Amazon Starts Flagging 'Frequently Returned' Products That You Maybe Shouldn't Buy (theverge.com) 46
Amazon is starting to warn consumers when products sold on its platform are regularly shipped back for returns. The Verge: As reported by The Information, Amazon is rolling out a warning label on "frequently returned" products that will encourage consumers to check the item details and reviews before making their purchase, helping customers avoid misleading or low-quality products and reducing unnecessary returns. Currently, Amazon's return policy allows customers to return new and unused items up to 30 days after purchase, usually for free, unless the item is deemed nonreturnable. But returning a product is still a hassle and a bad experience for customers -- and Amazon's platform is rife with counterfeits and cheaply produced, low-quality, and sometimes deceptively marketed products bolstered with fake reviews.
Having a visible warning that such items are usually returned not only deters consumers from buying them but also could encourage retailers to be honest about their listings or at least improve on issues that lead to higher product returns in the first place. The returns warning has already appeared on a few third-party listings fulfilled by Amazon, such as the Pro-Ject Automat A1 record player and two dresses spotted by The Information. You may need to be logged in to an Amazon account to see the returns notifications. These three items have a reasonably high star rating, which may initially reassure prospective consumers, but glancing at the customer reviews indicates that the products are not true to size or have previously arrived damaged.
Having a visible warning that such items are usually returned not only deters consumers from buying them but also could encourage retailers to be honest about their listings or at least improve on issues that lead to higher product returns in the first place. The returns warning has already appeared on a few third-party listings fulfilled by Amazon, such as the Pro-Ject Automat A1 record player and two dresses spotted by The Information. You may need to be logged in to an Amazon account to see the returns notifications. These three items have a reasonably high star rating, which may initially reassure prospective consumers, but glancing at the customer reviews indicates that the products are not true to size or have previously arrived damaged.
well, it's something (Score:2, Informative)
Now they might warn you that it is."
Re:well, it's something (Score:5, Insightful)
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Some bored, rich, teenager could help push this into a real solution. Buy everything they can find that's marked suspect, then return them all in a week. Repeat. Amazon's stance that the onus is always on the customer, when their algorithm goes out of its way to shovel absolute dogshit to the top of the heap when searching? Uh, yeah. May be time to curate things a bit.
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I'm sure Amazon makes the vendor pay those costs of returns.
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Yeah, I think this very good. So long as returns are free (even shipping), they bear the cost of peddling crap and have an incentive to fix the situation, and this is that.
Doesn't resolve anything. A large portion of users don't return stuff and throw it in the landfill. When things get returned they go into the landfill anyway. Amazon already has excellent return policies and yet they are the literal poster boy for where to shop for fake shit right now. The process as it stands doesn't incentivise anything other than sending products from factory direct to the scrapyard.
Also there's no such thing as a free return. Not unless they also paid you the time you spent on the websi
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I have 2 UPS dropoff points within walking distance as well as two "show the lady your barcode and hand her the unwrapped defective item" sites. The UPS site isn't the closest and it involves wrapping the thing, but I want to support the guy. Glad they're doing this, though. The nuisance of buying and returning a counterfeit microSDcard is annoying, even though I KNOW Amazon didn't do it deliberately.
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Agreed. Then again, I've pretty much stopped buying anything from Amazon that I can get locally.
Amazon was once a great service. Now they're a prime example of enshittification.
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Due to how their return policy works (send it back for whatever reason on Amazon's expense), they're essentially screwing themselves.
Why do you think this "great customer tool" is implemented in the first place? Because they suddenly give a fuck about their customers?
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Here's a radical idea -- how about stop selling crap that *YOU KNOW* is crap and likely to be returned because it is crap.
Sadly we live in a disposable oriented society that has no problem throwing away things and replacing them. Amazon is just feeding us what we tell them we want.
They substitute in the fake crap for the real (Score:3)
"Amazon sells fake crap. Now they might warn you that it is."
You order a 100% authentic US made woobie. It's going to take a week to get it to you. Amazon notices it has a "compatible" item in a local distribution center and can get it to you the next day. It automatically makes a substitution without checking with you, you find out when the order has shipped and there is a brief note mentioning a substitution. It arrives the next day and sure enough, a made in China knockoff. On day 3 you visit the local Amazon return center.
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Abusable? (Score:1)
What is stopping competitors from buying/returning items in bulk?
Re: Abusable? (Score:1)
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If you return too much of the stuff you buy, you simply get blackballed. Right now it take a bit 'til you're shitcanned with a "we don't want you as a customer", but if that picks up pace, rest assured that returning 3-4 items in a row might let you make the list.
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If you return too much of the stuff you buy, you simply get blackballed. Right now it take a bit 'til you're shitcanned with a "we don't want you as a customer", but if that picks up pace, rest assured that returning 3-4 items in a row might let you make the list.
