Amazon is changing its complaint process for returns and will pay customers up to $1,000 for products sold by third-party sellers that caused damage or personal injury.The company announced Tuesday that it will deal with customer satisfaction itself and go after companies afterward if third parties are unresponsive or unwilling to compensate valid claims. Amazon said the changes begin Sept. 1 for all products sold on its website.Here's how it works: Customers can contact Amazon's customer service and they will notify the seller of the problem. If the seller doesn't respond, Amazon said it will "address the immediate customer concern, bear the cost ourselves, and separately pursue the seller." If the seller rejects the claim, Amazon said it might step in to help address the problem and pay up to $1,000 at no cost to the seller."This streamlined process will save time, money, and effort for both customers and sellers," Amazon said about its new "A-to-z Guarantee." That represents a shift from the current process of having buyers contact sellers directly about problems.In recent years, numerous products sold on Amazon have caught consumers' ire. For example, hoverboards, carbon monoxide detectors and faulty dog collars sold on Amazon have caused problems. That has sparked a lawsuit, called "Oberdorf v. Amazon," that questions if the company can be held liable for damages caused by goods sold by third parties.Amazon said it's not a seller, rather just a marketplace for other sellers."If you purchase any of the products or services offered by these businesses or individuals, you are purchasing directly from those third parties, not from Amazon," according to its conditions of use. "Amazon does not assume any responsibility or liability for the actions, product, and content of all these and any other third parties."Now, to keep some customers satisfied and protect sellers from paying invalid claims, Amazon is assuming some of that liability.

VAN HORN, Texas —

Jeff Bezos blasted into space Tuesday on his rocket company’s first flight with people on board, becoming the second billionaire in just over a week to ride his own spacecraft.

The Amazon founder was accompanied by a hand-picked group: his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands and an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas — the youngest and oldest to ever fly in space.

Named after America’s first astronaut, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket soared from remote West Texas on the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, a date chosen by Bezos for its historical significance. He held fast to it, even as Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson pushed up his own flight from New Mexico in the race for space tourist dollars and beat him to space by nine days.

Unlike Branson’s piloted rocket plane, Bezos’ capsule was completely automated and required no official staff on board for the anticipated 10-minute, up-and-down flight.

Blue Origin was shooting for an altitude of roughly 66 miles, more than 10 miles higher than Branson’s July 11 ride. The 60-foot booster accelerated to Mach 3 or three times the speed of sound to get the capsule high enough, before separating and landing upright.

The passengers had several minutes of weightlessness to float around the spacious white capsule. The window-filled capsule landed under parachutes, with Bezos and his guests briefly experiencing nearly six times the force of gravity, or 6 G’s, on the way back.

Sharing Bezos’ dream-come-true adventure was Wally Funk, from the Dallas area, one of 13 female pilots who went through the same tests as NASA’s all-male astronaut corps in the early 1960s but never made it into space.

Joining them on the ultimate joyride was the company’s first paying customer, Oliver Daemen, a last-minute fill-in for the mystery winner of a $28 million auction who opted for a later flight. The Dutch teen’s father took part in the auction, and agreed on a lower undisclosed price last week when Blue Origin offered his son the vacated seat.

Blue Origin — founded by Bezos in 2000 in Kent, Washington, near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters — has yet to open ticket sales to the public or reveal the price. For now, it’s booking auction bidders. Two more passenger flights are planned by year’s end, said Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith.

The recycled rocket and capsule that carried up Tuesday’s passengers were used on the last two space demos, according to company officials.

Virgin Galactic already has more than 600 reservations at $250,000 apiece. Founded by Branson in 2004, the company has sent crew into space four times and plans two more test flights from New Mexico before launching customers next year.

Blue Origin’s approach was slower and more deliberate. After 15 successful unoccupied test flights to space since 2015, Bezos finally declared it was time to put people on board. The Federal Aviation Administration agreed last week, approving the commercial space license.

Bezos, 57, who also owns The Washington Post, claimed the first seat. The next went to his 50-year-old brother, Mark Bezos, an investor and volunteer firefighter, then Funk and Daemen. They spent two days together in training.

University of Chicago space historian Jordan Bimm said the passenger makeup is truly remarkable. Imagine if the head of NASA decided he wanted to launch in 1961 instead of Alan Shepard on the first U.S. spaceflight, he said in an email.

