hmm. Review policies. Bezoverse. I'll leave before I flounder. Reviews die in darkness. Gahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!! 
hmm. Review policies. Bezoverse. I'll leave before I flounder. Reviews die in darkness. Gahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!
Interesting timing for this thread. We've been Prime members for years and order often. This week was the first time I've had an issue with delivery times. My wife's SportCombi ate a headlight bulb Friday night. No big deal, I thought, I'll grab some from Amazon and they'll be here before she has to drive to work in the dark on Monday. Guaranteed delivery by 9PM Sunday. They arrived around 2 yesterday. The kicker is that they were still half the price of buying from anywhere local so I hesitate to scream too loudly.
I have very little to contribute to this discussion other than:
1. Amazon is inconsistent. I try to avoid third party sellers and try to go over the product page with a paranoid level of care. If anything looks odd or out of place, I do not order that product. I don't like all the cheap knockoff products they are pushing but I have been pretty succesful ordering from them so far.
2. Pickled eggs and beets are awesome. I need to make a batch. It's been a while, but I usually do 1-2 dozen eggs in a big jar with some sliced beets. They are great.
dean1484 said:Pickled beats would be like a second level of hell for me.
Pickled Beats is the name I use when I deejay Russian hardbass.
Knurled. said:dean1484 said:Pickled beats would be like a second level of hell for me.
Pickled Beats is the name I use when I deejay Russian hardbass.
Picked Beats sounds like the name of a band. I am thinking punk rock.
Update:
Amazon refunded all of their screwed up orders as a "gift card balance" instead of refunding my Amazon credit card (which is the original payment method) which is apparently their policy now. So although I managed to sell my stock in them, I cannot stop shopping quite yet because they're holding almost $200 hostage with this balance.
So I ordered a book. Like an actual, printed on paper, what Amazon started with, sold direct, book on 10/10. On 10/17 I realized it never arrived and looked up the order. The tracking information showed simultaneous books leaving Amazon's warehouses in Erlanger, KY and Portland, OR on 10/12, ...and that's it. Nothing else. So I contact "customer service" and after 40 minutes of run around, they refund the gift card balance and tell me to place a new order.
So I place a new order on 10/17 with "delivery by 10/19/19". Guess what never arrived? The book! Guess what hasn't even left the warehouse yet at all? The book! I have been dealing with customer service for 30+ minutes as they go round and round telling me that the guarantee is only an estimate and that it is actually scheduled for delivery on 10/22. Funny, looking at the product page right now to order a new one, and hey guess what it says? "Order within the next 2 hours 36 minutes for delivery by 10/21/19". The customer service rep is a berkeleying idiot.
In the meantime, my STEM Toy subscription auto-shipped a box. Despite having 10x the amount on the gift card balance available, Amazon charged the credit card instead. When I look at my subscriptions tab, it clearly shows that gift card balances are to be used first. I'm not even going to bother trying to get that one fixed. At least the toys came on time and not broken.
The only other order I have made is for some replacement chemicals for my hot tub. I am expecting to get them late and have them be knock offs. I am prepared to be underwhelmed at even that.
In reply to Javelin :
That's a pretty sucky experience. The giftcard refund is definitely new, I've had a few refunds this year and they all went back to my credit card. Admitted I do have an Amazon Prime credit card, but I would not find it OK either way.
One thing I've started doing is that if I find some quality merchandise on Amazon from a third-party seller I'm checking if they have their own online shop, too. In the current case it looks like I can buy the new firewall hardware from the Amazon seller directly for less money, but potentially have to pay shipping. I can live with that.
I just read an article that claimed a major change Amz made at the upper most levels was to get away from power-point presentations and start doing some 'narrative memo' thing authored by the entire company it seems and everyone in the meeting has to shut up and listen.
That is a loose translation but not a million miles from how I read it.
Let's see if I can find the link.
We've had items refunded through Amazon in the last 2 weeks and they have gone back on our regular credit card.
This is what you get for fielding a Tau army instead of Iron Hands. Let none doubt that Amazon will provide unity and hegemony for all.
Sorry low blow. Surprisingly Amazon has been pretty decent to me lately. Now Grainger can go suck it.
wearymicrobe said:This is what you get for fielding a Tau army instead of Iron Hands. Let none doubt that Amazon will provide unity and hegemony for all.
Sorry low blow. Surprisingly Amazon has been pretty decent to me lately. Now Grainger can go suck it.
I'm not exactly a competitive player anymore. And when I do, it's still orks for life.
In reply to nutherjrfan :
Not new. They've banned powerpoints since about 2002.
In reply to Fueled by Caffeine :
I got that. First I read about it.
Fueled by Caffeine said:In reply to nutherjrfan :
Not new. They've banned powerpoints since about 2002.
I have never wanted to work for Amazon until I knew this fact.
