I agree, returns are where amazon crushes it. I feel like there should be some startup just focusing on making the perfect returns product for small brands. Just do anything including at home pickup and then figure out how to optimize later.

> Got a dud? Quality not as expected? Ordered two by mistake? Size is not fitting?

I totally agree, but I find the quality of the items I get off of Amazon to generally be a lot less than other places I chose to shop. Likely due to the fact that I intentionally shop on other sites for specific products but on Amazon I get things that just aren't necessary for me so I spend less time curating the purchases.

Yeah, returning ends up being the clencher for me for a lot of Amazon stuff.

If I think there's basically no likelihood of me returning something, I'll sometimes shop elsewhere, but for anything where there's even a chance of me not liking it for whatever reason I will buy on Amazon now.

Much better that nearest post office. Take it to the nearest whole foods and don't even bother with the box.

i'm happy to pay a convenience fee to not have to set up an account to order from each individual store. having my address and payment info in one centralized superstore is way better than having it spread around dozens of niche businesses

I was floored the other day doing an Amazon return. It was a rented office space, with just a window where you drop off your item to a clerk. I peeked inside it was floor to ceiling packages and toys and items. And there was a line behind me.

The sheer logistics and human will that made that possible is crazy to me.

Extrapolate to multiple locations in Miami alone. Then Florida. Then East Coast. Then USA. Then Europe. Global locations.

Who is in charge of all this? How do they keep track of all this? How do they identify a tiny little podunk location is fucking up and how do they find someone they can trust to run it?

It's crazy! Think about it next time you return something to Amazon.

Except you don’t have the choice to “pay 10% extra just to buy from Amazon”. Amazon force sellers to set not-lower price everywhere else.

Just bear in mind that if they don't like how often you return or the circumstances, they will issue you a sudden lifetime ban

But also if you go to support chat (not via the order details, which often rejects attempts at getting support) via the site footer, and escalate to an agent, you can tell them you don't have a post office that's easy to get to for you and don't drive etc. and they will just issue you a refund (if it's a quality problem). Done this many times when the product was damaged.

The flip side to this is I've on multiple occasions had Amazon ship me clearly used shit resold as new — Amazon.com was the seller.

One even came with a sticker: "Thanks for giving this product a second life!"

The worst of the worst among us use Amazon as a try-before-you-buy or rental house. Their lax return policy encourages them.

If I buy anything important, especially expensive electronics, I buy it from somewhere else. If it's a reputable store with a strict return policy, I'm doubly sure there will be no fuckery.

That used to be the case until about a year ago, but isn't the case anymore at least here in Ireland. I'm taking them to small claims court because they closed my account without a refund on a legitimate return. Their customer support has gone from excellent to nearly nonexistent. Fortunately for me, I've kept all the receipts.

I distrust Amazon for anything over about £150 now. Which seems to coincide with their threshold for needing an OTP.

The last straw was getting a blood pressure monitor (which they don’t even sell) in place of £400 smart glasses. They insisted I returned the monitor, then said I failed to return the glasses. Took months for them to refund me.

The ease of returns was a huge factor in the early success of Walmart, as well. I worked there in high school and college (99-02 timeframe) and they harped on how much the customer was right for returns, unless it was just blatant fraud. if there was a chance the customer was not trying anything you just give them their money back

> 9 out of 10 people i ask this is the single reason they stay at Amazon.

9 out of 10 I ask say it's about reliable delivery (not necessarily next day). Most people order things because they need them and have read the reviews, not because they are speculating at something they may need or are ok with getting something else. Clothing being a notable exception, unpredictably sized and variable quality, which nobody is happy about.

I’ve only ever returned two things to Amazon: a counterfeit laptop battery (claimed to be an official part, had 30% lower capacity than labelled), and an unbearable replacement laptop keyboard (2KRO rather than the original’s NKRO, with horrific ghosting, a couple of keys that would stick if not pressed completely straight, and a space bar that had to be hit just so to activate at all). Neither of these products would have been available without Amazon, and that would have been a good thing.

