It suddenly occurred to me late last night that I had sent a case back to OCUK minus the optical drive tray, so made a note to myself to get that in the post to Overclockers and send them an email explaining my error. Now inside the box containing the case I had, with the reps permission, place another RMA , a 200mm fan in separate packaging with the different RMA number clearly visible. These items were sent yesterday. Today I received a receipt for the case RMA and shortly after notification that the refund was being processed. Confusion abounded, where was the receipt for the fan RMA? How were the processing a refund for the case when a bit was missing by my error? So I phoned and explained to the OCUK representative that there was a second RMA in the case and I was surprised that A) the returns department had not spotted this when they checked the case and B) how were they issuing a refund when there is a part missing. And the reason given is they do not actually check what is in the boxes they are just shipped off to the manufacturer, which I found very strange and annoying as I panicked a bit when I realised my error and rushed about getting the part packaged and paying for recorded delivery when it seems I needn't have bothered. I also returned a Zotac 1080 this week surely and had an acknowledgement of receipt and notification of refund within half an hour of each other. This is surely not the way thing are done as it is open to abuse , or is just certain types of items that are not physically checked?
This is how most larger business work. It takes too long to check each and every RMA so they either get sent straight back to manufacturer (for a genuine fault) or sold as B grade stock etc. Yes it's open to abuse, but when you're shunting £40 million worth of stuff a year, who cares about the relatively small percentage of RMAs?
Wish I had known that as I would have saved myself the postage of sending the tray back. But on the other hand probably not as it is no use for it and I am far to honest nowadays.
I used to work in support for a peripherals manufacturer, we told to people to not even bother sending broken stuff back unless there was a fraud suspicion (much more common than you think) or we actually wanted a device back for investigation (much less common than you think).
Working in a returns dept can't be much fun. I shudder at the thought of all the tedious problems they have to deal with on a daily basis.
Doesn't make a difference, the effort of verifying it simply isn't worth it considering they can't sell them as new any more, this isn't a clothing shop (who are free to commit as much fraud as they want by passing off returned items as new as they want).
I have this with Amazon quite often, especially for "cheap" items, they often don't even want them back (as postage and handling the RMA costs more than the item's worth.)
