Amazon is the most amazing company I've ever dealt with.
Once, I've had a package stolen from my doorstep, and they replaced it free of charge (fortunately it was just $5 guitar strings).
Last year, I bought a camera with a 18-35mm lens ($500) a week or so before leaving for vacation. It arrives 2 days later (thanks prime), but unfortunately Amazon Warehouse had shipped me the bundle with a 15mm lens. I contact their support right away— they propose that I return the camera and they send me the original 18-35mm bundle, but I tell the lady that I'm leaving in 3 days and would like to have the camera for my vacation. She talks with her supervisor, and 2 days later I get the 18-35mm lens in the mail (~$200 value) and they tell me I can keep the 15mm lens.
I spend a couple of hundred dollars at Amazon each month (research books are expensive), which is probably why I got such a great treatment— but I was pretty blown away.
I had a similar experience, except it was a MacBook Air stolen from my doorstep. They overnighted a replacement immediately with no questions asked (other than, "did you check with your neighbors?")
Your point about the service level relating to your customer history is a good one, though - I've spent upwards of $50,000 with Amazon in the last 3 or 4 years, so the real test would be how they'd react to a new customer in the same situation.
Packages are insured so, unless they suspect fraud, they will let insurance cover it.
Consumers usually pay FedEx for insurance when we need a package but I bet Amazon self insures, given their size. Either way, money is set aside to cover situations like this.
I know insurance covers it; I'm wondering how they determine what situations are likely to be fraudulent. