Venting about the Complete Incompetence of Support

Wow is all I can say. I have never met such a complete bunch of incompetent people that Amazon employ as ‘Support’ personnel (I use the word Support very loosely)

Ok so I bit of background:
Amazon stopped providing prepaid returns labels for an item I was selling. This issue went on for awhile and I finally got to the bottom of it. However, on any return happening in the meantime I instead provided customer with my own prepaid returns label.

Customer would return item using my label. I would try to refund customer but find I cannot as I have to enter a value above 0 in the ‘Return Shipping’ box. But there was no return shipping cost to customer as they used a prepaid label I had sent them.

I asked Support why this was the case - and so started a marathon exchange of messages where Support have completely ignored the actual question and instead keep sending me totally irrelevant information. In each case I repeated the actual question and have even sent screenshots of the refund page (twice now) showing that the ‘Return Shipping’ box is in red and I have to enter a value in order to process the refund.

Response 1 - telling me how to refund customer
Response 2 - asking for Order number of the item causing problem (screenshot attached)
Response 3 - link to help explaining the prepaid returns process
Response 4 - asking for Order number of the item causing problem (screenshot attached)
Response 5 - link to help explaining how to enter values on the refund screen (help says ‘Return Shipping’ box is optional but it is not)
Response 6 - telling to how to refund customer
Response 7 - telling me how to make a return for an item I purchased (why they sent this I have no idea)

Not a single response addressing the actual question. The closest was the response with a link to help explaining which fields needed to be entered on the refund item page - but even that said that the ‘Return Shipping’ box is optional when it is not.

Obviously - Amazon do not want to admit they made a mistake in the Refund Page interface. When an item is determined as being ‘free returns’, yet seller has issued their own prepaid returns label, then it is not possible to do a refund via the ‘Manage Returns’ screen. (There is a workaround - and that is issuing refund via the Orders page instead and selecting ‘Buyer Return’ but it should be possible to do it on the Manage Returns page).

At the moment issuing refund via the ‘Orders’ page does not seem to affect metrics for cancellation rate - but how long will it be before this loophole is closed and all returns have to be processed via the Manage Returns screen. At that point it will not be possible to issue your own prepaid returns labels or if you do you will have to refund customer a nominal 1p to process the refund.