Flagged as a Serial Returner of Kindle Ebooks
Following is from a recent comment to a post at Lindsay Buroker’s blog from a couple of years ago:
Having been flagged as a serial returner of Kindle ebooks by Amazon.com, I have posted below a shortened version of the comment letter I provide Amazon.com that sums up my personal experience and opinion re: this issue. I intend to make no further comments. However, if publicly sharing my personal experience forewarns other sincere but un-witted Kindle customers, the effort was well worth it. As follows:
I am submitting a letter of comment regarding my personal experience with Amazon.com’s, Inc. (hereafter “Amazon”) Kindle ebook return policies and my being flagged as a serial returner (high return rate of ebooks) upon which Amazon acted.
In sum, I believe a lack of transparency and public disclosure of Amazon’s overall Kindle ebook return policies contributed to my high return rate because I believed customer satisfaction was a legitimate reason for ebook return; the publicly disclosed return policy provided no further guidance, description, or warning (hereafter “guidance”); and, as an individual customer, I received no forewarning of exceeding an internal Amazon return threshold for Kindle ebooks.
. . . .
At present, I have 206 books in my Kindle ebook library; I made my first purchases in Spring 2012, mostly sci-fi romance and erotica categories. I have copiously utilized both sample previews and customer reviews; however, more often than not, preview of an ebook’s opening pages is inadequate and customer reviews are “hit or miss.” My Kindle Fire and my Kindle library represent a significant investment of my “entertainment” budget. I approximated my Kindle ebook return rate to be 60% of purchases for 2013 and 40% of purchases for 2012. I do not dispute the high return rate.
. . . .
The week of November 17, 2013, I discovered my internet return option was disabled. After briefly researching, it appeared that I un-wittedly exceeded Amazon’s internal return threshold. Following up on my inquiry, customer service representatives’ ultimate answer was the restriction is not temporary but the “matter may be revisited in the future,” no further guidance as to return policy except a generic “be careful of what you purchase,” and no information regarding the un-descriptive public policy or why potential violators were not forewarned. No assurance as to future access to my Kindle library was provided.
Link to the rest at Lindsay Buroker and thanks to Barb for the tip.
By typical online standards, Amazon has a generous return policy for both ebooks and other products, including physical goods. Other etailers are not nearly as flexible.
Visitors to The Passive Voice will have their own opinion, but returning 40%-60% of purchases of anything seems very high to PG.
PG hasn’t looked through Amazon’s Terms & Conditions, but any commercial site with competent lawyers has a general “abuse of the service” provision that allows restrictions on or termination of customers who appear to be misusing the website.
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases. 
40%-60%.
Wow, that’s exactly the rate of return I get from my local theater when the movies don’t live up to my impossibly high standards.
Dan
What’s wrong with 40% to 60% return? I’m sure a donuts shop won’t mind taking back a half eaten donut and give a full refund three days out of five days to the same customer. The return policy seems to be confused with buy-taste/consume-and-return policy, if such a policy even exists.
Doing the math… if we just call it 50% to even out the difference between 2012 and 2013… that person at the time of the post owned 206 books in Kindle library, and had further returned another 60% of Kindle purchases in 2013, which means they probably purchased roughly 420 books and then returned over two hundred of them.
And they were surprised by Amazon’s action? I wish I could return every book, restaurant meal, and movie ticket that is less than perfect. I’d be a lot richer!
I probably own about 150 or so Kindle books, and over the last 4 years I have only returned 2 books. One of them was returned because it was a head-fake from a publisher. They took a very old book by an author, changed the title and cover, and re-published it with a new publication date – I quickly realized I’d read it before and returned it without even finishing the book. The other one I returned was a nonfiction book that was genuinely, truly unreadable.
I appreciate T.O.’s openness about being banned from returning, but I really don’t understand what else this person expected to happen. Amazon let him/her get away with this for two years, returning well over 100 e-books, by T.O.’s own admission. If this person actually started that many books without completing them, then he/she needs to find a better way to winnow through the choices.
There comes a point when it becomes obvious it is either a) a problem with “all” writers or b) a problem with the reader. This is one of those rare moments when the answer is b.
