The flip side to this is I've on multiple occasions had Amazon ship me clearly used shit resold as new — Amazon.com was the seller.

One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!"

The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them.

If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery.

That used to be the case until about a year ago, but isn't the case anymore at least here in Ireland. I'm taking them to small claims court because they closed my account without a refund on a legitimate return. Their customer support has gone from excellent to nearly nonexistent. Fortunately for me, I've kept all the receipts.

I distrust Amazon for anything over about £150 now. Which seems to coincide with their threshold for needing an OTP.

The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.

> 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.

9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day). Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about.

The ease of returns was a huge factor in the early success of Walmart, as well. I worked there in high school and college (99-02 timeframe) and they harped on how much the customer was right for returns, unless it was just blatant fraud. if there was a chance the customer was not trying anything you just give them their money back

I’ve only ever returned two things to Amazon: a counterfeit laptop battery (claimed to be an official part, had 30% lower capacity than labelled), and an unbearable replacement laptop keyboard (2KRO rather than the original’s NKRO, with horrific ghosting, a couple of keys that would stick if not pressed completely straight, and a space bar that had to be hit just so to activate at all). Neither of these products would have been available without Amazon, and that would have been a good thing.

Weird. I think I might have made three returns to Amazon in 30 years of ordering from them. I research the shit out of just about everything I buy, if I have to return something it's because I either got very cleverly scammed or had a literal stroke before I made the purchase.

They became big, cause they had their customers first. They were tough to negotiate good prices and put customer experience quite forward. Any complaint and they replaced stuff, not many questions asked.

They then invested heavily in logistics, so now they could replace their support to annoying bots and use their market position to increase their margin.

FYI, when someone else says "this is why I do this thing", you don't get to argue with that. You don't get to tell other people what their opinions are. Psycho.

Most of the people I know would rank predictability is #1, price #2 and ability to do returns #3 (as a data point: I don't even remember last time I did a return, was years ago). Really depends on who your connections are and their specific needs I reckon.

i'm the 10th person, we don't stay for returns. However, I am doing a lot more shopping on different websites nowadays as I see Amazon is the most expensive option.

In my experience, the customer-friendly return experience is withering. I ordered a small table about a year ago that didn't ship with the correct hardware. I literally could not assemble the thing as documented in the instructions.

I had to call to get a refund; admittedly, I think I may have been slightly outside the ordinary return window. The customer service representative was pretty reluctant to accept it, somewhat heavily suggesting that I didn't assemble it right.

I actually just recently cancelled my Amazon Prime, which I've had for probably 10+ years. Not solely based on this one experience, but a general decline in how much perceivable value I actually get out of it.

>No-questions-asked returns

Different forms of marketing work on different people. This one works on me. I'm going to shop at Amazon and Costco because, in the very few instances where I want to return an item that didn't live up to its promise, I can do so without incurring penalties.

When this happens, I'm already frustrated. I assembled a floor lamp for far longer than an adult should spend assembling it, and it's wobbly as shit. A corporation than nickel-and-dimes me at this point will incur my irrational wrath. Canadian Tire (a big box retailer of mostly low-quality wares here in Canada) has lost my business over a decade ago because of this. I tell myself: most Canadians are meek sheep that will return after being told "well akshually you can't return this because technically blah blah", but I'm not a sucker, I won't shop here on principle.

A company that doesn't create this experience for me will get my business and exploit whatever other blind spots I have with their marketing, dark patterns, opaque pricing, etc, because they didn't piss me off when I was ready to walk away for good.

This is a strawman. OP said " I shop at Amazon due to their logistics." Nothing in your post refutes why OP shops at Amazon.

Ehh, maybe for some people. I've almost never returned anything to Amazon, so for me the logistics is definitely the biggest factor.

> No-questions-asked returns

That's the Right of withdrawal[0] by EU law, though. Do you mean something else?

I mean, sure, smaller shops might not cover the costs for the return shipping, but I don't really mind.

[0]: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/ret...

It's probably different for everyone. For us, it's chiefly because it's the only place where we can find a gazillion things our kids' school demands they bring to school, and we can have it in twenty-four hours without having to drive to the store.

I order books from a local indie bookstore and just wait a couple weeks for the books to show up from their wholesaler.

But for other stuff, including tools, why wouldn't I just order from a place I already have free 2-day (often overnight) shipping for, when my alternatives are physical big box stores? Like why go to Lowe's to buy a cross-cut jig when I can get it delivered right to my house in 24 hours for the same price? It's not even like my money could possibly go to an indie hardware store. They don't exist. Certainly not within an hour of me, which not only requires my time, but also money in the form of electricity to drive my car, plus the wear and tear on my car.

> their competiton couldn't do without going out of business

Why? If I sell a quality product I have no fear of excess returns.

Personally, the only webshop where I actually need so many returns is Amazon itself.

Some of that is intrinsic to a good chunk of what they're selling (poorly described imports from the Chinese market). I just ordered an assortment of cabling for shuffling PCIe signals around. Apparently there are a few different "standards" for pinouts on SFF-8643 and SFF-8654, but nobody actually describes them in their product listings! So I'll see which ones work with what I already have, and with each other, and the rest can go back. Sellers could have avoided that by doing that work once and describing their items, but they'd rather I do it instead. So when I do it, I don't feel bad about the returns.

But a lot of it is the dark patterns Amazon themselves choose to play. Nonstop pricing games make me push my actual purchasing decisions down the line. If something is on sale at a great price and I'm in the market, I'll just hit buy to lock in that price. I'll then try to do some research before it ships, but in general I've got 30+ days to make the actual purchase decision. This is what the seller must want, right? Or the same pricing games but after a purchase - if the price on something significantly drops, the answer I've gotten from CS is to buy a new one and return the old one. So if I already have other stuff I need to make a return trip for, that's what I do!

Or when I'm in the middle of building/repairing something, especially when I don't have a "trial" of "prime" (aka sunk cost fallacy), I'll order a few different types of items I think I might need. This way when they show up in a week+ (Slow, Spiteful Shipping) and I'm back focusing on the project, there is less chance of "oh I really needed this other thing" and having to wait another round trip.

With other web stores I just don't feel these type of dark pattern dynamics. Whereas Amazon is practically begging people to call their bluffs. So I call them.

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I have never returned anything to amazon. Maybe it's a US culture thing.