Slashdot Mirror
The Painful, Costly Journey of Returned Goods -- and How You End Up Purchasing Some of Them Again (cnbc.com)
Buyers return a huge number of packages they buy from Amazon and other e-commerce sites, so much so that retailers are sometimes left with little choice but to get rid of large swaths of inventory at a cost. Last year, customers in the U.S. returned about $351 billion worth of items that they had purchased from brick-and-mortar retailers and online stores, according to estimates by National Retail Federation. CNBC: There's a good chance that the $100 printer, the $300 wide-screen monitor, or the $170 router you recently bought from Amazon weren't supplied to the e-commerce giant by their original manufacturers. In fact, the order may have been fulfilled by someone like Casey Parris, who resells items that customers previously returned to retailers. Based in Florida, Parris spends about five hours each day visiting thrift stores and scanning auction and liquidation websites for interesting items, he told CNBC. Sometimes he finds auto parts, other times it's a pair of sneakers, and occasionally he purchases printer cartridges -- all with the goal of reselling them.
Walter Blake, who lives in Michigan, does the same. For years, he's been selling electronic items on Amazon that he acquires from a network of places. Blake and Parris are part of a growing cottage industry where dealers acquire discarded items at very low prices, only to resell some of them back on Amazon and eBay at a premium.
Walter Blake, who lives in Michigan, does the same. For years, he's been selling electronic items on Amazon that he acquires from a network of places. Blake and Parris are part of a growing cottage industry where dealers acquire discarded items at very low prices, only to resell some of them back on Amazon and eBay at a premium.
I don't mind purchasing used goods, there are a lot of things that can be just fine if opened.
But - I do like to know they have been exposed to other humans. Every now and again from Amazon you get a product that has obviously been opened to some extent, that you ordered as new.
So far it's not been anything I cared to return (again), but I think Amazon should try to be extra careful to clamp down on any suppliers shipping anything ever opened as "new"
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
There is nothing wrong with people re-selling thing as long as the following conditions are met:
1-The item is thoroughly tested, and any problems fixed or the item is listed as having defects.
2-It is clearly stated that the item is used or seller refurbished.
3-The item is listed for half or less of the going online price for the same item brand new.
4-If the item is listed as refurbished, any batteries must have been replaced with brand new batteries...if not, its USED, not refurbished!
5-Items cannot be listed as "open box" if the item has ever been removed from the box! Removal from the box makes it USED!
The Market for Lemons (1970) never gets old.
This paper effectively supports the regulatory intervention of government to ensure accurate public labelling of remarketware of all stripes and sizes.
It's not by any means always a bad thing for flourishing private commerce that government maintains certain forms of caveat emptor in their fiat-powered gun sights. Who, precisely, wants a mode of private commerce where everyone sensible runs around with permanently cinched purse strings?
Moral of the story: be careful what you drown in the bathtub if you value liquid enterprise.
No, you didn't purchase these "from Amazon". You purchased them "through Amazon". That's referring to an independent seller.
As far as Amazon direct sales, they are transparent about it. Returns are sold through their own refurb department. (I think they have just rebranded this "Amazon Renewed"?) I have purchased several items and all were good deals in great condition. They disclose in advance anything cosmetic defect, missing item, etc. with photos. It is usually no more than a cosmetic defect to the BOX.
I bought a high-end garbage disposer that had a scratch on the bottom. I really don't care if the plumber's eyes are offended by the scratch. ;)
The fundamental problem is the mentality that "the customer is always right". That wasn't even what was originally said, all those years ago in Macy's. It was more along the lines of, don't argue with the customer in public.
If something is broken, or wrong, or whatever - of course, you should be able to send it back. However, when it comes to abuse, the retail world needs to grow a spine. Just as an example: There is an online clothing retailer where I live. They have trendy stuff, and quickly became very popular with young women. The last I heard, a year or so ago, fully half of the clothes were returned. Some anonymous interviews with their customers revealed the reason: Lots of them would order 3 or 4 outfits, wear them out, or to parties, or whatever - show off something new - and then return the outfits, only to order more.
