With all due respect, historically, the guy with the greenbacks holds the upper hand in any deal. Many abide by the rule: “The customer is always right”.

Internet merchants often with unrealistic low pricing to “bait you” are attempting to sway the balance in their favor by cutting corners, eliminating posting a telephone number answered promptly by a live human being, too often sending out “one way” do-not-reply emails, which is shameful. Recently I encountered a tactic whereby a large corporate health care company would ONLY discuss matters over a phone call, so unless you were recording the conversation (and provide proper legal notice of such at beginning of call) there was no record of the conversation (now internet providers like Spectrum are doing the same). In fact, they were attempting to force me to sign a 30+ page contract full of legalese and “boilerplate” in their doscusign pdf format which coincidentally disallows one from modifying or typing in any disclaimers within the signature line. They refused over multiple communications to respond to several of my questions regarding costs and any future billing. I finally just stonewalled them by saying I would only communicate via email so there would be a written record.

I can regularly obtain a live human on the phone with Amazon and have always received a favorable response - - - obviously Amazon values their reputation. I personally will not do business with any company that fails to provide a telephone number answered promptly by a live human. Often I buy locally from brick and mortar shops with return policies in the event the product doesn't hold up to expectations. The somewhat higher prices I pay at brick and mortar are just “added insurance” that doesn't even compare to the serious disappointment or anger one experiences from some internet purchases where the seller sent a fake or missing GPU card, or the item coming from China has no reasonable cost of shipping it back “hoping” for a refund, or even a US merchant who refuses to honor a valid return. Now that memory prices have exploded, I expect to see even more of these fake or missing GPU shipments from online sellers.

Having been a former cc merchant, I know that any merchant that receives a chargeback will suffer at least a $35 hit, plus more on the time and effort to respond and fight the chargeback, indeed I encourage all buyers to challenge any that we discover dishonest. Merchants getting enough chargebacks will suffer the company providing the merchant account cancelling their business merchant account, often the merchants are are then “blacklisted” in the cc industry.