Two months ago I purchased headphones on Amazon. As all the electronics I buy now a days for the last years. Yet, even though Amazon is my main source and I’m used to the site and its policies, its return policy and warranty system still amazes me.
The headphones died within 2 months so I contacted Amazon to make use of the 2 year warranty products have in Spain. It’s one year from the seller and one other year from the manufacturer.
The headphones were just 8€. I had the original box and I even got an amazon envelope from another purchase to make the return. I already assumed they would issue me a reimbursement, that I would print the label and send it back.
My surprise was when the support person simply said they would give me a refund without the need of returning the product.
It’s 8€ so we can assume the cost of shipping and handling it’s above that number. In any physical store they would’ve asked me to bring the product in.
So, with the refund I got I’ve purchased new headphones, from another brand, and they’ll be delivered tomorrow.
Did you know that Amazon was not making any money for a long time? According to Recode it is now actually making some money:
But check this out, Amazon is making money in their other online services rather than the retail store:
A big reason for the profit streak is the growth of Amazon’s cloud-computing business, Amazon Web Services. The unit is way more profitable than Amazon’s core retail business — there are no physical products to buy, store and ship in AWS — and growing rapidly. While its growth is decelerating, its revenue still grew 43 percent year over year to $3.7 billion. That helps the bottom line a lot.
Amazon, in this matter, is quite amazing.
Ricard