Original title: “Refund Only” Has Arrived on Amazon — Is This Wave Finally Here?
Author: Duo Dong
Source: Tuke Going Global
Cover image source | Unsplash
“Refund only” has been debated in China’s e-commerce circles for years, and now it has turned up under a different name in the seller back end of Amazon’s European sites.
Amazon has rolled out a “refund without return” scheme for FBA sellers on its German, French, Italian, Spanish and UK sites. The rules are not complex: sellers join voluntarily, choose the products themselves, and set their own price threshold, with a per-item cap between 1 and 75 euros, or 1 to 75 pounds on the UK site. When a buyer requests a return, the platform reviews each case, and if the criteria are met, the refund is paid directly while the item stays with the buyer.
Why is Amazon launching refund without return?
From the platform’s perspective, this policy is driven first by the cost of returns.
Under normal circumstances, after a buyer requests a return, the item must go through shipping back, warehousing and inspection. If the item is in good condition it can be relisted for sale; but if it has been opened, damaged, or is simply unsuitable for a second sale, recovering it makes much less sense.
For low-priced products the picture is even clearer. Suppose an item sells for only a dozen or so euros, yet the seller must bear the shipping, processing and storage costs of a return; in the end the seller may find that recovering the item costs more than the value it can salvage.
Rather than letting an item keep generating costs inside the returns process, it is better to refund directly and let the buyer keep it. This is a key reason Amazon introduced the feature.
For sellers, it does offer a new way to control costs, especially for products with high return-handling costs and low recovery value.
Image source: Amazon
Saving the return fee may also mean losing the value of the goods
Refund without return, however, does not guarantee that a seller will save money.
In its official announcement Amazon set out several limits: returns processed through this feature still count toward the product’s return rate, but the corresponding high-return-rate fee is not charged. At the same time, such items do not qualify for inventory reimbursement.
In other words, once the buyer receives the refund, the item does not return to the seller’s inventory, and the seller can no longer recover part of the loss through refurbishing, repackaging or resale.
This raises a very practical question: should the seller bear the return-handling cost and take the item back, or refund directly and give up the remaining value of the goods?
Image source: Amazon
Convenient refunds also require guarding against abuse
Beyond cost, sellers have another concern about refund without return: if buyers use the rule to file refund claims in bad faith, who bears the loss?
That worry is not entirely groundless.
In February 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice disclosed an online refund fraud case. The case involved a refund fraud operation called Ressu Refunds, whose operator Leonardo Vidal recruited users through Telegram and other channels to help buyers obtain refunds from retailers on false grounds, charging a fee for the service.
In just eight of those months, the operation facilitated more than 3,000 fraudulent refunds involving at least $5.3 million. In the end, Vidal was sentenced to 30 months in prison for wire fraud and money laundering-related crimes.
Of course, this case does not prove that Amazon’s new feature will lead to similar problems, nor does it directly show that fraud of the same scale exists in the European market. But it does at least show that once a refund mechanism is exploited by criminals, it can grow from an individual after-sales dispute into organized profiteering.
Image source: justice
Amazon says it will screen buyers and offer the option only to accounts without a history of return abuse. But how many abnormal claims this screening can block still needs to be tested in actual operation.
Ultimately, refund without return only changes how after-sales cases are handled; it does not make return costs disappear. For cross-border sellers, every step from selling a product to recovering a return needs to be calculated clearly. Only with the numbers worked out can a seller judge whether this new feature is a cost-cutting tool or just another operating expense to absorb.
