It could say something else - almost always three letters followed by a number. It would appear in white inside a black line across the bottom. That would indicate it came through our of their own shipping centers. One of the reasons they are starting their own shipping centers (the first one was just last year) was because of funky things sometimes happening that they think traces back to Fed-Ex employees. Don’t know that that is true but its the claim.
They certainly took my word over the word of the seller that sent me the wrong cable the one time I had to file a dispute. Worked really fast too, after the bum gave me the runaround, telling me an Xbox360 VGA cable was an S-video cable because it was capable of SD resolutions, over the course of several days of emailing back and forth with the seller, I finally said enough and went to Amazon to resolve it and within the day the seller was offering me a refund.
I bought a Bluetooth car unit for 15 dollars through Amazon. Got it, charged it as instructed, and the thing melted into a surreal mess. Called Amazon, they refunded my gift card credits. I posted a bad review. The seller emailed me and said they’d send me a new one if I’d remove the bad review, so I did. Got the new one, it works, and Amazon let me keep the refund. I eventually spent it on something else.
They absolutely have a system to flag high-volume returners, and they will close the account after one or two warnings. Amazon will not communicate with the account holder except to send out the warning emails. Account reps have no way of discussing the issue with the account holders, they don’t have access to the reason why Amazon will close an account. That said, you really need to be a serial returner for them to shut off your account.
Here’s a thread on Mobileread where one of the members there received such a warning:
So just make a new account? I’ve made many Amazon accounts, mainly because I couldn’t recall my old login info (saved on some other computer’s browser) and it was less of a bother to just make a new one than try and track it down.
If you have a new name, credit card number, and mailing address to with that new account, there shouldn’t be any problem.
As it should be. A bad seller does more damage, and sellers have greater incentive to be bad, if they can get away with it.
I’m a long term ebay seller and I can tell you exactly what happened. The item you received was a return to the seller that the seller did not check before relisting it for sale and shipping it back out. The initial buyer who returned the merchandise for credit pulled a fast one and swapped out the new item for old.
If you are dealing with a high volume seller this is actually a fairly good bet for a scammer to make as many moderate value returns are barely glanced at (if that) before being put back up for sale. I do a lot of business buying new retail closeout and overstock items for resale and have run across a few of these scam repacks in getting merchandise from my Amazon affiliated seller. It’s infuriating but it happens. I check all my returns very carefully.
They track addresses and credit cards. If they shut down a user account, and figure out that a user has created another account, they’ll shut that down as well.
The 7in Fire tablet?
In my experience Amazon has always been very easy to deal with on returns. I have always been honest with them and they have treated me more than fairly.
With apologies to any Amazon partner sellers here, I always try to buy from Amazon and not from partners. It’s just simpler. Amazon is a single (but huge) company, the partners number in the thousands and you never fully know what sort of experience you will get with them. It’s usually fine, but like eBay, some are not.
Fire stick.
Ahh ok. I’m more of a Chromecast person myself but I did hear plenty of stories of people getting a rebate on the 2015 Fire tablets after the Black Friday sale.
I finally found time to visit the UPS store and dropped off my Amazon return. Imagine my surprise when I got home and found email from Amazon. They issued my refund immediately after UPS scanned their label into the tracking system.
Now that’s service. 
I’m very impressed with how simple and easy this process went. They emailed me the UPS label and I printed it. All the shipping return fees paid by Amazon. Can’t ask for better service than this.
Amazon is great for its customers. As an investment…not so much.
If you’d bought $1000 worth of AMZN five years ago, you’d be sitting on ~$4000 worth of stock today.
I’m sure there are stocks with better returns, but no one has lost money investing in Amazon over any reasonable time frame.