Seek theories regarding online ordering mysteries.

February 20, 2024 7:22 AM

I've received a couple of orders for which I was not charged. What could be going on?

I placed an online delivery order with Safeway grocery store. Groceries were successfully delivered. Was texted a photo of them on my front step. I went online and printed out the receipt, including the total of $70. Soon after, I received a text saying that due to high volume, they were unable to deliver my order and so they cancelled it. I then went online to look at the order. It shows the items I ordered, but now it shows the total as $0. I called customer service, and they said they would notify the manager. That was weeks ago, and I still have not been charged.

A few days ago, I started to place an online order with Walmart for some air freshener, placing the items in the online basket. I then changed my mind and decided to order from ebay, instead, so I removed the items from the online basked and logged out. The next day, I received a package from Walmart that contained the air freshener. I thought maybe I had accidentally not removed the items from the online basket, so I logged onto my account to check. The air freshener does not appear in the history of my purchases, and the credit card I have under my account has not existed for quite some time, so it is obsolete. I tracked the ebay order, and it says it is currently out for delivery.

What could be going on here? My son says all he can think of is that there is a benevolent hacker.

posted by SageTrail to Shopping (5 answers total)

There was an article posted recently in the Seattle Times about someone who started receiving packages from a name that was not his. Think it was amazon not Safeway or Walmart. End of the story it was some kind of return scam it is thought. Guy contacted everyone, couldn't figure it out for sure, cancelled his CC and got a new one.
posted by Windopaene at 7:43 AM on February 20 [1 favorite]

I'd personally go with "glitch" over "scam" because this doesn't benefit anyone except you and you're not trying to scam anyone.

You've made good faith efforts to pay for the $70 worth of Safeway stuff and if they haven't done anything about it then that's on them and your conscience is clear. Keep the $70 aside for a while in case they take the money unexpectedly at a later date but otherwise move on with your life.

Do the same with Walmart - phone them and tell them, return the items if they ask (at their expense), and then as above move on and enjoy a momentary free bonus which both of these humongous companies is entirely responsible for, and which neither is going to miss for a nano-second.
posted by underclocked at 8:10 AM on February 20 [6 favorites]

I think underclocked is right about the groceries but wrong about the air freshener, don't return that, it's what you ordered.

The air freshener delivery merely suggests that the eBay seller is drop shipping from Walmart, you got what you ordered.

If the price for the air freshener on eBay vs Walmart makes no sense that can easily be explained by the eBay seller using stolen credit cards or gift cards to make the Walmart purchase, and using your payment for money laundering.

Anyway, legally in the US and Canada you are under no obligation to return unordered items delivered to you (this assumes they have your name on them, you do have to return items delivered by mistake).

[This is a a result of an old postal scam that would mail heavy difficult to return stuff to people, then write later to claim a huge value and demand either payment or return shipping. As a result there are laws and regulations that prevent collecting payment for unsolicited deliveries.]
posted by tiamat at 8:19 AM on February 20 [6 favorites]

tiamat may well be right about the Walmart air-freshener, if it's the same brand you bought on eBay.

They've also made me realise I haven't addressed your most specific question of "what could be going on here" so my vote is for an issue with Amazon Web Services, which Safeway are very likely to use for the back end of their website and e-commerce systems, or a bug in a 3rd party payment system.

But really, you'll never know or be able to find out unless an employee is very honest with you. And that's only if this was part of a bigger issue that was large enough to raise a flag for someone to investigate and not just a momentary glitch. So tiamat's explanation makes sense for the air-freshener and the Safeway issue sounds like a software fart somewhere in their system.
posted by underclocked at 8:27 AM on February 20 [2 favorites]

What likely happened with the Safeway order is that an employee or database error marked your order as undelivered. It could happen a few different ways:

1. An employee accidentally edits your order and changes its status, perhaps while trying to change a different order, or perhaps just with a fat finger after marking it as delivered;
2. An employee just up and gives you your order for free, either out of good will toward you or malice toward Safeway;
3. Something goes wrong with an automatic database operation and the status of your order reverts to "out for delivery," and then it spends too long in that state so the system closes it automatically.

All three are possible, but having been a front line manager at a different retail store, my money's on #1. Our store had systems that were supposed to catch orders like that, but we had employees hand over orders without marking them complete multiple times a day. At least once a week we'd also have the inverse problem, where an employee marked the wrong order as completed. In that case we'd have to make up for the order that was incorrectly marked, and we'd probably also lose the revenue on the order that wasn't marked.
posted by fedward at 10:43 AM on February 20 [3 favorites]