Long story short: I purchased a set of books (for a birthday gift) two weeks ago from Amazon and it was never delivered by the estimated delivery date. Naturally, I called DHL, the shipping company responsible, to track my package. On this call, I learned that my package had to be sent back to Amazon due to ‘incomplete delivery information’. This happened despite the fact that I’ve absolutely and positively entered my shipping address correctly with no mistakes at Amazon’s check-out. I had Amazon contact DHL directly to find out exactly what had happened only to learn that the characters in Amazon’s address field did not translate properly to DHL’s system, resulting in ‘incomplete delivery information’ that led to my package having to be sent back to Amazon.
The million dollar question: How is this my problem?
It isn’t my problem and yet I’ve fallen victim to the situation and Amazon did absolutely nothing to remedy it. The only two options provided were:
(1) To refund the order and be out of a birthday gift that I needed by Saturday
(2) To refund the order and re-purchase a new set of books at a higher price because we could not locate the same set of books for the same price as my initial purchase. They could not price match, could not offer to incur shipping costs, could not offer expedited shipping to meet my deadline, and basically could not offer a single accommodating ‘We’re-really-sorry-for-this-and-here’s-what-we’ll-do’ solution to help improve the customer experience. A straight replacement of my original order was not feasible for reasons I really don’t understand and can’t even begin to explain even if I tried.
And that’s the last time I’ll ever shop at Amazon. And of course, I’ve taken the time to share my negative experience on my little platform on the web. I ended up purchasing the books from Barnes & Noble and paid $20 less than my initial purchase at Amazon.
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Moving on – these are the colourful hippie houses and shops at Kensington Market in Toronto.