I started to make a lawyer joke about estoppel (“You let me return ten books a month for a year and NOW you’re getting pissy?”) but like PG I am sure the Amazon TOS have plenty of ways to justify cutting this twerp loose.
Amazon has an amazingly generous ebook return policy! It’s so easy to buy a book, read it, and return it – using Amazon as a library. At the author’s, and Amazon’s, expense.
I have zero sympathy for her. Nor empathy.
Something tells me that T.O. was unaware of Amazon tracking the number of pages read in those books that they returned.
They got caught, but instead of owning it they go on a popular blog and complain?
Zero sympathy for her here as well.
Maybe this is where the myth of an unreadable tsunami came in? I have read some works in these categories, enough to say that yes a lot of the writing is not great and most books have a handful of typos and that probably only 1 in 3 actually pushes the buttons i am hoping it will push…but i would only return a book if it was (1) falsely presented as something it was not, (2) a book i had read before without realizing i had, or (3) so error-filled it was incomprehensible, or (4) a book i didn’t mean to buy but my finger hit one-click purchase on accident. I have never returned a book even though some have prove so not to my taste i removefrom device without finishing. My reaction to this person is, on the one hand, great job standing up for yourself when it comes to actual product satisfaction; on the other hand, get f****g real – movie theaters, restaurants, itunes, and barnes n noble don’t give you refunds for reasons of taste vs actual defect. Why should amazon, for TWO years, at that rate without cutting you off from the privilege?
I remove a lot from my device. Read it once, never want to read it again. Off the device! But I don’t return the ebook. Amazon isn’t a library.
I don’t think other e-book sites do returns at all, do they?
I’m just glad to see that Amazon really do enforce their returns policy on those who blatantly abuse it. I’ve returned a couple of books that I accidentally bought because they were advertised as free but weren’t free when I clicked on them, but I didn’t even download them before I realized the mistake. Returning 50% of books bought would clearly be unrealistic.
No, they don’t.
Not by default; you have to phone in, make your way through several escalations, have your credit history and NSA file checked, and (at Nook) get Riggio to sign off on the refund.
50% of physical books get sent back to the publisher for a refund too…
But seriously, the only surprising thing about this incident is that Amazon let him/her get away with it for at least two years. If their policy was clearer (“you’re allowed x returns per y days”), you can bet the average return rate would quickly stabilise at x-1 per y days.
This quote really boiled my potatoes:
P**s off.
Also, if you haven’t bothered to read the thread over there, Libbie’s being an enabler and blaming Amazon.
Libby’s reply to T.O. really surprised me. Not sure how anyone can see a 50% return rate to be anything but excessive and possibly fraudulent. Amazon’s policy is far more liberal than any retailer I know or could imagine.
I read the other comments too,
What stopped me was the “it takes less than 10min to buy an ebook, strip the DRM off it, and then return it”.
Are we combining our pirate activity with excessive returns now kids? The shame.
First of all, it’s Libbie with an I-E, Bridget.
Second, how was my comment “blaming” Amazon? I didn’t blame Amazon for anything. I fully support their ultra-liberal return policy and understand how the return policy is integral to Amazon’s focus on customer satisfaction above almost any other consideration. The only thing I don’t support and don’t like is the mysteriousness of their boundaries. They SHOULD be more up-front with their customers about where the cap is for returns, as MOST readers will never even think to approach the cap. It’s dumb to keep it mysterious, but it’d be far, far dumber from a business perspective not to have that return policy at all.
As I stated on Lindsay’s blog, I’ve worked for Nordstrom in the past and my husband’s full-time job is busting “serial returners” for Nordstrom in their loss prevention department. It’s not a problem I’m totally insensate to. On the other hand, I’ve seen first-hand, through working for a company and having a spouse who works for a company that literally built its reputation on an ultra-liberal return policy, the extreme benefit to the company in having such a policy.
If I’m “enabling” a customer in telling them that I support super-liberal return policies, then so be it. My business model for my own bookselling has always been to provide the best experience possible for my customers (readers), from the quality of the book they purchase right down to communication with me directly. Partnering with a company like Amazon that makes returns quick and easy for them in case they don’t like my books is absolutely a key part of my business model. And I think most readers are honest people who wouldn’t take advantage of a liberal return policy…just as most Nordstrom shoppers are honest and don’t take advantage, too. Again, if giving my readers the benefit of the doubt and assuming they’re honest people until proven otherwise is “enabling,” then again, I am guilty as charged.
