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.