Why is this the case? Is there some societal expectation? I know that eg: american grocery stores are much more accepting of returns for any reason vs european ones in general.
If the majority of returns are good faith, just swallow them and keep everything moving smoothly with happy customers.
If you have a critical mass of customers who disregard right vs. wrong and just see a mark to be exploited, you're pretty much forced to behave adversarially, and everyone loses.
I worked at a startup catering to Indian consumers. It was a typical transactional product coupled with offers. The time and energy we spent on fighting different kinds of abuse was outright insane. The fraudsters would come up with a new trick each week to abuse offers. No matter what check we placed (based on e-mail, phone number, IP etc., etc.,) they would beat it.
Based on my experience I can think of a few contributing factors.
1. Indian population. Lot of businesses underestimate this. They are used to reason in terms of %. But when you have a population of 1300 the % could still be within a threshold but absolute number would be larger than entire nations.
2. Outright incompetent cyber policing. The Indian consumers getting access to cheaper smartphone and internet exploded in the 2nd half of last decade. Naturally the country's police have just been unable to scale up to deal with new age crimes.
3. Poverty. It's super lucrative for young poor people to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities and abuse goodwill policies. The return policy is a good example. E-commerce companies in India are riddled with fraudulent return of goods. The modus operandi is simple enough. Order a smart phone, return a faulty/old one of the same model, sell the new one. Profit.
4. Extreme levels of corruption and vast geography. There are some well known cybercrime hotspot PIN codes but chasing the fraudsters is mostly futile. The police are mostly lethargic and more often than not are happy to work with the criminals to collect a weekly payment. It's more lucrative that way, why kill the golden goose?
5. Cheap internet, cheaper SIM connection. The country is awash with cheap bandwidth and SIM connection. To an extent you'll find new SIM packets lying on the sidewalk. This makes it extremely hard to tackle online frauds.
Don't sellers there record the serial number of phones? I thought it was routine everywhere.
If the serial number is recorded for the transaction then they can't just send back any other phone with a different serial number.
I'm curious, I don't know, but in my experience buying Apple products in several countries, they offer the legal minimum nicely, without resistance (which is already better than many corporations), but generally not more than that.
If the legal after-sales minimum is nothing, then that's what I'd expect Apple to offer.
American Express, Visa, and Mastercard all have some kind of requirement that the merchant allows returns (usually 14 days minimum). Otherwise the consumer can file a chargeback and the resolution will go to the consumer in most situations.
Um ... When I buy for myself I look for open box products all the time. Steep discounts (sometimes 25% or more) are awesome for something that is essentially new. I don't give a shit about the unboxing experience unless it's a gift for someone else.
In most situations, however, things are simply repackaged and sold as new. Clothing, for example, is commonly returned; then hopefully re-washed before selling again as new. In most situations this applies to electronics as well, although electronics can be different. There are stories out there of people buying new SD cards that had photos on them. Most companies have a return center that processes returns, inspects them, resets them, and repackages them to be sold again as new.
Exceptions are when returns are sent to stores… like Amazon or Best Buy handle returns differently than returns going back to the manufacturer.