Something similar happened to my wife as an Amazon affiliate. It took quite a while to piece together, but after about 4 or 5 back and forths, we figured out what happened.
Someone had clicked on her affiliate link, then copy and pasted it onto reddit to share the Amazon product with some people (without knowing it had the affiliate link as ?tag=....). Because reddit is a site you are not allowed to share affiliate links, Amazon suspended the account.
The person who had shared the link was obviously even a legitimate reddit user, and the post was pretty minor only getting a few upvotes (we only found it via a search). But because of this, Amazon suspended over $500 of earnings, and killed a site that took many months to build and establish. And now my wife is now on a "refuse to respond" to list for trying to contact them multiple times to get someone who can apply a little bit of reason to the situation.
I think in hindsight we made the mistake of not trying to publicize the issue and Amazon could just ignore it. So here's an upvote for the OP
How about fighting fire with fire? Write a script that copies all affiliate links it can find to reddit until the damage is so big they will have to take note and fix the process for everyone.
Huh, strange. I was convinced it was Reddit banning affiliate links, not Amazon.
There probably goes my passive income idea: Make blogs where I present merchandizing for fandoms and other niches, and promote the blogs on Reddit. :-) I wonder if the indirection makes it "legal".
That's wierd.. back when I was doing amazon affiliate I posted a lot on Reddit. I'd find threads about products and post a link to the product using my affiliate code. It worked "okay" - I made a lot more doing other things.
You are allowed to share affiliate links on reddit. Well on some subreddits you could. It's all up to the subreddit. And even if reddit banned the link, that's nothing to do with Amazon. Amazon don't enforce reddit policies.
I have run into this kind of automated bureaucracy several times in the last decade. It is both infuriating and frightening.
My mortgage was sold to a new company that had a weird computer-directed policy that rejected my home owner's insurance. They then flagged me as not having insurance and charged me over $1,000 for providing insurance. I spent hours on the phone speaking with people in India who absolutely would not send my proof of insurance up the chain of command. It wasn't until I was able to find the CEO of the mortgage company and contact her directly to explain my situation that it was finally resolved... for six months when the automated system rejected my home owners insurance again. I eventually had to refinance the home to get out from under this soulless company's grip.
Institutions like the Better Business Bureau used to protect consumers from this kind of abuse, but the complaints I have registered with them have achieved nothing. If I was poor, this situation would have financially ruined me. I would have missed mortgage payments, my home would have been foreclosed on, and my credit would have been ruined for years.
I highly recommend the science fiction film "Brazil" to anyone who wants to see the dystopia this kind of automated rules-enforcement could create. "Brazil" is the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" but the totalitarian government rules with a system of overwhelming bureaucracy. The problem here is that it is the Capitalists who are the oppressors.
Yes, the fact that you're already upset, combined with seemingly no ability to resolve the situation is incredibly infuriating.
I guess the side benefit of today's age is that it's not too difficult to find people high up in the company to contact. I usually do these things to resolve issues that can't be resolved through support systems:
1) Search LinkedIn for higher ups in the company who could help
2) Search Google to try and find the email format the company uses for it's company email... e.g. [email protected] or [email protected]
3) Write a clear and concise account of the problem and either include every executive you find or BCC them all
I had an issue with Babies R Us where they shipped me a piece of furniture that was destroyed at some point in the logistics process. I contacted support about it and they kept wanting to charge me return shipping fees and told me to take it to a B&M store to avoid that. So I took it to a local store and they said they couldn't process the return but would ship the item back for me and that I needed to contact the phone support to update them on the situation. I did that and phone support had no ability to sort things out with the store. At that point it had been nearly two weeks and I was charged the money but no longer had the item, as I had left it at the store. I began the charge back process but executed my tactics above and got multiple executive responses by the end of the day.
I've done this with multiple companies in the past and it has ALWAYS worked. It sucks that this is what you have to do but at least it's an option.
This also reminds me of a talk by Maxim Februari at the most recent TEDx Amsterdam[0]. From the description:
The infrastructure of connected things [..] imposes norms on citizens. Not in the form of written laws: the norms are hidden in the design of things. Citizens can’t protest the new laws, or change them, because they do not know them. And because decisions are made automatically, the laws can’t even be violated [..]
The BBB does nothing. It's just the Yelp of the past. They don't help mediate disputes they just extort business owners. If the owner pays enough money they can get rid of negative reviews. It's crap.
The only thing that will do you any good against a company like that is hiring a lawyer and it sounds like you should have done that in the first month.