The bottom line is that returns don’t hurt me. Half of a percent is negligible and the benefits far outweigh the risks to my business. If you are so wounded by your own return rates, look to the quality of your product first and to the honesty of your buyers second.
The only thing I don’t support and don’t like is the mysteriousness of their boundaries.
So you don’t think people should be able to figure out for themselves that Amazon might consider them returning 40-60% of a few hundred books to be excessive?
I don’t think most people in the world want to screw anybody else over. I think the number of people who want to bilk any given system are minuscule. And once you have much more clearly defined boundaries (even with a liberal system) it becomes much easier to definitively bust the abusers of that system. Again, being married to somebody who does LP for a company with an even more liberal return policy than Amazon’s, I speak from some measure of understanding here.
Are your return rates so high that you honestly feel threatened by this? I just can’t muster any Fs to give, because the practical reality of a few T.O.s floating around out there is that it might be responsible for me losing eight bucks a month. Big woo; I drop more than that every day on coffee and a scone.
You don’t appear to have answered my question.
How many people do you think believe returning 40-60% of the books they buy is OK?
I don’t. No-one I know does. I can’t see how anyone could really have imagined that was reasonable behaviour.
It’s impossible to answer your question with an exact number, Mr. Grant. And you know that.
How many do I think is okay (or, to put it in business terms, an acceptable loss)? A very small percent, which is roughly what we’ve got right now: a very, very small percent of people returning a ridiculous number of purchases, with MOST customers, by an overwhelming majority, using the policy fairly.
How many do I think is too many? A large enough percent that it starts to have an impact on my business that’s even worth noticing. ‘Cause right now, it doesn’t.
You also haven’t answered MY question: Are your return rates so high that you feel honestly threatened by such a tiny number of readers doing this that you literally would never have known for certain that any of them existed if one of them hadn’t admitted that she did in fact exist?
I’m not asking for an exact number, a rough guess would do. I don’t know anyone who thinks returning 40-60% of the things they buy is OK, so that would seem to put them in a tiny minority, well outside normal social behaviour.
To answer your question, no, I don’t care about returns of my own books. But I don’t see why Amazon should have to explain what ‘buying’ means to people who don’t understand the concept.
But I am highly offended that you can take a simple question on my part and claim I ‘attacked’ you.
“I don’t know anyone who thinks returning 40-60% of the things they buy is OK, so that would seem to put them in a tiny minority, well outside normal social behaviour.”
Exactly. It’s a tiny minority, and therefore it’s not really worth worrying about, is it? It’s certainly not worth devoting so much angst toward something that is ultimately a non-issue for authors.
Because it’s such a tiny minority, I can’t give you even a rough estimate. Currently we have a tiny minority behaving this way, and that’s where we should reasonably expect it to stay. (It’s not really reasonable to expect everybody to be honest, unfortunately, because history tells us that somebody will always be a jerk, somewhere.) If it climbs above “tiny minority” to just plain “minority,” then maybe it’s time to worry. However, I don’t see that happening any time soon. I’m sure you don’t, either.
“To answer your question, no, I don’t care about returns of my own books.”
Good. I’m glad it’s affecting you as little as it’s affecting me.
“But I don’t see why Amazon should have to explain what ‘buying’ means to people who don’t understand the concept.”
I don’t, either, and yet these kinds of things just happen in retail businesses. It comes with the territory, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why so many people get so upset by it. It’s just business as usual, from where I sit.
“But I am highly offended that you can take a simple question on my part and claim I ‘attacked’ you.”
Well, I was rather offended by the tone you took with me and did perceive it as pretty attack-y. So now that we have proven we can mutually offend one another, let’s drop it and go back to being amicable acquaintances from the PG blog.
There’s not a problem yet, but let’s make sure the conversation stays calm and respectful, please.