“That would have been unthinkable!” Bimm said. "It shows just how much the idea of who and what space is for has changed in the last 60 years.”

Bezos stepped down earlier this month as Amazon’s CEO and just last week donated $200 million to renovate the National Air and Space Museum. Most of the $28 million from the auction has been distributed to space advocacy and education groups, with the rest benefiting Blue Origin’s Club for the Future, its own education effort.

Fewer than 600 people have reached the edge of space or beyond. Until Tuesday, the youngest was 25-year-old Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov and the oldest at 77 was Mercury-turned-shuttle astronaut John Glenn.

Both Bezos and Branson want to drastically increase those overall numbers, as does SpaceX’s Elon Musk, who’s skipping brief space hops and sending his private clients straight to orbit for tens of millions apiece, with the first flight coming up in September.

Despite appearances, Bezos and Branson insist they weren’t trying to outdo each other by strapping in themselves. Bezos noted this week that only one person can lay claim to being first in space: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who rocketed into orbit on April 12, 1961.

“This isn’t a competition, this is about building a road to space so that future generations can do incredible things in space,” he said on NBC’s ”Today.”

Blue Origin is working on a massive rocket, New Glenn, to put payloads and people into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The company also wants to put astronauts back on the moon with its proposed lunar lander Blue Moon; it’s challenging NASA’s sole contract award to SpaceX.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. —

An 18-year-old is about to become the youngest person in space, rocketing away with an aviation pioneer who will become the oldest at age 82.

Blue Origin announced Thursday that instead of a $28 million auction winner launching with founder Jeff Bezos on Tuesday, the Dutch son of another bidder will be on board. The company said Oliver Daemen will be the first paying customer, but did not disclose the price of his ticket. But a family spokesperson said it will be considerably less than the winning bid.

Daemen snagged the fourth and last seat on the space capsule after the auction winner stepped aside because of a scheduling conflict. The offer came in a surprise phone call from Blue Origin last week, he said.

"This is so unbelievably cool!" Daemen said in a statement. "The flight to and into space only takes 10 minutes, but I already know that these will be the most special 10 minutes of my life."

He added in a video posted by Dutch broadcaster RTL: "I am super excited to experience zero-g and see the world from above."

Also on Blue Origin's first launch with passengers: Bezos' brother and Wally Funk, one of 13 female pilots who went through the same tests in the early 1960s as NASA's Mercury 7 astronauts but never made it into space because only men were allowed.

The four will blast off from West Texas atop a New Shepard rocket for a 10-minute flight. The Amazon founder will become the second person to ride his own rocket into space, following Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson by nine days.

The teen tourist was going to be on the second launch for paying customers, according to Blue Origin. But once the auction winner dropped out, the company seized on the idea of flying the oldest and youngest people in space on the same flight, the family spokesperson noted.

His undisclosed ticket cost will be donated to charity, just as most of the winning $28 million was distributed this week to a variety of space education and advocacy groups.

"This marks the beginning of commercial operations for New Shepard, and Oliver represents a new generation of people who will help us build a road to space," Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith said in a statement.

Blue Origin has yet to open ticket sales to the public or disclose its anticipated prices. That's expected following the upcoming flight.

Daemen took a year off after graduating from high school last year to obtain his private pilot's license. He'll attend the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands in September.

His father is Joes Daemen, founder and CEO of Somerset Capital Partners, a private equity firm in Oisterwijk, Netherlands. Both father and son were on their way to Texas on Thursday to prepare for the launch, according to their spokesperson.

The elder Daemen said he bid on the seat during the June 12 auction. "But when the bids started to skyrocket during the auction, we dropped out," he said in a statement.

Blue Origin said the unidentified auction winner will catch a future flight.

Daemen already has gotten some good space-traveling advice from Dutch astronaut and two-time space flier Andre Kuipers. According to the statement, Kuipers told him "not to make the classic mistake of taking pictures in the short time he is up, but to fully enjoy the view of our beautiful planet."

Soviet cosmonaut Ghermon Titov holds the record for the youngest to fly in space. He was 25 when he blasted into orbit four months after Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space. John Glenn was 77 when he launched aboard space shuttle Discovery in 1998, 37 years after becoming the first American to orbit the world.

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AP reporter Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands, contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.