I tried to sell a modem which I had previously purchased through Amazon. The modem came both as a bundle and by itself. I listed it correctly as purchasing the modem only, listed it "like new" (when really it was basically new, not removed from the box). It was actually the lowest price you could get it used.
Someone bought it, shipped it to them faster than necessary. About a week later I got a notice from him saying that he wanted a refund because he had thought that he was getting the bundle (not just the modem as it was listed). Why they thought they were getting the bundle like new for that price is beyond me, but whatever. I rejected the refund because it was their mistake and it would have been too much work to be worth it. Sensible, yeah?
They initiated a claim against my account and Amazon withdrew the money (it was actually great timing - overdraft). The claim said the the item condition was wrong (it was not). You are able to contest any claim like that so I took the time to explain what had happened and why the issue wasn't even about the item's condition. I don't know if they just didn't bother reading it or if all responses are handled with robots because I get a very superficial answer that didn't even acknowledge what had happened. I repeated the process in order to try to talk to another person, wrote up another account of what happened (including the new non response), and got the same kind of non-response (you must list items under the correct condition, blah, blah, blah) from a different rep. Basically, they just didn't bother answering me. I'd already wasted way more time than necessary on what I thought was gonna be a little extra cash, so now some dude in Minnesota got my modem for free, and I got an overdraft for my trouble. That's a cool trick.
Got no clue what's going on over there but I'll never sell anything there again if I can avoid it. Worst customer experience ever.
The day that I became a lifelong Amazon customer was when I mistakenly ordered a mattress to the wrong address via Prime. I noticed the mistake some 28 hours after placing the order. I nearly said that I called them to tell them about my mistake, but that isn't true. I typed in my number online AND THEY CALLED ME when an operator was available. The operator quickly calmed me down and told it was "nothing to worry about". She cancelled the shipment of the mattress going to the wrong side of the US and placed an order for a replacement within 2 minutes of learning about the problem. On top of that, without being asked, she upgraded my replacement to 1 day shipping FOR FREE so that my order would still arrive by the original delivery date.
Since I screwed up in such a ridiculous way, that I would have fully expected to have gotten slammed with a return shipping fee, a shipping fee for the replacement, and even some kind of BS replacement fee. But Amazon took the bullet and provided me the the best customer service I ever could have hoped for, which prevented me from having to sleep on the ground for even one extra night.
> Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.
This explains why individuals selling individual items, or a small number of items, can get so burned too. You need sufficient volume to cover all the inevitable bullets you have to swallow.
>Sellers just have to assume a 10% loss of gross margin due to issues like this. It's not the end of the world, but that's where the cost is.
Cost of doing business. Reminds me of the book "What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars" where Jim Paul describes how someone trading in lumber doesn't cry about 20% of the wood being useless, he knows 20% will be useless and he writes that up under cost of doing business. Just like refunds and customer support are a cost of doing business.
Amazon support is absolutely terrible. Amazon seller support is even worse.
I mean, the worst. Only matched by health insurance companies.
The huge problem with Amazon support is everyone I've ever interacted with (besides that one time I got forwarded to a supervisor) either have a fundamental lack an understanding of the English language or lack reading comprehension (or listening if phone support). They also won't or can't spend any significant time on any one customer inquiry, they need to move onto the next.
On the buyers side they understand how to refund an order which they do readily, ship items, say you can keep items that are errors, maybe some account stuff, and that's basically it. If you need them to do anything else that requires them to understand your inquiry it's an uphill battle.
Basically, you get terrible support if your inquiry can't be solved by quickly pressing the "refund" button or the "ship item" button. I guess most buyers usually only need those two buttons though.
I actually think that's part of why they have such a big problem with counterfeits (and other issues). If someone complains about a counterfeit some low paid employee who doesn't really understand the problem just presses "refund order," the customer stops complaining, and the systemic issues remain.
I have a nightmare Amazon seller support story, but I won't go into it for fear of spiking my blood pressure to dangerous levels. It was only resolved by me finally getting forwarded to a supervisor, who, finally, understood English.
