I am not sure there is a clear, known-to-work method for handling this sort of situation yet, given the prepaid returns and the fact that Amazon automatically refunds in 48 hours or so. We haven’t collectively had enough experience with it, in my view, to know exactly what to do. (But possibly someone else will chime in who does?)

I would suggest that you immediately file a Safe-T claim on the order saying that it was not returned in time, hoping that (a) Amazon will respond to the claim quickly and tell you you are not required to refund, and (b) the automatic refund will NOT take place due to the Safe-T claim response.

But I don’t think we really know yet if that works for sure. There has been an idea that people have used, which is to refund 1 cent or 1 dollar to stave off the automated return, but I don’t know if that really works, or still works, either.

If you WANT to refund, you can, and you can withhold 20% from the refund, plus original and return shipping, for the item being late.

The above discussion assumes you are on automated prepaid returns. If you are an individual seller or not on prepaid returns the answer would be somewhat different. In that case, you can simply write the buyer and say too late, you can send me a prepaid label to get it back or I’ll dispose of it. If he files A-z, you respond saying that the return is required by Amazon’s rules to be postmarked within 14 days.

bunga bunga!

If the item was returned in the same condition it was shipped in, I would refund and not levy a restocking fee.

I would not consider a restocking fee unless it was damaged or no longer NEW

I currently just made a post about this. 22 days filed return after order. Auto approved. Decided to finally ship 45 days after getting the shipping label. Amazon gave a full refund and I as well have been not seeing action in the SAFE-T. I filed a ticket because I was assured by a chat rep I had nothing to worry about since they did not return within 30 days.

So pretty much this is a huge loophole in their system right now. I can order something, file a return, then hold on to it for another 3-4 months before actually dropping it to UPS/post office.

FOLLOW UP: after being flatly denied on my initial SAFE-T request, I responded with a rant about all of the places Amazon and our terms and correspondence mention 30 days, and got back this, in entirety:
“We have granted your appeal against the return of order 112-1460527-xxx. You do not need to issue any further refund to the buyer for this return.”
which says to me that we get back the goods and keep all of the money (we have not refunded anything yet), less the return shipping label cost, which is far far more than we were asking for with the appeal. Seems entirely random to me (like much of Amazon, making their written policies worth the e-paper they are wiped on). AFAIK, there’s no limit to the amount of times you can appeal a SAFE-T decision, simply by replying to the email denying your claim, and you can just keep trying with the same words until you reach the “right” rep. We’ll see what happens when the buyer inevitably opens an A-to-Z, which will sting even if we win it.

So is the consensus that the buyer has 30 days to return after the auto-auth? We have several 11th hour Christmas return authorizations that have not shown up yet. I was going to give it until the end of February before filing a bunch of SAFET’s. As bunga said, there isn’t any official policy on this.

No