I've bought stacks of laptops from them during the pandemic when some things were difficult to buy. $15k worth of laptops left on the stoop. This happened multiple times.
Meanwhile I ordered a $20 speaker cable that was factory defective and decided it was better to eat the loss than risk doing a return. I know every return you do with Amazon is a Black mark on your record. Unfortunately they bought out Audible, I have a library there I've been building over fifteen years. If I get banned by Amazon I lose all my audiobooks as well as paid music and movies on Amazon itself. I've eaten a bunch of losses actually due to this threat.
Unless you're retuning multiple things a month every month this probably isn't a realistic fear but, I guess you never know with these big corporate automated systems.
So the problem is that Amazon is extremely non-transparent about the policy and what the triggers are, so you will never see it coming. This is exactly why it causes me so much anxiety, I've heard that if you have bad luck with one high value laptop being defective or God forbid being stolen off your porch, that can do you in. So I want to save all my social credit for actual nightmare scenarios like that rather than waste it on returning defective Chinese cables and trinkets. I also avoid buying high risk items off Amazon now. (Products I know from personal experience have a higher than 1 in 1000 defect rate.)
They do. That sort of thing is tracked internally. There are some neighborhoods we know to not leave things laying around because they'll get stolen. OTOH, in most any suburban environment as long as its out of sight from the street and is protected from the elements, then it's considered to be in a secure location. If you're getting packages stolen then honestly the best solution is to have them delivered to an Amazon locker near you. That might not be convenient, but you'll definitely get your stuff.