Weird. I think I might have made three returns to Amazon in 30 years of ordering from them. I research the shit out of just about everything I buy, if I have to return something it's because I either got very cleverly scammed or had a literal stroke before I made the purchase.

FYI, when someone else says "this is why I do this thing", you don't get to argue with that. You don't get to tell other people what their opinions are. Psycho.

Most of the people I know would rank predictability is #1, price #2 and ability to do returns #3 (as a data point: I don't even remember last time I did a return, was years ago). Really depends on who your connections are and their specific needs I reckon.

In my experience, the customer-friendly return experience is withering. I ordered a small table about a year ago that didn't ship with the correct hardware. I literally could not assemble the thing as documented in the instructions.

I had to call to get a refund; admittedly, I think I may have been slightly outside the ordinary return window. The customer service representative was pretty reluctant to accept it, somewhat heavily suggesting that I didn't assemble it right.

I actually just recently cancelled my Amazon Prime, which I've had for probably 10+ years. Not solely based on this one experience, but a general decline in how much perceivable value I actually get out of it.

This is a strawman. OP said " I shop at Amazon due to their logistics." Nothing in your post refutes why OP shops at Amazon.

>No-questions-asked returns

Different forms of marketing work on different people. This one works on me. I'm going to shop at Amazon and Costco because, in the very few instances where I want to return an item that didn't live up to its promise, I can do so without incurring penalties.

When this happens, I'm already frustrated. I assembled a floor lamp for far longer than an adult should spend assembling it, and it's wobbly as shit. A corporation than nickel-and-dimes me at this point will incur my irrational wrath. Canadian Tire (a big box retailer of mostly low-quality wares here in Canada) has lost my business over a decade ago because of this. I tell myself: most Canadians are meek sheep that will return after being told "well akshually you can't return this because technically blah blah", but I'm not a sucker, I won't shop here on principle.

A company that doesn't create this experience for me will get my business and exploit whatever other blind spots I have with their marketing, dark patterns, opaque pricing, etc, because they didn't piss me off when I was ready to walk away for good.

Ehh, maybe for some people. I've almost never returned anything to Amazon, so for me the logistics is definitely the biggest factor.

> their competiton couldn't do without going out of business

Why? If I sell a quality product I have no fear of excess returns.

> No-questions-asked returns

That's the Right of withdrawal[0] by EU law, though. Do you mean something else?

I mean, sure, smaller shops might not cover the costs for the return shipping, but I don't really mind.

[0]: https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/ret...

It's probably different for everyone. For us, it's chiefly because it's the only place where we can find a gazillion things our kids' school demands they bring to school, and we can have it in twenty-four hours without having to drive to the store.

I order books from a local indie bookstore and just wait a couple weeks for the books to show up from their wholesaler.

But for other stuff, including tools, why wouldn't I just order from a place I already have free 2-day (often overnight) shipping for, when my alternatives are physical big box stores? Like why go to Lowe's to buy a cross-cut jig when I can get it delivered right to my house in 24 hours for the same price? It's not even like my money could possibly go to an indie hardware store. They don't exist. Certainly not within an hour of me, which not only requires my time, but also money in the form of electricity to drive my car, plus the wear and tear on my car.

Personally, the only webshop where I actually need so many returns is Amazon itself.

Some of that is intrinsic to a good chunk of what they're selling (poorly described imports from the Chinese market). I just ordered an assortment of cabling for shuffling PCIe signals around. Apparently there are a few different "standards" for pinouts on SFF-8643 and SFF-8654, but nobody actually describes them in their product listings! So I'll see which ones work with what I already have, and with each other, and the rest can go back. Sellers could have avoided that by doing that work once and describing their items, but they'd rather I do it instead. So when I do it, I don't feel bad about the returns.