I’m failing to see what advantage Amazon would have publishing a hard number. Drawing a line in the sand would just inform the T.O.’s of the world how far they can push the envelope and get away with it. I would think Amazon would have software in place to tag such abusers and then each one would be individually evaluated by a real person before the plug was pulled.
Saying that, I would think this person’s job would be rather easy. The hard part would be spotting them when they open a new account a few minutes later.
No, a hard number probably wouldn’t be an advantage. As I discussed with Liana lower down the thread, some kind of warning email that you’re approaching a cap-off point would be a much better experience for the customer, though.
If we take T.O.’s post at face value and assume she’s being entirely honest about her intentions and actions, then she would read all the way through or most of the way through a book, find it dissatisfying in some way, and return it, presumably only keeping those books she honestly enjoyed reading. I think we can all agree that there’s nothing wrong with that kind of behavior. Where it becomes a problem for the reader, Amazon, and potentially the author is in the case of an extreme power-reader like T.O. apparently is. If about 60% of the books she reads in a year are a disappointment to her, but she buys such a high volume of books that her return activities are gaining notice from Amazon, then to an honest customer who is also a power-reader, SOME kind of warning would be better than what she claims Amazon did.
If customers are told “Hey, if you are dissatisfied for any reason, you can return what you bought,” a person who is both honest and a power-reader is going to have no reason to assume that won’t apply to her, even though she reads more than the average buyer. A little asterisk that directs you to a caveat that really super high volume readers may experience some limits in their returns would solve that problem.
I think most customers of any retail establishment — and that includes T.O., for all I know, use return policies in good faith. Most of them do not consume books at such a rapid rate that it ever becomes an issue. But a very small number of them do, and for those buyers, yes, some kind of warning system before reaching the tipping point sure would be appreciated.
Please. If you want to read books like that, use your local libary.
I’ve had exactly two copies of my book returned. Most readers know exactly what they’re doing when they buy a Kindle book.
I’ve known for a long time that Amazon will cut-off people with too many e-book returns, but I’ve never seen the threshold spelled out. It may be that they just judge it on an individual basis. Sounds like they were more than lenient with the author of the post.
I’ve also heard of them closing down accounts when there’s a high return rate for expensive physical goods like TVs and other electronics. Again, I don’t know what the threshold is.
Recently I ran into a problem with the sample feature. Two books I sampled ended with the lengthy front matter, without any of the author’s writing revealed. Would love to see Amazon come up with a cure for that. I skipped buying both books because I was afraid the purchases would lead to returns.
Poor formatting practices there.
While you could say that’s true, Amazon should let people set their sample size, the way Smashwords do. Then we wouldn’t have to fiddle with the formatting to get a reasonable sample size.
Wow, this is a little mind-boggling. Spring 2012 to mid-November 2013 is roughly 20 and one half months. T.O. says she has 206 books on her Kindle. If we figure her average number of books kept each month is 10, her average returns per month in 2012 was 7, but her average number of returns in 2013 was 15. (10 is about 60% of 17 and exactly 40% of 25).
How does someone think that returning 15 ebooks a month is reasonable? I really don’t get that.
I have not been troubled by many returns and I also consider the Amazon policy exceedingly generous. Book stores don’t let you buy, read, and return.
And like someone else above I think you really cannot expect great writing in those two categories for that many books. The subjects don’t lend themselves to it.
Borders would let you grab a book, read a chapter or three while drinking a latte, and return it to the rack. You could then repeat the drill until you finished the book. No need to buy and return.
Did wonders for their trafficking and pastry sales.
*One* time I read an entire book at Borders. (Keep in mind I can read a 300 page novel in less than two hours, so I could have gotten away with it on a fairly regular basis.) I would never, under any circumstances, have given anybody any money for it, but once I started, I was oddly compelled to finish it because *I just couldn’t believe it was happening.* It was a magnificent trainwreck – I wouldn’t pay money for trains to wreck, and I don’t want anybody getting hurt, but you *have* to look.
I did buy two other books when I was done, out of guilt.
Bookstore rubbernecking, huh?
The local Borders always had a dozen people (usually college age) people sitting on the nicely carpeted floor, reading full books. And then B&N opened up a block away.
I’ll bet those are the same folks blaming Amazon for bookstore closures, too.
