"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote:
With many cheap items it often saves the vendor money to simply write it
off, when the mistake is theirs.

Bulk postage from say China is obviously very cheap. The cost of returning
an individual item very likely to exceed the retail price - let alone the
out of pocket cost to them.

I'd guess that's what's happening here. They could just refund if you
complained, but then that encourages people to complain in the hope of
getting a free item. So they ask you to 'return' it, and check the tracking
says something was posted. They know that few people will actually return,
because of the postage costs for cheap items.

They don't actually care what happens to the item after that. Possibly the
address was once valid - when this started the addresses were often Chinese
restaurants, nowadays they're more likely to be bonded warehouses near
Heathrow. But now they're effectively outsourcing the landfilling of their
trash products to the postal system, so they don't care what the address is.

Theo