Looking at this now, it's amazing to compare with the public criticism that Werner Vogels gave to the face of the corporate blogging movement back in 2006.

https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2006/03/naked_answers.h...

Back then when he claimed that Amazon did a very good job of being customer focused, I was thinking: maybe, but whatever, I'm not sure what's special about their customer experience compared to others. Today, I'm thinking: wow, now that's a real example of audacious vision both executed and realized.

On a tangent, I recently interviewed with amazon and you can tell everyone’s being pushed to go to great lengths when it comes to customer satisfaction. The interview really gave me a sense of what amazons thinking when they give you a 25 dollar discount when you call them about a delayed delivery on a 30 dollar item. From the outside looking in, you think they are crazy but when you’ve seen the organizational obsession with customer satisfaction, it all makes complete sense.

The Scoble post he linked to in the above is now located here: https://scobleizer.blog/2006/03/30/three-audiences-three-dif...

This is absolutely true -- Amazon sets a high bar for customer service when it comes to returns, making things right, etc.

And yet there's this problem with fraud! Counterfeit products, Kindle Unlimited scammers, etc. I'm not totally sure how to reconcile the two. Possibly it's that the customer service mentality is very strong in the group that's responsible for saying "yes, you can return that" but not as strong in the engineering/product teams in retail?

(AWS is functionally a different organization than retail, which is probably worth remembering for these discussions.)

I keep hearing that Amazon is "customer obsessed", and I wonder who these happy customers are.

Their web site design leaves much to be desired. And it's heavy. Before I upgraded my PC, I dreaded opening a few Amazon tabs - it would bring my PC to a crawl. No other retailer had this problem. In the old days, with a single click, I could go to the Reviews page. Now the product page has no immediate click to the Reviews - I have to scroll down and click on it. Clicking the link on the top just takes me to the shorter review at the end of the page (and I have to scroll again to get to See All Reviews).

When I write a review, I have no way (that I know of) to get notified of comments to my review. If there's an option for it, do let me know. I just checked and I can't even find a link to see my own reviews in my profile's page. Anyone know where it is?

I've also sold by FBA. Their web site for sellers looks like it was made in the 90's, and discoverability is atrocious. I have to keep trying different links to see if it will take me to the report/inventory view I'm looking for. And I've dealt with several bugs on those pages (e.g. updating a price would not work sometimes).

Then there's their policy of comingling, so that when you buy a brand new item that is "Shipped and sold by Amazon.com", there is no guarantee you're not getting the item that an FBA seller put into their warehouse. Hence, no way to guarantee you didn't get a fake product.

Then when you check out sites like fakespot.com, you'll find how many products have incredibly gamed reviews. Amazon's reviews was what set them apart, and is now horribly unreliable. And then add to that mix the fact that many reviewers are actually reviewing the fake product that was shipped to them instead of the bona fide on. How do I know if the product is bad from the reviews? I can't.

And then to top it all off, when looking at one product, it's actually a combination of several ones that you have to pick. In some cases this makes sense - say I'm buying a particular brand of slippers, and they have different colors, that's fine - as long as the "model" is the same. But when I'm looking at a whiteboard, and the other option is a set of markers, that's ridiculous. The overall rating of the whiteboard has ratings of the markers mixed in. Now if I want to know the rating of just the whiteboard, I have to go through extra steps (click on Format, etc).

You're 100% right. Look at #1 of their leadership principles

https://www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/principles

As a customer and as a former interviewee, their motives were always very clear.

It is so easy to say that customers are our number one priority but I realized Amazon.com was different when my team was implementing gift cards at a smaller (still subsidiary of a public) company (not Amazon).

The question was simple: why do gift cards have to expire? The answer that nobody wanted to say: because we don't want to leave money on the table.

It was a frustrating exercise in futility as the customer priority took a back seat at the first sign of decreased liability/free money.

Also we would cancel orders for relatively minor pricing mistakes where I believed we should have ate those costs as a teachable moment.

On the other end though, as a customer I'm more scared of Amazon than walmart. As an Amazon.com customer, I consciously avoid returning unless I absolutely have to because I care about my account. I fear amazon will honor my ridiculous requests to a point and ban me at some point. I (unsuccessfully) tried to return an air mattress to Walmart after a week of use because it didn't hold air perfectly (they never do). I don't fear being banned by Walmart.

> The question was simple: why do gift cards have to expire? The answer that nobody wanted to say: because we don't want to leave money on the table.

My understanding from working on online game time / game bux cards (a little different from gift cards but not really) is that it makes the accounting much easier if your gift cards have an expiration date. Because you can't properly recognize the revenue until the gift card is used / expired, and if there is no expiration date, then you could potentially have revenue sitting around forever that you could never recognize. Terrible from an accounting / finance perspective. So it's not really greed it just makes things much easier to deal with and makes your books more sane.

That is my understanding anyways. I could be wrong.

> So it's not really greed it just makes things much easier to deal with and makes your books more sane.

Thus serving the convenience of the accountants over one's patrons.

It's not a problem for banks. They don't seem to feel any need to put an expiration date on their depositors' money.

Any sensible company should account for the gift card balances as a liability on their balance sheet exactly the same way a bank does its depositors' money.

The potential problem is that predicting how much liquidity you'll need to fulfill those liabilities in a given year isn't so easy. Banks are regulated to ensure that depositors are never out of their money. Some businesses have gone under as a result of getting this wrong with gift cards.

> As an Amazon.com customer, I consciously avoid returning unless I absolutely have to because I care about my account. I fear amazon will honor my ridiculous requests to a point and ban me at some point

From my experience i've had the opposite approach. Anything that doesn't live up to my standards or simply doesn't work out i return. I return ruthlessly and i've never had any problems. However my rate of return is still less than 1 in 20 and i purchase a fair amount.

I've never heard of anyone being banned for returning items on amazon?

I've heard of people getting banned for repeatedly buying and returning high value items. I have a video studio and while building it out I was going through a lot of returns of items that just didn't live up to their product pages' claims. As I was nervous about getting canceled I made sure to call Amazon and the CS rep put a note in my file about why I had a high (like 10%, but of relatively expensive stuff) return rate. She told me she gets asked to do that once in awhile and that she'd never heard of problems once somebody had done that.

I did the same thing recently (bought a bunch of networking / wireless gear and only kept the best one) and I noticed that after the 3rd or 4th return they started charging me a small restocking fee. I think it was related to having too many returns in a short time period.

Bezos talks about this in his talks (seen too many to remember which, but see his interview at the Economic Club with David Rubenstein); he mentioned "when you open up a buffet, at first you attract all the biggest eaters [high-order, high-return rates]!" By being generous, you surrender earnings but serve those patrons and build out the system.