I have to agree with everything people have said. I don’t get many returns myself but I’ve always wondered what the situation was and what is to stop somebody reading and returning every book they buy? I can understand returns for a defective or badly formatted/proofed file, or a book that is not as it is described, or a reader accidentally buying something in the wrong genre, or accidentally clicking buy when the just wanted a sample, but returning something after you have read it just because you did not like it may not be against Amazon’s rules it is certainly against the spirit of them. The most galling people are those who return the book then leave a stinky review, quite often admitting to having read the whole thing before returning it–why not go round to the author’s house and shoot his dog while you are at it?
Interestingly, I have the lowest return rate of any erotica author I have ever discussed the matter with, in an absolute walk. (I average around five to eight percent a month.)
I believe this has largely to do with the fact that I don’t give my books gobbet titles that attract people who want the book once, now, for a very specific reason, and then they don’t care anymore. Or it could just be my books are more likely to be worth reading more than once. Dunno.
But returns of 10-20% per month are not uncommon for erotica writers, even reasonably good ones. The really horrible ones can go higher.
Thanks for the great chuckle. Perhaps the person should look up the definition of library and adjust her buying habits. She is coming off as the type of person who buys a prom dress, leaves the tags on and returns it after grad.
In the UK that is known as ‘wardrobing’ or ‘returns fraud’ and is technically illegal, although difficult to enforce. I’m pretty sure buying and returning books after you have read them could also qualify as ‘returns fraud’ .
I already posted on Lindsay’s blog and on WC about it, but my thoughts are: who cares? If somebody out there is returning 40% – 60% of everything they buy, that’s a tiny percentage of customers who do that. Very tiny. As I stated on WC, my returns, even ones that are obviously serial returns (i.e. purchase of first book in series, return two days later, purchase of second book in series, return of that book two days later, and so on) come out to about one half of one percent of my income. Not a figure worth doing anything about, and giving HONEST customers (and there are more honest people out there than dishonest people) the safety net of knowing they don’t have to risk actual money on my books if they don’t like them, is a priceless perk.
I don’t see any problem with it. Returning so many is a bit twitty, but how many readers actually return at such high rates? There’s nothing particularly special about my business or my business model. Most authors with good books probably have return rates similar to my own. The few bad apples out there just aren’t actually having a significant negative impact on any author, so why get up in arms about it? If your return rates are very high and are making a significant dent in your business, it’s probably due to the quality of your product.
I don’t have a personal worry about returns; nevertheless, I ALSO don’t have a personal worry that Amazon is doing anything wrong by shutting down abusers of the system after TWO YEARS of abuse. At that point, they have a right to say, sorry, no.
Yes, I agree that Amazon has a right to manage their policy however they deem the most fitting. Even Nordstrom has its guidelines for when it cuts off the returns, and it also has guidelines for when too many returns gets a customer banned from stores!
Granted, we only have “T.O.’s” post to go by in evaluating this particular case, but it sounds like she felt very blindsided by the enactment of the policy, and didn’t understand a) that there was a threshold beyond which her returns would be considered suspect for fraud, and b) that she could or would be cut off somewhere. Not communicating that clearly isn’t a great idea from a customer service standpoint.
The only thing I will concede on that is she should have gotten a warning when she was nearing her limit/being considered for shutting it down. Giving her a chance to correct her behavior is a good idea; nevertheless, the fact that she didn’t see anything wrong with it in the first place is the only real ‘problem’ I see in this situation. As many others have said, it’s a store; not a library.
Yes – and that’s what I agreed with her about on Lindsay’s blog (which Dan DeWitt and Edward Grant attacked me for upthread). Some kind of warning that she was approaching suspiciously high return rates (per Amazon’s mystery threshold) would have been much, much better customer service than SURPRISE! YOU’RE CUT OFF AND ALSO WE MIGHT BAN YOU!
Plus, her choice to air her displeasure with a poorly handled customer service experience on the Internets has led to her being attacked by a bunch of angry authors.
First of all, it’s probably not a great idea for any author to scold T.O. None of you know who she is and what kind of sway she might have over your career. (Probably none, if you play the odds, but since she’s anonymous to you, why risk it by berating her?)
