Amazon is famous for their customer service, supposedly?

I’ve had the most ridiculous time over the last 60 days or so, which ended with their basically telling me to leave them alone in rather direct terms.

Here’s their last email

Greetings from Amazon.com.

Yes, all refunds for a specific order will go to the payment type
used for the order. In this case, since a gift certificate was
used, all refunds will go towards the gift certificate.

I understand that you are upset, and I regret that we have not been
able to address your concerns to your satisfaction. Unfortunately,
we will not be able to offer any additional insight or action on
these matters, nor will a phone call to our customer service
center result in a difference in policy.

Thanks again for shopping at Amazon.com.

Best regards,

Erik T.
Amazon.com Customer Service

The back story is this – bought two items using a gift certificate, they weren’t as described, Amazon said send ’em back and we’ll refund you the purchase, plus the cost of shipping. The cost of shipping was enormous, as much as the items. They acknowledge receipt of one item, and not the other. I inquire, they did get ’em both. They promise a refund to my credit card by my next billing cycle.

Many weeks pass, I check and nothing was ever credited to my credit card. I inquire. Note that this is a multi-step process, with the usual customer service experience of the person not really paying attention to your email. It turned out that they think they refunded one amount and not they other, but they keep switching back and forth as to how many amounts they think they should be refunding. It’s like they don’t keep track of the web-messages (the only way I am able to contact them, since they don’t accept email responses, but they send ’em out).

Eventually they indicate that they will refund my gift certificate account since I paid with gift certicates, or that they had already done so, it’s not clear, and in one message they say they will refund my gift certificate so watch for my credit card statement – in one paragraph they can’t even keep the story straight. This is the limitation of whatever cut-and-paste system they are using over there.

So I finally gather that they have refunded the purchase price, but not the out-of-pocket postage costs. It goes back and forth with the worst communication ever coming from Amazon – just that robotic “If you check your gift certificate account…” crap but no actual information or substantive response. It seemed to me that they should pay me back in $$ for the amount I had to put out of pocket to send the item back. The communication burden is clearly falling on the customer, me, to get some clarity – they don’t tell you what they have done, why they haven’t done what I expected, or what their policy is. Just terrible. And a different person every time, with terrible lack of consistency in what they are actually telling me. Culminating with this message above, do not write us again, they say, we won’t help you any more. At least this jerkoff was able to clarify (after my 3rd desperate inquiry) that they won’t refund cash for any part of an order that was paid for with gift certificates.

It’s all very annoying and really kind of disappointing – didn’t we expect better from these goofballs?

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