I can assure you that a dozen returns in a row of women's clothing won't do it. I know someone who views Amazon as a free borrowing service where you put up a credit card as collateral and is occasionally annoyed when party guests damage things so that they can't be returned.
Other things they need to fix (Score:5, Insightful)
They need to fix lots of other things. Duplicates of the same item relisted under seemingly random-name brands, flooding the listings. Those listings need to be combined, and simply listed as "other sellers", particularly when they're all fulfilled by Amazon. Sellers being able to fundamentally change the nature of a listing to an entirely new product, using the built-up reputation of the old, unrelated product to make the new product inherit an undeserved reputation, needs to be stopped. It's one thing for a listing to update as a minor rev occurs, but in those cases it's fundamentally the same series. Swapping a tchotchke for a television is not.
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Yup, I noticed the exact same thing. I was looking for a bag to go on the rack on the back of my bike, which I was fine getting some cheap no-name junk. The one thing that I noticed with those listings is that each had their brand on the item to stop Amazon from co-mingling them. But, yes, Amazon should stop that game and just say, "branding may vary" and list it from various sellers. When buying one of those items, I did go through pages of listings to find the cheapest one, though in retrospect, it wa
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I've noticed it for everything from cell phone cases to hitch anti-rattle stabilizers.
It's almost easier to do a Google image search for site:amazon.com for the description of the item one wishes to buy, because Google recognizes similar images and conceals them. The bulk of the redundant products are omitted, only the unique ones make it through.
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I put Shimano pads and chain on my rock hopper... as far as I know. Not much preventing fakes there.
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Brands were created so consumers could see who is responsible. Before, you didn't know who made the crackers w/ the worms because it all came from a generic barrel. Ritz branded their crackers so you could see its not generic.
The problem is that you can't reliably tell what brands are on Amazon. There are so many counterfeit batteries for example.
For other things where counterfeits are not the issue, Amazon could let us know how long the brand has been listed on Amazon. It would give incentive to keepin
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From what I know, the random-name brands was the result of Amazon's earlier lazy attempt at quality control.
Amazon used to let anyone sell, and got a lot of garbage. Their "fix" was to only allow those with a brand name that was trademarked in the US to sell.
The result was what you see - a bunch of different companies, selling what is likely the same product built in the same factory, under a bunch of random brand names.
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Sure. And with basically identical promotional photos being used by all of them, it should continue to be easy to consolidate them into a single listing.
Amazing (Score:1)
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It's probably an experiment to cut losses.
In the old days you bought from Amazon's own inventory, now unless you filter seller=Amazon, you are buying from someone claiming to sell said item.. Just look at how obviously counterfeit some of the packaging is in the review photos of burned customers.
Re: Amazing (Score:2)
My favorite is seeing the brand as xyz and then go to purchase it not from brand xyz but some random third party
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If they didn't want you to buy it, they would pull the listing. What they don't want you to do is return it.
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They don't want you to buy that specific thing, they want you to buy some other thing. Maybe the first thing something else might want instead
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...just flag the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be safe.
rip (Score:3)
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Checking the reviews, it seems like it has quality control issues. The reviews are better in Germany, which suggests that the shipping process to the UK is damaging them, or putting them out of calibration.
Better late than never (Score:4, Interesting)
This tells you the cost of returns are high enough (Score:5, Insightful)
for them to give the slightest of fucks. We'll see how this works in practice.
They increased their price within the last year and then just recently crippled their grocery delivery service by greatly increasing fees and minimum orders effectively removing the only thing I regularly used (mostly small stop gap orders as it was unreliable especially for real groceries like meat/dairy/produce) outside the odd random book or other small purchase.
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They don't want to actually deal with returns so they palletize them and sell the result off so they don't have to pay for disposal, the sales cover the wrapping and shipping. But the problem then is that the people selling Amazon's returns are actually competing with Amazon.
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for them to give the slightest of fucks. We'll see how this works in practice.
No it doesn't. Right now the biggest issue is the amount of shit Amazon cops for sending returned items directly to the landfill. The cost for them is insignificant.
Amazon who? (Score:3)
The frequency of trucks delivering down my street seems to have really slowed down as of late. We canceled Prime a while ago. Finding stuff on the site is a frustrating sea of bad gray market crap you have to wade past to get the real deal, and the risk of name brand stuff being fake knockoff garbage is way too high. I can get it cheaper on Ebay and Aliexpress if I actually want the gray market clones, and I can't trust the "real" stuff that is now rarly actually cheaper than elsewhere. 2-day shipping is extremely hit and miss, sometimes next day, sometime a couple weeks.
I think the glory days of Amazon are past us.
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Cool now fix the fucking recommendations (Score:1)
easily gameable (Score:1)
I expect that just like with reviews, scammy companies will just purchase their own products through a third party and turn around and restock them for resale to improve their crappy return rates.
Useful and ignored (Score:2)
I did notice this. I did buy such products because the quoted problems did not concern me. The products then had other problems, so I had to return them.
Check the comments for WHY things were returned (Score:2)