I stumbled across this while trying to complete a warranty replacement for my earbuds.

The company emailed me saying that alternate replacement products were available and asked me to choose one before the link expired.

I opened the portal.

No products.

Instead of assuming the UI was broken, I opened DevTools and traced the API responsible for loading the replacement options.

The backend responded with:

{

  "productList": {

"replacementProducts": \[\]

  }

}

An empty array.

I then inspected the frontend bundle and found it simply checks whether replacementProducts.length > 0 before rendering the product cards.

So the frontend was doing exactly what it was told to do.

The funny part is that the automated email confidently told me replacement options were available... while the backend was literally returning zero replacement products.

I ended up sending the company a technical report with screenshots explaining why the issue appeared to be in the backend workflow rather than the frontend.

Not every "broken website" is a frontend bug.

Here's the link where I documented everything,

https://x.com/i/status/2075259557316837410

Backend says "no replacement products", email says "choose your replacement".