Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dkjaudyeqooe 1349 days ago
Amazon tracks your returns, but if you're within their model, which is not particularly tight, you don't have anything to worry about.

It's mostly targeted toward people who are egregious, and more importantly, lose Amazon money.

If you return a few too many DSLRs, Apple laptops or other high end gear you'll quickly find yourself on the rocks, or decide you're going to start a drop-shipping business from your Prime account or maybe you regularly put bricks in your returns instead of the actual products.

By comparison there is my friend. She shops a lot on Amazon but not a huge amount, maybe 15 items or so a month on average. She returns a lot of items, at least 20%, sometimes 50% or 100%. Far from banning her she routinely gets courtesy credits and outside policy refunds to keep her happy.

This is after she had actually been banned by Amazon, but not by retail. Instead, she spent 2+ years returning every since book she purchased for her Kindle, well over 100, when she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it, but turn off the Kindle internet connection while she finished reading it, before it was removed. They banned her from ever doing another Kindle return but she otherwise uses her Kindle normally.

7 comments

I mean, she could just download pirated books at this point. It doesn't matter if she got it through the store or not if she's going to exploit the system to read it without paying. The author won't see any money either way, so she can drop the pretense.
I would imagine the author would rather you just pirate the book than do this. Returns on a book can't be great for recomendation algorithms.
After Amazon's fees, returning books like this COSTS authors money.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/tiktok-trend-authors....

Nah authors aren’t part of the equation, they got paid and now the publisher is the only party affected
> Instead, she spent 2+ years returning every since book she purchased for her Kindle, well over 100, when she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it, but turn off the Kindle internet connection while she finished reading it, before it was removed. They banned her from ever doing another Kindle return but she otherwise uses her Kindle normally.

Out of curiosity what goes through someones mind to think this is remotely acceptable?

Obviously by sharing this with you she sees nothing wrong/feels no remorse for what she does?

Blatant theft like this costs everyone money, why not just go to the library or something?

> Out of curiosity what goes through someones mind to think this is remotely acceptable?

Copying data is not theft.

They did not "copy data". they purchased something, returned it for a refund and then kept it by turning off the kindle's wifi.

This clearly is retail fraud.

Lots of things are fraud. Most of them are not theft.

The greatest ThinkSpeak the media industry pulled was to redefine copyright, contract, and license violations as "theft" and "piracy."

Saying something is not theft/harassment/abuse/murder/etc. isn't the same as saying it's okay. Precise language matters.

It's not possible for someone to steal my chair or my wallet without harming me. Actual theft usually is not a victimless crime, by definition. In contrast, most of the people I've seen engage in copyright violation are too poor to buy what they're copying. Virtually everyone I know starts paying when they get real jobs. How do I feel about a broke high school student breaking my license? It's complicated, but much less bad than about someone stealing my phone.

They didn’t purchase anything; the EULA says so plainly.
She could have just gotten those Kindle books from the library.

I recently dug into my property taxes and found I’m paying over $200/year (!) for the library. A lot more than the cost of Amazon Prime. Since I found this out, I’ve been using the library a lot more ..

As for our Amazon “customer score”, wish we could see it. I bet they have merchant scores too - would be interesting to see the number of returns per product displayed on each product page/merchant page.

I pay over $400 a year in property taxes to support our library system, but I'd be happy to pay twice that, partly because I get a huge amount of use out of the system (including ebooks, though honestly I prefer paper unless there a ton more holds), but also because it's one of the most tangible contributions to the quality of life in my city I fell I can make. Obviously roads without potholes and firefighters are great too...
> I’m paying over $200/year (!) for the library.

You aren't, you are funding it. Anyone can use the library.

Don't forget the online portion of your local library system, mine uses the mobile app Libby but other methods are available for ebooks/videos/audiobooks to loan, though the selection through each method is slightly different.
As an author you need a better class of friend, she is frankly a thief.
> she realized she could buy a book and immediately return it

Doesn't this cause authors to actually lose money, so it's worse than straight up piracy for them?

Indeed it does cost them, and so you are right - they should simply pirate instead.

The CBC did a writeup on this:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/tiktok-trend-authors....

>> If you're not doing anything wrong you have nothing to worry about

> How do I know if I'm doing anything wrong?

>> ... that's proprietary

Nice, Amazon was capable to loose my iPhone 14 Pro twice and the courtesy credits I got was £5. At least the third time was charm