Amazon makes it so easy for consumers to return products that some buyers take advantage of the policy and defraud sellers.
A small business owner who sold clothing and accessories on Amazon described a customer returning a pair of flip flops following an order for Nike cleats. Another shopper swapped a Coach wallet for a knockoff accessory, according to a recent Wall Street Journal report.
“Amazon sellers are getting all kinds of garbage,” Wall Street Journal reporter Sebastian Herrera, author of the report, told CBS News.
He said another business owner who sells household goods received dirty cable boxes and bars of soap from buyers making returns. “It’s really everything you can imagine. People are throwing back all kinds of trash and they’re doing it every day.”
Sellers who receive fake return offers lack much recourse. They can file what’s called a return flight claim, but that doesn’t guarantee they’ll be made whole.
For its part, Amazon said it had “no tolerance for fraudulent returns,” a company spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.
“Sellers don’t have a lot of ways to combat this,” Herrera said, noting that Amazon’s policies tend to favor buyers. “A lot of this problem is that Amazon has really set up its system to please customers, and a lot of that has to do with the ease of returns,” he said.
Sometimes, when Amazon decides the cost of processing a return is too high, the retail giant even offers customers refunds on low-priced items they don’t want, while allowing them to keep products.
This is just one of the challenges facing traders on the platform, and one reason why the Federal Trade Commission sues the online retailer.
“A lot of sellers are unhappy with Amazon because they feel squeezed by the company and unsupported,” Herrera told CBS News. “And the return flight is just one example that they cite as an area where they don’t have a lot of power at Amazon.”
Megan Cerullo
Grub5
