also no fee - the fact i can buy worry free knowing if its not as described/trash/broken i can just send it back at no cost is why i use them. don't know any other online store like that
I also regularly didn't get things on time. And I don't mean a day late, I mean "hasn't even shipped yet by the time it should arrive" late, and without even a notice.
What really sold me on Amazon was game sales, though. I'd pre-order something at Walmart or Gamestop and show up on release day to find out they didn't get it. This happened enough that I finally just ordered it on Amazon instead and hoped it'd work out. It not only worked out, but it had great tracking so I always knew what was going on. I had maybe 2 games be late from Amazon in all the time I ordered from them, and at least one of those was weather that stopped the planes and would absolutely have affected GS and WM, too.
From there they introduced the 2-day shipping and the rest was history.
I recently had an AWS issue. Emailed our rep. Next day I was on the phone with like 8 Amazon people, high up enough to make things happen and low enough to make things happen.
It was pretty wild and yes, for all their faults, the are the most customer focused company I’ve ever worked with.
Amazon is famous for their fake returns that get put back into inventory without being inspected.
Amazon is famous for their fly-by-night third party operators who do all sorts of crazy shit to the customer, but then Amazon claims it’s not their fault. And then Amazon also refuses to tell you who the actual third party was that did the crime.
Amazon is famous for not giving you an adequate solution to a problem that they caused.
Amazon could solve a lot of problems just by never co-mingling inventory from one seller with that from another seller — or with FBA inventory.
Let each seller sink or swim on their own, and let their information be fully exposed to the customer.
Order a three pack of cat litter and get only two packs in the box because one never got included in the first place or the box was opened during transit and the re-taped closed with obviously non-Amazon tape? Gotta ship that box back with two bags of cat litter in it, before you can get a replacement box of three bags of cat litter.
Guess how many times that kind of crap has already happened to me?
Why can’t I just send the pictures of the box and then they send me the third bag of cat litter that got stolen?
I’m tempted to ship them back the bags of cat litter after they’ve been used, so that they can inspect other outputs too….
Sometimes that recourse is stupid (“ship back an entire desktop CNC because it’s missing a spring”), but it’s Amazon’s dime not mine. Other times (alternator mounting flange machined incorrectly by 1/16”; “we can send you another one that’ll get there in 6 days”) I had to make do and modify the part to fit because I can’t be without a car for a week (and the local parts stores were 2 days out at 2-5x the Amazon price).
Order another 3-pack, ship back the 2-pack. If you need to use one bag now, use it, and when the new one comes in, ship 2 of those back. Amazon’s giving you something workable and fair-to-you, but appears stupidly inefficient. So what? It’s their money, their choice; not my job to protect them from themselves. (I do suspect a 2-minute chat with A2Z and asking for a 1/3 refund and ship nothing back would also be granted.)
Amazon is still one of few companies that has a completely seamless, no-BS return policy, for example.
The "sensible" alternative is to shop direct from small businesses, which I do sometimes, but see [2] from above.