Tell HN: Amazon fraudulently canceling orders as returned items
I just got scolded by the rudest customer service rep I have ever dealt with. Apperantly I should "Know full well that BC had a weather event and that my items were damaged" which is another lie as I tracked them and they never left the Amazon processing center.
But anyways I assume what they are doing is clearing up space for new deliverable orders as the center is jammed full of packages that are for addresses cut off from the lower mainland. All new orders are being rerouted from the east rather than the south, but instead of reshipping the items at their southern warehouse, they just claimed they were all returns and placed the owness on the sellers for returned items.
I guess doing the right thing would have eaten into Amazons profit margins, and if those margins are not big enough...well I guess their billionaire owner wont be able to take another joy ride into space.
Dealing with Amazon customer support is felling more and more like dealing with an abusive partner.
151 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadHeres the FOAD letter they just sent me.
>>>>Hello,
As you are likely aware, unprecedented weather events across British Columbia have resulted in road closures and damage to infrastructure that is severely hindering transportation into and out of Western Canada.
Unfortunately, because of these events, we can no longer provide an estimated date for delivery of your package. If you do not want to wait for your package, please contact our Customer Service team to discuss other options.
Thank you for your understanding. We wish everyone affected a safe and quick recovery. Please know that we also continue to prioritize the health and safety of our Amazon associates while we work through these challenges.
Sincerely,
Customer Service Amazon.ca
SINCERELY? Pfft! At keast they are not canceling the items that real carriers fedex, canada post picked up....unlike the amazon contract carriers they use and abuse.
How many more times before you start acting on it for real? I had two bad experience Amazon France and never used since then. This company is crap, not only for buyers but for employees and traditional retail too. Also evade taxes. If you want things to change it's time to stop using it for real.
As a French user of Amazon, I've always watched these topics with a bit of concern, but never had myself any issues. I figured their practices might be different for whatever reason in the EU as compared to the US / Canada. Even deliveries fulfilled by Amazon have been great experiences, with the people coming to my door (I live in an apartment building with a concierge not accepting packages).
What kind of a concierge is this? How do you not get into fights over this?
Apparently they only take care of the building. "Public hours" are very restrained, so basically the delivery guy has next to no chance of finding it open.
> How do you not get into fights over this?
I rent, so I can't really complain about it effectively. But I was surprised to find this was the case, since I was looking for a building with a concierge for this exact reason, and it's the first time I've seen this. Guess I'll know for the next time...
I rent too, I’d just print out some flyers about the subject and drop them in all the neighbours mailboxes. This kind of stuff is just petty.
I hate giving corrections, and this is a severe word misunderstanding, so I feel it's better to inform rather than leave it. I mean no disrespect by posting this, I intend only to inform and/or educate.
PS: I guess I should spend more time in the LiBerry and Axe more questions ;P
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn
Yes, what he is saying doesn’t make any sense.
That's the potential fraud part, which makes sense to me.
Also, OP is complaining that they are cancelling the shipment in the first place instead of rerouting. That part isn't fraud but it's bad customer service.
Also, OP was possibly lied to about item damage, which is really bad customer service.
> Also, OP is complaining that they are cancelling the shipment in the first place instead of rerouting. That part isn't fraud but it's bad customer service.
Cancelling orders in a force majoure situation like this is normal, it’s not bad customer service. Working around this would be exceptional.
The title is imprecise, but it's just a title. The first paragraph of the actual post clarifies that OP is saying if sellers are paying return fees, which is how returns normally work, then it's fraud.
> Working around this would be exceptional.
An option to delay shipment would not be 'exceptional', and it would not cost Amazon anything notable.
They cancelled an order on your behalf, then when you contacted to say you didn't cancel it, they claimed it was damaged in transit? And refused to honour the original price in sending a replacement?
>>>>
Hello,
I recently made some purchases on Amazon.ca and because of the shipping routes being cut off due to the weather events my shipments are delayed. This is an understandable situation but what Amazon has decided to do is cancel my orders without any option of waiting or offering a rain cheque for the items at a later date. Instead they just send an email saying your money will be refunded in 2 to 4 days(Which 2 to 4 days is also seems unreasonable considering they initiated the cancelation)
I understand why they are doing this as their warehouse/shipping center is getting jammed up with items they can not deliver but with the current state of inflation and rising prices, I will be forced to pay more for the items which I already purchased due to their lack of capacity.
When I contacted Amazon I was connected with the rudest customer service rep I have ever had and was scolded because "I know full well that there is a state of emergency in BC and that my items were most likely damaged due to the flooding". Which if that was the case I still feel my order should be fulfilled by Amazon at a later date.
