You are enabling the thieves, and mis-training the honest buyers. Now the rest of us will have to deal with them.
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While true, in many cases it’s cheaper to just do returnless refunds. I’m FBA but if someone contacts me with an issue, I refund them in 100% of cases. If I were FBM, every return request would just be a refund. Return shipping costs me more than COGS a lot of times. If getting ripped off is cheaper than paying return shipping I’d rather get ripped off.
There’s a lot of costs associated with trying to prevent a refund. Unhappy buyers can leave negative feedback/reviews. I’m not the brand owner so I don’t really care about negative reviews, but most brands I work with would give a complaint generating reseller the boot. Giving a customer a NCX can result in them complaining to the brand as well.
There’s 1 thing that truly matters for a business, dollars in vs dollars out.
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Too many items are not worth the cost of return shipping.
I get virtually no post sale complaints.
MY BUYER ARE NOT THIEVES.
I strongly recommend that sellers consider replacing items that appeal to thieves with items honorable people buy.
Those of us who sell high margin items, with few returns do not need the hassle of returns. I am going to reserve returns for items which I do not mind having in my possession. And that is a dwindling number of items.
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Yet. 
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This is key. Processing returns is a pain in the azz. So if you don’t have to you can focus on other things.
Some sellers fight buyers because they’re in high fraud categories and it’s necessary. Some do it because they hate taking losses on orders. Whatever the reason may be, constantly trying to fight buyers on returns/scams is a very tiring thing to do. Some people can tolerate doing that, but I can’t.
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I can’t upvote this enough. The cost of chasing returns for the few that we get is much more than I want to deal with especially considering the waste of my time - which is valuable to me.
-Ana
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Even the perverts are getting into returns now.
They used to be reliable. I could sell expensive erotica to honest perverts and they would buy it and then go away, because they did not want to be outed.
But I just sold a rare Japanese piece for 300 dollars. It has a rear cover drawing of a man kneeling before a woman. His hands are on her legs, sliding up under her dress. One of her hands is on his head, and with the other she is driving a nail through her hand into his skull. ( I don’t make this up. You can see it at Amazon.com )
It was damaged by the publisher: a four inch tear along the spine. But it is rare, so still salable in this condition.
I described it carefully. I posted pictures of the damage - for those perverts who don’t read and just want to look at pictures. I rated it ‘acceptable’.
But, despite my clear and exhaustive attempts to make sure that the prospective buyer could not miss knowing about the damage, it is being returned. The return reason:
“Product damaged, but shipping box OK”.
I miss the honest perverts.
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To be fair, product condition is kind of hidden because multiple sellers share the listing. Your images wouldn’t show up as the detail page images so they’re likely ignored.
I think amazon is an unsuitable platform for an item like the one you described for that reason.
Overall 16% of retail sales are returned. Obviously a lot of that is clothing. Clothing’s tricky because customers buy stuff with the intention of returning it for non-fraudulent reasons, eg, buying 2 - 3 sizes and returning the ones that don’t fit. And you have to put up with it because other people just won’t buy anything from you period.
There’s also an important chart there:
Basically, unless you’re selling something where the margins are so thin you can’t actually afford returns, you’re almost always better off dealing with more returns/more fraud otherwise you lose a lot of business because people won’t buy from you at all.
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How can one see a “bad buyer” from that list, and refuse their order?
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So the man is an Amazon seller, and the woman is the personification of Amazon?
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You can cancel the order, although it is not practical to do this frequently on Amazon.
I’ve found it useful in on other ways:
- I had bad feedback on eBay removed when I put a link to badbuyerlist in the request.
EBay officially does not acknowledge its existence, but that rep clearly used it. - I’ve added signature confirmation based on what I saw on badbuyerlist, and then saw the recipient claim INR ddespitehaving signed for it. ( He lost the claim. )
- It was integral in getting sellers together to shut down the Boos brothers in Dallas, and it helped in shutting down the scammers in Des Plaines.
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Wow, people in my industry also call me directly and send me email, and ask me to send them product. Dealers, end-users, whatever. I send product, I put an invoice in the box. People send a check. Since 1998, I only had one guy fail to pay, and he had an excellent excuse, having dropped inconveniently dead.
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deadbeat businesses are a thing, but at least they usually don’t pull stuff like false INR claims
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“products where the typical consumer are elderly people, the refund rate is SIGNIFICANTLY lower. "
As an elderly person, I can agree that I rarely return anything because anything is an effort . Also, I am honest. As a long time, elderly seller, every time Amazon changes a policy I run for the CBD oil to calm me before I try to understand the policy change and how to protect myself from more losses. Regarding refund rate, I get really pissed when I get screwed over by Amazon return policy and inflated return postage. I sell books and got a recent return for " no longer needed.”. And another for “Book was fine but not exactly what I expected.”. My return rate is around 3 percent but my blood pressure is around 200 .
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Welcome to SAS. With a BP of 200, you may want to switch to gummies when it comes to dealing with Amazon
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Glad to see you’ve found your way here, to the BSFE (“BEST Seller Forums Experience” aka SellersAskSellers) even though you continue to pull more than your fair share of weight over in the NSFE.
I am hopeful that that participation here might help lower your BP numbers.
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BTW, I suspect that you might appreciate our friend @ASV_Vites’ May`23 SAS (“SellersAskSellers” not “Strategic Account Services”) thread which has resulted in his Ollie-cat being widely adopted as an unofficial mascot for this forum:
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Gummies…good thought, thanks
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“Gummies - HA!” he thinks, as he holds his spoon of heroin over the flame of a bic lighter. “She won’t last long with nothing more than GUMMIES!”
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In general terms, I would agree.
Still, let us not lightly overlook the longstanding stance of the Bookseller cohort of our Seller Community, which evidentially points out, above & beyond any reasonable dispute, that the bookjackers have long exhibited a marked tendency to do exactly that in pursuit of ill-gotten gains.
Citational Reference to the ongoing nature of said nefarious practice being displayed in this or that iteration of Amazon’s Global Catalogue, in this or that of its 22 Global Marketplaces, is available upon request.