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For months and months Amazon have been promoting the anticipated Assassin’s Creed video game for pre-orders. Usually, pre-ordering the item means reserving your copy for the release date to receive it ASAP. I did just that, and I even registered to Amazon prime to enjoy FREE 2 day so called shipping. I did that only to receive such a silly email from Amazon saying:

“We wanted to let you know that there is an unexpected delay with your
video game order (Order# 104-3371841-0424220) you placed on November 12 2007 02:32 PST. Unfortunately, we are unable
to ship the product(s) as soon as we expected and need to provide you with a new estimate of when
they may be delivered:

“Assassin’s Creed” [Video Game]
Estimated arrival date: 11/16/2007

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by this delay.”

What? What am I supposed to do with this stupid apology? I sent them an email to clarify why the hell the item is still Shipping Soon (as of yesterday and up till now!). Their reply came simple:

“Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

I’ve checked your order and can confirm that we are currently
preparing it for shipment.

Please know that we dont offer release date delivery for the
item “Assassin’s Creed”.

We still expect to ship it in time for delivery by the date listed
in Your Account: November 16, 2007″

Very overwhelming right? The fact they still claim they (expect) to ship it IN TIME for the date listed in my account. Nov 16! Let’s just review facts here, as they seem to change the shipping date however they like and then refer back to it as evidence. The item was pre-ordered, expected to be shipped on Nov 13. On Nov 14 only, it’s status changed to Shipping Soon. Today, and as I am writing this post right now, it’s still shipping soon. I.e., almost 24 hours and it’s still shipping soon. While in fact, today should’ve been the worst delivery estimate, they are still hoping to make it the best shipping estimate. And since it’s shipping soon, I cannot even cancel the order. I wonder why they listed it for pre-order if they don’t have enough of it.

Also, for me, it’s not only a matter of convenience. I am grouping my items as one shipment for the courier forwarding company to send over to Kuwait. Alas, now I am paying an extra over $10 for the previlige of receiving late shipment. But you know what? I think it’s my mistake I didn’t listen to my friend’s advise about GameStop. I’m just not sure how they will handle delivery to US courier forwarding companies, and international price is high.

[UPDATE]: They did come back to me with a bit long and polite email offering $5 credit. It’s not much, and won’t cover the delay and separate shipment cost as they know and stated it, but what can you do? Fine. At least they admit the problem was from their end this time. The item is out for delivery now. Can’t wait to get my hands on it :)

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I am playing with some new Amazon Associates widgets that I came across today. These are the new ones to me:

• Unbox Video: Lists some videos to play from. Nice feature, but it’s too wide to fit into a blog, and there isn’t large variety of videos. For example, I chose documentaries and biographies, but ended up having only movie films showing. Why? Simply, no variety or it’s still buggy. Both ways I can’t risk showing any type of video on my site.
• Slideshow: I love this kind of interactive ad. You can fade in from one item to another. Again, minimum size is 336×280. Not suitable for a blog.
• Product Cloud: The typical cloud of words, bigger is most popular. I don’t like that type of ad very much.
• My Favorites: This is what I used to list down another list of What I’m Reading. So far, I prefer the old links as they are faster to load and take less space. What do you think?
• Wish List: If you want everyone to know your wish list. Not that it’s very different than my Favorite list, but I just don’t feel like letting people in. Ofcourse my wife sneaks on my list from my PC I can do nothing about it :(.
• Quick Linker: This might be interesting for some. Installing the widget on your blog/site will enable you to use custom HTML tags for quick associate linking to Amazon like this:
  • <a type=”amzn” >Harry Potter</a> –> Links to Amazon.com search results page for “Harry Potter”
  • <a type=”amzn” search=”Harry Potter”>My favorite hero</a> –> The link reads “My favorite hero” and points to a search results page for the phrase”Harry Potter”.
• Search: On the fly AJAX based search results. Width can fit sidebar of a blog.

As to how is the overall experience with Amazon conversions? Not so great at all. I just have it there become it doesn’t harm for one, plus I want to list my recommended items and guide the site visitors to buying it. What do you think?

