I was scammed hundreds of dollars buying counterfeit microphones on amazon[0]. Amazon did not provide any way to handle this other than a generic form. The sellers refused to send my money unless I removed my reviews, which I was not going to do at all. I followed the seller's page around, and after a few weeks they renamed themselves to "Sally's Cosmetics"[1] or something, and I posted more reviews on their page. Eventually they disappeared with one of the Amazon counterfeit seller purges. How convenient for Amazon and the seller.
Amazon is like eBay to me. I value my time and cash too much to get involved.
[0] I know, I hadn't been on amazon in a while. I forgot not to buy music equipment (or anything not disposable) from Amazon.
[1] So counterfeit sellers have sold cosmetics on Amazon, and that should be obvious from the state of the store, I guess..
Amazon wouldn’t accept a return? I don’t return a lot, but when I have it’s been really easy - no questions asked, just fill in the form then take it to the nearest Whole Foods.
They've gone downhill enough I've started returning a fair bit of things and it's almost always effortless.
Only time it was a hassle was when a price dropped the day after my order, and they don't have price matching, so customer service suggest re-buying and returning and promised me free return shipping.
That promise turned out to be worthless, and I had a helluva time trying to get them to pay for return shipping across the country for a squat rack.
Thankfully, I did succeed in the end (phone support person was much better, chat people ran me around in circles). I didn't get the at-home pickup I was originally promised, but fortunately I owned a spare old pickup truck.
You do need to fill in a (very simple) form first - but at least for my recent orders it's fairly straightforward: in the "My Orders" list, there's a "Return or replace items" button on the right hand side, (_below_ the yellow "Get product support one). It does disappear after a while - looking at my account a month maybe?
Depending on whom you actually bought the product from (Amazon is a seller of only a decreasing fraction of the items on Amazon) returns might range from trivial to miserable.
I've spent more than $20k on Amazon over the years total, and the one and only time I had to return something (for a low-dollar item), they totally screwed me on it.
That was the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
I'm not sure I want to know how much I've spent on Amazon, but I'm sure it's a lot. I too went years with nearly weekly purchases with no issues at all. Maybe a delivery that was later than the estimated date here and there, but that's it.
In the last few months though things have become measurably worse for me. In the last three months I've had to send nearly every order back. Orders have been incomplete, or wrong (like, children's Shrek t-shirts instead of reams of copier paper). They've sent incomplete orders, or obviously not-new "new" items (with finger prints, food crumbs, wads of newspaper), or the products advertised were not even remotely what was described.
It's not that surprising to see Amazon posting poor numbers. I've stopped purchasing from Amazon, buying direct from the people making the things I buy if possible. It costs more, and takes longer to arrive, but now I'm not burning time fixing Amazon's stupid problems.
Amazon is now a huge heaping pile and has been for years. Glad people are catching on. I have almost never had an issue with eBay, Etsy, random websites.
Amazon is like eBay to me. I value my time and cash too much to get involved.
[0] I know, I hadn't been on amazon in a while. I forgot not to buy music equipment (or anything not disposable) from Amazon.
[1] So counterfeit sellers have sold cosmetics on Amazon, and that should be obvious from the state of the store, I guess..