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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

> I've also had tons of problems with Amazon deliveries since they switched to their own logistics company. In comparison, Walmart is looking better and better by the day.

Complain. Call Amazon customer service and let them know what you think. This benefits you in the short term (they'll pay you for your trouble) and the long term (enough complaints, even Amazon will respond).

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I ordered an air conditioner right before a big heat wave where I live last summer. I also subscribed to Prime at the same time to get the free shipping, because I figured why not. Here's why not: when they completely dropped the ball and never gave the air conditioner I ordered to the shipping company, their bright idea to make up for it was to give me a free month of Prime. Hooray.

Honestly, do you believe your complaints will get passed the call center worker in Banglore who doesn't even understand the problem up to someone who can do something other than give you a free movie rental to shut you up?

Hint: the answer is no.

Do you honestly believe that complaints are not classified and plugged into some sort of analytics system at the absolute minimum? I could never imagine that any company with half a clue would not be trying to quantify their support requests in some way.

Amazon doesn't seem to have a clue. My experience with Amazon as a third party seller is they run their operation like a trainwreck. I'll give you just one example. Once I shipped a box of commingled items to Amazon's wearhouse. It was received, checked in, and I sold all my inventory quickly. A month later I started randomly selling more inventory without restocking. How could this be? I ran though my reports and figured it out. My inventory was checked in a second time. Amazon didn't even have a database constraint to prevent that. They gladly sold all my "inventory" a second time and paid me for it. It's been two years, nobody has noticed.

Heres another example(s):

http://www.orensmoneysaver.com/2016/03/amazon-and-mysterious...

>I sent in 14 [items]. 14 were received, 1 was lost and 1 was found. How many should have? 14. How many does Amazon say I should have? 11. How many units do I actually have? 9.

I stopped selling expensive items on Amazon. Every single time I listed one I got 10+ messages a day from scammers. I reported all of them to Amazon but their report button seems to go to /dev/null. They just don't care enough to filter out the obvious scammers. I then got my seller account dinged for marking too many messages "no response needed." So I got dinged for not replying to scammers.

Here's another take on some of the unresolved problems with scammers on Amazon and why it's not taking action

https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2017/01/12/why-amaz...

Hey, the way Amazon treats third-party sellers is a topic I've reported on a bit. [1] I'd love to talk to you about your experiences! My email is smann@inc.com — please get in touch if you're interested. Our discussion can be off-the-record if that's what you're comfortable with.

[1] https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-counterfeits-no-starch... and https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/amazon-fraud-scam-sellers.htm...

What the sister reply said: analytics. Amazon is madly driven by them.

This was true for amazon years ago but these days just just say too bad. And maybe if you're lucky they'll give you more prime. I wouldn't consider that paying me for my trouble.

Anecdote supporting this:

When they used DHL in the US, I complained about how bad DHL was for a few reasons. I was told that they would log my complaint, but there was nothing they would do until enough complaints had been logged.

A few months later, Amazon no longer used DHL. (At least in my area.)

So it does matter if you complain about their systems.

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