I'm having a strange sense of deja vu reading this having worked for customer service for MidwayUSA for twenty years until last May...
Amazon doesn't seem to get the idea of a contaminated supply chain. We've found if we created a listing on Amazon, other Amazon sellers could jump on the listing and claim their part was the same part number even if they were selling something from a different brand with significant differences (in our case, it was a Weather Pack kit that came with a very different number of pins).
nutherjrfan said:In reply to Fueled by Caffeine :
I got that. First I read about it.
Yeah, that is pretty extreme. Over a year expired? 40% of the reviews that are actually allowed to stand say the food is expired!
Like I said, circling the drain.
I've got a similar host of complaints. Two things I liked early amazon for:
1 - carrying one or two decent name brand versions of every product at a good price, so I could just go order a ____ 5 minutes after I discovered I needed a ____, without having to do a ton of research.
2 - cheap chinese knockoffs of stuff, that generally worked just fine. Like the harbor freight "buy it cheap and if you use it enough to break it, buy a good one" but for the rest of life.
Now after all their recent failures, Target has become my online source for (1) and I've given up entirely on (2) because it's impossible to decipher which of the 400 crappy chinese versions of something might be a good functional one since the reviews are all garbage and there's way too many choices.
Also every time I ordered from Rockauto, I would price check other sites and Amazon would occasionally win because they could get it here in a day. Now that I can't trust Amazon to get stuff here in 1-2 days anymore, I've stopped even checking and just order from Rockauto/Summit/Jegs depending on the type of product.
I'm generally annoyed that my online shopping world consolidated to 1-2 websites (literally, amazon & RA) for about 5 years and has now ballooned to 5-6 different ones again, but amazon really started screwing stuff up so much it wasn't worth it. Not planning to renew Prime anymore.
Screw it I just got burned, should have kept my mouth shut. Counterfeit Dewalt batteries shipped to the office today
wearymicrobe said:Screw it I just got burned, should have kept my mouth shut. Counterfeit Dewalt batteries shipped to the office today
I hate to say I told you so...
I've noticed for quite a while now, at least a year, that when I check reviews of popular products on Amazon over 50% of the time there are a number of people complaining they received a counterfeit or the wrong item entirely.
I have managed to avoid this particular experience for the most part, but there have been orders that went awry and never arrived which I had to get refunded on and/or reshipped. All of my orders come via UPS or in some cases USPS. Quite recently I ordered components for a new PC and everything arrived fine except the CPU fan. For some reason I received a change dispenser instead, the kind you wear on your belt and push the little levers. Very strange mixup there, but they fixed it and got me the right item.
I had an incident a while back where I ordered hydraulic jack oil, the Liquid Wrench stuff that comes in a bottle, and I had three orders in a row show up in inadequate packaging with oil leaking out of the container and through the packaging. I gave up and went to Advance for fluids after that.
I have ordered cheap tools from Amazon without an issue overall, but I've rarely ordered auto parts off of there as the majority of the time they are sold by a third party and it costs more than finding a dedicated online parts store for the brand. When there are limited reviews for an item I usually avoid. The one time I ordered some auto parts it was a retail box package brake kit and it arrived as expected.
If you look at the box in the upper right you can tell if an item is shipped and sold by Amazon or by a third party. Prime shipping has nothing to do with that. In the screenshot below from one of the items that Javelin originally linked notice that it's showing as Prime, but at the bottom it shows as "Sold by Sxlofty and Fulfilled by Amazon." This is where it could get sketchy since it's a third party seller dropping the item at an Amazon warehouse.
Harvey said:at the bottom it shows as "Sold by Sxlofty and Fulfilled by Amazon." This is where it could get sketchy since it's a third party seller dropping the item at an Amazon warehouse.
Not only is it a third party seller, but with the "fulfilled by Amazon" stuff, Amazon considered the item's source to be fungible. Meaning that if you are a third party seller and list an item for sale that other sellers are also selling, they may ship the other seller's items instead of yours if they are closer to the buyer. So in a situation like MadScientistMatt's, where an item tends to attract knockoffs that aren't even the same item, the buyer might buy from you but end up with the wrong item entirely - something you don't sell at all - shipped to them courtesy of a third party (fourth or fifth party at this point?!) poisoning the supply chain with improperly listed goods. Thus you take the fall for someone else's lack of diligence or malicious intent.
Ugh. Another one. Due by 8pm today, didn't even ship until 3:21 pm today, Amazon finally called it as late at 10:00pm.
An aside: I would not like to be an Amazon Key delivery driver opening stranger's front doors at 9:45 at night to deliver a spiral bound notebook.
I get enough out of prime that I probably won't cancel, but I'm going to favor brick and mortar for a minute.
Interesting update.
Book finally arrived. When I placed the order it was sold by Amazon directly. The completed order now shows sold by someone else and fulfilled by Amazon. I specifically purchased the direct version.
Hanky panky going on...
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