Yes I am definitely just ranting here, but there was a time (really!) when you could chat up a CSR on Amazon and get your issue resolved usually in your favor within seconds.
Yesterday I got sent the right item but in the wrong size, and the insane rigamarole I had to go through to “prove” that I wasn’t lying… for them ultimately to give me two options:
- send the item back and reorder. which isn’t the end of the world, but it is an inconvenience based on THEIR mistake
- keep the item, they’ll refund the price difference but they will NOT refund the tax charged on the difference. which is, again, a fairly minor issue but what an insane thing to request of your customer who did nothing wrong. He claimed that tax is a government issue and they’re unable to make any accommodations.
Ultimately I talked to a supervisor and got it resolved but BOY oh BOY was I getting cheesed about the whole thing.
fake edit: I’m sure the responses will include “stop shopping at Amazon” so, yeah, point taken
It has been my experience that if they make a mistake, they will be very convenient.
For example, I ordered two hard drives and one of them arrived DOA. They simply shipped me a new one, emailed me a shipping label, and said to send them the old one once I had the new one.
It took almost no effort on my part to plop the old one in the new box and put the label on it. I wasn’t out any money and I didn’t have to send it back first.
Now that tax thing sounds shady. If that’s their SOP, then I imagine one could get their state tax authorities involved. I had a similar thing happen with an eBay purchase, but since it was a refund from the seller it just wasn’t worth it for me to jump through hoops to get $2 of tax back.
I bought a bluetooth mouse a couple weeks ago. It worked for about 24 hours, then stopped. Replacing the battery didn’t help. I talked to a customer service rep and told her the problem. Also that I didn’t have the box (it would have been too large anyway since there was a pair of sandals included). She said no problem and immediately shipped out a new one that arrived two days ago. I was also able to download a postage paid shipping label. I stuck the old mouse into the box, glued on the label and took it back to the post office yesterday (the same time I mailed in my and my wife’s presidential ballots). So I had no problem at all.
I have found their chat support to be incredibly useful. So much better than talking to a person. You can do it while in a Zoom meeting or whatever.
Also, for a lot of things (I think the ones that go through Amazon directly), they will let you just take the return to a UPS store, unboxed, and just hand to it the desk person. They scan a QR code on your phone and you have your refund before you get in the car. This is the best thing ever.
Honestly, I feel like there customer service is better now. Back in early Amazon days, like 15 years ago, you couldn’t hardly find a number.
“Contact us” used to be easy to find at the bottom of the Amazon home page but now it is buried behind a chatbot… which probably already left a bad taste in my mouth from the get go, but yeah
I had a crazy Kafkaesque experience with Amazon support yesterday. I started off asking them if I could get a discount on my Prime membership because a thing that I ordered that said it would be delivered in 2 days was delayed and delayed and is now 2 weeks late. The person in chat said, sure, no problem, I’ll send you an email detailing that.
I then got an email saying my Prime membership had been cancelled. I then chatted with four separate people, each of whom was very sorry this had happened, but then would apparently just wander away from the chat before resolving things because the chat window would show “Start typing and someone will be with you in a moment” at the bottom and then I’d get a new person who had to try to figure out what was going on again.
I finally had them call me on the phone and person 6 fixed the issue by giving me a refund on the remainder of my membership so I could order another one.
I’ve only had good responses from Amazon whenever they’ve sent the wrong item. Last month I bought a refurbished camp chair because it was half the price of a new one. When it arrived, it was clearly the wrong chair, but inside the correct box. (Someone clearly switched it out at some point.) I used the Chat window to contact them right away and they refunded my account and scheduled UPS to come pick it up. I didn’t have to do anything.