Sorry to hear that. I want to add a side note on this for people considering a mortgage. We never think about the fact that your mortgage could be sold to another company when going for a mortgage. So unless you get the mortgage from one of the big guns like wells fargo etc, there is a good chance that the "smaller" mortgage firm that gave you a great rate will repackage your mortgage and wash their hands off it. This can throw things off for you as you are left to deal with a new company who can impose their shitty policies on you and you didn't even choose them.
The Better Business Bureau is not a US govt organization. It's a 501c3. They only provide moderation to businesses that subscribe to them ($€£¥) and even then its non binding. BBB is a decades old joke.
Glad you mentioned Brazil. Was thinking the same thing as I was reading the first part of your comment.
I mentioned it below, but the Federal Government's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the CFPB, has been very helpful to me in the past with PayPal.
http://www.consumerfinance.gov/
I feel really bad for the guy and I hope this gets enough media attention for Amazon to actually care about helping him.
But this is the world we are headed toward with people continuing to stake their entire livelihoods on services with almost non-existent customer service. Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it.
If they won't give you a phone number that rings through to an actual human being promptly, you shouldn't allow yourself to become dependent upon said service continuing to work. Let alone base your entire income and the incomes of employees under you on it. That's just incredibly irresponsible.
Why is a phone the gold standard for support? If I have to talk to someone on the phone, it means I have exhausted every other possible method to resolve my problem, and I am furious with the company for making me talk to an idiot in real time.
What I want is an issue tracker that has responsive, accountable, people on the other end. That's my ideal support experience. Phones are the worst case scenario.
What I see is a world that cannot deal with unique situations. I had an issue with fraud on my paypal account. I got refunded, at the same time I got a automatic draft. My account then went negative because it didnt pull from my bank account which is my usual source of funding.
Telling paypal that a mistake had been made and it was their fault they didnt really know what to do. I got passed around 12 times over a few dollars. They basically didnt know how to handle a unique situation. I have similar experience with my bank.
Customer service teams are homoginized to only deal with volume, they are never trained on how to solve problems.
These automation issues just let that same system float to the top.
> Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it.
While the point you're making is certainly valid and most of these big companies we've come to rely on have next to zero customer service, I just wanted to say that in the case of PayPal I recently had to resolve an issue with a purchase (with Musician's Friend, who I will never, EVER do business with again, but that's another story) and their customer service was actually pretty decent. Granted, I had to make a couple phone calls to them before I got a "good" agent that was able/willing to resolve my issue, but I'd take that experience over calling the likes of AT&T or Comcast any day.
I'll admit I've never considered what a position that puts you in, but it makes sense. Especially if you have employees, that's incredibly vulnerable. I suppose I figured if you were doing enough business with a company you'd reach a level of support indicative of how much money you're generating for them. Just like many banks have specialized agents for fiduciary level money.
>Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it.
You mean the companies a lot of us here work for and should be able to have some influence over but ... don't because they let us play with "Oooooh shiny!" and because we'll be moved on to the next place in a year and a half? Those companies?
> ... you shouldn't allow yourself to become dependent upon said service continuing to work.
This is easy to say but can be difficult in practice. Even if they did provide a phone number, there's still no guarantee.
Any business is going to have to depend on multiple individual providers, any one of whom could inadvertently shut you down. Your bank, your energy supplier, etc. Trying to mitigate for such scenarios is near impossible as a small business. It's worth remembering the flip side of the current story. This individual was able to sustain their family and two employees from this business. That's impressive. That an innocuous change on one device can have such a negative impact, with no warning, is a heinous oversight on Amazon's part.
with the recent google stunt where they blocked 200+ email accounts, I have been planning to move over to some other paid email service and replace all of the google products that I use. The only thing I cant replace is the android and I need a gmail account for it to work :-/
Yes, blame the victims for working to support their families. That will surely be productive...
Amazon does have a seller support line. So what do you want people to do? Google "Selling on Amazon sucks" and then base their life on the opinion of some random strangers on the internet? What about the 99.9% of people who sell on Amazon and have positive experiences but don't bother to write about it? If we held other employers to the same standard using GlassDoor reviews, half the country would have nowhere to work.
"Honey, I could be making thousands of dollars a month selling this product I created on Amazon, but I'm going to take a part-time job instead because Joe Schmoe said Amazon has poor service. I'm sure little Timmy won't mind going hungry as long as he knows I did the responsible thing according to byuu."
I recently had a bout or two with Amazon over a relatively trivial issue. Simply that sold me a USB stick (Corsair Survivor) that fell to bits. Asked for a replacement to be sent out. They wanted me to send the old one back. I refused unless I can destroy the ICs on the board first for obvious reasons. Took 45 minutes of explaining to someone who didn't really care. Eventually they agreed to replace it and told me to dispose of the original.
Then about two weeks later I got an email saying that I was going to be charged £31 for the replacement. Contacted Amazon again and was told that it was policy to take a payment for it and they wouldn't budge. They also had no record of agreement before either.