I am sure I am not the only one going through this in the North and I feel this matter should be investigated for the sake of others. I would expect that somewhere in the Amazon terms and conditions there is something that absolves them from making things right but just because something is legal to do, does not always mean it is fair.
Thank You
The best arguments here have been that maybe this fucks over the sellers (not from the OP, and no evidence to support that). How would that be an issue for the consumer protection advocate?
Maybe you should actually try to read OPs comments? They make much less sense if you try to read them instead of just skimming and letting your imagination fill in the blanks.
It’s also a perfectly reasonable assumption, as explained by the first two lines of my comment.
Anyways, I posted this to inform others of the actions taken by Amazon and how they affected myself and others that are currently cut off from all supplies in the North. I feel like Amazon just wrote us off with no regard to our current situation.
Reasonable options would include reaching out to customers and saying "ETA is in N weeks, do you want to wait, or refund now" or including a raincheck with the refund, so you can reorder once the crisis ends without penalty.
I had a similar crisis recently: spent a fortune on a graphics card that was defective out of the box. I was very concerned the vendor would just straight refund it because the same card is $300 more today.
Here is the actual Act incase anyone is interested in some dry reading.
https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/stat...
Anyways the short of the long of it is Amazon made a decision to cancel my purchases, obviously I am not happy with that. Amazon processed the cancelation as a return which is fraudulent and unfair to the sellers. Those items will most likely end up at a liquidation center and create a loss for the seller.
Even if You feel I am being unreasonable because of the "State of Emergency", Amazon is still shipping non essential items to customers in the lower mainland and burning up our fuel and resources while the rest of us are suffering fuel rations.
Don't be so quick to discount my situation as selfish as one day soon You may very well be the one being dismissed.
if that is not fraud what would You call it?
I have also viewed the tracking information and these items were not damaged due to any weather event, the items never left the warehouse and there was no flooding within 100KM of it. If an Amazon employee drives a forklift over my package is it acceptable for them to not fulfill the order and claim that I returned it? Maybe so, but in this case I suspect the items are perfectly fine just in the way of other incoming orders.
It would kind of be the same as if the Ports just decided to dump all the containers in the way of the incoming ones into the ocean just to clear up congestion. Then tell the customers sorry, here is a refund for your items, please reorder them at higher shipping rates and or prices(including shipping and inflation). Sorry about that..there was a state of emergency declared and we can do whatever we want now.
Except in my case there was not even an apology, just a notification of an incoming refund for the items I supposedly returned. Then when I contacted customer service to find out what was going on I was abused by a nasty person telling me that I "know full well what is happening and that my items were damaged".
But I guess I'm just a crazy, privileged, selfish person living outside of reality. OK
I know it was mine because I contacted the brand to check if Amazon had bought from them. They hadn't. Also, I was the only one selling this item on Amazon so they couldn't have stolen from someone else. What's more, I was the only one importing it to the US. I know because I'm acquainted with the brand owners.
When I finally managed to get my stuff out of their warehouses, which took almost a year, they admitted that some of the inventory had been "lost" and compensated me pennies on the dollar.
It was a surreal, Kafkaesque, experience that still brings back painful memories. I avoid thinking about it but I hope that one day Amazon will crash, burn, and hopefully never recover.
That said, I could certainly see why someone might want to avoid devoting their life to fighting Amazon over something like this.
If it is this difficult to fight a tiny business, how does anyone take on Amazon? There are rare people who are willing to lose their shirts on principle, but most people are just trying to take care of their families.
Best long term solution is to not use Amazon at all. That is also very difficult. So we are all stuck with not much choice
This lets you search through the entire import records, and find out suppliers for various brands, note: some companies intentionally use a different name under which it imports the products (rare), but still is be a good place to start looking.
Good luck with your business !
Glad this site is free though :) I hope they stick around for a long time
Search up where their product facilities are, is it outside or inside usa , if so then depending on that you’ll need to look up parts of the product.
If you need help looking through it, Ping me on “me at teitoklien . com” (klien is not a typo)
I’ll try to help you, search for it.
If confusion is common enough to warrant the preemption, then why not just get teitokline.com as well? Seems to be available.
people dont mistake it with kline, its usually with klein
Appreciate the suggestion tho :)
If so, it should be documented. All the evidence with relevant vendor contact information, accounts, dates, events. Each state has their own consumer protection laws, so as this involves interstate commerce who to report it to will vary, but you can start by calling local police. They can tell you about jurisdiction, and escalate to stat consumer protection division. And states work together with the FTC on such cases as well.
Amazon has systems in place to say "We cannot ship from X to Y anymore", but they require manual intervention and maybe those tools don't get used very much. Until someone finds the right button and presses it, orders are dropping into the warehouse to be fulfilled. Ship this sprocket from Vancouver to Calgary since Calgary's site has none.
