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Meanwhile insurance fraudsters love AI, and its ability to manipulate photos!
by cm2187 14d ago
Meanwhile insurance fraudsters love AI, and its ability to manipulate photos!
- Gigachad 14d agoIt seems like companies are getting a lot less trusting with their return policies. It used to be you just email them a photo or video of the issue and they send you a replacement. Now companies won’t send one until they have received the defective one back.
- colechristensen 14d agoI knew a guy who would buy three different kinds of a thing and return the two he didn't like... regularly. A small number of return abusers ruin things for everybody. Then again my last two online purchases, a pair of shoes arrived stained with somebody else's socks in the box and a cordless vacuum arrived with a mismatched brush head for a different model.
- jordanb 14d agoThe thing is this was the pitch for buying clothes online: worried it won't fit? Just return it. No questions asked! We'll even pay return shipping! It's interesting how companies are now redefining things they explicitly encouraged their customers to do as "abuse."
- estearum 14d agoThe GP described it as abuse. That's not evidence of companies calling it abuse. As you say, this is basically intrinsic to the deal of buying clothes/shoes/etc online and obviously online retailers know that and accept it, or else they would not allow it (and in turn would not exist as businesses).
- rtkwe 14d agoWell we don't know that they're talking about clothes at all. Clothing retailers are still pretty open about returns afaik because it's kind of the only way to run an online clothes store people will actually use.
- Gigachad 14d agoFrom what I've heard, most returns just get binned. Its terribly sad how wasteful online shopping is.
- rtkwe 13d agoI think that depends a lot on the industry. There's a lot of evidence Amazon is recycling "unopened" returns into the new stock pool because people are getting sealed items with their contents replaced because it turns out it's not that hard to shrink wrap items well enough to convince an overworked return intake employee. Some also gets diverted into return resale stores where companies like Amazon will sell a 3rd party a pallet of miscellaneous returns they then sell.
- zamadatix 14d agoThe few cases where this is an advertised arrangement should be excluded from the usual situation where returns are meant for defects/errors. Even then, the one clothes example (shoes - which had been returned stained and with socks in the box) mentioned in the above still wouldn't seem like a valid return by any stretch.
- QuantumNomad_ 14d agoZalando has free return for 30 days in my country, and they also include returning goods from multiple orders in a single return package as a suggestion in their FAQ. They sell clothes and also shoes. Zalando very much is operating on the principle that you order things to try them out at home and return whatever doesn’t fit or whatever you end up not liking. Just like in a physical store you try out clothes and shoes inside the store to see how it fits and how it looks on you. That being said, there are limits to what they consider reasonable: > One key part of that experience, and something our customers deeply value, is the ability to make an order, try the items at home, and, if needed, easily return those they don’t want to keep. In short: bringing the fitting room to your home. > […] > Customers whose return activity reaches disproportionately high levels will receive an email warning. This proactive step gives them the opportunity to reflect on their behavior, discover the solutions we provide to avoid returns, and adjust before further measures are taken. https://corporate.zalando.com/en/convenience/bringing-transparency-returns-help-customers-shop-more-consciously https://corporate.zalando.com/en/convenience/bringing-transp...
- zamadatix 14d agoI've edited the above to clarify the issue in GP's shoes example was meant to be about the previous return being stained with socks in the box, not just that it was shoes in general.
- QuantumNomad_ 14d agoMakes sense :) My bad for not understanding what you meant there.
- deleted 14d ago[deleted]
- WarmWash 14d agoIt's even worse than that, because they are adamant that they aren't abusing the system, and insist that if they didn't want people doing it, they would stop taking returns.
- estearum 14d agoThe behavior described in the immediately above comment (ordering multiples and returning ones you don't like) is not abuse. The behavior described above that (lying about a defective item) is abuse. Dealing with returns is the tradeoff that online sellers make in order not to put a store in every city or to deal with retail arrangements.
- colechristensen 14d agoFor clothing it makes sense, also much of the price of clothing is often illusory, the marginal cost for the piece of clothing is tremendously less than the price paid. Not so for consumer electronics
- estearum 14d agoOh yeah that's pretty insane for consumer electronics.
- nvme0n1p1 14d ago> The behavior described in the immediately above comment (ordering multiples and returning ones you don't like) is not abuse. Oh yes it is. Buying something you know you don't plan to keep is abuse. If you ran a store, would you be fine with 2/3 of your orders being returned? A good litmus test for "am I being an asshole" is "what would the world look like if everyone behaved like me?"
- estearum 14d agoYou should do some reading on the birth of ecommerce. This was a very explicit tradeoff that these businesses decided to make. That's why free returns are pervasive. Now whether it's a good thing wrt the environment etc...
- rtkwe 14d agoPlaces need to get a lot better about actually checking returned items if they're going to go back into the stream as a NIB item instead of open box. Amazon and other electronics places are bad about this with horror stories of getting expensive graphics cards either replaced with equivalent weight items or with the GPU chip harvested in some cases.
- charlieyu1 14d agoThe insurance industry are the fraudsters.