ðŸ§Â Home / Default State / Amazon Refund
A couple of months ago I returned a product purchased from Amazon US. It was a standard process. I dropped off the item at their local hub and received a confirmation for the return along with an ETA for the refund. I waited for a few days for the money to be credited to my bank account but it didn't. At this point, things got interesting: the money did arrive, but not to my bank account. The amount was added to my Amazon wallet, which obviously had me confused.
As a user, I had a simple mental model of the refund process: the amount always gets credited to the original mode of payment, unless specified otherwise. Thus, if I originally paid for my Amazon order using a card, the expectation was that the money would automatically be returned in a similar fashion. However, something changed in the return process of my Amazon refund, which I didn't realize at the time. So I made a mental note to keep an active lookout for the process whenever it happened again.
Last week, I requested a return & refund for an item purchased on Amazon due to product deficiency. This time I paid close attention. The following image represents the return & refund stage, with my private information redacted.
Image 01
The first thing to notice here is that the default state is to Replace instead of *Refund.*This is an intentional choice that makes sense, as Amazon is trying to do right by the customer by offering a replacement to address concerns with the original product. In my case, a refund was the appropriate action that I sought.
The design of the page offers the Refund as the next option, as a choice between two radio button options. The important thing to note here is that the money is being refunded to the Amazon account and not to my original mode of payment.
The user journey that Amazon envisions their users to pursue seems to be along the lines of
However, a closer inspection reveals a third option: refund to your original payment method. There appears to be a deliberate effort to present the original options (Ideal & Potential) as a binary decision*.* The third choice is kept visible but made slightly harder to use due to its visual appearance as a hyperlink (image 01). Upon clicking, the interface expands (image 02) to present a three-way choice.
Image 02