Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Amazon Shipping Charges (Updated)

I buy a lot of stuff from Amazon since it's convenient and sometimes you save a few dollars. When I had problems with the SSD drive install, I ordered a data transfer kit that cost ~$20. Since you get free shipping for orders over $25, I added a cheapo Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad that cost only ~$16. Anyway, when I successfully cloned my boot SSD, I didn't need the cable/software so I tried to cancel my Amazon order.

Well, Amazon came back and said they were able to cancel the data transfer kit but was unable to do anything about the Bluetooth keyboard. Since the order is now only $16, they added back a $8.50 shipping charge. The BT keyboard only weighs ~1/2 pound so the charge seemed ridiculously high, and I would never have ordered it if it would cost me ~$25. I think if Amazon was unable to cancel the entire order, they should have let me choose between continuing with the original order, or approved the revised order with the crazy high shipping charge. In this case, I probably would have kept the original order since I may need the USB-SATA cable in the future. Also, I don't know their order fulfillment process but not sure why they couldn't cancel an order that didn't ship until three days later. Lame.

Anyway, I wrote a short email message to Amazon to see what they would do for me. I probably ordered a couple thousand dollars of stuff from them in the past six months (my Sony a55 kit was >$1000) but not sure if that makes me a customer they want to keep.

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Wow, Amazon replied within 25 minutes and credited the shipping charges. I sent the email at 4:30am so they must have CSRs in India or something.

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