Key Takeaways
- Amazon checkout lacks a tipping option for sellers, but scammers find creative ways to ask for tips.
- Some sellers misuse the product customization section to solicit tips directly from customers.
- Despite seller manipulation, Amazon seems to enable these tipping options by not flagging them for review.
Tipping culture is normalized in the US, but there are people who don’t appreciate it. So, some businesses operate with an optional tipping system or a tip jar instead of forcing you to pay a fixed percentage of the billed amount as gratuity. That said, several popular e-commerce platforms don’t have options to tip sellers at all, and Amazon is one of them. However, you might run into a few scummy sellers asking for tips in unorthodox ways. Here’s how they do it, and what you can do about it.
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Typically, Amazon’s checkout process in the US and other countries doesn’t include an option to tip the seller. At least stateside, you may see an option to tip your delivery driver, even on Amazon Fresh orders. However, scams are aplenty on such platforms despite stringent countermeasures and it helps to say wary of common red flags like fake reviews.
The latest favorite among a few sellers seems to be the misuse of the product customization suite to demand tips directly from the customer. At least one Redditor spotted this happening when they tried customizing the item they were shopping for. One of the options there allowed adding a tip, presumably for the seller.
Is Amazon enabling this seller behavior?
Tread cautiously
Although the original post and account has since been deleted, comments underneath note that sellers aren’t supposed to use the customization section like that. Moreover, the delivery window was rather wide, and some speculated that a tip would incentivise the seller to ship the product sooner. Graciously, this seller gave customers the option of proceeding without a tip as well.
Although we haven’t received closure whether the redditor reported the seller to Amazon, one could say the platform allowed and enabled such tipping options to be added, and they weren’t flagged by any automation Amazon uses for scrutiny. While tipping isn’t the evil here, sellers asking for it in such roundabout ways may dull your enthusiastic shopping experience this holiday season.
