Shopping on Amazon has become almost a rite of passage. There are very few people that have not embraced the convenience that this ecommerce platform provides, but shopping there comes with more than a few advantages and plenty of drawbacks, making the experience questionable for many.
The main problem seems to be that they are quite big, and although Amazon does care about shoppers’ experience, sometimes disputes with customers are not solved in a quick or satisfactory fashion. Most times shoppers accept the good with the bad, and decide to just lose the money and give up on the problem, but after a lawsuit that has been filed against the company, Amazon seems to be taking some of the complaints a lot more seriously and dealing with some of the backlogs in complaints.
The new Amazon lawsuit and why customers are being reimbursed
The new wave of Amazon reimbursements comes about after a federal lawsuit that was filed in Washington accused Amazon of not adhering to its stated return procedures. The suit claims that some customers, despite using designated drop-off kiosks as instructed, were denied refunds because their items were not returned directly to an Amazon facility and in certain instances, refunds were never issued. The complaint also alleges that the company revoked instant refunds from customers who had followed return instructions properly.
This was considered by execs at the company as a batch of “unresolved” orders and not a problem that needed to be solved. Since the problem was so niche and many people do not complain given the usual amounts of money lost in these orders, the problem went largely unnoticed for years until a report from Bloomberg brought it to the forefront of everyone’s mind.
For now, we do not know how far back these new-old refunds go, but we do have testimony form one Steven Pope from Alpharetta, Georgia who made a return in 2018 and just now, in 2025, got his money back. “WILD—Amazon just refunded me finally for a return in 2018! \$1,798.81 is being credited to me today in 2025 after 7 years,” he posted on LinkedIn. “I’m probably not the only customer who has experienced this but isn’t that crazy!? 7 years to pay out a return???”
While the connection with the current lawsuit cannot be confirmed, the timing is suspicious enough to raise some flags. These started when, during a call with investors on May 1, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky announced a one-time charge of about \$1.1 billion in the first quarter linked to “some historical customer returns”.
The explanation given by the spokesperson contacted about the returns was vague, just stating that company had done an internal review and found a “very small subset” of returns where refunds were issued but the payment did not actually go through, or a return was not verified properly so no refund was given at all. If this is the case for your return, they affirmed that “There is no action required from customers to receive the refunds, and we have fixed the payment issue and made process changes to more promptly contact customers about unresolved returns going forward.”
Some of the affected individuals also got an email from Amazon explaining the mistake and taking responsibility for the lack of payment “Following a recent internal review, we identified a very small subset of returns that were unresolved because we could not verify that the correct item had been sent back to us. We could have notified these customers more clearly (and earlier) to better understand the status and help us resolve the return. Given the time elapsed, we’ve decided to err on the side of customers and just complete refunds for these returns.”