Mike Snider, USA TODAY
2 min read
Some Amazon shoppers will soon be getting long-awaited refunds.
The online retailer is issuing refunds to a small collection of U.S. customers who had issues with returns in the past. At least one customer's return apparently dated back to 2018.
“Following a recent internal review, we identified a very small subset of returns where we issued a refund without the payment completing, or where we could not verify that the correct item had been sent back to us so no refund was issued," Amazon spokesperson Maxine Tagay said in a statement sent to USA TODAY.
"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.”
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Amazon hasn't detailed how many customers are getting refunds or the total amount of the refunds.
However, during its first quarter earnings call on May 1, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told investment analysts that the company took a one-time charge of about $1.1 billion, Bloomberg reported. The charge included “some historical customer returns” that were unresolved, as well as the cost of stockpiling inventory in anticipation of tariffs, Olsavsky said, according to Bloomberg.
One consumer, Steven Pope, posted on LinkedIn that he got a refund of nearly $1,800 on May 20 for a TV set he had purchased in 2018, The Verge reported.
"WILD - Amazon just refunded me finally for a return in 2018!" he posted on the networking site. "$1,798.81 is being credited to me today in 2025 after 7 years."
Amazon's note to Pope read, according to his LinkedIn post: "We are contacting you about an unresolved product return that you initiated on Amazon."
Pope, founder of My Amazon Guy, a company to help sellers on Amazon, was among consumers whose return hadn't been resolved, Amazon's note said. "Given the time elapsed, we’ve decided to err on the side of customers and just complete refunds for these returns."
Amazon returns are also the focus of a potential class-action lawsuit in which several consumers say they were recharged for an item after they had returned it. Amazon has argued that it may re-charge a customer and reverse their refund if they did not send back the item, sent it back in bad condition or sent back an incorrect item.
A federal judge in Seattle on April 29 denied Amazon's request to dismiss the case, which is currently in the discovery process.
