Well now I'm triggered. I was really only offering you an opportunity to clarify. There is a difference between offering a refund and forcing a refund. This was clearly a retaliatory action and you either didn't understand that, or disagree with the premise.
If you start from the premise that "the customer is always right" then I can see why it looks like a retaliatory action.
The thing is that "the customer is always right" is just a customer relation principle/approach and not law.
In order to actually have a legal point against the action taken by the merchant first it is necessary to clarify what the actual product is in that transaction.
Let's try it this. You get cloud powered pacemaker and you contact the company on its forum because it gives you cardiac arrhythmia.
The answer from the company is "we don't want you as a customer so we remotely blocked your pacemaker from ever functioning, you now have a choice between us keeping your money for something that will not work because we made sure it won't or give us our device back and the third party store will give you a refund".
I made thicker lines to make the point appear more clearly, but it's drawn with the same pen.
You seem to confuse a product that costs tens of thousands of USD (the pacemaker) with one that costs only $100 and you purchase on Amazon on a 2-day delivery.
The former is sold within an industry that is not only heavily regulated but also very mature and governed by laws that have had time to maturate over decades if not hundreds of years.
The latter is sold within a nascent industry (IoT) and the definition of a product is not yet properly settled. Hence my question as to what you actually buy.
But hey, if you can clearly draw lines for me with your imaginary pencil, more power to you. But it does not replace proper and balanced argument.
I don't think the cost of the device has any bearing on the issue. If you sell me something for $1, you have just as much obligation to ensure that it is fit for the purpose you advertised as if you sold me a device for $100k.
The sale price only affects my willingness to sue you and the amount of damages I might be able to collect in the judgment.
Regulation of the industry just means that more interested third parties may become involved in our dispute.
If you sell me an Internet-connected garage-door opener that includes a smartphone app as the remote operating device, you are responsible for ensuring that the app meets the consumer expectations previously set by radio-frequency garage-door opener remote-activation devices.
My expectation there is that the only time such a device should fail to function is when the battery inside it is dead, or if the door itself is prevented from moving. And I also expect that my remote device will not open a neighbor's door, nor that any device used by my neighbors will open my door.
So when I press the virtual button on my phone, and my door does not move, because the button crashes to the OS display manager, that is a critical--but still fixable--technical failure for your IoT door-opener company. Subsequently banning your complaining customer from using the device he already bought is an existence-threatening customer service failure.
With incidents like these, it shouldn't be too difficult to get clueless consumers to realize that connecting things to the Internet is a solution in search of a problem. Your fridge doesn't need to write Tweets, and your garage door in Denver doesn't need to be opened from Budapest. Sometimes, standing up from your couch, walking to a physical switch, and flipping it is the best solution. And when it is not, blowing the right pattern into your quadriplegic's control straw should activate a radio signal received by your self-hosted home automation server that does not need to consult the Internet in any way before turning your lights on.
In case of complete insanity, where you have actually connected your garage door opener to the Internet, and the manufacturer banned your device from using the central server, why the hell would your device then be useless, if both the phone and the opener can be connected to the same LAN over wifi? Why has the manufacturer made a reliable Internet connection a mandatory requirement for opening a door that is likely less than 10m from the end of your nose? A wifi antenna can broadcast a short-range radio signal even better than a dumb opener remote can, so why is that not an expected mode of operation?