But the truck didn't show up, or maybe it did but now it's got nowhere to go.
Now the dock has one section slowly filling up with packages. It's been days. Dock doors are a limited resource, and here's a bunch of them with a mountain of packages blocking them. And the site leadership, well, they have metrics to hit. Just like every other cog in the machine, they will be fired if they don't make rate. What, you thought it was just the lowly associates who are running with dogs nipping at their heels?
What's a site leader to do? Well, there's a returns department right here. They've got tools that can handle the package being returned, allowing them to restock those items, refund the customers, clear the dock, and make everything go back to normal for the site.
Sounds like good 'Customer Obsession' to get those orders refunded as quickly as possible.
Sellers? Those aren't customers. Those metrics are not something the leadership needs to worry about, so they won't.
This is a common scam in retail. Buy something, keep the something, fill the box with something else, return the item under extremely lenient return policies, get something for free. Next buyer shockingly gets box of rocks.
It's not fine to steal the refused return.
But if they don't accept the return then it's not their property. Throwing it away is theft.
I think your definition of theft is in need of adjustment. You might have something against Amazon, and might even be justified in that feeling, but it is misguiding your judgement in this case.
Amazon taking possession isn't theft. Destroying something they don't own is theft. Specifically, it's conversion.
I was just trying to make the conenction how Amazon could see it as potentially being scammed by claiming a return for AP1 but receiving AP2 in AP1 box. That's not the item agreed to accept as a return. Whether by mistake or knowingly, it was not what was agreed upon for the the return.
What is the right thing to do? Eat the costs? Sure it's Amazon, they can afford. So let's ignore it is Amazon and think in more general and hopefully neutral tones. Is the person making the mistake willing to pay for the shipping to return the incorrect item? No? Then what is retailer suppposed to do? Put it on a shelf, or just chunk it as it is trash to them.
Another perspective: they've made 20k orders already. Surely, over that time, they've made you enough money in retail margin to make eating the cost trivial. Even without the 20k orders, we're still talking about someone who's bought two pair of $120 earbuds. The expected lifetime value of that customer probably exceeds the shipping cost. Hell, even the gross margin on one sale probably exceeds the shipping cost.
I think it's pretty clear that not only should the retailer assume it was a good faith mistake, but they should also step in to help make it right.
A company the size of Amazon will not feel the repurcussions of someone going online trying to make hay about some slight received from evilCorp (however wrongly/rightly that justification is). They just won't even notice.
For a legit serious customer that made a mistake, who's going to look that up? The poor warehouse employee whose job it is to receive the returns? Do you honestly feel like these employees are taking the time to look up the returner's purchasing history? Do we think that's even a good idea for that employee to have access to that data? I'm not trying to do free work for Amazon, not that they'd ever listen to feed back from randos on a website, but there are further questions arising from this logisitcs exercise.
This would probably take a whole 30 seconds extra, but it would be an edge case. And, as you said, unless they stand to lose this person as a customer, it won't make a damn bit of difference to Amazon whether this particular edge case doesn't work. But, then, so much for "customer obsession," right?
I wish that more people realized that Amazon’s retail operation is a flea market before they suffered. I hope that your story inspires more people to realize they’re vulnerable, re-evaluate the risks of using Amazon, and cancel Amazon Prime.
I can't believe I'm saying this but... google of all people, have better support than most tech companies these days.
In London we have a huge range of service levels to choose from:
- UberX: The cheapest option, truly a mixed bag.
- Comfort: Drivers with 500+ trips, average 4.85 rating and mid-size cars starting from 2015
- Exec (Black): 1000+ trips, avg rating of 4.9 and a “mid-tier luxury vehicle” manufactured after 2016
- Lux: Basically only drivers from professional chauffeur companies, 90% of the cars are new S-classes. Occasionally you’ll see a Rolls Royce.
You get exactly what you’re willing to pay for, the prices are very competitive at every service level.
What's supposed to be the problem here? Amazon just cancelled some orders that they couldn't deliver, you got a refund.
Calling this "fraudulent"? That just makes you sound like a crazy person.
Pre-pandemic they never had to learn how to take the L and move on. Now that the Ls are piling up, privileged people are losing their collective shit.
Our product is very much a WIP, and will likely fall over with even modest load, but feel free to kick the tires. We have a lot of work we need to do, but if anyone (buyer or seller) has feedback, we would love to hear it. We're currently only indexing ~140k shops, and ~90m items, mostly from shops in the US, Canada, and Europe, but its a start.
It would help to preload some products (popular/trending at the moment perhaps?) I think or show some categories. So that it looks more like Amazon or any single shop, but the search gives you results from many.
