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Amazon Is Banning People For Making Too Many Returns (businessinsider.com)
Amazon -- which for years has maintained the standard for free returns online -- might now ban users for making too many returns. From a report:The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday documented complaints that the e-commerce giant had barred customers who had returned items. Amazon apparently failed to alert the customers that they had returned too many items before the bans. The Journal spoke with two people and cited dozens more online who said they had been barred from Amazon, as well as others who received emails from the company after returning some items. The two people who spoke with The Journal seem to be part of a wave of hundreds of people who were barred from Amazon in late March and early April, as previously reported by Business Insider.
Use new lines, not carriage returns!
I've read of some people buying and returning the same item every month so they never had to actually pay for it since Amazon kept giving them a full refund.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Amazon is acting rationally.
So 'Free Returns' means 'Infinite number if Free Returns'?
Non-defective returns cost retailers money, retailers are not in the business of loaning out their products.
Ken
From better articles about this, it appears a large number of the bans were actually people who used returns as part of a fake review scheme. They'd 'buy' something, review it as a 'verified purchase', then return it at the last possible minute to get discounts, freebies or pay outs.
They're banning "hundreds" of people out of the hundreds of millions of customers they have. These are people who are abusing the system, and they deserve the bans (well, maybe some of them don't, but I strongly suspect they all do). People like that are the reason why companies have to institute less lenient return policies, and by banning them Amazon can prevent abuse of their policies while still allowing people who may have legitimate reason for returning items to do so. In other words, Amazon can offer those free returns precisely because they ban people who abuse them, not because they ban people who use them.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
But the fault lies with them for not being clear about what they want to offer.
I suspect part of the problem is the rules are "soft."
If you bought 500 different things from Amazon over the year, and returned 50 of them, that's likely fine.
But if you bought the same thing every month, returned it, then bought it again - In effect "renting" it for free, then you might get banned - Even though you're doing four times fewer returns than the first example.
Their systems are looking for people that are 'abusing the system,' and that's a lot harder to write into a clear policy.
There are people on YouTube who have channels devoted to unboxing Amazon items that they clearly have no intention of ever keeping.
Many of the reviews are truly low on content because you can tell the person has unboxed his/her 50th item that day, and they don't have the energy or knowledge to say anything of value.
Amazon isn't in the business of allowing these people to profit from free returns.
Your explanation is too simplistic - When you have advanced software systems looking for people engaging in 'fraud' or 'gaming the system' those systems are looking for a wide-ranging set of behaviours which aggregate together to indicate something.
If a rep from Visa calls me up and asks me to confirm a few purchases, he likely can't articulate the policy that caused Visa to suspect fraud - Other than in general terms. Likely it's the same here.