But a lot of it is the dark patterns Amazon themselves choose to play. Nonstop pricing games make me push my actual purchasing decisions down the line. If something is on sale at a great price and I'm in the market, I'll just hit buy to lock in that price. I'll then try to do some research before it ships, but in general I've got 30+ days to make the actual purchase decision. This is what the seller must want, right? Or the same pricing games but after a purchase - if the price on something significantly drops, the answer I've gotten from CS is to buy a new one and return the old one. So if I already have other stuff I need to make a return trip for, that's what I do!

Or when I'm in the middle of building/repairing something, especially when I don't have a "trial" of "prime" (aka sunk cost fallacy), I'll order a few different types of items I think I might need. This way when they show up in a week+ (Slow, Spiteful Shipping) and I'm back focusing on the project, there is less chance of "oh I really needed this other thing" and having to wait another round trip.

With other web stores I just don't feel these type of dark pattern dynamics. Whereas Amazon is practically begging people to call their bluffs. So I call them.

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I have never returned anything to amazon. Maybe it's a US culture thing.

So it's kinda like how credit cards charge the merchant a fee and in the past would disallow the merchant from offering a cash discount.

They are not allowed to do this in the country I live in.

And my point is that many of us aren't even shopping on price!

You could also flip around the reading to.. boohoo poor sellers have to raise their prices elsewhere and take higher margin?

Why don't they figure out how to ship/delivery more quickly with a competitor with all those extra margin dollars they are being forced by Amazon to take elsewhere?

It certainly varies at least by country. I'm in London, and its very unusual to get worse than next day delivery except for marketplace sellers, and often <12 hours.

In the outskirts of a college town with unusually bad retail (like the clothing stores at the mall are the Loft, Target and T-shirt express) 2 day shipping became 2 week shipping during the pandemic leading to me to quit Prime. It particularly bugged me because if I expect to get something in 2 days that's more convenient that making a trip to the store, but if it 5 days or more I'll be going to that sector anyway for another reason and it is easy -- it struck me as significantly dishonest that they were promising fast shipping and not delivering.

Maybe 2 years later I tried the free trial of Prime, if only to quiet the ads, and it was great... they must of extended their logistics network into my area and I get a lot of stuff in 1 day or 2 days now. I went through a phase of taking discounted or free Prime offers when I could but broke down and I've been maintaining a Prime subscription. It's probably not really worth it because my pattern is that I am typically heads down doing this or that and every other month or so I do a burst of buying stuff that I'd wanted for a while or I am doing some project that requires a lot of stuff. Then I might go a month and buy nothing on AMZN.

> I didn’t get any estimates until after purchase.

If they are not going to tell me the day it is going to arrive, I am not buying. Thats the "prime" reason for using Amazon these days.

when I check out there is usually a button that says "as fast as possible" or "fewer delivery days" or "slower delivery for discount"

It depends on the country. For the last few months here in Germany Amazon has been having major shipping issues

But that's just the basic physics of mail-order shopping, it isn't anything specific to Amazon.

Every general store in every town everywhere can't possibly stock millions of individual products. When some item has a potential customer base of a few tens of thousands of people in a country of hundreds of millions, most stores would never get a single sale for that item. But when you can serve the entire country at once via the mail, having a single centralized warehouse specializing in that niche category of items is quite viable.

The only difference with Amazon is that you are buying from a single website, rather than going to the website of a small webshop specializing in your flavour of niche items. And the drawback is that Amazon has zero quality control, so rather than a store where you can browse for known-good curated high-quality niche items you will instead be drowned by piles of absolute garbage - with the occasional decent item hidden in between.

Sure, Amazon might beat your local store, but that doesn't mean it is good for buying niche items.

Basically the only things I don't buy from Amazon is groceries and large kitchen appliances, and it's 90% due to the convenience.

Yep, I've always been a traveller of the long tail.

Speaking of erosion of trust Amazon does nothing to protect consumers and is fine putting peoples lives at risk. I have received multiple counterfeits from Amazon

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B90_SNNbcoU

It’s extremely common for delivery drivers to pee in bottles. Have you ever driven delivery?

I remember a friend in the 90s excited about his job at UPS. He laughed about the pee bottle. Same for people I know who work for usps and fedex.

