
Banned from Amazon: The Shoppers Who Make Too Many Returns - cepth
https://www.wsj.com/articles/banned-from-amazon-the-shoppers-who-make-too-many-returns-1526981401
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thisisit
Dupe:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17124924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17124924)

Repeating my comment from the same thread:

 _This isn 't surprising at all. Amazon's return policy is prone to social
engineering. And there is a cottage industry out there taking advantage of
this situation to con money out of Amazon. A friend's account was hacked last
year and his account information changed. Then the hacker proceeded to request
a gift card refund on a previously purchased laptop. The gift card was then
used to buy another laptop shipped to a freight forwarder. Couple of months
later, Amazon banned the account.

Amazon actually needs to improve its fraud detection capabilities. But until
the time it does that, blaming customers for too many returns seem to be the
go to strategy._

~~~
Chaebixi
> Dupe:

The previous one seems to have died on the vine. This one has more comments
and votes.

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dqv
They shouldn't do this.

One time I made an order with a few things, but namely cat litter and an
(expensive) air filter. The cat litter and air filter were cutely packaged
together with no protection for the air filter. Of course the air filter was
smashed and unusable.

I forgot this "bug" twice more and realized they weren't going to fix the
issue. I determined that I should _not_ order these items from Amazon lest
they ban me for returning the filters too many times. I sent feedback each
time, but I guess they'd rather just ban customers or whatever.

~~~
jbob2000
Who orders cat litter from Amazon? The delivery fees on something that heavy
would cost as much as the item itself! Yeah, yeah, it's heavy and you might
not have a car to pick it up from the store, I get it.

But still. Knowing what we know about the amazon warehouses and how quickly
the staff are forced to work, maybe it's in your best interest to be cognizant
of what you're ordering and _not_ order certain items together.

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ryanlol
I order drinking water from Amazon, beat that!

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blackflame7000
I once Amazon Now'd a 12 pack of coke. What? I was thirsty.

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jason_slack
I have placed 106 Amazon orders in the last 6 months.

Recently I have had more returns than normal. Why? The products I am receiving
are broken or not as advertised or the quality is just very poor.

I returned a screen protector because it just would not stick to the screen of
my phone.

I returned an iPad case because it wouldn't close all the way even though it
was for my iPad size.

I returned a laser pointer and goggles because I couldn't see the beam.

I wonder too how much I am being penalized by Amazon's internal systems for
these.

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21
I know someone who orders toys for their children and returns them after one
month when the kids get bored with them and buys new ones.

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tonyedgecombe
Can't say I'm surprised, dealing with returns is expensive, I'd want to block
people who abused the system.

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Zelphyr
On the one hand, I agree. But with the increasing scammers on Amazon, this
policy is going to bite them. I ordered a Nest Protect a few years ago and
what I received was a cheap First Alert detector inside a Nest’s box. Did I
get flagged for that return?

As an aside, clearly their returns department doesn’t bother to check returns
like they indicate with a “Amazon Inspected” sticker on the box. So not only
was I scammed, but Amazon was complicit in it AND may have penalized me for
the return.

Lately I’ve gone through three adaptors from three different manufacturers and
sellers and every one of them has broken within weeks, maybe months, of
receiving it. And they all had great reviews at the time I bought them. But
when I go back later, I notice a lot of obviously fake reviews that weren’t
there before. Not sure how that scam works but it’s costing me money.

I used to stay with Amazon in large part because of their fantastic customer
service, but that’s not enough anymore. The scammers are running rampant on
their platform and Amazon is choosing to view me as the troublemaker.

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kelchm
I have to wonder what the actual parameters are to end up being flagged in
this way. I feel like I'm fairly liberal in returning things to Amazon and the
painlessness of returns is really one of the primary motivators behind
ordering from Amazon for me.

I've purchased around 1700 items and spent around $56,000 at Amazon since
2006. Of those I've returned a total of 90 items.

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jaclaz
From the article: “If your behavior is consistently outside the norm, you’re
not really the kind of customer they want,” said James Thomson, a former
senior manager at Amazon and now partner at brand consultancy Buy Box Experts.

Today it is Amazon _normalization_ , tomorrow ...?

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dragonwriter
> Today it is Amazon normalization, tomorrow ...?

Companies “firing”, both explicitly by bans and by putting them into service
hell until they go away, customers that are expensive to service because their
behavior is outside of what the firm is optimized around is decidedly not new
or something Amazon invented.

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davemtl
Pay walled article.

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assblaster
Try fullwsj, it goes through Facebook affiliate link.

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headShrinker
Now that there is a domain dedicated to this hack I can’t imagine it will last
much longer.

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21
True, it didn't work for me yesterday, but maybe it was just a fluke.

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assblaster
I've always opened the links in cognito with success, so maybe cookies might
have played a part.

