Used soap, relabeled fakes! Amazon sellers hit by return fraud

Returns are an important part of online shopping and provide convenience to consumers. However, due to the "intentional actions" of some "careful" consumers, "returns" have become a headache for many sellers.

A survey by the National Retail Federation ( NRF) shows that return fraud has become a major problem in the U.S. retail industry. In 2023, the total return rate of the U.S. retail industry reached $743 billion, of which 13.7% of the returns were fraudulent, amounting to $101 billion.

Last year, the total return rate of online shopping in the United States reached 17.6%, and the amount of returns reached 247 billion US dollars. NRF believes that with the popularity of online shopping, online shopping has become a disaster area for return fraud; many online sellers also said that return fraud has become more and more common in store operations.

As one of the world's largest e-commerce platforms, Amazon naturally has a large number of sellers and users, and has therefore become a hotbed of return fraud.

There are professional "cyber thieves" and individuals who deliberately commit fraud. There are even online forums dedicated to teaching people how to commit return fraud. The returned goods are also a variety of things, including fakes, used second-hand goods, and stolen items from stores.

For example, an Amazon seller selling household goods received used soap as a return item; an Amazon seller selling travel goods received Christmas decorations and toy airplanes; and an Amazon seller selling Nike hats received counterfeit goods that only had the "Nike" logo on them but had nothing to do with Nike. Among these categories that have encountered return fraud, high-priced items such as clothing and electronics are the hardest hit.

Some sellers said that their stores encounter return fraud every week. These sellers hope that Amazon can help them recover these losses. However, many sellers said that submitting claims to Amazon takes a lot of time and effort, because the platform may take weeks to process the application; even if the application is approved, the seller may not be able to get a full refund. Therefore, many sellers often choose to bear these losses themselves.

In addition to these, there are also some cases where Amazon accidentally repackaged the problematic products and sent them to another consumer, which also caused trouble for some sellers.

Of course, Amazon is not doing nothing about these situations. Amazon said that the company cooperated with law enforcement agencies to launch actions against return fraud. For example, last year Amazon sued an international organization called REKK, which worked with internal employees and customers to defraud millions of dollars through fraud. In addition, Amazon also uses a number of tools to track the movement of goods to ensure that these goods can be safely delivered to consumers.

However, sellers believe that this is not enough, and some sellers believe that the existing policies are more favorable to consumers with fraudulent intentions. They believe that the platform should give sellers more autonomy, such as verifying returns before processing refunds, so as to reduce the occurrence of return fraud.

However, some people believe that this is a challenge for Amazon because the simple return process is an important reason why Amazon attracts users.

According to Amazon's existing policy, consumers can pack their own return boxes and deliver them to the return location; and when returning goods, they only need to select the reason for the return without providing more supporting documents.

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Fraudulent returns

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