Q&A: Why do you send Amazon Marketplace buyers to the A to Z Guarantee?

QUESTION: You've said you usually steer people requesting refunds to the A to Z procedure at Amazon.com rather than just refund their money yourself through your Seller Account. Why? Is there any advantage to the seller to send a buyer to Amazon.com and A to Z for a refund, or is this just to figure out if the buyer is running a scam?

ANSWER: It's a combination of things. The bottom line is, I know from experience that Amazon will pay the A to Z claim if I have proof of postage.

So my typical response to a customer complaining about a late Media Mail delivery, for example, is, "I'm fairly certain you'll receive the package very soon, but in the unlikely event you don't receive it within 30 days of the purchase, I'll assist you in getting a refund from Amazon."

This way, the A to Z Guarantee covers me in the case of nondelivery by the Postal Service, and also in the case of a scammer trying to get his money back because the Postal Service actually delivered, but didn't scan the package delivered.

But A to Z isn't my first resort. Actually I do a fair amount of refunds, especially for customers who aren't belligerent. But my radar goes up when a customer's first response is, "I want a refund." That's the first response of a problem customer, and that makes me suspicious they're trying to take advantage. For customers who give me the benefit of the doubt, I give them the same courtesy, and I rarely go the A to Z route -- I'll meet them halfway somehow.

The interesting thing is, the people I refer to A to Z actually follow through on it less than one out of 10 times. And it's not like they're confused, I give them the A to Z link, and I give them their order number just in case they don't know it. That's the key, making it firm but not confrontational.

Why do only a small number of people demanding a refund actually go through with the A to Z Guarantee claim? Well, I have no way of knowing for certain. But after several years of experience, my hunch is that the people who ask for refunds but don't follow through with the A to Z claim think better of it when they see this warning on Amazon's claim form, where they must indicate:

I understand that submitting a false claim violates federal and state criminal fraud laws and may result in serious criminal penalties.

I've had four or five A to Z claims deducted from my payments account in over 100,000 Marketplace transactions, and in each case it was a customer I would have refunded if they'd notified me of the problem before filing the A to Z claim. There have been two or three other cases where I believed the customer scammed me by filing an A to Z, and in those cases Amazon has always restored the funds to my account after I insisted on it. In two of those cases, I had to insist several times, but I thought it was worth making the point.

Anyway, my stock response to customers "I'll assist you in getting a refund from Amazon" covers me in both cases. It assures the scammers I'm not a pushover, and it reassures the 99.9 percent of the others -- the skittish customers who are probably going to get their book in the mail tomorrow.