If your Amazon refund is not received there are a few possibilities with little you can do about it.
During a recent audit of the books at CoolToys.TV highlighted an imbalance with Amazon. We buy lots of stuff and once in a while we get it wrong or it just doesn’t show up. For instance we ordered some cupholders for an old GMC Safari Van. They shipped, we were given delivery alerts and after waiting two extra hours a text said “delivery cancelled – refund to be issued”.
It got us wondering, how often does that happen? Was the delivery ever real? If the driver was in an accident, why not deliver two days later? Or was this a grub hub style driver thieving where the driver said “hey these are cool” and listed them as lost? We’ll never know.
64 days later our credit card showed a credit for the missing cup holders. Given the size of Amazon, that is a lot of cash to have in float. Customer cash that Amazon isn’t paying for and is probably getting paid for. Maybe Bezo’s is jealous about how good Elon is at collecting deposits and sitting on money for cars that don’t exist.
During an audit of the account for CoolToys TV, we found a list of failed items, and mis delivery’s that appear as “return received, refund issued”. The wetsuit hangers in the photo are one of them. The hangers were for a test after doing some early morning surfing. They both collapsed as soon as a wet wetsuit was hung on them.
We bought two on the same day, returned two on the same day in the same package. Notice the refund dates are different? The odd thing is that we returned them to a Kohl’s drop box on Jan 31st. What we noticed is that we didn’t get a refund at all.
It is less than $100 for these two hangers and a couple other small items we are missing refunds on. If you think about how many deliveries amazon makes each day the possibilities are astounding.
If each customer just overlooks one refund per year with an average of $10, that could end up being over a hundred million dollars. Yes that is $100,000,000. For a trillionaire wanna be like Bezo’s, a hundred million is a rounding error. Or his soon to be ex wife’s allowance. For us, even our little share is one more item we can’t buy to test and play with on CoolToys.
After 45 minutes of digging around the “customer service” section of Amazon, we realize why Bezo’s was almost the richest man in the world. Money goes in, and there is almost no way to get it back out. There is no customer service email, phone or even chat. Just some help files saying refunds can take up to 10 days. There are links to check the status of the refunds too. If it says refund issued, that is that at least according to Amazon. It doesn’t matter whether you actually got the money.
We are working on a way to get a hold of someone and get our money back. If you have any ideas or have found out how to get your refund money that didn’t show up, let us know.
Editors note: It turned out there was a chat feature buried very deep in the customer service section of the website. With that we found that there was an amazon gift card balance. It seems if you don’t make sure the box is checked the refunds go to a gift card, not how you paid.