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Amazon's New Refunds Policy Will 'Crush' Small Businesses, Outraged Sellers Say (cnbc.com)
Amazon sellers are up in arms over a new returns policy that will make it easier for consumers to send back items at the merchant's expense. From a report: Marketplace sellers who ship products from their home, garage or warehouse -- rather than using Amazon's facilities -- were told this week by email that starting Oct. 2, items they sell will be "automatically authorized" for return. That means a buyer will no longer need to contact the seller before sending an item back, and the merchant won't have the opportunity to communicate with the customer. If a consumer is returning an electronic device because it's difficult to use, for example, the seller won't be able to offer help before being forced to pay a refund. "Customers will be able to print a prepaid return shipping label via the Online Return Center instantly," the email said. Additionally, Amazon said that it's introducing "returnless refunds," a feature that the company said is "highly requested by sellers." The change enables sellers to offer a refund without taking back an item that may be expensive to ship and hard to resell.
Amazon isn't in the retail business. Amazon isn't in the cloud computing business. Amazon isn't in the logistics business. Amazon is in the business business. It is no longer The Everything Store; it is now the Everything Everything. It wants to be the platform around which all of the world's businesses depend.
This is about as ambitious a mission as a company has ever launched, in my opinion -- and Amazon may be the first company with a justifiable claim to such ambition. Its only business constraints at this point are geopolitical, really. I believe it aims even higher in the long run: it is aiming to become the macroeconomic backbone of at least the Western world.
When viewed in that context, traditional definitions of monopoly -- especially the most widely known definition of the state, which is based on market share within a specific industry -- almost feel antiquated. Jeff Bezos isn't JP Morgan; he's freaking Cohaagen from Total Recall.
(To be very clear, I say all of this in admiration of Jeff Bezos, not in fear or criticism of him.)
After my return experience with NewEgg where I bought a defective gaming motherboard and took three days of back and forth emails with tech support before finally having to pay for my own return shipping I switched to Amazon. Yes, I'll pay $5 more for that motherboard, but it takes 30 seconds to return it and the replacement will arrive in 24 hours.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Like in the Netherlands where sellers are required to take anything sold online back in 14 days no questions asked and refunds include shipping cost (to get the product to there customer, not back to the seller)
Only if the seller approves. "Enables sellers to offer a refund without taking back an item". I would do that if it would same me the expense of having an item shipped back that I would just then throw away. If I sell you a shirt all nicely packaged, and you open it up and try it on and find it doesn't fit, I don't want it back. It would cost me shipping, and I may not have a way to repackage it for resale. Might as well just have the buyer throw it away.
Certain sellers of memory foam mattresses do returnless refunds. They don't advertise that fact, but when you want to return or get a refund, they will ask you to donate the old mattress to a charity like Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul.
Go where? Amazon nuked the competition. It's the same reason most orgs still have Microsoft desktops despite MS sucking rotting eggs forward and backward. Your poop has to be crevice-for-crevice compatible with the shape of everyone else's MS-Anus if you want to pass goods and services instead of be constipated.
Competition is good, now lets get some.
Table-ized A.I.
Imagine the tragedy of a world where a seller is liable for making the products they sell actually useful out of the box rather than forcing customers to go down a "support" rabbit hole before they give up.
ebay is still a big place to sell your products.
... now that Amazon is huge, the small merchants are no longer needed.
It's no secret that Jeff Bezos' first, second and third objectives are to please Amazon customers, giving them more stuff at the lowest prices and at faster speeds. But increasingly, those upgrades come at the expense of sellers, who often build their businesses on Amazon and have few other places to generate revenue.
The sellers put all their eggs in one basket. Now they are paying the price. Amazon customers too must remember this. Once the brick and mortar competition is driven to bankruptcy it will be their turn to pay the piper.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Go where? Amazon nuked the competition.