I lost my shit. Another 45 minutes later, eventually I have a resolution, I think. I'll only know when they take or do not take the money.
Three lessons from the above and the original post:
1. Get everything in writing. Use Amazon's chat facility when you contact them and make sure you get a transcript emailed to you.
2. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. I wouldn't trust them to solely run my infrastructure or my business fulfillment. You don't really matter in the scale of things so they can afford to do a shitty job sometimes.
3. Cheap isn't necessarily a good deal. I'd genuinely rather pay more these days for something and get it from Argos here in the UK. Or bytemark etc.
+1 for Argos. I've started using them wherever I can, after Amazon failed to deliver 3 orders this year. The first 2 orders were refunded, the third wasn't, because the package was signed for (but by someone with a completely different name, and they didn't record the house number it was delivered to). Emailed them many times. They won't even reply to the emails or call me now.
Can't agree with this more and I learn that it's truer and truer the more interactions I have with Amazon.
I recently purchased a pair of boots on Amazon that were marketed as authentic and selling for half the cost of the originals, and they were listed as "shipped from and sold by Amazon" so I figured they must be real. The thing is that I own the authentic pair, so was able to compare when they arrived and the Amazon pair was obviously fake.
I no longer have any faith whatsoever in the authenticity or quality control of Amazon's products and wouldn't trust them for any major purchases, and never for clothing or anything that is relatively easy to imitate.
I'm quite sure that they are getting away with straight up copyright and trademark infringement hundreds of thousands of times a day, just because nobody can afford to challenge them.
This kind of thing is standard for storage device returns. When your Western Digital drive fails under warranty they expect you to send it to them whether you are able to scrub the bits or not. Some of vendors allow you to pay a "media retention fee" to avoid sending the failed drive. I know that HPE does.
As a side note, it's frustrating how email [email protected] is fast becoming the only way to get real customer service. I'm a T-Mobile customer and recently had a billing issue that required me to interact with their customer support who were thoroughly unhelpful and just added to the frustration. I had heard about the tactic of emailing John Legere so I did, and sure enough the issue was sorted out promptly by a US-based exec response rep. I was happy to get everything sorted, but the fact that customer service reps apparently didn't have the power to fix a relatively straight-forward issue still frustrates me.
My own story time: I found an item selling on amazon.co.uk and amazon.de for much less than the going rate on amazon.com. I ordered a bunch from co.uk. Then I was testing out the amazon.de site, I added a gift credit of 10 Euro. Somehow this flagged the .de account for verification, and that account got locked out. Then, that lockout spilled over to the uk account, and eventually to the US account, where I had dozens of pending orders.
I sent an email to [email protected] with a summary of the issue. It took a day or two for my US account to be fixed, and about a week for the other accounts to start working. I don't know whether the email helped or whether it would have been verified eventually anyway.
The process is definitely broken, though. Even one day lockout could be catastrophic for a larger seller.
These larger tech firms are consolidating and often have market monopoly. They often don't care when your account is suspended due to their own erroneous fraud detection systems. They would rather have 2 innocent people lose their livelihood than check on 500 fraud cases.
I imagine these destroy a livelihood around the globe every 60 seconds:
"I lost my Adsense account because someone in India clicked on my ad?"
"I lost my Amazon merchant account because of my
'suspicious' credit card?"
"Uber suspended me after someone threw up in my car?"
I've had terrible experiences with Amazon this year (though nowhere near as bad as this poor guy) and it took me an entire day of repeatedly phoning their support lines and forcing my way through to a manager until I found someone who would actually use a bit of initiative.
In my case, I had something like a 50% failure rate of Prime delivery orders. It was at the point that every time I'd buy something with a delivery date of tomorrow, I'd get it 3 days later after it was dispatched from Germany instead. The drivers who did turn up have now been banned from delivering to our apartment block, as they would ditch all the parcels outside or with security instead of delivering them. Standard customer support wouldn't refund my Prime subscription because I had apparently used it 66 times in 3 months, which must mean that they must count MP3 plays as uses, as I only ordered 12 parcels in that time. Thankfully I did eventually get hold of someone who took the time to check and see that I've been buying from Amazon since they launched in the UK, and had been a Prime member since that launched too, and she promptly refunded me the membership. It took far, far too many managers to get to that point, however.
The general customer service seems to have deteriorated in the past year. Prior to that I always had great customer service from Amazon. I've now largely switched away to ordering from elsewhere. eBuyer gets me my parcels within a day on free shipping, and they're pretty competitive on price. I always ordered from Amazon because the CS was good, but they've lost me as a customer for now.
