Amazon.com wins this round

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I order a lot of books and DVDs online. For whatever reason ever since I started buying stuff on the internet Amazon.com was my default place to go. I don’t know why, maybe because back when I started 'nep shopping Amazon.com was not only the most notable online bookstore but really the only one that came to mind when I was ready to place an order (Barnes&Noble existed in my subconscious.)

In general I was very satisfied, my stuff always came very quickly even with standard shipping, and even with the Free! Super Saver shipping you get for orders over $25 (I tried it the first time and my order came as fast as a regular order.)

Over the last few months though things degraded from years past. About 6 months ago I quit using the default Super Saver shipping on my orders because the delivery time grew too long. I figured, oh well, I’d been getting ridiculously fast deliveries for free for a long time I couldn’t fault Amazon.com for making their free shipping as fast as advertised verus much faster than advertised in the past. But then regular shipping started coming 4-5 days late. One time I wanted the 4th book in a 4 book series pretty bad, and it wasn’t available in any local bookstore. So I ordered it with next day shipping, the hedonist’s version of online delivery.

It came 4 days later. I was livid, not to the point of doing anything about it by writing or calling Amazon, but I definitely decided no longer to buy books there.

There’s a Books-a-Million (big box bookstore, 2 of them actually) here in this area of VA, and due to the fact that they’re pretty close to me I’d been there several times in the past. I had one of their discount cards that works over the internet so for the book I was ordering today I decided to use their service. I was placing an identical order with Amazon.com to see how much money I would save total. All told after S&H and the discount card factored in, I saved about $1.25 versus Amazon. I wasn’t expecting a big savings, this was a moral decision not an economic one.

Then I saw something devilish there on the check-out screen at Amazon.com.

“You have been selected for a 3 month free trial of Amazon Prime!” I’d vaguely heard of Amazon Prime in the past but it hadn’t been advertised heavily on their front page in awhile, and I wasn’t really that interested in it at the time. But in looking over their offer I saw that it was pretty genuine. Three months of the service at no charge, and with the service all shipping except overnight is free. So instead of saving $1.25 I was now losing like $5. More than that, I started seeing the potential of like $50 saved over the free trial period. Then I realize, whoa…if I’m saving $50 over the free period, and the regular subscription is $79 a year…I could save real money with this service.

Before I realized what had happened I’d placed my order with Amazon.com, failing in my moral quest to withhold my consumer dollars from them :(.

2

OH what shall I do? :wink:
Laugh? :slight_smile: or
Cry? :rolleyes:

3

All I order from Amazon any more is diapers… And baby wipes…
I DO pick free shipping though, since delivery on a box of portable poop containers is $16.

4

I’ve been shopping with Amazon for years. I live in an area which has no bookstores (it was tried-- it failed. We have ten movie rental places in town, yet cannot support one book store . . . but I digress.)

I’d noticed the same thing-- over the last year or so, their service has really slipped. Used, to be, when I’d place an order which included not-yet-released items, they’d go ahead and ship what was available, and ship the other items when they were released.

I made an order like that in January. I checked back, and saw that they had my deliver date as late July! I sent them off a polite e-mail, asking if things had changed. The response was that since I had selected “group my items into as few shipments as possible” they wouldn’t ship until the whole order was ready (which isn’t what they used to do, but I let it pass.)

The rep said that because of the “confusion” they’d do a one-time favor for me-- they’d change me to 2-day shipping at no additional cost. I was stoked, until I checked back and saw $80.00 in shipping charges on my account.

I sent off another polite e-mail, and got a response which seems almost grovelling. I quote verbatim:

Wow-- they must have thought I was really pissed.

Amazon has always struck me as a company that really cares if its customers are mad. In the past, I had a dispute with them, and though they never agreed with my position, they sent me a $25.00 gift certificate as a peace offering.

I’ve ordered with them hundreds of times-- I used to joke that Jeff Bezos owes the success of his company to me-- and I’ve only ever had two or three problems. I’d say that’s pretty good. I look at the recent slip-ups as a phase. I think, given enough feedback by unhappy customers, that they’ll change.

5

I’ve yet to have a serious screw-up with Big A. As close as it gets was a couple years ago when I ordered a Fiestaware “mini disk” pitcher. The page said Cinnabar. The order said Cinnabar. The box said Cinnabar. The contents were Periwinkle. Presumably a mis-pack at the manufacturer. So, I emailed a note to see if they perhaps had a Periwinkle box with Cinnabar inside.

