> The thing I really loved about Amazon is that they had their act together. But that has declined drastically over the decades

This seems to be a problem for all big platforms. When they’re small enough to not change the ecosystem, they can do what they do well. Eg amazon ships more conveniently and google returns better results and uber is less scammy. Then they get massive and become a viable,better understood target for fraud/manipulation, and suddenly their offering begins to suck. It’s frustrating as a consumer.

I suspect you're undervaluing the impact of monopoly on those businesses. Google and Amazon are barely competing with anybody - when they were trying to win their position, there was a lot of value in keeping you happy. Now, not so much

It's nothing really to do with them being massive and better understood. Google was heavily attacked (SEO) and massively used, long before their quality started going downhill.

so, at what point is legitimate to involve the Credit Card company? you don’t even need to actually do it, tell cs you will do it unless it gets here in x days.

issue a chargeback and move on.

As others have also said, doing a chargeback risks Amazon closing your account permanently.

So if you're prepared to take that risk and never buy from Amazon again, sure.. go for it..

But given the centralization of vendors this can have bigger downsides than upside.

Intriguing and horrifying.. What happens with a ban?

I assume all my not-downloaded Kindle books become unavailable. Does the Kindle app delete the ones I have locally? (I assume the result would be similar for movies/shows purchased.)

Does it ban my credit card, name, address, or a more abstract "buying profile"?

Amazon does have the ability to remove downloaded items from your Kindles (assuming they sync with Amazon, of course); they've publicly used it before [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...]. I can't confirm whether that happens when you chargeback, though.

No longer at amazon but I was in the appstore and charge backs were pretty common, you just lost access to the apps/iaps you charged back. Though I don't know what happens if you do it repeatedly or high value items.

And while they definitely deserve the ire for doing that with 1984, even in 2018 when I left preventing 1984 like issues were commonly brought up in design reviews, calling out 1984 by name.

Hope you don’t have any digital media streaming held with Amazon, or AWS, or Alexa, Kindle tablet, etc. So many horror stories get posted on hackernews regularly about what happens when one of these huge centralized companies decides to ban a customer with no recourse, no matter whose fault it is

I'd wager that, as with other digital "purchases" from companies like Apple, Google, Steam, etc, if your account is closed, you lose everything since you didn't actually buy it.

at what point do you call it a bad experience and just walk away?

BB lost a part of an order, just a $3 thermal paste. Luckily the heat sink came with some. I couldn't dispute it with BB, post office blew me off, and since it was only about 10% of the order I couldn't dispute with cc.

I am fairly sure that you actually can dispute partial amounts with your issuer.

Probably, but the whole thing took about 4 months to shake out, and it was only $3.

To be fair, this is almost certainly an issue with whoever was selling the item on Amazon, rather than Amazon.

Which of course is nothing more than a convenient excuse for them to use when the only ones with the power to regulate what sellers end up on their platform is... Amazon.

> To be fair, this is almost certainly an issue with whoever was selling the item on Amazon, rather than Amazon.

This (soccer magazine case) does not seem like a 3rd-party seller issue. Third-party sellers only have a limited amount of time to ship (30 days in 2018) after which the order is automatically cancelled.

Also, the Amazon "we weren’t able to cancel the items" message only occurs with Amazon-fulfilled items.

The long "4-16 weeks" estimate also suggests it was not 3rd-party seller selling via FBA, either, but straight-up sold by Amazon.

There could well have been an issue with the seller; I can't tell. But my issue is more with how Amazon was a) totally unprepared to notice and fix seller issues, and b) absolutely unable to get it together even when brought to their attention repeatedly.

Declined over the decades? Decades?

The company is over twenty years old. What’s the problem?

Because I doubt anybody complaining about decline used a feature available for two decades and saw decline in it.

My first order with Amazon was May 6, 1997. It was worlds better than traditional mail order at the time, and also way better than most bookstores for niche things like technical books. And when I had to deal with customer service, they were really on top of things.

As many have testified here, they just aren't like that anymore.

I don’t like my dependence on Amazon but they have definitely improved my quality of life. I get everything I need other than groceries online. This has saved me a lot of time over the years.

That sounds nice.

How does this relate to you repeatedly doubting what I said?

So, you been ordering books for decades from Amazon. Has your book ordering experience gone down?

* I guess I’m just trying to understand what exactly has declined over two decades? Because I feel like I’ve had the opposite experience.

I refer you to the my original comment: "The thing I really loved about Amazon is that they had their act together. But that has declined drastically over the decades; now whenever I actually have to deal with them it seems like there's a ton of internal chaos."

Dunno about anyone else here, but I've definitely been using Amazon since the late '90s when it was primarily for buying books.

<conspicuously defensive voice> Two is plural!

I actually had almost the same issue ordering a mattress from Amazon. The seller had created a tracking number so the order was showing as "shipped" even though there hadn't been any movement ever, which meant I couldn't cancel the order without escalating about 5 times to different service reps.