All of us sellers (and our listings) are assessed using multitudes of metrics. Whether we like it or not, Amazon has to do it. Amazon, using their standards, needs to weed out bad or unwanted products or sellers.

But how about weeding out bad or abusive customers?

I believe a vast majority of Amazon's customers are decent and honest. However, there are really abusive customers. I've seen countless postings regarding customers doing "switcheroo." We've experienced a number of those customers. Since most of the items we are selling are low-priced items, we do not bother wasting time challenging abusive customer returns. A significant majority of the abuse we encounter, however, are from customers who are buying products without even reading the product details or description.

We are in the business of selling replacement parts. Replacement parts, by nature, do not work for all devices. So when listing products, we always try our best to describe the compatibility details.

But despite our efforts to provide more accurate product description and compatibility information, there are still customers who return products because they obviously did not read the product details. It's ok if the customer is honest enough to accept that they missed to read the product description. But there are many customers who chose "defective or does not work" as return reason just to get free returns (even though they can chose other return reasons and still get free returns). But when you read the return description, you'll find out the customer obviously did not read the product details. There are also many customers who intentionally write very vague comments on why they returned the product.

To make a long story short, there are many customers who are abusing Amazon's very generous return policy.

Here are some suggestions:

1. I think it's high time for Amazon to monitor customers' return rate. Just like putting threshold on various seller metrics, Amazon should do something to customers with return rates that are higher than a set threshold (e.g., Amazon may have to require these customers to pay return fees). Customers should see their return rates when they log in to their account.

2. All replacement parts being sold on Amazon should have a standard banner that says "Replacement Part: Read Compatibility Details Before Buying"

3. "Item defective or does not work" should be changed to simply "Item defective." Customers may erroneously chose "Item defective or does not work" when they are really mean "item not compatible." If the product "does not work", customer can simply choose defective. If the "item is not compatible", customers can chose either "Inaccurate website description" or "Bought by mistake". Further, "Bought by mistake" should be expanded to "Bought by mistake or missed to read product details"

Please be constructive. My objective is to influence positive changes in Amazon's Policies affecting us sellers without negatively impacting good customers.