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Comment by uptown | Hacker News Reader

I've been having increasing difficuly getting 3rd party sellers to even ship their products. Here's the most recent scam that I don't quite follow the purpose of:

1. Seller sells me a small patio side-table on Amazon.

2. Seller marks item as "shipped" with a UPS tracking number, meaning it has a tracking # but carrier has not taken possession of table.

3. Seller contacts me indicating that "FedEx" trucks are being used for covid purposes and that said table requires multiple boxes (not true) and that there are a backlog of boxes waiting to be picked up and that table will be delayed, but offers me a percentage discount which I decline.

4. Package never ships.

5. After the required number of waiting days from Amazon, I request and receive a refund.

What's the scam here? Is it purely negligence and they're not actually benefitting from this charade or why would a 3rd party seller go through this? How would this benefit them?

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I’ve had this happen with some exercise equipment - where they just say “the package was damaged in shipping” (even though I can see the package never made it to FedEx/UPS/etc), and then they “ship another one”, and repeat this process forever until I request a refund. My thought was that these are drop shippers who keep their prices low, and haven’t been able to find a lower price anywhere else, so they keep you hanging while they keep hoping for a lower price to show up somewhere. But I am wondering - could this be an investment scam, where they’re investing the money before they get the refund request, and pocketing the interest? I’m not sure how payment schedules and merchant fees and all that work for Amazon, I’m not sure if that’s viable or not.

Maybe their supply chain is disrupted, and they lied to Amazon about having inventory ready to ship. Then extended the lie a bit, hoping to get a shipment in before it came crashing down.

if you accept the discount, Amazon won't give you the full refund. my wife got caught by this, and customer support told her that because she had accepted the refund she couldn't also then request a full refund. It seemed crazy to us but I'm guessing the scammer is just using this policy as a way to steal a portion of the sale price. I'm sure amazon will catch on but it's just a cat and mouse game.

Interesting. Yeah, once they started changing the usual flow of the transaction, I knew there was no advantage to my doing whatever they were asking me to do, so I declined. Glad that I did. Thanks for explaining this version of the scam.

I would think that some people accept the discount and wait until they're out of the time period during which they can request a refund before realizing the product won't ship.

Do they want you to pay directly by other means with the "discount" maybe?

Not in this case. Apparently that's a common issue though because Amazon warns customers about it in the "wrapper" they put around the correspondence sent from the original seller.

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