Making an Amazon return by refusing shipment – FAIL

Early last month I bought a set of stainless steel cookware from Amazon. It was not performing the way that I thought it should and I saw another set listed under a Friday sale and ordered it. Later that night I was doing some research and discovered two things.

1. The problem with the first set of cookware was actually my crappy gas stove in my apartment and not the pans. I also needed to adjust the heat with these pans compared to my older ones.
2. The new cookware set I had just bought, while cheaper, was clearly crappy as there were loads of bad reviews that I had somehow missed.

So, I sign back into Amazon in an attempt to cancel the order. Somehow, just a few hours later on a Friday night, I could no longer cancel the order as it was “shipping soon.” So, I did some research and learned that I could just refuse the shipment when it arrived and it would be returned to Amazon and I would get a refund just like that.

Ha!

So, the item was returned refused and I saw with the tracking info that it was delivered to the Amazon shipping dock on 12/15/08. By 12/24/08 my refund had yet to appear so I sent them a quick email to inquire about the status. I got a response that they had not received it yet, contrary to what the tracking info said, and that I needed to wait until 1/8/09 before contacting them again.

As expected, my refund never appeared and I was missing that $110. So, on 1/9/09 I sent them another email to check on the refund status. The response was that they had never rec’d the item so the refund had never been processed. However, they could see by the tracking that it was delivered to them and that they were going to process my refund for me.

So, the moral of the story here is unless you really want to be apart from your money for a month, instead of refusing an Amazon shipment to return something just bite the shipping cost and get a refund shipping label.