You probably didn’t know this, but I probably have a package from Amazon.ca every week arriving at my house. Amazon is my go-to for CDs, DVDs, book, etc.
I have never had an issue with them for the past five years so it was interesting to see them slip up in the customer service realm with my order of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness on vinyl.
Scenario: October 1st, I pre-ordered the box set as well as the vinyl of Mellon Collie. Both items come out on December 4th. (sidenote: Super pumped!)
Amazon’s pre-order guarantees are amazing…when I pre-ordered it, the vinyl was around $65. But the price dropped a few times to the point of $26. So I’m locked in at that price! Bonus! It’s a great guarantee they have and that’s why I use their service all the time. On a sidenote, $26 for the Mellon Collie vinyl was an amazing deal compared to Amazon.com.
Fast forward to two weeks before the release of the item, Amazon.ca suddenly cancels the item completely, apologizes because they can’t obtain it from the supplier, pre-order eliminated as well. D’oh!
I contact them asking if this is an error since all other Amazon sites have it still listed. I get a response saying that it’s not an error, they don’t know when they will get it. Bummer.
I then ask if it does come back into stock on their site before the item is released, will I get my pre-order guarantee.
I swear that I emailed them four times about this issue and the generic copy/pasted (with some tweaking) response always said no. I find this ridiculous. This smelled of a “Uh oh…we notice that we may take a big loss on this item. Let’s just cancel it and bring it back in a few days.”
Luckily, I had a tab open with the item in question and I noticed it popped back up one day for $65. I then noticed that if you simply searched for this item, it didn’t appear in the results. Interesting.
I emailed them about this and asked again if the pre-order would be honoured. I also found out that someone else had successfully obtained a credit by using their client service ‘chat’ feature. I decided to try my luck. Within ten minutes, I had a credit for the amount of difference between the current price and what my pre-order price was. Success! I was very impressed with the service I received.
I wasn’t too impressed when I received an email 5 hours later singing the same old story that it wouldn’t be possible to honour my pre-order guarantee…without them realizing that I had already obtained a credit through their chat service.
Herein lies the problem of large organizations. Heck, I know what they deal with. Email responses generally have a databank of stock responses that they copy and paste and maybe they add a little personal touch here and there, but in the end, we can see that they never went over and beyond the duty of customer service and actually thought “Hey, this guy is completely right. We cancelled this item, canned his pre-order guarantee, but managed to put the item back online within a week and now we aren’t honouring the guarantee?”
But the person on the chat service easily gave it to me. Bingo bango, they realized what was going on and rectified the situation.
I’ve emailed Amazon with my comments about the differing level of service between the email service and the chat service. At least it’s good to give them a heads up. But knowing large organizations like I do…they probably already know this.
No excuse though!
UPDATE: Received an email saying that the item was cancelled by mistake and they have a limited amount to offer up those who pre-ordered.
Good on you, Amazon.ca.