I recently tried to change my password on my Amazon account (something I do a couple of times per year) and was presented with a multi-factor auth prompt for a long-forgotten and inactive AWS account that I trialled years ago. It turns out the phone number on the AWS account is out of date and the authenticator app was on the same phone that I no longer have, so I can't remove or reset the MFA. All my details on my Amazon account are up to date but these can't be used for resetting the MFA, only the details I entered when I signed up to AWS. I've hit an impasse with support, they'll only accept a notarized identity verification form and affidavit to proceed, which isn't that easy or cheap to do outside of the USA.
At this point I'm snookered - I feel like if my password is ever compromised I'm screwed, but it's not like I can just start a new account because all my digital purchases, my Kindle, my Echo, etc are tied to my old account.
Basically: do yourself a favour and sign up to distinct services with distinct accounts and don't have one global account for everything.
I don't think you should blame Amazon for enforcing the MFA that you set up. Allowing you someone to trivially reset the password on an MFA-enabled account would completely defeat the security purpose of MFA. If you've been reading HN for long, I'm sure you've seen stories of how attackers have used famous peoples' personal information to compromise their accounts at various services by requesting password resets. Respecting MFA and requiring a higher bar for password resets is necessary for defending against these attacks. And of course, if you're using both Amazon.com and AWS under one Amazon account (which it sounds like youare), then it would also defeat the security purpose of MFA if you could reset your account password through Amazon.com after setting up an MFA to protect your AWS usage.
I think your conclusion and advice is good. Separate your accounts for different services.
> I've hit an impasse with support, they'll only accept a notarized identity verification form and affidavit to proceed, which isn't that easy or cheap to do outside of the USA.
This should in fact be very cheap most places in the world. Do they not have notaries public in your country?
Generally you just need to sign a legally binding form asserting under penalty of perjury that you are so-and-so, and this is your account. You do this in front of the notary, and they inspect your government ID to confirm it's really you. Then the notary stamps the document to indicate that they've witnessed you signing it, and have inspected your id. Now you're done.
A number of online businesses require this in certain circumstances, and it's something that you can do in about 10 minutes at a store. In the USA, stores like the UPS Store, Kinko's Copies, etc. often have notary services. If you work for a medium-sized company or larger, your company will typically have a notary in its business center who may be willing to notarize personal documents for free. It should be a pretty simple process to complete, if inconvenient.
I've been saying this a lot, and hopefully I don't get downvoted because this is too "political", but...
Essentially, Amazon is no longer a business. It is infrastructure. Every citizen should have the right to complain if something goes wrong. There could be a little office in every bigger city where you pull a number and get to talk to a real human. And if the dispute isn't settled, you should be able to take your case to a real court.
Note I don't want to expropriate anybody. Congratulations Jeff, you won capitalism! Give the man a billion and make him Secretary of Shipment or something. But the whole structure he created has become so important, that it should be subject to the same scrutiny that a wing of government would be (should be)... parliamental control, transparence and accountability, separation of powers, etc..
I don't get this. I got turned off of Amazon a few years ago and have been buying elsewhere. Because Amazon doesn't subsidize buyers with aggressive lowest prices the way they used to you can even find the same or better deals elsewhere.
It's not hard at all to live without Amazon unless you choose to submit to it.
I learned a while back a form of this lesson, which I would state as "never rely on Amazon as a single source of revenue."
My experience was starting a website that showcased interesting/humorous products in the vein of thisiswhyimbroke. After getting a great deal of traffic and getting a fairly substantial number of purchases occurring through my affiliate links, Amazon informed me that they could not approve my account and that I would not be credited for the sales that I referred to them.
I asked for a clear explanation and was not given one, only told to reapply for the program.
I was pissed off but learned a valuable lesson- that Amazon customer service is shit and at any point they can cut the power off to your business if they don't like any minute part of it.
So while I might use affiliate links as a source of revenue again, I'd never rely on Amazon as more than a small percentage of that.
I never do anything business related with our personal Amazon account. I have an LLC with its own bank account and Amazon account for anything business related, and this kind of stuff is why.
In the end all we are is an account number and money provider to Amazon. If they piss off 1000 small vendors or customers it is 0.000001% of their business and thus makes no sense to care. I work for a business where the customer is treated well (not your usual technology company at all, but everyone knows who we are) and it does cost a lot of money and effort to treat each one as important. But we do charge a lot for this and have an enormous count of employees and that makes it much easier to be customer centric. Companies built pure on leveraging technology to make things happen and only profit as a business by ignoring the human element can't or won't or don't (care). We support this type of company because we save money or gain convenience and even to us customers we are willing support them anyway, which tells them what matters.
It's amazing these companies don't have a "buy your way out of trouble" service. I'm sure this guy would be willing to pay a few hundred $ to have a human resolve it.
