We received this message from Amazon Customer Service, which is laughable. They have to know sellers have nothing to do with payments, right? How would you respond?
"Dear Amazon Seller,
This is Amazon’s Customer Service team. A customer reached out to us with some questions about a purchase they made from you. Here’s a description of the issue:
Product:
Order number:
Return requested: No
Reason for contact: Our valued customer call us about the XXXXX, they accidentally selected the card as payment method and they wanted use different card to pay this order. Kindly offer best resolution, if return is the best way to be refunded for the full amount kindly offer pick up service.
Te prevent fraud and theft, Amazon does not allow third party sellers to change or even see a customer’s payment information. If you have an issue with your payment method please cancel your order and place a new order with the correct payment information.
Got this from Walmart customer service the other day.
Order shipped from Walmart
I must have forgotten my password / 2FA code to control USPS. Silly me.
This is an escalation: Hi, Hope you’re doing okay. The nice customer contacted us, and they mentioned that the order have been delivered, but the status still shows as on the way. USPS should really have changed the status as soon as they were able to deliver the order, Customer is totally right that the order could have been stolen, and no one would have known about this, as the order status was never changed. Please do look into this for the customer as soon as you can and have the status changed, Thank you.
They bought the product from Amazon and paid Amazon. As we all know, this has nothing to do with you or any seller.
I would respond with a common sense response and be kind about it.
Sadly, that probably won’t solve the issue because any buyer that is dumb enough to open a case / communication like this will never be satisfied with a common sense response.
So just tell them to return it for a refund? I can give them return labels, thats fine. But since it is technically a buyer faulted return, can I recoup my return shipping costs or charge a restocking fee? Unfortunately, this is a large/high cost/high shipping cost item.
This is beyond ridiculous and I mean that with all my heart.
The buyer is assuming this is going to be an easy fix but it’s not.
I would reach out to them and tell them what needs to happen to make what they want to happen, happen…
They may just let it go and deal with the CC issue themselves. I assume they meant to charge it to a business or personal account and they selected the wrong card because there were multiple payment methods on their account. I did that once but realized it in time to cancel / reorder.
I would charge back whatever you possibly can per policy if this is going the return route and that should be in the message to the buyer to try and square this away.
The payment system is fully automated by Amazon. As a third party seller, I cannot access or change your payment method and I cannot cancel an already shipped and received order.
"
some buyers are not aware of the level of automation behind the public facing facade, and that it cannot be manipulated. They envision a simple ‘edit’ fix option that does not exist.
This vision is not unreasonable. Amazon could charge the second card, and if it goes through, then they refund the first card.
For an allegedly customer-centric company, this is a big omission.
The only way to be refunded in this situation is to return the item. In this case, Amazon policy states that shipping charges will not be refunded.(Add a pre-paid return label to this message, which will be deducted from their refund as a Buyer-faulted return, in case they don’t make a separate Return Request).Although a pre-paid return label is attached to this message, please note that shipping arrangements will need to be handled by the customer.
I mean….any buyer who has to call in and talk to support about this isn’t even going to read your reply anyways because they won’t see the email or won’t even know where to check. It’s almost moot.
Again, maybe I’m bad……but on stupid stuff like this, I literally only reply to preserve my protection in the event of a claim for any reason. It’s for the reason above, too….the buyer likely won’t contact you again about this after and won’t see your reply.
This situation, as you’ve noted both here in the SAS and over there in the NSFE, is indeed laughable on its very face.
Especially-so since the CSBA (‘Amazonese’ for “Customer Service by Amazon” [link, Home/Landing page]) Program to which you’ve enrolled seems to have failed badly, yet again, of Amazon’s initial promise that enrolling would alleviate the previously-long-extant phenomenon of its outsourced (and often enough offshored) first-echelon ‘triage’ personnel manning the trenches not properly employing published policy…a situation, as you may well remember, that SEAmod spent a good deal of time investigating and correcting not too many years back.
Still, I’m at least slightly encouraged to see that Susan relied to your NSFE discussion with a recommendation which closely-mirrors our friend @maintak’s reply in Post #2 upthread, re: the templated response s/he uses for misfortunate scenarios like the one you’re facing.
I’ll refrain from posting a link to that NSFE reply, and a quote of it, because I do not want to expose your PII w/o your consent - nor give any other clues to the Bad Actors (or even Ignorant Actors, etc.) in a publicly-visible thread like this one.