It was the last allegedly Cinnabar pitcher in stock, with no particular plans to re-stock. (Uncertain supply is a fact of life with Fiestaware) They almost fell over themselves apologizing and not only refunded the purchase price (it was something like $10 as a close-out) but let me keep the wrong color item and sent me a $25 voucher. I can live with that. :smiley:

I also got the trial offer for Prime recently. It came in the final clicks of ordering a power tool. A large and heavy power tool. Did I want to try Prime and get a seventy-pound saw shipped in two days for free, or would I like it tomorrow for $3.99? Ummm… YES! Bring it tomorrow!

Their customer service was also very friendly on the phone when I needed to clear up a little confusion over applying an instant rebate, a “spend $X in tools today, and get $Y off” deal, a $1-off thing from Burger King and a $25 voucher from the Amazon credit card.

6

Well, I lost 55 dollars to Amazon. Most of it was my mistake, but a good portion was due to their website design. I neglected to change my bank account information, so when I sold a book, I never got the money. Shortly after that, my email account ended (was from previous ISP), and when I went in to change my email address, it reset my password and sent the new password to my old email address. The one that no longer works.

This was all due to their user interface. I clicked change email address, not change password, apparently they both led to the same place. I wrote an email complaining about it, and they sent me an email back saying something along the lines of what my old email account was, what my credit card number was, the old password, etc. Most was, of course stuff I knew, but they also wanted the last book I bought, which I didn’t remember, and I sure wasn’t going to give my CC and stuff out over an email.

I created a new account, but the 55 dollar book that I sold on Amazon apparently poofed. I cannot log on to see what happend to it, and I don’t know if they mail you a check or what.

7

I only know of one bad Amazon expereince.

My brother ordered a book for our Mom’s birthday.

Her birthday is in April, the book arrived in September.

In French :smack:

8

I had one eh experience. I was fifteen and ordered a couple of CDs to listen to on my discman on a flight to Tampa to get on a cruise ship. I ordered them a couple weeks before the trip, and waited. Waited. Waited. Eventually I figured something was wrong and contacted them. Apparently they had gotten lost in the mail and they sent me the CDs again, next day. I got them soon after (don’t remember if it was really next day or not) in the mailbox. The 2 CDs were shoved in a small box so tight I could hardly get them out and the cases were both cracked. I didn’t care too much but it was kind of crappy.

I shop at Amazon because they have EVERYTHING. I hate when I go to B&N when I’m at the mall to pick up a book, because they never, ever have the book I want in stock. Same thing with CDs, DVDs, etc - whenever I have a list in my mind and some money, the stuff I want is never in stock. Amazon is more reliable for that. And I like the lists - I’ve found good books and stuff looking at the lists they reccommend.

9

Every store is subject to occasional slipups and mistakes, but what I love about Amazon is their willingness to fix problems once they do occur. If something happens to your order and you don’t tell them about it, naturally they’re not going to do anything about it. However, on every single occasion that I’ve complained, they’ve more than satisfactorily handled the issue. A lot of stores will fight, bitch about and otherwise sidestep proper service once they’ve already sold you the item, but Amazon always seems to want to make things right even after the purchase.

Yeah, I’m a fanboy, but they deserved it. Been a customer for years and have been happy with every purchase I’ve made from them.

Once, I was messing around with some orders and adding/subtracting items, cancelling, re-ordering and combining orders because I was trying to add an item to a previous Free Shipping order. I mistakenly upgraded the shipping to 2-day from the standard, but because it was so close to the deadline, the website immediately changed my orders to “Shipping Soon” instead of “Open”, which means they could no longer be changed. I emailed them asking for a change back to free shipping, but by the next morning the orders had already shipped out two-day. Most stores would say it’s my fault at this point, but the Amazon guy was really cool about what happened and refunded the shipping on all my orders – $23 in shipping fees – and I ended up with free 2-day on everything. That’s what I call service.

Another time, an item I purchased dropped some $30 in price a few days after I bought it. I called them at 3am and asked for the difference to be refunded and the guy just did it, no questions asked and no complaints.

My only bad experience with them was when I once asked a question (not related to an order) and the response was a FAQ that I had already checked. I wrote back and said my question wasn’t answered; the second CS guy apologized profusely (heh, I’ve never seen anybody so sorry about such a minor issue) and answered it. It makes me wonder if they have an official “Be very, very sorry” policy.

I got my free Amazon Prime trial at the beginning of December – right at the start of the holiday shopping season. By Christmas, I had a stack of Amazon boxes that literally stretched to the ceiling :smiley:

Great service; fast, free shipping; no sales tax; great prices; the A9 discount; 3% cashback… hard to see why I’d choose any other store.

(Heh, on preview, I see it’s kinda creepy how much I love 'em… but it’s hard not to!)