“Live free or die, death is not the worst of evils.” Adopted as the state motto in 1945. “There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!” Said to his men prior to the Battle of Bennington.
We are one of the five states without a sales tax. And we do not have a state sales tax.
The “Nexis” days drove us nuts, as did the snake oil sales people selling sales tax services. It got to the point on the OSFE, where I would not even bring this sort of thing up.
We did look up the number of warehouses our product was in across the United States, it was over 100. All chump change as it related to value of goods.
I remember that; I, too was one of those who spilt some ink trying to educate our Seller Community about nexus under Quill - but as it became apparent in late 2017 that both those who’d fallen for the spiels of TaxJar/Avalara/etc (or for State DOR fishing expeditions) were quite adamant about their correctness & my lack of understanding, and that the looming Wayfair decision was about to cast a sea-change, I simply held my tongue.
Kohl’s has enough business problems without selling b-goods. Their space is too valuable for this crapola. They still have stores without a Sephora. I think they will eventually go the way of Bed, Bath and Beyond. Like BB&B they rely heavily on coupons and similar promotions.
Most men will not buy at a store where no two customers in line buying the same product pay the same price. Their appeal is mostly the same as super-couponing.
A liquidation chain in Maine with 13 stores, cannot move all of the Amazon stock - AZ product and FBA they buy at 40% below AZ price and has to mark down the product every 2 weeks - eventually reaching 25 cents.
Others have reported AZ product making it down to 25 cents in other parts of the country.
Selling b-goods means more returns no matter how low you go. This is why Amazon Warehouse Deals always has as much negative FB as it did.
Those business models only work under a “all sales final” model, which means the products need to be sold VERY cheap for the buyer to assume all risk with them. There’s actually a bunch of stores that do this selling amazon return pallets. They do this business model where they bring in new stuff on Monday, and all items are like $5 on monday, $2 on tuesday, $1 on wednesday, 50 cents on thursday, and 25 cents on friday. I guess whatever’s left after that goes into the trash.
There’s definitely some shady (even shadier than “honest” liquidation vendors) people who’ll pack up a bunch of trash that’s already been picked through and sell it as an original Amazon/walmart/what have you return pallet.
While I applaud this long overdue move, getting customers to pay their fare share of the transaction process will inevitably take the bloom off of the online rose and send many shoppers back to their local brick and mortar stores for items that are readily available.
Also, if one knows that there will be a cost to return something they don’t like, there will be less impulse buying online. I have yet to see a study on this, but using myself as an example, I believe that there is millions - possibly billions - of dollars worth of unopened, untouched inventory sitting in the junk drawers and junk rooms of American homes, all bought because the shopper was sure they needed it at the time they were shopping. Is this 1% of all sales, 5%, 10%? Think of the “outside of window” return requests you get. These are people deciding to empty their junk drawers and hoping you’ll make an exception for them. What multiple of these are customers who know the return policy and don’t bother to ask?
I think this move is extremely shortsighted, for some of the reasons you mention.
For one, I think it’s an ecommerce store’s responsibility to pay for all costs associated with the transaction within reason (customers who have an excessive problem rate should be cut off from free returns or blocked from shopping at all), much like how it’s a physical B&M store’s responsibility to pay for all costs associated with maintaining the storefront (imagine if a B&M store charged you an entrance fee? Or charged you to use the bathroom?). This was especially true when ecommerce first started to get things going, and the landscape has changed a lot, but parts of it still hold true. Warehouse rents have gone up but it’s still generally cheaper to rent a warehouse than to maintain numerous storefronts.
For some of these companies, the new fees make some sense, as driving people to go to their own B&M storefronts is fine, but for an ecommerce only (or primarily ecommerce, as Amazon does technically have a physical presence nowadays) company, driving people to go shop at a B&M would be an incredibly stupid move.
