valites.net

(I stole the idea to gripe/praise companies from my friend Greg’s companies blog entries.)

Yeah, I’m making a list alright. It’s not the good type of list though… Unfortunately for Amazon, TigerDirect & Buy.com, they’re on it. Normally the companies names in the previous sentence would be links to their sites, but their recent tactics don’t deserve the business I might send their way if someone followed the links.

On December 14th, I received an email addressed to the email address I use when ordering items from Amazon with an offer for $10 off my next purchase. As I was readying to purchase some Christmas gifts from Amazon, I was happy to see I’d be saving some money. Then I saw the sender - TigerDirect <TigerDirect@tigeronline.com>. TigerDirect doesn’t have a good reputation to begin with, nor have I ever done business with them. Amazon leaked my email address to them.

Depending on which address/company my email addresses make it to, I use my judgment and sometimes unsubscribe from certain lists. The email from TigerDirect included a link to unsubscribe (http://www.TigerDirect.com/applications/email/emailmanager.asp), so I checked it out. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I read the source for the page & saw the title, name & alt tag for the button on what was supposed to be the unsubscribe form were all “subscribe”. TigerDirect will never seen a penny from me.

This is actually the second issue I’ve had with Amazon - over a year ago I ordered a digital camera, costing several hundred dollars at the time. After I submitted the order, I decided I’d see if I could slip in an item or two from my Amazon Wishlist onto the same order. Since I was still logged into Amazon & had the corresponding browser cookies, I was able to just hit the back button in my browser and choose my wishlist link without having to log back in. Once on the wishlist page, I chose the items I wanted to add & headed to the checkout. I was surprised to see the camera I’d just ordered in my shopping cart. I figured perhaps Amazon was able to detect that I’d just submitted an order that wasn’t processed yet and was allowing me to add additional items to it, so I completed another checkout. When the shipment arrived a couple days later, there were two cameras, from two shipments! There is no excuse why Amazon couldn’t have detected I submitted the same order twice. I would expect this check out of any modern day online based shopping cart.

But that’s not where it ends! As I was leaving for vacation the day after the camera(s) arrived, I didn’t get a chance to return the second camera for quite a while, at which point it was beyond their normal return period. I called customer service to see if they could work out a return. They told me several things, none of which I was happy about:

• I was responsible for return shipping costs
• They couldn’t refund me the full purchase price for the camera
• They couldn’t even tell me exactly how much or even what percentage or the original purchase price they could refund me

I told the lady this was crazy - she wasn’t able to alleviate my fear of shipping back a camera costing several hundred dollars and only received a fraction of that in return. I ended up shipping the camera back and receiving 80% of what I payed for as a refund. They did give me a $10 credit to cover the extra shipping cost I payed in the first place, but in the end I still lost money. Two days after I received the email from TigerDirect to my Amazon email address (on December 16th), I placed an order with Buy.com - or so I thought I did… When I arrived at home on the 22nd, I was surprised to see my order had not yet arrived.

I checked my account history on the buy.com site & discovered there was a problem processing my credit card information, which required me to submit it again. Yet at no point in my previous checkout had I been prompted with this information, nor did I receive any email alerting me to a problem.

After seeing the failed order in my account history on the 22nd, I was able to enter my credit card information again & have the order accepted, but wasn’t able to change the shipping options.

My mother’s “big” Christmas gift will be late this year now. Luckily I purchased other gifts, but I still feel terrible I won’t be able to give her the ones from this order on time.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 24th, 2007 at 12:38 am and is filed under companies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.