Kind of makes sense. Where do you expect someone to pee who is driving around for 10 hours a day.

Or having to continue to work while their dead co-workers are laying nearby under a blanket. Yikes.

I'm the same way. I've also been very impressed with Chinese made goods too. Especially in the music world, M-Vave recently released a very capable synth for $50 (FM-1) that is having a massive resurgence of tinking in the community (people are sly enough to use LLMs to vibe code different firmwares that turn the device into something else entirely, like a groovebox or drum machine for example).

It's a shame neoliberals hallowed out US manufacturing but at least consumers around the world are benefitting.

FWIW Prime also often delivers earlier than the set date (yes, even when it's set to next day...)

I assume they want to limit the amount of customer support more than advertising their logistics.

I gave up and canceled my Prime subscription years ago after repeated failures to meet even a 2-day delivery promise. I never once got anything same-day. And the Video and other services of Prime were things I never used.

I'm not a Prime customer. I'd wager close to 50% of my orders arrive within 2 days. I'm glad Prime members are subsidizing this :-)

Even more shocking: I'm not an Amazon customer at all. Which, granted, is probably easier if you're outside the US.

For me, FedEx is almost always a day or two over the initial estimate, and the package looks like it's been routed through a war zone.

UPS is generally pretty good.

I've been an eBay customer for 25+ years and it's worse than ever with fraud. It's gotten so bad that my account now warns me that I'm at risk if I report any more purchases on there.

Examples: 1.) Bought my wife a dress, it came and had multiple defects that were not in the photographs. I reached out to the seller and they didn't offer a refund but said "sorry". I have no recourse if I don't open a dispute. If I open a dispute I get penalized. 2.) I bought "Mid Century Modern" metal wall art. The listing said 1960's and the photos were of two metal wall art items with no markings. The items came with a clear "Made in China" marking on each of them that was not in the photos. These are modern inspired pieces not actual mid century modern. I opened a dispute and got my refund from the seller who didn't even ask to have them shipped back. 3.) Purchased a video game that showed NTSC ESRB rating on the front of the game in the photos. What came was the european PAL release. Not only is that version not playable on this console but the value of the two items is distinctly different (PAL is worth far less).

I'm done shopping on eBay until they have new management. At least Amazon honors their buyers policy.

This sounds like you are running an ad blocker that’s breaking stuff.

I also run an ad blocker in all my devices and have to periodically disable it because it’s breaking random sites in ways that look like the site’s fault.

Do you think it's more likely all these major websites are broken, or that you are doing something to cause the problem?

I don't use eBay much, but I use Firefox exclusively and never recall any issues with it there.

> walmart: still get the "technical issues" error page.

Try a different browser. I use Waterfox for most general purpose browsing and it rarely works with Walmart.com, while Chrome works fine.

For me, this was a key reason I cancelled Prime.

In the 90s and 00s Amazon would fix things. The last time Amazon lost a “delivered” package they told me that they could do nothing about it. My ticket got escalated a few times and they offered a discount on ordering a replacement. I just did a chargeback with my credit card. I was frustrated with Amazon because I probably ordered 30 things a year for 10+ years and they trusted their driver over me saying I never got it.

This is not my experience. I had a package simply not arrive, and Amazon AI said it would replace the missing package (which was a high dollar value). Instead, it just repeated the order, double charging me. I had 3 conversations with human CS promising me they saw the mistake and would fix it, and never did, so I was double charged. After months trying to resolve it I eventually gave up and ate the cost.

I've never had such a poor experience, including being repeatedly lied to by CS, and this was the last straw for me. I honestly don't miss Amazon, I buy less stuff and feel better about it.

>Why is a purchase ever in such a hurry? Short delivery only really encurrage impulse purchases.

We never do impulse buys for frivolous throwaway consumerism junk but fast ~2 day delivery is still very helpful because... Life Happens ... such as stuff unexpectedly breaking and you want to have a replacement to quickly fix it.

