Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Stops Giving Refunds When an Item's Price Drops After You Purchase It (recode.net)
Amazon has for years issued refunds to users when the price of an item drops after they've purchased it. But lately the e-commerce giant hasn't been doing that on a number of products, except for televisions, according to price-tracking companies. Recode reports: The move may have something to do with the rise of startups that track prices for Amazon customers and automatically request refunds when appropriate. One of them, a Santa Monica-based startup called Earny that is backed by the startup incubator Science, first pointed out the change. Earny scours a customer's email inbox for digital receipts, and then continuously checks the price on a retailer's website to see if it drops.
Yeah.... no.
I haven't used Newegg in years. Their return policy is terrible.
If I get a defective product from Amazon, they send me a new one before asking for the return. Newegg wanted their product first, charge me return fees since it's not their fault it's defective, and charged me shipping for the replacement.
Only had to have that happen a few times to say to hell with them. Plus, their prices are not very competitive anymore.
I haven't used Newegg in years. Their return policy is terrible.
Amen. I bought a board from them a few years back. Got the PC all built and running, but something was causing lock ups. Turns out several individual pins were bent in the CPU socket. There's no way I'm good enough to just bend a single pin in several different places, so it had to have come like that. I didn't want to wait a week+ without a PC while I shipped it back and they shipped me another one, so I purchased the same one overnight from Amazon and had it up and running the next day. Newegg's return policy for mobos is "No". Just "No". Even if they shipped it to you in three pieces, you cannot return for a refund under any circumstance. It took several days for them to at least agree to give me store credit. After spending thousands with them over the years, I found this to be an exceptionally poor way to handle a $150 purchase. I haven't been back to their site since, and I spend every opportunity I can advising people not to shop with them.
If Fuck You is why, then why did the previous policy exist?
Either Amazon suddenly got a little eviller, or some other condition changed.
I think the "this is costing us more than it used to" explanation fits the facts pretty well. It used to be segmented marketing, where they charge people depending on how much they care/complain. If you're a squeaky wheel, you get oil. If you're a silent wheel, no oil for you. Then robots came in to automate squeaking, independent of how much the user cares. You can't do segmented marketing when the segments all merge.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
None of that applies to today's race to the absolute bottom in wages and working conditions.
Working in a modern warehouse is nowhere near the "absolute bottom", and claiming that it is worse than 19th century plantation slavery is idiotic.