Perhaps that option would create a new set of complaint about people being extorted out of support fees for problems that weren't their fault.
Let the record show this has 481 points after 5 hours, and it's #36. Meanwhile there are at least three stories on the front page that have far fewer points that were posted further in the past.
I wonder why, I truly do. Admin manipulation? A messed up algorithm?
Stop for a moment, and think what happens when our increasingly-advocated "cashless society" ends up being owned by a few "too big to fail" institutions.
Run afoul of some policy, or mistakenly triggered monitoring, and suddenly you are penniless. Maybe your phone and Internet bills go unpaid, and you are connectionless.
Right now, Google can kill your email (et al.) and Amazon can take away your books. Paypal can freeze online payments and balance.
Who you gonna call, when they take away it all?
Given that this is alread de facto business practice and not about to go away, it's sorely in need of regulation.
"Regulation?! Abomination!!"
Well, how do you think we got regulation in the first place? People getting screwed over by circumstances too big to effectively fight, as individuals.
Yeah, some of it went bad. But baby, bathwater. And with changing technology, we are back to individuals getting screwed by circumstances very difficult or impossible to fight and remedy, as an individual.
This same thing happened to me -- a compliance review and e-mails about closing my account. I hadn't even changed my name, but got requests for my mother's information. Thankfully I wasn't a seller, but it took me over 3 months of constant calling before I could get it resolved. I was constantly handed off in between customer and seller support before I decided to e-mail [email protected]. In the end, I was able to suss out that this is some back department of Amazon that does compliance reviews, has a limited grasp of English, will not take direct phone or chat correspondence, and is only good at constantly asking for government ID and offering no other help.
An executive support representative reached out after I e-mailed Jeff and was able to figure out what was going on since all of the previous reps had no idea and kept passing the buck. I was in fear that I was going to lose my buyer's account, and hadn't sold more than $100 on my seller's account.
A tip for anyone else going through this: no one reachable through regular CS channels knows anything about this issue and everyone will tell you conflicting things. The only way to resolve it is to reach out through executive support. I tried escalating multiple times and people would tell me to not worry about it, then I would get e-mails asking for the info again or saying that my account was closed (it was not).
It is worrying how more and more people are reliant on running a small business tied to a tech giant. It could be selling on Amazon or eBay, driving for Uber, selling apps through Apple or running a website with Google AdSense. All these companies treat their sellers as entirely disposable, and if their algorithms look at you the wrong way you're out.
I am afraid this is more common than it looks like: software glitches (or faulty logic) locks out people who are small fry for amazons and paypals and thus get no customer support -- it is almost certainly not profitable for amazon to spend time to resolve this except to fix bad PR. If an affected person cannot generate enough media attention they are SOL.
Maybe the problem is big enough so a new mechanism makes sense -- something like a well curated (and thus respected) resource that can select and publish "top 10/100" of the most egregious glitches which could shame companies into better behavior.
That, and having a "Plan B" in place -- local backups of cloud content, pre-selected secondary payment option, etc.
[+] [-] unknownsavage|9 years ago|reply
Someone had clicked on her affiliate link, then copy and pasted it onto reddit to share the Amazon product with some people (without knowing it had the affiliate link as ?tag=....). Because reddit is a site you are not allowed to share affiliate links, Amazon suspended the account.
The person who had shared the link was obviously even a legitimate reddit user, and the post was pretty minor only getting a few upvotes (we only found it via a search). But because of this, Amazon suspended over $500 of earnings, and killed a site that took many months to build and establish. And now my wife is now on a "refuse to respond" to list for trying to contact them multiple times to get someone who can apply a little bit of reason to the situation.
I think in hindsight we made the mistake of not trying to publicize the issue and Amazon could just ignore it. So here's an upvote for the OP
[+] [-] dandare|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ominous|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] captainmuon|9 years ago|reply
There probably goes my passive income idea: Make blogs where I present merchandizing for fandoms and other niches, and promote the blogs on Reddit. :-) I wonder if the indirection makes it "legal".
[+] [-] ceejayoz|9 years ago|reply
Wait, really? I see "buy this poster" affiliate links on Reddit ads all the time.
[+] [-] legohead|9 years ago|reply
Is this a recent change, in the last year or so?
[+] [-] dalore|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] serge2k|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ideonexus|9 years ago|reply
My mortgage was sold to a new company that had a weird computer-directed policy that rejected my home owner's insurance. They then flagged me as not having insurance and charged me over $1,000 for providing insurance. I spent hours on the phone speaking with people in India who absolutely would not send my proof of insurance up the chain of command. It wasn't until I was able to find the CEO of the mortgage company and contact her directly to explain my situation that it was finally resolved... for six months when the automated system rejected my home owners insurance again. I eventually had to refinance the home to get out from under this soulless company's grip.