Yeah, that's absolutely the problem they have. One time I ordered some road bike tires. Amazon sent mountain bike tires by the same manufacturer. I told Amazon. They sent me two more of the wrong tires. I told Amazon. They sent me two more of the wrong tires. I gave up. They don't read anything you write to them, they just either send you something or give you your money back.
I guess most people value money over anything else, but if I take the time to help them correct their inventory problem, it would at least be nice if they fixed it.
Very similar thing happened to me about 12 years ago.
I ordered some glassware, very fragile. It was packaged incorrectly, basically shoved in too big of a box with no padding or anything. Or if there was padding it was very, very minimal. It arrived broken, of course. It would have been nothing short of a miracle if glassware survived that packaging.
Told Amazon the item broken due to poor/incorrect packaging. They sent another packaged identically, broken.
Told Amazon, same thing, they sent another packaged identically, broken.
I tried one more time begging them to package it correctly and got another packaged identically, broken.
I just gave up and decided I didn't really need it, got a refund, and continued to drink out of dollar store plastic cups. There was absolutely no getting through to them what they problem was. I ended up feeling defeated with 4 sets of broken glasses.
Another "they don't read anything you write to them" story... Several years ago I sold a memory card via FBA. The buyer returned the card, they said they were returning it because of a defect, they said "card slows down significantly after it gets half full." Amazon's wearhouse receives the return, they mark it as sellable, and then sell it (as new) again!! Clearly its not new, the problem was evident only from using it! The new buyer didn't complain or ask for a refund, thankfully for me, but the card might have been commingled (I don't recall) so another seller might have been dinged if Amazon shipped out the used card to their buyer.
If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?
>If the return reason is "defective," why would mark as sellable ever be possible?
Because customers don't always tell the truth, as in your perception of truth might be different from my perception of truth, meaning what's considered defective to you might be perfectly acceptable to me and to other customers.
That's my experience as well. As long as all you want is return faulty/not-needed-after-all articles then Amazon is great. Never ever had a hiccup in 10 years and I order a lot of stuff.
However if your request is a little more specific and doesn't fit neatly in whatever scripts they're using then it's a bit of a mess. I mainly use amazon.fr so I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly. In the end I could see that they kept reverting to the script and where a bit lost when I tried to steer things away from it.
I just wanted to complain about a transporter who kept failing to deliver my parcels so it wasn't a big deal but I think it would've been pretty difficult to interact with this (nonetheless very kind) person if I had something a little trickier and more important to figure out with them.
> I've interacted with the french support but like you they had a rather thick accent and seemed to have trouble understanding me at times even though I did my best to speak slowly and clearly.
That's the one advantage of living in a tiny country (the Netherlands) that speaks a language hardly anyone else does. It's impossible to outsource customer support to low-wages countries because you simply can't find anyone there who speaks Dutch.
There are lots of low-wage Afrikaans speakers, and Wikipedia says there "is a large degree of mutual intelligibility between" Dutch and Afrikaans. So there must be some other explanation for why you get native Dutch speakers for customer support?
Afrikaans is not similar enough for customer support roles. If you hear Afrikaans as a Dutch person you can sort of get the meaning of what they are saying if they speak slow enough, but it's not like it's just a dialect.
It's a bit like the difference between English and Jamaican Creole.
Actually there are companies doing that type of outsourcing in Serbia. Wages there are still low and they have enough employees who can speak even the smaller European languages.
I think the main industry there is tourism. If there are any Dutch speaking callcenters there they aren't very common, I've never encountered it in real life (you'd instantly notice by the accent).
I don't doubt you're right about the "anything but basic refund/reship is a nightmare", but I think the reason people are praising Amazon (and I would too) is that most other companies (big OR small) don't even do that, even though it resolves like 90+% of the customer support issues and leaves happy customers behind.
As for sellers, yes, it's obvious they're getting screwed.
>I actually think that's part of why they have such a big problem with counterfeits. If someone complains about a counterfeit some low paid employee who doesn't really understand the problem just presses "refund order," the customer stops complaining, and the systemic issues remain.