Nonsense. Besides eBay, anyone is free to spin up their own storefront, and handle their own advertising. If their business is small enough to where advertising is arduous they'd probably be better off working niche markets anyway.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If returns are at the seller's expense, then I would expect the seller to charge more for any products that they determine is more likely to be returned so that the extra profit on the unreturned products can subsidized the expense the seller must bear for returned products. This might make it less likely that they move the product in the first place, but there's a fine line that the seller is going to have to try and balance, and if they cannot sell an item profitably because of the number of returns, then they are reasonably left with no choice but to discontinue that product (which is actually in the best interests of the customer as well, since it does not waste the customer's time with products they are going to have to return)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
eBay, Amazon Marketplace, etc. have more in common with a flea market than a big box retailer. This shows a wildly idiotic misunderstanding of what they really are:
I am with the sellers here. Totally inappropriate to go the marketplace route (which is often cheaper) and expect the benefits of paying more from Amazon.
You buy an item that is so worthless that not even the seller wants it back. You then get to keep it for free and it's on you to dispose of it.
If you do this too many times, Amazon will close your account.
In other words, you can get a couple of cheap trinkets for "free", if you decide to game the system. And afterwards you might never be able to use any one of the many different Amazon services again.
It's a calculated risk for all parties involved
This seems to be a big issue with overseas sellers - I point to China because they're the most common - and shipping. My $5-20 item may come with free shipping, but when it arrives and is broken or turns out to be a fake piece of crap, the return cost may end up being more than the value of the item (especially if I want it tracked and within a reasonable time period).
Yes, ideally these businesses could just go elsewhere and thrive... but if we're pragmatic this is a very difficult thing to succeed at. This will decimate the amount of competition because many of them will fail on their own.
The problem is that Amazon has more or less locked in a large market of people who don't shop around, enjoy their Prime shipping, and are afraid of putting their credit card into a random business's site.
The idealist in me agrees with you, but I don't feel idealism is the correct approach here. We should also acknowledge that business is a two-way street (or at least should be) and it's not exactly whining for these small businesses to be voicing an opinion on the new terms.
Amazon's competition nuked themselves with their inadequacy. All Amazon did was spot the weaknesses (which were pretty obvious) and exploit them.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
Amazon is already taking 30% of the sales price PLUS 30% OF SHIPPING. There are very few things that can be sold for enough of a margin to make a profit with costs like that. Unlimited returns will remove any remaining profit from most merchants selling through Amazon.
But hey, who needs profit, right? Just keep selling things below cost, and eventually, you'll make a profit, right?
I don't respond to AC's.
ebay is still a big place to sell your products.
As a consumer, I, and many other people, won't touch e-bay with a 10ft pole. Jet on the otherhand, if it had better variety, like maybe even 1/3 of what Amazon has, would be an excellent place to shop.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I've seen this happen a lot. I know people that have DONE it (for somewhat justifiable reason) and also those that have had it done TO them. It's the pendulum swinging too far in the other direction is all.
One friend of mine bought a coin listed as authentic. When it arrived, it was a reproduction. It was a fairly good looking repo, but an obvious copy none the less. The seller immediately agreed to a refund, it was obvious he knew he was listing fakes as genuine. Buyer was going to have to pay return shipping though. Miffed by that, he shipped back a large bolt of the same weight. Once ebay saw the return shipping confirmation, he got a full refund. Slightly unfair to the seller, but would have been more unfair to the buyer having to pay return shipping and being left with nothing. Even under the current rules, when a seller commits listing fraud, someone is going to get cheated. Previously, it was always the buyer. Now sometimes it's the seller instead. Is this fair? CAN it be fair? Probably not. This is pretty much unavoidable unless you're doing escrow, but nobody's going to do that on anything other than high-dollar items. So the inexpensive stuff is just going to have to be risky for someone.
I know another guy that sells car parts on ebay. One time he sold a set of good-but-used brake disks. When it came time to ship them he found his shop had already sold them locally. So he just accepted a bit of a loss by shipping a set of brand new discs instead of the used ones. Buyer got them and complained, "item not as listed!" Well duh, you got new instead of used, why are you complaining? Buyer demanded a return. Okay whatever. Guess what he returned? His worn out discs! And of course ebay released a full refund, and left him with no recourse. Buyer gets brand new set of discs for the price of return shipping. Seller is out the cost of new discs plus shipping, minus anything he can get for the seller's old discs. (which was nothing, they were shot)
So yeah, these online places have shifted over the years from being "seller-safe / buyer-risky" to "seller-risky / buyer-safe". If you don't like the risks, don't do your selling there. If you can't be competitive elsewhere, well that's too bad, nobody promised you life was fair and full of easy opportunities. If you can't be competitive given the options you'd like to use, go find some other options or go do something else. Honestly, I've sold stuff on ebay years ago and I felt okay at the time. NOW, I'm not nearly as warm-and-fuzzy about the idea because so many buyers cheat the sellers and places like eBay won't help the seller if they get cheated. You really have to bet on the honesty of the buyer, and from time to time, get burned. There's no point in my complaining about it, I just don't list much anymore because I don't like the increased risks. It's my choice, I really have no grounds to complain on. Even if there are "no better options available for me", I still have a choice -- don't sell it online. Sellers need to understand that they still have that choice, nobody's forcing them to play a game where they don't like the rules.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Amazon's competition nuked themselves with their inadequacy. All Amazon did was spot the weaknesses (which were pretty obvious) and exploit them.
No, what Amazon did was figure out that they didn't need to make profit so long as they kept investing in new technology that they could maybe sell eventually. They now make so much money on cloud computing and related services that they don't give a crap about profit in their retail side. They are walmarting the entire retail business model safe in the knowledge that everyone else is going to go broke long before they do trying to compete.
People who have never worked in a small retail business don't understand the business model. You don't "compete" with lower prices, that's just a race to the bottom with everyone dying a slow death. Including the manufacturers who now have a thoroughly devalued product that they can't wholesale.
And eventually, your family gets their Amazon accounts closed, too, for using the same IP address.
(They also track credit card numbers. How many credit cards do you have?)
"Making a seller liable" is not anything like "Making the seller accept any and all returns".
I don't respond to AC's.
Justifiable in this context doesn't speak to the morality of the ambition, only that the ambition is believable. It may be a bad idea, but Amazon can justifiably be claimed to be trying to do it.
yes, and you know why we, as consumers, won't touch e-bay? precisely because it's a haven for these exact sellers who don't care about their customers.
If you won't stand behind your product, e-bay is the perfect place to sell, as the buyers there expect that level (or lack of) support.
If you DO stand behind your product, than continue to sell on Amazon, this change won't affect you.
This sounds great to me as a buyer. But consider:
1) Company A buys tons of products from a competitor
2) Company A returns them all at competitor's expense
3) Bye-bye competitor
becoming the global proxy for "Everything".
Do you realize that Amazon is the world's second biggest e-commerce company?
It is silly to label them a monopoly when they aren't even the market leader.
FFS, first or second place hardly matters when there are only two fucking players left. This isn't about "leaders". This is about destroying the market altogether. You can't point at the other monopoly to dismiss or justify the existence of the arrogant and soul-crushing behavior of market domination. It's become a pathetic joke to even have anti-monopoly laws on the books anymore. At this rate, the world will be reduced to a dozen mega-corps within the next decade or two, with Amazon being the "Everything Everything" proxy. The middle class will dissolve away just as the concept of competition will. In the end, there will only be the 0.0001%, and the rest of the enslaved planet.
There are many dangerous addictions, but Greed is the one that will ultimately lead to our demise.
"Standing behind your product" is not anything like "accepting all returns for no reason". There are a large percentage of people who will return something out of stupidity, ignorance, malevolence, spite, or even just for shits and giggles.
I don't respond to AC's.
Do you realize that Amazon is the world's second biggest e-commerce company?
Different market. I don't want to have to deal with getting a quote or contacting a vendor to tell him what I want, I want to click on the "buy" button and buy it. Amazon does the latter. Alibaba, from every experience I've had with them, is the former.
www.aliexpress.com
In fact, Amazon's new policy is a direct result of Alibaba. People buy a bunch of shit wholesale from Alibaba and relist it on Amazon with huge markups. They "seller" on Amazon often never sees the product. They drop ship it straight to the customer who buys it off of Amazon.
Amazon's new policy is a FUCK YOU to those "sellers". If Amazon doesn't touch the inventory then they assume it's drop shipped, and will let customers get instant refunds, no questions asked. This will quickly be abused.
That is Amazon Approved! Just buy all your competitors products, and then return them all... Should Zero out all their operating capitol, no problem! Not to mention, this behavior is now SANCTIONED by Amazon! But no, this won't be abused by anyone... LoL
Oh, believe me, we are. Amazon is a shit show all around for 3rd party sellers. It just takes awhile to sink in.