I wouldn’t mind if Amazon allows FBA 3P sellers to choose how their returns are handled (eg. always free returns/returnless refund without question, or to charge people for returns, and a couple options in between), as long as they reasonably favor offers from more customer centric sellers and clearly display those policies in the buy box. I would gladly take the market share from the sellers who want to shoot themselves in the foot by saving a few bucks on returns. I don’t think this would ever happen though as Amazon’s all about creating a more uniform buying experience and making it seem like you’re buying from Amazon.com regardless of who the 3P seller is.
We saw some gas stations in Los Angeles CA with restrooms charging a quarter usage fee. Don’t know if that was more annoying than trying to find a clerk to get a key to get into one. (But we understand why they were doing it.)
Isn’t that what the membership fee is with stores like Costco and Sam’s Club?
Amazon is not alone in this. Most chain / franchise stores strive to achieve the same thing as that is what builds the brand / store recognition.
It’s all about learning to play by the rules whether you are a 3P seller on a platform or a franchise owner of a store.
Those are not typical retailers, you’re paying a fee in exchange for getting sub-retail prices. Your membership fee is basically paying for the privilege of buying products at cost (Costco’s mark up basically covers their cost of acquiring and selling those products to members, most of their profit comes from the membership fees). If Costco was charging full retail markup, they wouldn’t exist as a business.
Gas stations are kind of a weird case because you have to use them, location is more important than anything else, and amenities/customer service are a minimal factor. If anything, the chief complaint about gas station bathrooms is that they’re disgusting. Most of the time I’d rather piss on a tree by the gas station than go into their bathroom.
In spite of this, there are classes of merchandise where Costco is not the best price available.
I suspect that they are using the soft money they get from manufacturers to pay for the extended warranties on electronics.
Although your explanation of Costco pricing may not be incorrect, or an untruth, it may not be the whole truth either.
I recently returned a pair of jeans to Costco that I purchased in 2020 when my size changed after my CABG. Still had tags on. Had no receipt but they had the transaction when I purchased it. They went directly to sale, no markdown, had to be marked up to today’s inflated price.
It’s not gone that UPS store may have had enough. They get paid $1 to pack up and send back the return. The owner of the UPS store near me said the amount of overtime it takes to pack up all these Amazon returns costs him money.
He said most of the people walking in are doing Amazon returns, some don’t even put the item back in the retail box so he has to explain they can’t ship it back that way. He told me UPS is going to start charging Amazon more because the UPS store owners are starting to complain. They are supposed to be in business to make money not lose it on packing up Amazon returns.
If I ran the store I’d just zip tie a trash bag full of the returns, smack a label on it, and whatever happens after that happens. What’s amazon going to do, complain that the returns weren’t packed right? If they pull that UPS store’s location as a dropoff point from Amazon.com due to too high of a problem rate, who cares?
If people return an unboxed item, just smack a label onto the item itself, it’s Amazon’s problem when it shows up completely destroyed.
Someone is doing that. UPS or Kohl’s. I’ve received a few FBA returns that had the label slapped on the item.
I was behind a woman in line at a UPS store, she walked up to the counter, held up her phone and handed the clerk a bra. No package, no bag, just the bra. After she left, I commented about how times have changed and he (an older gentleman, probably the franchise owner) just shook his head.
At this point, any business who’s margins can’t absorb a full loss on all returns has a serious business model problem.
They’re probably paying UPS less money to handle returns than waste management collects for picking up trash. I’m not surprised the returns are being treated like trash.
For sellers who have a lot of discretionary returns, this extra step helps reduce the returns. However, as a buyer who has purchased items that arrive damaged, it is extremely frustrating. Just this past week, I loaded an ink cartridge I purchased from Amazon directly in my Pitney Bowes Mailstation and it was defective (didn’t print anything). I had to order a replacement, also from Amazon directly, and it was also defective (Mailstation registered the cartridge as being empty). So now I have two crappy cartridges that I have to drive to Kohls to return because I would have to pay more to label the return myself and have Amazon’s junk returned back to them.
