For a big company like Amazon (who don't charge until despatch anyway) it's not a big deal.
But there are smaller to mid tier sized companies, where time wasted on cancelling and refunding is significant enough to affect costs.
It's like that in my office. We are a logistics company. If a client books with us, let's say that dialogue took 10 minutes of email back and forths and then a 20 minute phone call to finalise and a further 10 minute of system admin to finalise the booking details on the system. That's 40 minutes of my time, plus storage on the emails/system, plus phone bills.
Let's say a week later the person cancels and wants a full refund, and with this theoretical example I'm considering the cancellation happened before the shipment was even actually organised (so giving benefit of doubt for even less time spent than if it had got to that stage).
Let's add an extra 20 minutes for the refund dislogue and needing to inform Accounts and management of refund request. That's now a total of 1 hour of time that was spent on that client, all for them to get their money back anyway if we would refund on demand.
1 hour that could have been spent on clients who had shipments already in progress, or on other new clients who potentially would have order values greater than the cancelling client and who wouldn't cancel.
With all this in mind, our policy of no refunds (but you can use your order value as credit for a future booking) makes sense. Sometimes for regular clients we'll break the rule (logicaly makes sense) or if a client has cancelled early enough from the time they booked we'll refund less a certain amount to cover admin costs.
For me, and perhaps you'll interpret this as towing my company's line, this all makes logical sense. Time is money isn't just some empty platitude, it's literally and logically true.
