I can kind of see how this works for merchants selling through Amazon. AMZN provides the customer with a good experience, makes customer feel valued, customer is more inclined to buy more products despite a bad moment knowing they'll be taken care of.
Probably not how it pans out in practice, however.
the problem is, the customer is not always right. but your money and product is gone regardless...unless you're willing to jump through a ton of dispute hoops most of which take a long time and end up in favor of the customer on some obscure seller agreement clause.
As a customer, that's how I want it to be. One of main reasons I consistently order from Amazon (and buy Prime) is the bad experiences I've had when trying to get customer service / return / exchanges on other sites. Saving $5 or $10 isn't worth it if I have to waste an hour dealing with issues like getting the wrong item shipped to me, or trying to return something.
It's hard to argue with the logic behind a customer-centric policy here. Merchants are going to go where the customers are and they can spread the cost of dispute resolution, etc over far more transactions than an individual. Makes sense to inflict the "pain" on their side.
In all fairness, if a few unfairly returned shoes are already almost figuratively putting you in the red, then you just might be in the wrong business or doing it wrong because online retail has clearly become this pond of a few HUGE fish who can easily afford to not care at all about returns - and customers love that and will keep coming back.
I can kind of see how this works for merchants selling through Amazon. AMZN provides the customer with a good experience, makes customer feel valued, customer is more inclined to buy more products despite a bad moment knowing they'll be taken care of.
Probably not how it pans out in practice, however.