Article and rant detailing my extremely negative experience with business account opening and network gear order on Amazon, covering difficulty in getting customer support, difficulty setting up business account, difficulty reporting potential security issue, shipment of second-hand open-box devices instead of new items, Amazon's refusal to send replacements, problems with the process of used items collection and associated refund, barrage of auto-generated emails, zero customer care, my subsequent decision to shop local, other details, and more
I don’t have a business account with them but have had a Prime subscription since Prime became a thing and have to say that something has changed in regards to the support as of late and not for the better.
Last week, we had 6 orders scheduled to arrive to our house and we got notifications for all that they had been delivered to the office and handed to reception, which we don’t have, just a porch and a door. My wife contacted support to tell them and they said they would refund all of the orders without even looking to see where they got delivered to. The support person gave a few different totals, none of which were correct and we ended up having to go through our orders to add up the refund total since he couldn’t do it correctly. After all of that a refund was issued… and then the packages were delivered about 30 minutes later.
We have been trying for days now to let them know that the packages were delivered so we could be billed correctly but so far, every person we’ve talked to has said they’re allowed to refund but not allowed to charge us and that it had to be passed to someone above them.
I don’t have a lot of faith that they’ll figure it out and worry that some day, they’ll just cancel our account because they detected some type of fraud.
In some cases, it’s easier to eat up the cost instead of dealing with one problematic order and having a potential future customer switch to a different site permanently. You can be sure that they won’t ask if they said they can’t charge you.
Yeah, Aliexpress. All the same stuff as Amazon but at a discount you get for being patient.
They likely can’t even charge you at this point so I’d give up. They’ll do something like ask you to return them, at most. And what will likely happen is they will say “just keep them.”
If you really want to pay them money, order it again and return the old items. There is an option to not request money.
Companies are not allowed to charge for items they already shipped correctly or incorrectly. Even if they could, I can’t imagine it being easy for anyone to just bill you money and mark the order as completed without shipping anything.
From the FTC website - “By law, companies can’t send unordered merchandise to you, then demand payment. That means you never have to pay for things you get but didn’t order. You also don’t need to return unordered merchandise. You’re legally entitled to keep it as a free gift.”
Since they issued the refund, you got unordered items. It’s a business write off as a loss to the seller or Amazon.
Thanks very much, that’s what we ended up doing. We just reordered the canceled items and then returned them with the “no refund needed” option chosen.