Hacker News Reader

Comment by nanoseltzer | Hacker News Reader

They may have ruined online shopping but they haven’t solved it either. The clothing retailers (an area hard for amazon to move in on) will remain competitive.

I think the one area amazon absolutely has done right is customer service. If any other company made their customer service as good, easy, and simple, I think they would be able to catch up quickly as well.

For example: I recently bought a jacket on sale from Columbia sportswear. It didn’t get delivered to my unit properly (despite their usps tracking saying that it did), and when I emailed them about it: absolutely no response. My issue went into a black hole. Of course I have now blacklisted Columbia sports: never again. If this was an amazon purchase, I would have been able to resolve it almost immediately.

View on HN

I find it interesting that we think of Amazon as having gotten "customer service" right. I've had two classes of experience with Amazon:

Products they act as a seller for, and products they act as a producer for.

When I'm buying item X and it's not up to par, Amazon's response is invariably "just send it on back and we'll refund you." At one point I complained I'm not taking a half-day off work to get this $5 item in the mail and they said never mind, just keep it, and we'll refund you anyway.

Awesome.

OTOH, they have a $10/mo (or so) a la carte book service, labelled "Prime Books," with a "free" subtitle (or it was - I haven't checked back recently.) Clicking on it was auto-enrolling. I didn't find out for a few months that they'd apparently one-click-enrolled me in a recurring monthly bill. It took me 3 hours on the phone to get them to partially refund it, and it ended with me closing my account then and there. Despite having been a member since they more or less "opened their doors," and a good chunk of my household spending going through their portal, refunding money from their own service was a line in the sand for them.

I can see that 3 hour call being real - I’ve had similar experiences with amazon customer service that I could foresee becoming a long call, such as canceling Prime: they certainly made me wait about 15-20 minutes while trying to “procure permission” and it ended up being some kind of verbal guarantee that another depr would email me the confirmation. After a few hours I did get the confirmation and refund. The entire call did take about 45 minutes: quite a frustratingly long time.

Navigating amazon customer service itself has become a learning experience. Typically the fastest way when getting an annoying customer service agent who “just doesn’t get it” is to request a transfer to amazon USA customer service. You can also request speaking to a supervisot and continue escalating. Sometimes calls end up being 30-45 minutes regardless of method, since they do not always make transferring to amazon USA easy (and then once you get to amazon USA you play the same game over again).

It’s certainly nowhere as good as my original post made it sound, but it’s still better than most online shops.

I just cancelled my Prime subscription this month. I did it online, and other than having to click "yes I really want to cancel" on three separate confirmation screens, it was pretty frictionless. My subscription was about to renew so there was no issue of a refund, I just cancelled the renewal.

I agree. For example in The Netherlands, Amazon is a small player. Almost all popular online retailers there have amazing customer service. Also, by law, they are all required to take back any order, for almost any reason, within 14 days of delivery.

We need a breakthrough in package delivery. Over half of people’s online shopping complaints are due to items not arriving on time, being delivered to the wrong address, being stolen...

If you were older you'd know we've all ready had a massive breakthrough. 6 to 8 weeks nude to be normal. Now its couple days for free. Next day even same day is possible. I can get food, other perishables. Stuff is delivered from Hong Kong in days. You often get tracking of status, location, and eta. All of this without having to call and wait and wait on customer service phone line.

Its mindblowingly amazing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com