The headline on various news sites is:
Amazon banning shoppers who return items too often
But Amazon has been banning shoppers for other reasons as well such as selling fake reviews. If a user publishes eBooks on amazon and they have been doing things to manipulate the rank of those eBooks then that is also causing customers to be banned. Amazon has rules and they expect their users to follow those rules. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t take issue with that in the way that I take issue with the behavior of youtube and twitter treating users like crap for political reasons. Even though Jeff Bezos is pushing a political agenda at the Washington Post I don’t think that has translated into any bad behavior at Amazon in the way it has at youtube and twitter.
As some people may know I operated inwoods.com that sold things both in physical stores as well as online. I didn’t mind the returns when they were warranted. But with inwoods, because I also had to do free shipping to compete, just one return could not only cancel the profit from that sale but the next sale. The margins were that thin. So I don’t blame amazon for telling customers who are costing them money, “bye.”
Because I haven’t been selling that many eBooks lately, returns haven’t been a problem for me on amazon. But there was a period there that there was no doubt that Amazon had customers who were abusing if not out right cheating the system. There were other writers in certain forums who were being hit by far worse than me and wishing amazon would do something about customers abusing the return system. Apparently, now they have.
Still, some customers claim that they have not broken any rules. They really don’t understand what they did. If that is true, which I don’t know, hopefully Amazon will straighten those issues out.
by Chuck Peters
Advertisement: