This happens all the time to sellers on Amazon. Buyers can be, opportunists, and it looks like you make it really easy for them by sending the product in a zip lock bag.

You could try sending your products in tamper-proof envelope, even a small envelope that needs to be ripped open would be a deterrent as they could not return it as they received it.

It’s frustrating and its happened to us many times with many higher value items, you just have to reduce opportunity where you can and account for the potential of these returns into your pricing.

I’ve always wondered; what’s the point of us having a Return Policy when Amazon overrides it!

Take a photo of the returned goods. Deny refund, partial refund or full refund.

HI OP,

With the greatest of respect, and with the best intentions;

With the greatest of respect, what is your part in all of this ?

Surely, you now know that this is an issue, so what are you going to do about it ?

How are you going to make your packaging less easy to open, more tamperproof, and put off opportunists, who think it is just easy …

What can you do here to lessen your exposure to future repeats ?

Every time I have been " scammed ", I took it as a challenge, and learnt from it.

What can you learn from this, and change for the future ?

Good Luck !

I trust Del and Rodney more then the buyer on here and amazon

i would simply deduct 50% or more form the refund saying there are not the amount originally sent being returned.

Maybe you could use the unsaleable packs, and ones where you yourself have noticed that one is damaged, to create another ASIN with half the amount in? If nothing else these customers have proven there is a demand for it!

Would it be possible for you to purchase a heat seal machine and package your items in a ‘clip top’ (not sure on the official name) see through package, on the basis that you pack/check each package yourself? That way the customer can see the contents within without opening and to open would be breaking the seal. I purchased one relatively cheap (£30). Maybe a possible solution. Good luck.

We use cellophane peel and seal bags, and put the sticker for the FBA barcode over the seal to act as a tamper-proof seal - you have to tear across the sticker to open the product. It’s better than nothing and seems to work well for us. Is that something you could do?

There are all sorts of things you can try and do to negate this sort of thing but you also have to consider the additional costs against the times it has happened and just have to put it down to experience.
It is annoying and modern day shop lifting but it is what it is and you are not 100 percent sure that it was the customer that has removed some of the contents. It could be from anyone who has handled the product in between from the point it lands in the fulfillment center The customer may have returned it because the package was short for instance.

I once did a bespoke job with printed designs on and the customer stated they had received them blank. I personally spent time doing the design and making the print and then packed the parcel, it would be impossible to send these out blank. I asked for proof ie a photograph in which they would not provide and I then offered for them to return but instead they entered it into an A-Z and won. Eventually I got the decision overturned whereby Amazon still granted the claim to the customer but offered to remove it from my A-Z. metric Would you believe, I still had to fund it.

I guess the moral is that the more you sell, the more of these anomalies come up but you just can’t do much about it. I have a budget in mind when I am selling stuff in FBA fo goods that you will lose whether they get damaged in fulfillment, customer claiming non receipt and Amazon not reimbursing when they should, returns etc. If you fall below the budget then happy days, if not then you have to consider raising the price or changing procedures.

I would really like to empathise with you, but I can’t.

This is just one of the things you have to swallow with FBA.

We literally get a pallet of returns back every week and at least half of them are used, missing, broken, tried and didn’t like or plain just completely different items that we don’t even sell.

All of this is customer damaged stock that has little or no value to us anymore.

Amazon doesn’t care, as the staff have to meet quotas, most of the time, the returns are not even checked by Amazon, they are refunded before the buyer posts it back.

You MUST account for this kind of thing in your pricing, every solid business model relies on this.