Example of 2 events just in the last month: (1) garage door screw coupler broke. It's the piece that connects the motor shaft to the screw drive. You cannot buy this type of oddball part from Home Depot or Lowes. Amazon had it and delivered it the next day so I was able to repair the door immediately. The alternative of waiting a week+ for slower delivery means the door has to be disengaged from the track so it can be manually raised and lowered. This is not acceptable because I don't have the specific key to the garage locking mechanism from the outside. Why don't I have a key?!? Because life happens. I guess I could manually lock it from the inside and leave the car outside the garage for a week but I didn't like the idea of leaving a catalytic converter exposed to drive-by theft.

(2) was my Skechers work boots had the sole separated from the shoe. I bought the same model shoes from Amazon for $59.99 and had it in 2 days. I could drive to the local Skechers store but they charge $79.99. So either wait a week+ for slow delivery or pay $20 extra plus round trip gas money to buy at the local store.

Amazon quick delivery acts as a JIT (Just In Time) inventory system to take care of unexpected things that happen in life. That's a more sane alternative than holding a bunch of inventory of random parts for things that might go wrong.

Btw, Amazon often offers extra reward points credited to your account if you voluntarily choose slow delivery instead of 2 days. This is what we do the majority of the time. I assume Amazon does this pseudo "cashback" incentive as a way to consolidate as many customer orders as they can to optimize their delivery routes and reduce costs.

Oftentimes I'm buying maybe a tool or a part or something like that which isn't necessarily available in my local hardware store.

Having a predictable delivery date for that on top of it most of the time being way faster than anywhere else is really nice. If I buy some of these somewhere else I might wait weeks for a small part due to logistics issues or low availability compared to Amazon

Not all purchases are things that are just consumable/materialistic. I find most of the time the stuff I buy on Amazon nowadays are things like this, where I want something I need but can't easily get locally or am too busy to go out and get during stores hours.

Oh no my toilet broke, the hardware store is 45 minutes away, and I have work and kids. Don't worry, I don't want the replacement part overnight. It arrives when it arrives!

i'd love a 'slow amazon' variant where i could shop for things as normal throughout the week, but it would hold them all until a single specified time where i could do a final review/approval of orders for the whole household the order and then have it submitted at once.

I'd win because I could remove the late-night impulse buys and de-duplicated things added by multiple family members.

They win because it simplifies shipping logistics/packaging and actually encourages more loose/impulse driven buying ("just add it to the cart, we'll review it later").

> It arrives when it arrives.

Yeah, but will I be at home when it does? We no longer live in a world where everyone has a nuclear family and the wife is always home while dad is at work. In 2026, only the rich can afford a housewife.

Most of the time I am indeed not in a hurry to receive my purchases. For most items I genuinely could not care less if it arrived tomorrow or two weeks from now. But I do need to know when it will arrive, so that someone is home to receive it.

"A month from now, on a Monday morning" versus "A month from now, on a Tuesday afternoon" makes a huge difference for me, as one of them would result in me having to walk to my front door and the other would result in me having to rent a car and spend an entire afternoon having to go to the other side of the city to pick it up at some warehouse.

90% of the time I choose next-day delivery it is because I know I will be home tomorrow, and the alternative is "some random day next week". If they offered me the option to pick out of a bunch of guaranteed delivery moments next week which are convenient for the seller/shipper, I would!

I just said its often not even the hurry. I just want an ETA!

Purchasing decisions for "this arrives in 2 days" are different than "this may take 2 weeks".

It's the difference between saving me a run to the local big box store or not.

In the former German Democratic Republic waiting for your car (Trabant) to arrive after ordering took 12+ years on average

POV: you just completed the order and discovers you have ordered from China and it will comme in 100 small packages over a period of three months.

It gives more confidence in the service at the time I'm thinking about the order. I want it to be reliable so I don't need to track and worry about it.

I almost never impulse buy. When I order something, it's because I need it. And if I need it, I definitely care that it arrives quickly.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

This is such a remarkably silly take that I’m struggling to believe it’s being offered in good faith.