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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> The bad actors who really know how to work the systems

Time to bring back retailers sharing a list of names of those bad actors and just refusing to do business with them.

For the people who buy one of each color and then return all but one, a solution is to only ship one at a time.

I'm surprised that Amazon doesn't have (or perhaps has it in secret) a "score" for each customer, and certain kinds of transactions are simply rejected for them.

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>For the people who buy one of each color and then return all but one, a solution is to only ship one at a time.

Zappos, which is owned by Amazon, essentially encourages people to order multiple sizes and return the ones that don't fit. Presumably there are people who take advantage of such policies to an extreme. There are presumably also people who just wouldn't shop for certain things online otherwise.

> For the people who buy one of each color and then return all but one

Amazon's "try before you buy" encourages people to do just this, so I'm guessing Amazon has figured out how to make this shopping pattern profitable.

Try before you buy is not quite the same as buy a spread in order to pick one.

Actually in this case it is, you choose a box of items to get shipped to you and ship back what you don’t want. You can get an identical shirt in 5 different colors, or sizes, and ship back all but one.

I’ll bet my last shirt they have in invested big time in fraud risk scoring. That’s stuff Amazon is set up to do perfectly.

Not that it really disproves your point but a friend recently received a new camera from Amazon, except what was actually in the box was a container of pool chemicals.

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