I expect this has been considered when creating policy at the largest companies — what’s the ease of obtaining recourse for unhappy customers?
What’s additionally interesting is I thought Amazon CS had a degree of goodwill factored into policies based on LTV or some other calculation. We saw zero goodwill here despite having spent >$100k on Amazon.com in the last 5 years.
Both this and the YouTube example seem like bad business; you’re disincentivizing your most ardent users from continuing to tolerate your services. They hadn’t looked at shopping on Walmart or B&H with every purchase previously and now will. They hadn’t considered Twitch or other places to serve video and now will.
Logitech, Kaiser and Capital One all suddenly changed their tune when the AG simply forwarded my complaint.
Then they’ll just keep doing it.
They’d sold a LIFX to Customer A who bought a $0.69 BR30 from Home Depot, substituted into the LIFX packaging and then returned to Amazon, who refunded them, and listed the item on Warehouse Deals.
On that one Amazon CS was also somewhat useless but they did at least refund us.
When it eventually came to a senior leaders attention, Amazon got it sorted out properly. They ended up auditing all their stock in Warehouse Deals for this type of item and discovered widespread fraud. Sounds like they fixed smart bulbs but haven’t fixed GPUs though!
I'm on the verge of getting banned as they've warned me I'm returning too much, and have had enough negative interactions with their support that I'm in a similar boat.
It's been somewhat freeing giving them up. There's plenty of D2C out there we've been neglecting due to AMZs marketplace...
I am starting to despise every sort of activitsm. Why can't people decide for their won, without running round and evangelising everything to their great new pet peeve?
Veganism, Abled body people fighting for the disabled, Language police... Go home.
I am sure you feel differently regarding your son. But as a person with a disability, I can tell you that this never worked in my family. My mother might be motivated to do all sorts of things, but most of them are not helpful or even subtly counterproductive.
To sum it up: If you speak for someone, you are likely patronizing them.
The sad reality is that the mainstream does not want to think about the challenges facing disabled people and they are all too happy to simply ignore the (perceived) minority which is directly impacted by them. All these absolute assholes who park on parking spaces for the disabled come to mind. Those people will only ever be convinced if they are not confronted by a broad section of society. It is simply not something that a minority can ever hope to achieve without the explicit support of at least some part of the majority.
In my experience, someone standing up for me seldomly did anything good for me. They might feeel better.
But I am not going to convince you either way, so... All the best for your son.
Ebook / audiobook and other licensed-not-bought content may no longer be accessible.
(I avoid this problem by not shopping Amazon full stop.)
The ability to do charge backs will probably disappear in future. When the system was created we didn't have the same ability to authenticate cardholders that we do today and many jurisdictions didn't have small claims courts.
I'm tired of these giant companies having their cake and eating it too. These companies have structured themselves in such a way that it's win-win for them, and lose-lose for the customers and smaller businesses around them.
With great power comes great responsibility.
The problem is that for any of the new security features of cards to drive any of those kinds of changes the old mag-strip style of card authentication has to be deprecated and removed - which is likely not going to happen in the next 20 years.
Visa and Mastercard (and the layers between them and the merchant) have tried pretty hard to apply financial pressure (extra fees) to promote chip-only transactions and it still hasn't stopped mag-stripe from reigning supreme.
We're basically in an IPv4 and IPv6 situation in the payment industry =/
Or did I just not understand your story?
It's an accident. And if Amazon would've read the email instead of feeding it through ChatGPT they would've been able to rectify it.
But, because of their scale and the number of fake items on the platform I think their number of returns will also increase along with their costs. I'm sure some executive will then try to minimize costs by "fixing" or retiring the AI.
I'll not be surprised if this has already happened in one way or another.
On the other hand, a scammer would send a brick back and ChatGPT would apologize in the same fashion.
So I kinda get it why they're being so stingy with it
In the end they returned the wrong thing and no wonder alarm bells went off. Yes, it was an understandable mistake, this time.
If it's oh so difficult for Amazon to properly handle this function of a business, that is AMAZON'S fucking problem.
Neither the customer nor any other outside entity forced Amazon to construct itself as the operation it is. They very deliberately and actively did that of their lwn volition and over the sustained course of decades.
Back up and revisit just what is and is not a sane perspective here. Poor Amazon can't be expected to deal with all the scammers they created for themselves? But can still rake in the benefits of their scale and insane staff:customer ratio 100x more than any normal shop?
They absolutely CAN deal with their fraud, the same way every other business in the world before them had to, by actually having whatever number of employees it takes to service their number of customers.
They just can't do that and still have 1% of the normal overhead every other businesses has.
Incredible that anyone is even for a second considering the plight of poor Amazon in a case like this.
I thought those were mine, which had a specific extra warranty purchased from the store (Not Apple's own). Returned those to the store to get it fixed. Turns out they store and check the Device ID and I found out we've switched pods with my SO at some point.
They wanted a "spurious return fee" that was more than the value of the AirPods. I just didn't pay it and they destroyed them.
didn't amazon pledge to stop destroying functioning products or was that just in the EU?
We ordered two pairs of Beats. One was ordered by me, the other by my spouse. We’d discussed the purchase but we weren’t clear on who was actually going to order. Received both via Prime.
I setup a return. We return the item which was received on her Order ID against my return.
Amazon tells us we’ve returned a fraudulent item because the Serial # do not match. Multiple emails (5+) back and forth with Customer Service to explain fall on deaf ears. We give them both Order IDs. We ask for ANY option to solve this mess. We’re told repeatedly that this is their policy, their decision is final, go away.
Amazon won’t even send us the headphones back so we can send the correct ones — those have been destroyed.
“To protect our employees and customers, we have disposed the incorrect item that we received as per our policy.”
In a nutshell Amazon stole $250 from us.