Institutions like the Better Business Bureau used to protect consumers from this kind of abuse, but the complaints I have registered with them have achieved nothing. If I was poor, this situation would have financially ruined me. I would have missed mortgage payments, my home would have been foreclosed on, and my credit would have been ruined for years.
I highly recommend the science fiction film "Brazil" to anyone who wants to see the dystopia this kind of automated rules-enforcement could create. "Brazil" is the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four" but the totalitarian government rules with a system of overwhelming bureaucracy. The problem here is that it is the Capitalists who are the oppressors.
[+] [-] ssharp|9 years ago|reply
I guess the side benefit of today's age is that it's not too difficult to find people high up in the company to contact. I usually do these things to resolve issues that can't be resolved through support systems:
1) Search LinkedIn for higher ups in the company who could help
2) Search Google to try and find the email format the company uses for it's company email... e.g. [email protected] or [email protected]
3) Write a clear and concise account of the problem and either include every executive you find or BCC them all
I had an issue with Babies R Us where they shipped me a piece of furniture that was destroyed at some point in the logistics process. I contacted support about it and they kept wanting to charge me return shipping fees and told me to take it to a B&M store to avoid that. So I took it to a local store and they said they couldn't process the return but would ship the item back for me and that I needed to contact the phone support to update them on the situation. I did that and phone support had no ability to sort things out with the store. At that point it had been nearly two weeks and I was charged the money but no longer had the item, as I had left it at the store. I began the charge back process but executed my tactics above and got multiple executive responses by the end of the day.
I've done this with multiple companies in the past and it has ALWAYS worked. It sucks that this is what you have to do but at least it's an option.
[+] [-] bsandert|9 years ago|reply
The infrastructure of connected things [..] imposes norms on citizens. Not in the form of written laws: the norms are hidden in the design of things. Citizens can’t protest the new laws, or change them, because they do not know them. And because decisions are made automatically, the laws can’t even be violated [..]
[0]: https://youtu.be/qIVTKBeiabI (skip to 2:30 to get to the meat directly)
[+] [-] ebbv|9 years ago|reply
The only thing that will do you any good against a company like that is hiring a lawyer and it sounds like you should have done that in the first month.
[+] [-] codegeek|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geuis|9 years ago|reply
Glad you mentioned Brazil. Was thinking the same thing as I was reading the first part of your comment.
[+] [-] awful|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josh_fyi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] near|9 years ago|reply
But this is the world we are headed toward with people continuing to stake their entire livelihoods on services with almost non-existent customer service. Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it.
If they won't give you a phone number that rings through to an actual human being promptly, you shouldn't allow yourself to become dependent upon said service continuing to work. Let alone base your entire income and the incomes of employees under you on it. That's just incredibly irresponsible.
[+] [-] SwellJoe|9 years ago|reply
What I want is an issue tracker that has responsive, accountable, people on the other end. That's my ideal support experience. Phones are the worst case scenario.
[+] [-] SN76477|9 years ago|reply
Telling paypal that a mistake had been made and it was their fault they didnt really know what to do. I got passed around 12 times over a few dollars. They basically didnt know how to handle a unique situation. I have similar experience with my bank.
Customer service teams are homoginized to only deal with volume, they are never trained on how to solve problems.
These automation issues just let that same system float to the top.
[+] [-] callinyouin|9 years ago|reply
While the point you're making is certainly valid and most of these big companies we've come to rely on have next to zero customer service, I just wanted to say that in the case of PayPal I recently had to resolve an issue with a purchase (with Musician's Friend, who I will never, EVER do business with again, but that's another story) and their customer service was actually pretty decent. Granted, I had to make a couple phone calls to them before I got a "good" agent that was able/willing to resolve my issue, but I'd take that experience over calling the likes of AT&T or Comcast any day.
[+] [-] Pigo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|9 years ago|reply
You mean the companies a lot of us here work for and should be able to have some influence over but ... don't because they let us play with "Oooooh shiny!" and because we'll be moved on to the next place in a year and a half? Those companies?
We are part of the problem, too.
[+] [-] amirmc|9 years ago|reply
This is easy to say but can be difficult in practice. Even if they did provide a phone number, there's still no guarantee.
Any business is going to have to depend on multiple individual providers, any one of whom could inadvertently shut you down. Your bank, your energy supplier, etc. Trying to mitigate for such scenarios is near impossible as a small business. It's worth remembering the flip side of the current story. This individual was able to sustain their family and two employees from this business. That's impressive. That an innocuous change on one device can have such a negative impact, with no warning, is a heinous oversight on Amazon's part.
