Why bother - isn't the return policy enough? I'm assuming they are optimistic on new returns being new, but they are liberal on the return end to compensate.
Once you establish a monopoly, the consumer-friendly behaviors which enabled you to crush the competition no longer have a justification for their cost.
Amazon is hardly close to a monopoly no matter how much some political class and their big competitors want to hammer that point. In fact I rarely buy anything from them precisely because they suck quite a bit on retail and competitors have gotten better (and consciously want to take my business elsewhere because I don’t like to benefit AWS). Because they are not a monopoly I don’t feel particularly in pain not purchasing from them.
I suspect the cost structure and consumer behavior has forced their hand to be more restrictive on retail (and perhaps they no longer care as much either).
Yep I ordered a big jug of cleaning solution that showed up completely destroyed in a soaked and ruined box. Amazon refused to credit me a refund unless I returned the product to them, which was literally impossible. They have gotten big enough that they don't need to care about customers as much as they used to and, unfortunately, they might be right. The only solution is to not shop there any more.
Another behavior I started seeing a lot more of the past couple years was paid listings selling a product for 4-5x the normal price, mixed in with the organic results. The only purpose of those is to rip off people who are in a hurry or confused and miss that they are being taken advantage of. They must work often enough to pay for the ad placements and clearly Amazon doesn't have any interest in protecting their customers.
I've returned stuff to Amazon twice, and my experience both times was pretty bad. But even if the seller is good about returns, having to return it is still a loss. It takes time and hassle, and you have to wait even longer for the thing you want.
My wife had to repeatedly call Amazon to get them to re-refund a returned item on multiple occasions. That issue coupled with generally terrible quality on almost everything is why we stopped buying anything on there. They would refund the item and then a month later claw it back. The csrs usually wouldn’t understand what she was saying either so she would have to wait for a supervisor every time.
