Consumer complaint received 2023-09-22
Company: Affirm Holdings, Inc
State: MO
Product: Payday loan, title loan, personal loan, or advance loan
Sub-product: Installment loan
Issue: Problem with additional add-on products or services

Complaint:
On XX/XX/XXXX I purchased a front XXXX for an XXXX XXXX from XXXX. 

On their website they claim " Give your XXXX XXXX a face lift with the XXXX XXXX XXXX from us! Perfect fitment and High quality this XXXX will not disappoint. We have been working months to get the best XXXX from our supplier. Don't waste $ XXXX {$600.00} and save today with ours! This XXXX will fit the XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX I received the XXXX and when I went to install it there was essentially 0 ability to fit the XXXX to the car without major modifications ( see attached emails with XXXX car accessories showing the photos. ) This is certainly not perfect fitment. On XX/XX/XXXX I reached out in an attempt to resolve my issue with the merchant, they asked for photo proof because they had " never had issues like this in XXXX of sales ''. So I sent multiple photos to them early the next morning showing all of the issues the XXXX  has. They never responded. Ever. I could not get an email back from the merchant. So on XX/XX/XXXX I submitted a dispute with Affirm because the item delivered to me was not what the merchant described ( a very standard dispute type within card networks ). I submitted all of my information and proof in the online form on Affirm 's website. 

They opened a dispute case for me and immediately asked for all the documentation I had already submitted, which makes no sense. I reiterated with them that they should already have all of the documentation and there should be no reason to submit anything else. 

On XXXX I received an email stating that the dispute had been resolved in the merchants favor and they said the merchant had a refund policy and that's why they won. The merchant 's refund policy was not only not provided to me by Affirm but it is difficult to find on their website. Also during checkout, there's no checkbox that I must agree to any sort of refund policy when purchasing from the merchant. I went back and forth with Affirm a couple times and they kept hiding behind this merchant 's " refund policy '' that was never provided to me as a way to claim that it's ok that the merchant sent an item that was not sufficiently matching what they claimed on their website. Affirm also claims the merchant sent me a return label, which I never received at any point to even be able to return the product. 

Affirm stopped responding to me on XX/XX/XXXX and have since sent my purchase to collections. Companies like Affirm are harming consumers by not having to follow standard card network rules and thusly being able to do anything they want, making any decisions they want, and not having to follow a standard process that has been in place for decades. 

Had I made this purchase with a XXXX I would have had rights as a consumer to protect me from merchants lying about their product, not assisting me as a customer, and leaving me with a purchase that is useless without heavy modification. Networks have specific rules around return policies, how to agree to them, and how merchants must reply to customers. Allowing Affirm to create their own process in which they will go out of their way to ensure that bad merchants get to keep undeserved money from consumers will continue to harm the market. Affirm allows merchants that refuse to work with customers to resolve their problems, then don't even supply the necessary information back.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation