I ordered an item on Amazon, and it arrived not as described. I notified Amazon online of this, and they elected to issue me a refund without my needing to bother with returning the item. Great!

A couple weeks later, I’m scanning through my credit card activity as usual just to make sure there are no surprises, and I don’t see this refund. I wait another two days since this happened right around Christmas and I thought it might be delayed/pending without being listed as such. It still doesn’t appear, and other more recent charges have posted.

I call Amazon Customer Service and ask what happened to the refund. The CSR I got - who was a delight - said that contrary to their text description of what would happen, it didn’t refund onto my credit card but rather via an Amazon gift card. I replied that I’ve made some purchases via Amazon since then, and I didn’t see a positive balance or reduced order total. He said I already used the amount. I asked on what, and this is where it gets interesting - “I” used it on a recent Subscribe & Save order.

Subscribe & Save orders, as of this blog post publication date anyhow, do not show up in your order history, and the price you pay each time is not tracked anywhere on the website that’s viewable to the customer. Furthermore, the email I was sent about the item I was going to receive via Subscribe & Save didn’t mention a gift card balance or reduced cost. Unless I noticed on my credit card statement that the amount of that charge was lower than what the email indicated and connected the dots (which I didn’t), there was no other indication to me for what had happened to my refund.

Amazon gave me another refund since the first didn’t make it back to the original payment method, which was nice of them since I was apparently already secretly refunded. However, I think Subscribe & Save orders and payments should be viewable to consumers on the website order history for transparency and better user experience.