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by adetrest 2703 days ago
There is also the issue of genuine items sold as new which are actually very well repackaged returns. Amazon does minimal (if any?) checking of returns and I have frequently received items that had obviously been opened and used then returned and sold to me as new. I very fondly recall opening the package for Wahl electric clippers and having a bunch of hairs fall out of the box, but it's far from the only occurrence. Of course, the item was shipped and sold by Amazon.

Also see the cases where houses burned down because of hover boards sold by Amazon. These items didn't meet the standards to be sold in North America and burnt a family's house down. They went to court and amazon won because "they're only a market place and your beef is with the manufacturer, and we can't tell you who they are or how to contact them because they're some fly by night company in China."

2 comments

I've never had that problem Amazon fulfilled merchandise (but have run into it with some third-party sellers, including one that sent me a product with "Bad - does not work" written on the box, so it was clearly a defective return).

But I have had some bad experiences with "Amazon warehouse deals" where they do resell returned/opened merchandise at a discount, once the product in the box was completely different than what it was supposed to be.

They've been good about replacing/refunding those but now I only order the warehouse deals if I'm ok with waiting for a replacement if the one they sent is bad.

This keeps happening to me with books.

It's extremely frustrating because I know that it hurts the artist's bottom line when I have to return the same book 3 times because it comes with a worn spine or bent pages or unknown substances on it.

And I've had to report USPS multiple times for stuffing giant paperbacks from Amazon into my tiny mailbox but nothing's changed as of yet.

I thought books were what made Amazon famous? I'm so turned off by the quality that I'm wary of making purchases with their sister site at Comixology.