I've wondered before why Shopify doesn't do this fwiw. Why isn't there a central shop entrypoint for all Shopify shops? Bit of crossover with Etsy perhaps, but probably the more serious end and beyond.
Imagine a brand new, tiny, unknown seller. This feature alone might be worth it for the seller to sign up with Shopify.
https://vendazzo.com/
I am guessing they're trying to game some metric so they don't get in trouble with amazon itself.
It's fun to shit on Bezos for doing what he wants with money he earned, but I was humbled recently listening to his various talks from around 2006-2010, when AWS was just taking off.
You are complaining because
1) the refund took two days to process, which you claim is unreasonable.
2) You are also complaining based on your emails that they didn't offer you a "rain cheque", depsite the fact that amazon does not offer rain cheque's, and in fact changes prices of item you have put in your cart.
You have now contacted a consumer protection advocate with this claim of fraud.
Good luck! This is the MOST ridiculous consumer complaint I have seen.
Are sellers treated like crap? For sure, that is a given. Sellers are not amazon's customers, there is no seller obsession, their is a customer obsession, and for the metrics amazon is watching what they did here probably makes sense, they can restock and reship these items to places they can deliver to.
I've had a nearly identical experience and I believe the reason is some shortcuts in Amazon's integration with UPS. In my case, I ordered a fairly expensive item from Amazon, it was late on delivery, and then I saw (via MyChoice) that the UPS tracking had been updated with a note along the lines of "merchandise missing, returning carton to shipper." It seemed like either someone had stolen it in shipping or something had happened that broke the box open. In any case, this decision by UPS to "return to sender" seems to have automatically triggered return processing on Amazon's side, as I got a "We couldn't deliver your item" email from Amazon followed a couple of days later by a slightly incongruous email telling me that my return had been received and a refund issued.
They did not hold back any return fee, I got the full amount back. Overall I have no complaints about their handling, other than that the item was sold out so I'm now waiting on a restock which is slightly annoying... but that's the chip shortage for you.
As for what the seller faced, it's sort of hard to know... while not the friendliest in the world I can imagine Amazon holding back some funds from the seller in this case because the risk of things being lost in transit (or stolen after delivery) is well-known to online sellers and something they presumably price in.
On the other hand, around a year ago I had a series of Amazon orders all get stuck in the tracking and ultimately cancelled... at the same Amazon fulfillment warehouse in Southern California. They must have been having some kind of serious problem there, but it was annoying that they just kept trying to fulfill my orders out of the same place.
They can't get you your item because of the weather. Whether or not you personally feel that they should have worked harder or not isn't really the issue; that's not your call to make. They tried, they decided they couldn't do it[1] so they cancelled your order and refunded your purchase price. That's good customer service, not bad.
[1] One likely reason is that they probably don't have the local warehousing space to store everyone's in-transit items; it needs to go back to a main shipping center anyway. And if they do, they should ship it to a customer they can reach from there promptly instead (which again is good customer service on the whole: ship as much stuff as you can as fast as you can).
In 2012/2013, I was doing FBA on damaged cargo/insurance buyouts (If a truck gets into a wreck, 99.9%, they can't use the goods on the truck, so, Insurance companies will sell them for pennies on the pound. Yes, pound) when I found a company that was selling a trailer full of LG 27" monitors for what would equate to about $18/each. I had some office and self-storage space and a SUV, and would literally take 10 them from my self storage unit every day, take them to my office space, test the monitor out, open the back to inspect for damage, and then repackage everything in the box and sell them as Used/Tested/Refurbished depending on what I needed to do to get them working again.
My biggest complaint was that when someone would return a monitor, it'd never make its way back to me -- as in, it always looked like someone would never return the monitor. I'd set calendar reminders to follow up with Amazon Seller Support, and I'd always get the money credited back to my account.
I've watched the fees go up and up (when I was doing FBA, my Amazon fees would cost me around $10, shipping included, per piece. Today, the same fees would run me around $30/unit per device: my item is considered 'oversized')
As someone on the Seller Forums mentions a few different times -- you aren't amazon's customer, the end-user is. Amazon is just a channel for selling your goods. Unfortunately, dealing with Amazon as a channel partner is just basically russian roulette -- no matter how well you can describe your problem, you're working with a team that just doesn't care.
I've had offers from the same trucking insurance company over the last few years -- even a truck load of PS5's this summer -- but, didn't really want the headache of dealing with Amazon, so, I've turned the offers down.
Or even better, there's a need for an aggregator where people can offer to buy "their share" of the full truck of damaged items, and once you have sold 100% of the truck you send the items and collect the payment.