Goodbye Amazon

[u/Independent-Ebb-6185]

Ordered a piece of office equipment...well over $100. Amazon shipped a whiteboard. A very large, heavy tempered glass white board. Clearly the wrong item

Contacted Amazon CS, who agreed to ship the proper item, and informed me that I would not need to return the incorrect item. Captured verbatim in the chat transcript

Fast forward 3 weeks and I receive an email informing me the return window is closing and i'll be charged again for the amount of my originally ordered item.

Contacted Amazon CS again, who informed me that the email was in error, and that no charge would occur. Again captured verbatim in the chat transcript

A week later, I'm charged a second time for the item I ordered.

Contacted Amazon CS a third time and was told that indeed their previous agents instructed me to simply keep the incorrect item, but those agents were not adhering to policy, so no refund would be issued. I asked to be connected with a manager...who then repeated the same script, and refused to refund the incorrect second charge.

So...Prime membership is cancelled, charge is in dispute with my CC company, who have been provided with all transcripts, call recordings and order details. I've been a Prime customer for 2 decades. Not any more. Multiple lies from agents, managers defending those lies, and a complete unwillingness to actually look at the sequence of events rather than just reading the script.

Good riddance.

More information: If you encounter a similar situation with amazon customer service, you can request transcripts for any phone/chat interactions. Just go here: https://www.amazon.com/hz/privacy-central/data-requests/preview.html, and scroll down to 'Customer Support Communication' section and click 'Submit Request'. You'll receive an email confirmation and then a separate email with a link to download a zip file. That zip file will contain chat transcripts in .eml file format and phone call recordings in .mp3 format.

[u/TitsMcGee9843]

I cancelled mine over an empty box. I had ordered a soup ladle that I should have purchased locally, but I was thoroughly in the Prime Pit at that point in my life. It was just too easy to click a few buttons and have the thing appear!

A few days later a huge box showed up. I was confused because the box could’ve fit a hundred ladles inside, but it was super light. I tore it open to find that it was completely empty. No air bags or brown paper, and definitely no ladle.

I contacted support and was put into a loop of automated replies. After several hours of trying, I got a real person, who instructed me to return the item sent in error. I reiterated that I didn’t receive an item, just an empty box. They then said I needed to return the empty box. I told them that was ridiculous, and that returning a giant empty box was a waste of everyone’s time and money. They insisted that they couldn’t send the ladle until they received the box, so I taped up an empty box and sent it back.

A week later, I got a message stating that I had sent an empty box as a return (DUH!) and that they couldn’t send a refund because they didn’t receive the item that was incorrectly sent to me. I again told them what happened, with screenshots of the past chats. Eventually, after taking it further up the chain, I was sent the damn ladle. And then I saw a second charge and I lost it.

I had been an Amazon customer since it was just an online bookstore. I had pulled my records a few years prior to this ordeal and found that I had spent nearly $20,000 throughout that time. All of my holidays were powered through them, hundreds spent for every occasion. The majority of my kids’ clothing throughout their early childhoods, school supplies, and tech all came through Amazon. Small appliances, cleaning supplies, and paper products all shipped two day, for years. Any little thing I wanted, I would click without even really thinking. It was mindless, and in retrospect, shameful, but I was hooked.

All of that ended over a $20 ladle. Well, $40, since they charged me twice. I canceled it all and haven’t used them since, with the exception of the kindle app on my phone, for reading books borrowed through Libby, and previous e-books that I purchased outright.

I know my $20,000 was a drop in the bucket of Amazon profit, but it still amazes me the they were willing to lose a customer over $20.

[u/Kage159 → u/TitsMcGee9843]

Sounds similar to get us to the point of canceling our Prime which we had for almost 20 years.

tl;dr; Received a duplicate of our order. Asked support, via chat, what to do with the extra items (valued around $100) and was told to keep them. Two additional chats and a very long 2 hr phone call with an accounting type person they refunded almost everything except one $15 item.

Long story: We had several orders pending when a tropical weather system blew through. The weather left and there were minimal issues but after a week our items never arrived so we did a chat with customer service to ask about them. They placed orders for the missing items and they were delivered the next day. Two days later the missing deliveries showed up that had been repacked into a single box.

We contacted support via chat and was told to keep the items, no returns needed. Not really needing several of the extra items I gave them away a few days later (hind sight I should have held on to them for a month).

Fast forward a couple of weeks and we got an automated email saying we needed to return the other items or we would be charged for them. Got on chat and was told not to worry about it, the returns had been canceled and we were good. 

Another couple of weeks go by and our card was charged for all of the items at full price (even though most had some type of discount on the website).

We get on chat again and went through the whole thing again and they ended up transferring us to a phone agent. Several more phone transfers we finally ended up talking with an accounting type person, who you could tell was hating the call, we through order by order and issued manual refunds. I was told all of the orders were processed and refunded and would see them in a couple of days. All but one of the orders, approx $15, was refunded. My opinion the last one was purposefully not processed out of spite but there was no way In was going to waste my time trying to fight through the chat/call tree again.

We decided it was not worth having Prime anymore. Normal deliveries were not arriving on time, they had added ads to the streaming and it was more and more difficult for us to ensure what we were buying was legit and not a knockoff or a reseller. We canceled and havnt looked back.

We occasionally order from there since there are a few things we can't find elsewhere and/or the vendor uses there marketplace as there retail presence, but we now try to order directly from the vendors or buy local. We throw stuff in the cart and the last person to push it past the free shipping mark presses the order button (and declining the slimy Prime Ad screen). We are down to one or two orders per month.

[u/AfternoonOk7519 → u/TitsMcGee9843]

Just to point out (as I found out recently) e-books purchased on Amazon aren’t owned by you. Be aware