The same thing happens in other branches, although non-clothing is a bit less personal. Who hasn't received a piece of electronics, or a toy, or whatever where the packaging has clearly been opened? If shop like the clothing retailer I mentioned stay in business, the only way they can do it is by sending out those very same articles again to the next customer. Sold as if they were new, not due to some shady middleman, but directly by the stores themselves.
So we all pay the price for this crap. Getting (hopefully lightly) used stuff sold to us as new. And generally paying higher prices, because the associated costs have to be covered somehow. If you aren't familiar with the site NotAlwaysRight, you should have a look. It's where people in retail get to tell the stories of some of the customers they have to deal with. It's funny, sure, but it's also freaking sad...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Wow, you're a shitty person!
That's not the complaint. It's fine reselling it. But reselling it as *new* is fraud.
Ebay's been around 20+ years now, and the premise has been pretty much the same for most of that time. If this had been posted as news in 2000, it still would have been old news.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
You obviously don't do this very often, or Amazon would have dropped you as a customer by now.
This is a sad shift of where we have come as a culture. It used to be that retailers that opted to provide high end customer service would include 'no questions asked' return policies and their premium customers appreciated this flexibility but mostly did not take advantage of it.
Roll the clock forward and we now have people that knowingly abuse these policies. I know of people personally along with all sorts of anecdotes where they have purchased a big screen TV for the super bowl or a PPV fight or similar, throw a watching party, and then take the unit back for a full refund AND SEE NOTHING WRONG WITH DOING THIS. Their rationale is often that other people do it so why not, and/or the store lets me do it so what's the issue.
The retailer often has no choice because all of their competition allow it so they will lose customers if they do not. This is often really hard on small locally owned stores because they have to compete with the chains, but do not have the purchasing power to push all those returns back to the vendor and so just have to eat up the discount they have to give to sell the 'previously opened' unit to someone else. And no, you can't just box it up and sell it as a new item - if you know it has been previously opened then legally in the US you are not allowed to sell it as 'new'.
So at the end of the day the manufacturers and the retailers all mark their products up to recover the losses due to returns and the people who actually pay for things end up covering the cost of the asshats who think it is their right to game the system. There are of course cases where things need to be returned because they don't fit or are not the right color or w/e, but with most purchases you should be able to figure those things out without opening and using the product.
I recently ordered a not inexpensive ($400~) smartphone from Amazon but they sent me the wrong sub-model. After initiating the return procedure, Amazon never sent a courier out to pick up the package. It was sitting on my coffee table for nearly a month and I had been in contact with no less than 6 Amazon reps, all of whom assured me that someone would be by to pick up the package. The last rep I spoke to issued a refund back to my credit card (which I verified) and said he would put in a "special" request to have the package picked up and that if it wasn't picked up, then I could keep the phone.
Guess what happened? No courier showed up and I now have a free, albeit wrong sub-model, smartphone. In the meantime of waiting for the courier to show, I had bought the correct sub-model from a different online shop, so basically I got two for one. I ended up giving the free phone to my girlfriend because I had no use for it.
The bottom always supports those above.
But then things fall apart; the centre cannot hold! Anarchy is loosed upon the world.
You're why retailers track our returns and sometimes decline them or ban you.
Why do you need someone to pick it up for you? Just put it in a box and send it back yourself.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
I'm probably from a different country, so I don't know how these things work, but can you do that without paying postage, and do these shipping boxes fit in a typical post box?
It's called "Reply Paid", "Business Reply Mail", "Freepost", or even "International Business Reply Service", and exists in several countries. More information is on Wikipedia: Freepost.
In general, being able to return items without paying postage depends on where you live and who you bought the item from, but it certainly does exist. In the Netherlands, where I live, it's part of the competitive advantage of webshops: next day delivery is so ubiquitous that not having that actually means you lose customers, so your return policy becomes m ore important.
I used to shop A LOT at Micro Center, so I got to know the store manager pretty well. My return rate was always around 5%-10%, which they considered pretty normal. But they had one guy who's return rate was over 100%. The infuriating part to me is that he had to go over $10K in purchases before they banned him. Yes, you read that right, he returned Every. Single. Thing. he ever bought. But that's only 100%. Yup. They had an amnesty period when they first opened, where you could return things without a receipt, and he had returned an old copy of Microsoft Office. This was about 20 years ago or so, so it was a substantial amount of money. People like that really ought to be taken out back and shot.