Second, since authors were kind enough to blow this customer service issue up into a much larger kerfuffle than it needed to be (an occurrence which should surprise nobody because, again, INTERNET) T.O. is now extra pissed at Amazon, I’m sure.
Way to go all around, party people.
If you had said that, I would have agreed with you. You said that Amazon screwed it up and should post their limits, which to be honest, I disagree with. Considering they allow the abuse to become horrendous before addressing it, posting such generous limits is more likely to encourage abuse.
I didn’t scold TO. I disagreed with you specifically for defending a reader’s RIGHT to abuse the system. I also didn’t scold you. I disagreed and will end on this note as it is clear nobody is going to change their opinion.
Sorry — I didn’t mean to imply that you were one of the ones doing the scolding. You certainly were not.
As for your disagreements with me, fair enough!
“However, I think most people who do returns, even a large number of returns such as you describe, are returning books for honest reasons.”
You also blamed Amazon for not devoting resources to investigate each individual abuser. So I stand by my enabling comment.
As for who TO is, and how mad they are at Amazon, I couldn’t care less. If they didn’t want a reaction, maybe they shouldn’t have posted a long letter they wrote to Amazon in which they attempt to justify their serial returning. At any rate, maybe it will encourage them to stop stealing so much if Amazon lets them back in the sandbox.
Lastly, at no point did I attack you. I did, however, take exception to you telling TO that you’re sure they had honorable reasons to return so many books.
I think there’s a disconnect between what you think we’re saying, and what is actually being said. No one cares about returns in general. But a lot of people are taking exception to this individual who behaved with really poor form, attempted to justify it, and went public.
This month I’ve been watching someone worm their way through an entire series of seven books. This is unusual for this series. Typically, I will see a few returns for the *first* book but very rarely for the sequels. The reason is simple: if they like the first book, then they will typically like the following books. Why return the later ones?
Other than they look at Amazon as if it were a library.
Sigh.
No sympathy from me for serial returners.
I’ve seen the same thing with my sci-fi series. Return the first one, then a day or two later the rest of the series has a return. The only thing I can hope is that they like it enough to tell their friends
Wow. What a sense of entitlement.
Am I the only one who finds serial returner T.O.’s repeatedly referring to himself or herself and his or her actions as “un-witted” to be terribly funny?
What? Have you never been unwittingly burgled or mugged? Happens all the time.
“Unwittingly”? Sure.
But what does “unwittedly” mean?
*snerk*
Amazon did crack down on serial returners in Germany once. Maybe they will now do it in the US:
08/2013/kindle-owners-beware-amazon-is-now-closing-accounts-of-bad-customers-in-germany/
I’m going to speak up in favor of Amazon’s not communicating this policy clearly. There are very significant downsides to having a clear limit to the number of returns allowed. Returns are allowed because that encourages sales. It gives buyers confidence that they are getting what they pay for. To build that confidence, Amazon
has to have a pretty generous policy (10-15 ebooks a month is very generous).
If the limit is known, dishonest folks will have the perfect cover for their actions. They know exactly how much they can get away with. And some percentage of folks will see the return limit as their entitlement to that many free ebooks. Both of those effects will dramatically increase the number of returns, harming authors, publishers, and other readers as the price of ebooks goes up to compensate for the lost revenue.
In addition, when a limit is known, reducing that limit becomes much more difficult because people feel that a benefit is being reduced. But I’m sure Amazon was more lenient in the early days and is gradually tightening down on the return behavior that is allowed.
Overall, I’m sure Amazon feels like the upsetting the occasional oblivious customer is an acceptable cost of doing business. And I think that the way they are handling this is better for both readers and writers.
I have to agree with you William. No matter how you communicate a returns policy, people will always abuse it. What I think most people find galling is how affronted the commentator feels about what Amazon has done, and does not see anything wrong with his/her return rate. I doubt that I have ever read 1% of books I have ever bought more than once, but I don’t return the 99%. Furthermore, there are aspects of nearly all books I could point to as being dissatisfying-it may be a minor thing, or it might be a giant plot hole-but I wouldn’t return the books because of it. If all readers returned every book that they didn’t consider to be 100% perfect in every way, then every author would have a near 100% return rate.