[+] [-] scottydelta|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikeboy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gthtjtkt|9 years ago|reply
Amazon does have a seller support line. So what do you want people to do? Google "Selling on Amazon sucks" and then base their life on the opinion of some random strangers on the internet? What about the 99.9% of people who sell on Amazon and have positive experiences but don't bother to write about it? If we held other employers to the same standard using GlassDoor reviews, half the country would have nowhere to work.
"Honey, I could be making thousands of dollars a month selling this product I created on Amazon, but I'm going to take a part-time job instead because Joe Schmoe said Amazon has poor service. I'm sure little Timmy won't mind going hungry as long as he knows I did the responsible thing according to byuu."
[+] [-] setq|9 years ago|reply
Then about two weeks later I got an email saying that I was going to be charged £31 for the replacement. Contacted Amazon again and was told that it was policy to take a payment for it and they wouldn't budge. They also had no record of agreement before either.
I lost my shit. Another 45 minutes later, eventually I have a resolution, I think. I'll only know when they take or do not take the money.
Three lessons from the above and the original post:
1. Get everything in writing. Use Amazon's chat facility when you contact them and make sure you get a transcript emailed to you.
2. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. I wouldn't trust them to solely run my infrastructure or my business fulfillment. You don't really matter in the scale of things so they can afford to do a shitty job sometimes.
3. Cheap isn't necessarily a good deal. I'd genuinely rather pay more these days for something and get it from Argos here in the UK. Or bytemark etc.
[+] [-] amyboyd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkrich|9 years ago|reply
Can't agree with this more and I learn that it's truer and truer the more interactions I have with Amazon.
I recently purchased a pair of boots on Amazon that were marketed as authentic and selling for half the cost of the originals, and they were listed as "shipped from and sold by Amazon" so I figured they must be real. The thing is that I own the authentic pair, so was able to compare when they arrived and the Amazon pair was obviously fake.
I no longer have any faith whatsoever in the authenticity or quality control of Amazon's products and wouldn't trust them for any major purchases, and never for clothing or anything that is relatively easy to imitate.
I'm quite sure that they are getting away with straight up copyright and trademark infringement hundreds of thousands of times a day, just because nobody can afford to challenge them.
[+] [-] discreditable|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CPLX|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] witty_username|9 years ago|reply
I did not know that that is not possible.
[+] [-] freddyc|9 years ago|reply
As a side note, it's frustrating how email [email protected] is fast becoming the only way to get real customer service. I'm a T-Mobile customer and recently had a billing issue that required me to interact with their customer support who were thoroughly unhelpful and just added to the frustration. I had heard about the tactic of emailing John Legere so I did, and sure enough the issue was sorted out promptly by a US-based exec response rep. I was happy to get everything sorted, but the fact that customer service reps apparently didn't have the power to fix a relatively straight-forward issue still frustrates me.
[+] [-] ikeboy|9 years ago|reply
I sent an email to [email protected] with a summary of the issue. It took a day or two for my US account to be fixed, and about a week for the other accounts to start working. I don't know whether the email helped or whether it would have been verified eventually anyway.
The process is definitely broken, though. Even one day lockout could be catastrophic for a larger seller.
[+] [-] ransom1538|9 years ago|reply
I imagine these destroy a livelihood around the globe every 60 seconds:
"I lost my Adsense account because someone in India clicked on my ad?"
"I lost my Amazon merchant account because of my 'suspicious' credit card?"
"Uber suspended me after someone threw up in my car?"
"Why am I suspended? I sent the package?"
[+] [-] robotmay|9 years ago|reply
In my case, I had something like a 50% failure rate of Prime delivery orders. It was at the point that every time I'd buy something with a delivery date of tomorrow, I'd get it 3 days later after it was dispatched from Germany instead. The drivers who did turn up have now been banned from delivering to our apartment block, as they would ditch all the parcels outside or with security instead of delivering them. Standard customer support wouldn't refund my Prime subscription because I had apparently used it 66 times in 3 months, which must mean that they must count MP3 plays as uses, as I only ordered 12 parcels in that time. Thankfully I did eventually get hold of someone who took the time to check and see that I've been buying from Amazon since they launched in the UK, and had been a Prime member since that launched too, and she promptly refunded me the membership. It took far, far too many managers to get to that point, however.
The general customer service seems to have deteriorated in the past year. Prior to that I always had great customer service from Amazon. I've now largely switched away to ordering from elsewhere. eBuyer gets me my parcels within a day on free shipping, and they're pretty competitive on price. I always ordered from Amazon because the CS was good, but they've lost me as a customer for now.
[+] [-] peeky|9 years ago|reply
At this point I'm snookered - I feel like if my password is ever compromised I'm screwed, but it's not like I can just start a new account because all my digital purchases, my Kindle, my Echo, etc are tied to my old account.
