Amazon have banned another customer from making future purchases and closed his account. According to the Guardian headline he was “Banned by Amazon for returning faulty goods“.
Read on however and you’ll discover that the customer returned 37 purchases that were faulty, damaged or not as described. That’s 37 out of 343, way over 10% of items that somehow had a problem.
I don’t know about you, but I’m an Amazon customer and I think most people would agree that they’re pretty good at what they do. At least half the time I purchase is from Amazon Retail and the remainder from third party Amazon merchants.
The customer complains that Amazon didn’t give him a “proper explanation” and insists that he didn’t try to abuse the system. Whilst we don’t know the details of this particular case, I think it’s fair to say that anyone that returns one in ten purchases with a fault or is unfortunate enough to keep purchasing products not as described is probably one of your more difficult customer to deal with.
Amazon refused to comment on the particular case and rolled out their standard statement to the media regarding banned accounts: “Our goal is to deliver the best experience for the millions of customers who shop with us. In a tiny fraction of cases, we are forced to close accounts where we identify extreme account abuse. This decision is only taken after we have reviewed the account carefully and tried to work with the customer over an extended time period to resolve any issues“.
It’s hard to find a reason not to side with Amazon. If you’re one of the third party merchants selling on Amazon we suspect you may well be applauding their decision to ban this user and others with similarly high return rates.
23 Responses
We can only dream that one day eBay will do the same for the thousands of scammers they seem to encourage rather than ban.
Amazon actually regulate their customer base unlike eBay. As long as eBay can pocket a bit of money from scamming buyers, they are happy, whilst us sellers are left powerless.
As a third party seller I applaud this ban!…Why?…Amazon are extremely generous when it comes to handling my returns on behalf of me. That generous that I think sometimes their customers ridiculously take advantage.
I have the following returned back to me from FBA customers (which are forward to me by the fulfillment center)
– I have customer tested hygiene sensitive related products
– Product packaging with NOTHING inside!
– Product broken under force
– Product packaging containing exchanged inferior goods within
– Products returned in a state where it looks like they have been handled by an aggressive gorilla
– Products returned lovely extras like hair and earwax
Amazon! – Carry on banning such buyers because a 10% return rate is just ridiculous, sellers like me and companies as big as Amazon would run into the ground at that rate
Surely this depends on the manner of the returns? Was the buyer returning the goods at his own expense or forcing sellers to pay for return P&P. If the foremost then what’s the problem?
eBay need to take a similar approach to this and the dreaded INR look at this unlucky buyers feedback happy buying away and claiming INR on everything
https://feedback.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewFeedback2&userid=dontikas75&ftab=FeedbackLeftForOthers
How can any buyer be so unlucky to not receive so may items yet eBay have not picked up on the pattern
The problem on ebay is of course that as sellers we can only review customer feedback to see if there is a pattern of INR mentioned. The clever ones don’t leave feedback to highlight it therefore we are in the hands of ebay to identify the scammers which either they don’t do, or they don’t publicise how they do it. It would be too much to expect a bit of transparency from ebay to tell us how they are “protecting” us? (other than messages to say they do so without any detail).
Having experience of many INR claims you get to recognise the wording of the genuine cases and the people who do it so regularly they know how to play the system.
To get back to the Amazon issue, it all depends on what the faults were. Yes, it is possible, but unlikely, to get 10% of items with faults, and as all sellers know some buyers are far more picky than others. However, if there genuinely was a fault with all these items, then the buyer is not misusing returns. He is asking for his legal rights as a consumer. It is the sellers responsibility to make sure what the buyer receives is right. If the faults were genuine then Amazon should be hung out to dry on this. If the faults weren’t genuine or so small as to be of no relevance, then Amazon are right.
As for Ebay, disgraceful this user is till on the platform. I no longer sell to Lithuania because of too many problems and post too slow.
We had our fair share of FBA returns from Christmas as was to be expected. Vast majority actually never got returned and we were re-credited. The main issue we had last peak was so called buyers taking the mick out of eBay’s un-managed returns process. They simply did not want to pay to return the goods so would claim they were faulty. Not one item that came back from eBay was actually faulty. Cost us about £700 in the end, and of course all the silly defects that came with them
All the goods have been refurbished as such and sold at a loss. We did however remove all the lines from eBay and put them on Amazon.
Amazon seem to manage buyer abuse a lot better.
I’ve been an Amazon customer like forever, even before the UK site was up and running and in all that time I’ve only ever returned two items.
He should use Ebay…. you can return 100% for dodgy reasons and still have 100% positive feedback!
eBay are the true scammers here. They turn a blind eye to fraud and on top of it gain revenue from it!. Scamming buyers are profitable for them
Amazon on the other hand see fraudulent buyers as non-profitable and try and eradicate any future losses
As everyone else says – This, vs eBay. Astonishing, really truely astonishing… Although, 10%… wow, even I’m not that harsh 🙂 But the devil is in the details. If they were consecutive, recent, specific category of products, etc, it could have looked very sus.