Amazon Shutting Out Some Shoppers for Making Multiple Returns

How many is too many?

Amazon, vaunted for its free two-day shipping with Prime membership and free returns, has apparently been shutting out some shoppers based on how often they return purchases, according to the Wall Street Journal and several other media outlets.

Dozens of shoppers have been taking to social media to complain about their accounts being cut off, the criteria for which remains unclear.

While the company’s returns policy doesn’t spell out the risk of losing your account based on returning too many items, its terms of service do say Amazon reserves the right to terminate accounts at its discretion.

“We want everyone to be able to use Amazon, but there are rare occasions where someone abuses our service over an extended period of time,” an Amazon representative told CNET. “We never take these decisions lightly, but with over 300 million customers around the world, we take action when appropriate to protect the experience for all our customers. If a customer believes we’ve made an error, we encourage them to contact us directly so we can review their account and take appropriate action.”

You can read the rest of the story here.

MCM Musings: Like every other ecommerce company, Amazon is impacted monetarily by the massive growth in returns of online orders. This shutting off of accounts is one way to address it, albeit at the cost of a bad PR moment. Clearly Amazon can easily absorb whatever negative blowback it gets from this story, even in such a prominent publication. But they’re not helping their cause by failing to provide more clarity regarding the criteria for shutting down someone’s account.

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