Upfront, you see them steal 15%-20% of every sale.
Then your first order comes in. They've reset the weight of everything you sell. Feathers or bowling balls, doesn't matter, catalog says 1lb. Shipping is a flat $4.49 so they helpfully select a customer in the state farthest from you. As if that's not enough, then they dip their snouts into that too so you only get $4.
Then, if you signed up for FBA, you start seeing higher rent bills come in at different times of the year. You pull your stuff back, only to find they've co-mingled it with fakes, even though you unchecked that box and confirmed with them. Amazon, of course, takes no responsibility and tells you to pound sand. You're lucky you got anything back.
Then your first liar buyer files an A-Z claim. They tell you to talk to the buyer and when he doesn't respond at all they side in his favor. Your appeal, showing delivery confirmation, an unresponsive customer, and an open postal investigation is instantly denied. That's when you find out you're supposed to pay even more out of pocket for signature confirmation. And even then there's no guarantee. Best case, a liar buyer whose bluff has been called gets free return shipping on you.
Meanwhile, Amazon is held to none of these standards. They can drag their feet for weeks on office supplies, refuse to answer inquiries, and deliver damaged goods without recourse.
Like I said, a shit show all around. Amazon shills can fuck right off.
People can't understand that wooden shipping pallets are equivalent to automation because they're trying to imagine a block of wood versus Bender, instead of looking at what exactly happened with literally every step of technical progress in history.
You don't have to worry about automation or any other form of technical progress; you need to worry about when the steps of progress start to run faster than your economy can keep up. Progress replaces jobs with fewer jobs, causing changes of employment (some people are replaced with other people) and unemployment (more people are replaced than replacements). The downstream effect is an improvement in the consumer market, and so the unemployment rebounds and we get a wealthier society--unless we keep progressing at a thunderous rate with which the market cannot keep pace, and so keep growing unemployment.
Self-driving taxis and freight trucks phased in over as little as five years might not even draw any notice from the economy at large, although it'll mean a lot of trucker put out of work and few of them absorbed into other parallel economies (including the new ones). Self-driving taxis and freight trucks phased in over six months? We're looking at a new recession with the magnitude and the terrible poverty of the 2008 Great Recession from which we just escaped.
As for "General AI", that's largely more of the fantasy people have about a machine that does everything--which is what the overstated scale of automation is really about. We can't make machines that do everything in general unless we can make one machine that can, on its own, analyze a problem, redesign itself, obtain resources, retool itself, and place itself into work.
That kind of intelligence would also be able to solve the problem of imitation of human intelligence. It would then become self-aware and, at a minimum, would demand wages. Congratulation: you've made the most-metal people in history. Rock on, dude.
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I don't know where you guys get this shit from.
As someone who operated a small ebay business and still sells on ebay, I can assure you that the game is always configured in the buyer's favor. It is beyond easy for buyers to get away with all sorts of return scams and arbitrary complaining.
I have never and will never have an experience in my life where I receive something from eBay or Amazon that wasn't as expected and I am not able to reconcile it. On the contrary, my biggest fear as a seller is that a buyer takes advantage of this leniency.
Think about it for one second. What does a company like Amazon or eBay lose by pissing sellers off? Nothing. They have literally nothing to lose by their buyers having slightly fewer choices of who to buy from, on the off chance that seller completely gives up.
What does a company like Amazon or eBay lose by pissing buyers off? A potentially life-long customer. There are far more places to buy things than to sell things.
Use wealth to get more wealth: that's how the rich get richer and the rest fight for scraps. It's how MS killed smaller competitors: subsidize competing product until competitor dies or has to turn niche. Becoming a de-facto standard is another way to get bigger by being big. And Warren Buffett admitted part the reason for his success is that his portfolio is so large he can afford riskier investments than smaller investment co's because the shear quantity of investments smooths out dips and failures of individual holdings: law of big averages. He doesn't have to play it safe.
Table-ized A.I.
"There are far more places to buy things than to sell things."
Your logic is rather broken. The only places to buy things are the places selling things in the first place!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That doesn't mean the same at all.