[soundman98]

yep, some of it is the dramatic difference between large business and small business.

a large business with 400,000 orders can easily absorb the cost of 1,000 returns.

a small business that ships 100 orders, 10 returns quickly eat their entire profit margin.

i used to work for a small electrical company. we would process maybe 25 credit card transactions in 1 full year. so the prices were based on paying by check/cash. anyone that wanted to pay by credit card, there was a 3.9% surcharge.

you don't know how many people would absolutely flip out that we didn't just include this extra credit card processing cost in the overall cost. in a highly competitive market where even a cost increase of 2% would allow other electrical companies to out-bid us for the work. the larger firms could easily keep the costs competitive and absorb it based on performing more work over the same year. but any other smaller company was caught in the same crossfire. raise prices to cover overhead of assumed processing of credit cards all the time, but get priced out of the work and go out of business, or assume the lower pricing, and deal with the fallout for the few customers that try to pay with a credit card, and need the fee increase explained to them.

restocking fees have always been conflicting to me.

extremely custom stuff that was special ordered from the factory, or the place that you ordered from was the middle man/distributor, restocking only makes sense. they're going to have an impossible time reselling the stuff. so it makes sense to make it more difficult, or at least cost-worthy for them to limit returns on such items.

but restocking fees on normal unopened/undamaged items that are stock items and easily re-sold always feels excessive to me.