Turns out Amazon's easy return policy may not be as flexible as you think. Amazon Inc has been banning people from its e-commerce platform for various violations including returning purchased items too often, sometimes without giving them reasons for doing so.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Amazon has terminated the accounts of several customers in the recent past for allegedly breaking its terms of use without specifying the violation.
The e-commerce giant, which aims to become "Earth's most customer-centric company", has forced many e-retailers as well as brick and mortar stores to offer similar hassle-free return policy to their users, thereby increasing the competition in the retail space. But now, its very same free returns policy is creating issues for its customers who say that the company led to believe that it was ok to return items frequently.
Many shoppers have taken to Twitter and Facebook to complain about their Amazon closing their accounts without a prior warning. One customer even shared a screenshot of an email she received from Amazon asking her to explain why she had returned multiple orders from her account in the past 12 months.
Amazon has been offering free returns on its purchased items for quite some time now. While the company does list a series of conditions that make a purchased item eligible for return and its conditions of use say that the company reserves the right to refuse service, terminate accounts, terminate rights to use Amazon Services, or cancel orders in its sole discretion, nowhere does it explicitly state that returning items frequently would lead to the termination of the user account.
Amazon, on the other hand, says that on it bans users from its platform when they abuse its policies. "We want everyone to be able to use Amazon, but there are rare occasions where someone abuses our service over an extended period of time," the Amazon representative told the English Daily.
Meanwhile, this is not the first time that Amazon has banned user accounts on its platform. Earlier in April, Amazon locked the accounts of several Amazon Prime members without giving them proper explanation for the same. Some users even threatened to file a class-action lawsuit against Amazon for the same. Also, the company terminated the account of a United Kingdom-based customer in 2016 after he returned 37 of the 343 items he purchased.