I really don't understand why individual people try to sell small items through Amazon or eBay anymore. The chance of getting cheated is just so high that unless you're a high-volume seller making a business out of it the risk/reward ratio just doesn't make sense. Better to sell for cash on Craigslist or Nextdoor (with the transaction done in the police station parking lot for safety).
Probably my worst experience was with Amazon. Ordered a big sofa sized furniture. Got wrong color which was cheaper. Asked them to adjust the price since I didnt want to go through the hassle of shipping it back. No. The guy just said "we dont price match, you can sent it back and order again". Not even a sorry. I got so frustrated at his response, it ruined my day. Tried twice more with similar response. I sent it back, ordered again (at a lower price than my original order).
In Amazon's defence, this items price was dropping heavily during that period. But I wasnt asking them to give me new price.
Because of this incident plus Amazon taking 4-5 days to just start shipping and the news about fake goods, Amazon is no longer my first preference.
I ordered a small item 5 dollars item came was different tried to refund but wanted me to pay to ship back the product which costs more than the product. I gave up.
For me, Amazon by far has been the worst. Closing my account for buying too many things (and inevitably returning a tiny fraction of them because they were fake/shitty quality as most Amazon products) is the most insane thing I've ever experienced. This while I was paying for Prime. The only thing they didn't do is threaten to sue me, but stealing my membership fee is pretty on par with that.
Only if everything goes into the two categories: 1.) send again 2.) reimburse/take back
Everything else doesn't work at all.
I had a phone from Amazon, empty box delivered, they had no way to stop the contract, weeks of pain, my threat getting the police involved solved the problem.
Amazon Logistics didn't deliver important stuff with evening express several times, Amazon did nothing.
One time they tried to deliver an order at 10pm (!). And I had a 10-minute discussion with support who told me it was deliver 10am until they reread the entry and agreed it was 10:07pm - at an office address.
Support stuff lied to me and put lies in their support system.
I recently received an empty box from Amazon. No more than 5 minutes with their online support and they had created a new order to re-send the item with their fastest shipping option. Easiest customer support experience I've ever had honestly.
>I have. Amazon. Over 15 years now and flawless every time.
Wow, I have a completely different experience. I had been a Prime member up until about 2 years ago when my last 10 out of 10 deliveries arrived late. Since I noticed Amazon wasn't really competitive with other sellers on E-Bay, etc, I only used them when I actually needed something fast. So, moral of the story is I paid more for something to get it sooner, and it still didn't help.
Amazon is generally only competitive on big ticket items that you'd get free shipping on anyway. So I found Prime to be worthless.
I cancelled my prime account after a string of issues, the worst of which I’ll summarize.
I bought a $1300 camera, received a $500 camera. Easy error, easy fix. I wish.
I had to call twice to initiate the return, call twice more to find out why a moth later I had neither a camera nor my money. Turns out the return was silently rejected. Why? “Wrong item returned.” No kidding! Had to call a fifth time to finally get this resolved, but at the end of that call I realized I was paying amazing $100 annually to fix issues that they caused.
I’ve mostly had good experiences, but once I had a battery charger fail and destroy some batteries. I spent over an hour on the phone while the CSR tried (and failed) to look up how voltage worked so they could blame the failure on me instead of just sending me the $60 order again. Just gave up after ~90 minutes.
Amazon contract deliveries to organisations like Yodel, who you can't contact directly and have exactly the same problems with failing to deliver or chucking parcels over the fence etc.
Everytime I see my package is being delivered by Yodel I just sighs, they always find a way to fuck up an order.
But to be fair, it seems like Amazon, are no longer working with Yodel, I have not seen any item I have from bought from Amazon.co.uk to be delivered by Yodel for at least two years.
Yep. Other replies about bad selling experiences notwithstanding, as a buyer, Amazon's experiences are mechanically great. They might sacrifice a seller on an altar every week, and that would be sad, but it makes your statement no less true.
I have years of free Prime because my 2 day orders never come in 2 days. At least they give you something when they mess up, but they do mess up a lot.
customer service, sure. but delivery.... eh. A few weeks ago my brother ordered a tripod and got a toilet instead. Someone I follow on Twitter ordered an Xbox and got.... Capri Suns[1].
I have. Amazon. Over 15 years now and flawless every time.