Basically: do yourself a favour and sign up to distinct services with distinct accounts and don't have one global account for everything.
[+] [-] Pyxl101|9 years ago|reply
I think your conclusion and advice is good. Separate your accounts for different services.
> I've hit an impasse with support, they'll only accept a notarized identity verification form and affidavit to proceed, which isn't that easy or cheap to do outside of the USA.
This should in fact be very cheap most places in the world. Do they not have notaries public in your country?
Generally you just need to sign a legally binding form asserting under penalty of perjury that you are so-and-so, and this is your account. You do this in front of the notary, and they inspect your government ID to confirm it's really you. Then the notary stamps the document to indicate that they've witnessed you signing it, and have inspected your id. Now you're done.
A number of online businesses require this in certain circumstances, and it's something that you can do in about 10 minutes at a store. In the USA, stores like the UPS Store, Kinko's Copies, etc. often have notary services. If you work for a medium-sized company or larger, your company will typically have a notary in its business center who may be willing to notarize personal documents for free. It should be a pretty simple process to complete, if inconvenient.
[+] [-] captainmuon|9 years ago|reply
Essentially, Amazon is no longer a business. It is infrastructure. Every citizen should have the right to complain if something goes wrong. There could be a little office in every bigger city where you pull a number and get to talk to a real human. And if the dispute isn't settled, you should be able to take your case to a real court.
Note I don't want to expropriate anybody. Congratulations Jeff, you won capitalism! Give the man a billion and make him Secretary of Shipment or something. But the whole structure he created has become so important, that it should be subject to the same scrutiny that a wing of government would be (should be)... parliamental control, transparence and accountability, separation of powers, etc..
[+] [-] gdulli|9 years ago|reply
It's not hard at all to live without Amazon unless you choose to submit to it.
[+] [-] dkrich|9 years ago|reply
My experience was starting a website that showcased interesting/humorous products in the vein of thisiswhyimbroke. After getting a great deal of traffic and getting a fairly substantial number of purchases occurring through my affiliate links, Amazon informed me that they could not approve my account and that I would not be credited for the sales that I referred to them.
I asked for a clear explanation and was not given one, only told to reapply for the program.
I was pissed off but learned a valuable lesson- that Amazon customer service is shit and at any point they can cut the power off to your business if they don't like any minute part of it.
So while I might use affiliate links as a source of revenue again, I'd never rely on Amazon as more than a small percentage of that.
[+] [-] jonstokes|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hondor|9 years ago|reply
Perhaps that option would create a new set of complaint about people being extorted out of support fees for problems that weren't their fault.
[+] [-] unethical_ban|9 years ago|reply
I wonder why, I truly do. Admin manipulation? A messed up algorithm?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120872 256 after 10h
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120794 167 after 10h
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120301 143 after 13h
[+] [-] pasbesoin|9 years ago|reply
Run afoul of some policy, or mistakenly triggered monitoring, and suddenly you are penniless. Maybe your phone and Internet bills go unpaid, and you are connectionless.
Right now, Google can kill your email (et al.) and Amazon can take away your books. Paypal can freeze online payments and balance.
Who you gonna call, when they take away it all?
Given that this is alread de facto business practice and not about to go away, it's sorely in need of regulation.
"Regulation?! Abomination!!"
Well, how do you think we got regulation in the first place? People getting screwed over by circumstances too big to effectively fight, as individuals.
Yeah, some of it went bad. But baby, bathwater. And with changing technology, we are back to individuals getting screwed by circumstances very difficult or impossible to fight and remedy, as an individual.
The long-term effect of crap customer support.
[+] [-] registered99|9 years ago|reply
An executive support representative reached out after I e-mailed Jeff and was able to figure out what was going on since all of the previous reps had no idea and kept passing the buck. I was in fear that I was going to lose my buyer's account, and hadn't sold more than $100 on my seller's account.
A tip for anyone else going through this: no one reachable through regular CS channels knows anything about this issue and everyone will tell you conflicting things. The only way to resolve it is to reach out through executive support. I tried escalating multiple times and people would tell me to not worry about it, then I would get e-mails asking for the info again or saying that my account was closed (it was not).
[+] [-] TorKlingberg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phereford|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11360482
If your livelihood is solely invested in a singular vendor, then you absolutely need to find a contact on the inside :/.
I hope he gets it resolved.
[+] [-] ptero|9 years ago|reply
Maybe the problem is big enough so a new mechanism makes sense -- something like a well curated (and thus respected) resource that can select and publish "top 10/100" of the most egregious glitches which could shame companies into better behavior.
That, and having a "Plan B" in place -- local backups of cloud content, pre-selected secondary payment option, etc.