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.

Comments

Good

[iamhassi]

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.

Re:Good

[Ogive17]

But would it surprise you?

There's always a few assholes who ruin a good thing for the rest of us.

It's an outrage

[Kohath]

Amazon is acting rationally.

Re: It's an outrage

[orlanz]

Exactly, in the past two years Amazon service has gone to the dogs. I probably return 1/10 items we buy. Rarely is the return not defective in a certain way. Off colors, wrong specs, bent pins, clearly well used, etc. Also sometimes it is days to weeks late. I have had them explain that it is 2 day shipping, it doesn't include the time it takes to ship out?!? And estimated delivery is not always accurate. Or the lack of tracking info means it will get to me tomorrow?!?

Spend hours on Customer Service and they are more than happy to extend your Prime subscription or return the product that is lost in transit for a week as "compensation". I still need the baby food, diapers, gift, or relay circuit! And I don't want to reorder and pay the current higher price! Amazon said it was available under Prime for a certain price; they should stand behind what they say.

I think they have moved onto AWS and left retail on autopilot.

Re:Free returns?

[DedTV]

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.

Re:Free returns?

[Baloroth]

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.

Youtube Un-boxers

[bryanbrunton]

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.