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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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This is really strange and new experience with Amazon I faced recently. I always say buying from Amazon is more safe than buying from the store downstairs. This time, it was not the case. I ordered video card from a reseller, TigerDirect and since they don’t ship international, I had to ship it locally to my local courier address in US, Aramex. What Aramex does is basically give you a virtual P.O. Box in the US. You simply ship it to their US Address and add a short code after the name to indicate it’s meant for you, like shown below:

<your name>/ KWI <your number>
147-29 182nd Street
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
United States

This is very normal people use it in Kuwait all the time. However this time the shipment never came to me and they sent me delivery notification! I checked and found out TigerDirect have shipped the item to the address without the code KWI … They trimmed it and sent it. I contacted them to explain the problem and they replied with the the Thank You we shipped it to this address:

<your name>

147-29 182nd Street
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
Springfield Gardens, NY 11413
United States

Yes I know! That’s what I was trying to say. Incomplete means wrong address as far as I am concerned. And since Aramex (as they explained) receive the shipments as whole packages they have to sign and accept it, they can’t check each individual item. I said what the heck? Those TigerDirect people don’t know a thing about customer service. Amazon TO THE RESCUE! They replied and explained they will wait for the shipment to return for the refund, and advised to place a second order if I am in a hurry. OK I said. So what? I placed the second order directly from Amazon and got it.

Now it’s more than 45 days and still no money refund. Few emails went back and forth between me and Amazon, until their buyer-guarantee@Amazon.com replied and said the shipment was delivered and signed, we can do nothing to help! What on earth are those people talking about? The shipment was sent with incomplete details, you advised to put another order and wait for that one, now you simply walk away with it? I replied with a nasty email and got a (POLITE) reply saying:

“Greetings from Amazon.com,

We are sorry to hear that you have not received your merchandise
from order ###. The seller provided us with UPS
tracking ### that shows a delivery with
signature acceptance. Amazon.com is not able to resolve shipping
problems after delivery. The address confirmed by UPS is the same
as given for delivery. Please note the UPS tracking number above is
different than the one you supplied as yours had a couple of numbers
transposed. We advise you to contact your local authorities if
necessary in order to pursue this matter further. Thank you for
your understanding.”

Read the bold part and see how they admit the shipment was sent with incomplete details, and now I have to contact local authorities to resolve it! Quite contradicting isn’t it? And what pisses me off more is the address they use “buyer-guarantee”. So I place the order through your site, your reseller trims the address and ship it. You advise me to wait and buy new one, then it’s my problem? Aramex ofcourse is a different story, and say they will charge $30 (8.5 KD) to return the shipment, and that I need to get the refund from TigerDirect.

Now, everyone have taken his hands off and I am the only one who lost. I had no choice but to ship the item to Kuwait and now looking for a buyer. How ironic? I replied to Amazon now just to emphasize more the problem is from the reseller, he needs to address his problems. It seems Amazon are overlooking customers, or tend to think reseller problem is not theirs.

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Did you notice that? The site reviews that was powered by Amazon is no more on Alexa.com. Try searching for Google, Expedia or any other site. I could not see the old site reviews we used to see. But why is that? Most likely it’s due to extensive spam issue. But this is sad really. It would have been better to have protective measures than remove the whole thing. You definitely like to see a site review before you buy something from it. I did see high spam ratio however when it comes to certain sites, especially spam ones. People tend to post their site name rather than review that site. A filter on urls would do some job there.

I don’t know of any good comprehensive site-review sites. Alexa was not so comprehensive as well, lacking reviews on many of the sites, but it was still good. Any other good site reviews you recommend?

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Following yesterday post on Amazon Context Link and as per Daniel noted Amazon have fixed the Firefox hanging problem, I have decided to give it a try on a separate page. What I did is simply post a little boring paragraph about me, with the intention to list down some of the item’s I’ve already purchased from Amazon to see how quickly and efficiently Amazon links those items. You can click the link and see how it renders the page. First, the main page is loaded normally, and then Amazon script runs to hyperlink the specific phrases to Amazon related product page. You can feel the waiting time for rendering to happen for this very small page, so a larger page might be troublesome. Below is the page I posted with Amazon Context Link code added to the bottom of it:

“Hi,This is a little brief about me. Mainly in an attempt to test Amazon Context Links. I am a computer software developer, love programming and all computer geek stuff. I usually program in Java, PHP, and right now going into Ruby on Rails. I am also a gamer… without proper time to play all the games I want. My game of all time is no other than Monkey Island. Adventure games is my favorite genre, though for some time we have lacked some real good games. It’s coming back now with Telltale games, Ankh Reverse the Curse, Syberia, Broken Sword and others. Action/Adventure game is another type I love. Prince of Persia and Beyond Good and Evil are what made me Ubisoft fan. As for 3rd person shooter, Mafia is a game that can be as good as GodFather if made a movie.

