone downhill in the last 10 years. My father's Leatherman is a solid tool that has withstood lots of abuse. I went through three doing light electronics repair (chipping the wire cutters, bending the hinge out of whack so it won't close all the way, busting the tip off a blade) before finally deciding to never buy another one.

I feel like practically all manufacturers have switched to cheaper metal alloys. For example, Fiskars scissors, garden shears, and such used to be a thing you buy once and use practically forever, now they're pretty much the same as anything that has any kind of brand on the packaging.

> "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.

I think it's less nefarious than that. The vendor did not fulfil their end of the contract, so the contract is voided and the money is transferred back. If the bank starts to go into do partial refunding they could suddenly be spending a lot more on this service.

Maybe the simply lack the manpower to do basic customer service and device repair?

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".

I'm arguably not too involved in the US Customer Service industry ... but what prevents Leatherman to kill your credit score in that scenario?

The credit relationship is between you and your bank (or your credit card issuer), not Leatherman.

Leatherman's ultimate recourse would be take me to small claims court, argue I lied to the credit card processor to win the chargeback case, get a judgement, and if I don't pay go after me for collections. I doubt they'd have a good time given they sent me an email refusing to do a warranty repair and I based my chargeback on that.

Of course they'd have to come to my home jurisdiction and all that. While in theory if they prevailed I think they'd get triple damages, they also run the risk of losing and throwing away even more money and also angering Visa who considers my bank's ruling in my favor to be final. There were a few companies that had the genius idea to go to small claims and Visa got upset enough that those companies can no longer take credit cards.

In most cases it is better for the merchant just to eat it and write it off as a loss.

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.

Yup, it's a business now on internet boards. Here is a link to one such telegram group: 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.

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.

>I suppose the first step is actively finding these people and putting them in prison.

what do you think the police are for? the FBI also investigates wire fraud cases. unfortunately both do not have enough resources to investigate $200 frauds. Hell, in some jurisdictions they don't even bother with $900 thefts.

This is what I think the police are for but as you say, it's hard to figure out what they actually are for these days. And to be clear, it's not just the police, decades-long underfunding of the public legal systems, prisons, and all the services that are supposed to stop people ending up that far in the first place.

But I'm not sure it's good to stop expecting the police to deal with this. That sort of surrender to criminality would be a dark step for humanity.

> what do you think the police are for?

General beatdowns. Detectives are what you're thinking of. Most people want detectives, few people want harassment and fines (or death) over nothing more than some cop's power trip or petty things (like jay walking when it blocks no traffic and is completely safe).

Granted, this perspective is colored by American policing. I know some other countries have it better.

Yep, and that's why fraudsters should spend decades in prison

Decades? Murderers get less than that.

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.

> 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-bille...

If you do a chargeback, you have to be prepared for the company to permanently ban you as a customer. Many people are not willing to take that risk with their Amazon account.

I'm fortunate in that I have been able to cancel my amazon subscription and not do any more purchases with them, but if the poo hit the rotary accelerator I am sure I would be grateful to have the option.

Charging back on your Amazon prime account will quickly get it closed. Any gift balance you have goes with it. You can probably keep access to your digital purchases if you complain enough.

It certainly doesn't sound legal to invalidate your gift card balance, and it seems at least in one case a banned person received reimbursement in the form of a check.

> “All open orders were canceled, I just could access digital content purchased in the account. I had over $100 in my gift card balance and Amazon agreed to send me the refund, I received a check in my mailbox after 1 week,” wrote Do, who calculated that his rate of return for Amazon is about 17% — ordering 104 items and returning 18.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/if-youre-returning-a-lot-o...

I am not sure what the law is here in Australia, but as others have mentioned, a chargeback would have jeopardised my account. I don't pay for prime (although I think I actually had a prime trial at the time of the issue, which makes it even more infuriating) but have quite a few kindle books.

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!

Are you in the USA? Every Amazon return I have done is they give you a QR code and I drop it off at a UPS store. No printing required and UPS handles the packaging.

Amazon has many faults but returns have always worked well for me.

Australia.

I guess their systems aren't quite as smooth here. I'd still be quite annoyed to have to go to UPS in my free time to return something I never ordered.

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.

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

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.

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.

If you wrote to square saying you are taking them to small claims court in the US, I bet they would have immediately buckled.

If you file in small claims court, they might settle. Saying you're going to file doesn't work like that (because people say it all the time and very few people follow though). At most large companies, the script if you threaten legal action is to notate it in their file, refer them to the legal department and stop communication except through legal.

Long story short, don't threaten lawsuits. Just file the suit.

I figure it is worth trying anyway, as the cost to send an email/phone call is almost nothing compared to the time it takes to fill out paperwork for the small claims court and actually go and deal with that.

IIRC they have one of those bogus arbitration clauses in their ToC. I told them I wanted them to appoint an arbitrator and now they won't respond at all.

And as someone who litigates for shits and giggles, it can be pretty expensive in Small Claims, about $400 often just to file and do service on the defendant. And some courts won't accept suits that are less than the filing fee. And a lot of the time you can't get back your costs from the defendant either. And.. I'm not sure you can sue the bank for not charging back. I guess the correct process is to sue the merchant for never delivering the merch.

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/

There are federal mail order laws in the US. They better slow thier road.

>> 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.

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.

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%.

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.

"slight" got quite the chuckle out of me. You are quite lucky!

Which manufacturer? I've had good luck with EVGA and terrible luck with MSI, but that's pretty anecdotal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Similar thing happened to me a couple of years ago with a 3D printer. Tracking showed it cross the country, get within 50 miles of my house, and then suddenly took off several states away. At that point tracking stopped updating. After waiting a while for Amazon to get past their "just wait to see if it shows up" threshold, they shipped me a another printer, which arrived without trouble. Two months later the original printer randomly showed up one day. I contacted support but they couldn't understand what I was talking about. After wasting a bunch of my time and their time, it seemed pointless. I didn't really need a second 3D printer but it seemed like it was going to cost both me and Amazon more time than it was worth to straighten out their mistake so I dropped the matter.

This reminds me of a similar tracking behavior I saw last year. It was both frustrating and hilarious. Item shipped via FedEx from TX to CA. I think the ETA was 5 days.

   Day 1: Left TX
   Day 2: In transit in NM
   Day 3: Arrived in Tracy,CA
   Day 11: Left Tracy and arrived in destination city
   Day 14: Left destination city
   Day 15: In transit in southern OR
   Day 18: In transit in northern OR

It hasn't been seen since. When I contacted FedEx, their investigation showed that the truck it was on was currently sitting empty in WY. No explanation for why it sat so long in Tracy, why it left the destination, or where it ended up.

So the seller shipped a replacement.

   Day 1: Left TX
   Day 2: In transit in TX
   Day 6: Arrived in Tracy
   Day 7: Left Tracy
   Day 11: Left Tracy, again
   Day 12: Left Tracy, yet again
   Day 13: Arrived in destination city
   Day 15: Delivered

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.

I twice got things as part of an Amazon order what I didn't order. It took hours, and speaking so several supervisors to get them to take back the extra stuff, and that no, I wouldn't "just keep" large metal pipes.

Amazon now has an option on their return reason: 'received extra items'

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.

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.

My American law, you're entitled to keep it with no extra payment.

When this happens to me, I tell the retailer that if they want to schedule a pickup at my address, I'll happily hand it to the driver, but I'm not going out of my way to fix their mistake.

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.

> 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"?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don't you get blacklisted with prejudice at the vendor if you chargeback?

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.

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_re...

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.

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!

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.

Inflation causes retail profits to plummet... So we'll see this as managers try to protect their bonuses.