Amazon losing it!
I spoke before about how I am starting to feel Amazon are overlooking their customers and the quality of customer support is deteriorating. They have not resolved or even replied to my last call on the previously reported problem at all. Their last reply was from someone who did not read, or does not want to read my email. Because he knows it will make sense. This was followed by other several scenarios where I noticed their customer support does not seem to answer your email, but rather pick from a library of templates which suits you most, polish it and send it. Like when I had my Shipping Address modified for just visiting the edit page and clicking back. I contacted them and explained it, I made it clear I did not modify the Address. But they come back and say “Are you sure you didn’t add some characters by mistake?” I already said no. There is something wrong with your application. Least you can do is send it to your technical team.
There is also their shipping speed, which seems to be coming slower for some reason. My brother sent me an email yesterday confirming Amazon awkward shipping behavior. He was buying 4 books with expedited international shipping to Kuwait, which it says to be 8-14 business days. After placing the order however he got the estimated delivery date to be 10th October! He wanted to cancel the shipment but the items were already being prepared for shipping and he cannot cancel the order anymore. This means that the delivery it self takes up to 40 days!. He did another very interesting test. Added new items t his cart and went to checkout. There, he compared the estimated shipping date for standard and expedited. Guess what? For Standard the expected date was 18th Sept – 3rd Oct, while for Expedited (Faster method) it was expected on 10th Oct! How on earth could that happen? He emailed them about the unexpected delay and the case he tried.
Amazon did reply to him, and as I expected, they do not answer your email. I will take snippets from it as it’s too long. But in summary they said “As stated in our help pages it takes “9 to 27 business days”!. But we saw the expedited shipping time to be 8-14 business days. And I have snapshot from it right here.
Why is that? Go to this URL and see. It turns out Amazon has different international shipping estimates for different regions, and for Kuwait which is in Middle-east, it does take 9-27 business days. This means there is a serious bug also with shipping estimate at checkout. When you select a country outside US, it is giving the default shipping estimate and not taking into consideration your country region, thus misleading the customer. I could be in serious need of the item, and 14 compared to 27 business days is a hell lot of a difference. This is a bug that was ought to be also communicated to the technical team rather than replying to the customer with “I apologize if this information was not clear at the time you placed your order.”. This apology does not help a bit does it? It also does not give any indication of error correction.
So now we all agree, regardless right or wrong, the estimated delivery date could be 10th Oct. Why does the Amazon employee says this later on? “I also suggest you to please check with your local postal services since it is possible that they have already tried to deliver your package but were unable to deliver due to following common scenarios…”. For God’s sake you just said it is expected to arrive on 10th Oct. How could you suggest now in the same email that the postal service was not able to deliver it and we were not in Sept yet at time of writing the email!. Another solid proof it’s a cut-and-paste support.
The example of expedited shipping being than standard also was not address. The case does not happen always, but I also saw it yesterday when I tried it with 1 day slower shipping. Now this is something serious that they they should check and resolve rather than juts ignore it from the customer email. How annoying do you think it is when you, the customer, take the time to write long detailed email explaining the problem and giving them hints, while they send you general template email with just little polishing, and ignoring the facts and bugs you’ve put? You don’t expect that from Amazon do you? Well, recently I expect a lot of this kind from Amazon. They have literally lost my faith in them.
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Skillroad: Unfortunately, the mentality with local physical stores could be even lot worse. As for sites for middle-east, I don’t know of any.
Amazon in general is the best in customer service and flexibility. I’ve been using them for over 5 years I loved them. Recently, I started to face those kind of problems and notice the low customer focus. It seems they got their brand strong enough and now new customer service employees are just trained for certain cases, nothing else.
It happens a lot with online merchants. It’s better to buy from a physical store. Or do you know any good online stores in the Middle East? They should be better at delivering stuff to Kuwait