Away from the computer, if you ever find me, I like reading. There are many great books out there, cheap and so rich and useful. Book about habits of effective people, 7 habits of highly effective people. Don’t sweat the small stuff is another very simple, yet very effective book I enjoyed. Google Hacks and Spidering Hacks are two other books (for geeks) that I enjoyed a lot. If you are into biography, or inspiration, read about the life of the richest man on earth, and how he started an evolution. Bill Gates and the making of the microsoft empire could be the best book i’ve ever read. You learn quite a lot about Bill him self, how he made his fortune, how he made it, and why everyone is out there after him. It is also very inspiring. Bill him self wrote a not so bad at all book about Business running at the speed of thought.”

At the time of writing, the page had four links to Amazon generated automatically only, namely Bill Gates, Amazon Context, Prince of Persia, and Monkey Island. One of which, Prince of Persia, only was pointing where I wanted it. Monkey Island pointed to a book instead of the game, so the script does not have intelligence to determine what kind of content I am talking about. Bill Gates linked to a book other than the on I have hoped for, but that’s OK. You can see however that all the other intended items: Java, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Ankh Reverse the Curse, Syberia, Broken Sword, Beyond Good and Evil, GodFather (Can you believe that!), 7 habits of highly effective people, Google Hacks, Spidering Hacks, and Bill Gates and the making of the microsoft empire, all did not generate any hyperlinks, while most of them are highly rated items on Amazon. I assume it’s intentional not to overload the page with affiliate links, but it’s causing me to lose the items I want linked. 1 only out of the 14 items I wanted was properly linked, another was linked to undesired content. To sum it up, below are the Pros & Cons of the service:

Pros:

- Automatically embed affiliate links in the article without need of manual intervention. Could increase sales traffic.

Cons:

- Slight delay in page final loading time. For large pages, this might be an issue as well.

- Annoyance for end user, as all links open floating window with product description.

- Credibility loss: As users gets used to affiliate links in the site, he will ignore the real related links.

- Loss of desired links: Unless you link the specific desired products to Amazon manually, you may lose your intended links.

With all of this in hand, I think I will stick to manual linking to the items I want instead. Your experience as a publisher or end user on this is mostly welcomed.

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Amazon is a great site, they have great customer service, and wonderful online features. The level of control they bring to the customer is really unique, and their personalization algorithms are really good. Even though I was recommended once King Kong Two Disc Edition because I bought Nero 6! Amazon support were not able to explain it ofcourse, but that’s OK. In general, I do find related useful recommendations. The sad thing about Amazon is that as much as they try to expand, their new services don’t seem to appeal to the public, at least not to me.

The Amazon Prime offer for example is something they promote to me where ever I go in their site, and they even enrolled me for free for 3 months period. I just canceled it right before the period ends. I am trying to find a way to make spending $79 on Amazon Prime membership worth it. I couldn’t. Another interesting, yet impractical concept is the Amazon Gold Box. Special daily offers that are supposed to get you too excited to place the order instantly, however the limited few bucks discount doesn’t overcome the international shipping rates. They tried twisting and changing the way items are presented, but I still don’t think they are doing really great with it. A9.com is another story as well. Few years back they launched it, they started having promotions and discounts for simply doing few queries from it and still no luck it seems. I do credit them however for the OpenSearch format.

Few months back, they started the Plog (Personalized Blog). I didn’t really care so much about it. But today only, I thought of reading the 59 new posts there and the first one was simply useful guide as to how to clean up the laptop from inside. Quite what I wanted. The idea is that publishers write articles that gets sent to people based on their past purchase experience. This feature, if utilized properly and not abused for marketing, could turn out really useful to educate the customer and keep him in link with the publisher. Some however seem to be overly posting just to market their products. The good thing is, you can rate your post experience and decide not to receive posts from specific publisher. I think I should start doing that too. Specially when I am ordering for others stuff I would never browse otherwise! My personalized page looks stupidly unbalanced now.

If you are an Amazon customer, check your Plog and see if you can find something of interest there. Publishers are writing to attract your attention, so you should see something useful about your interests.

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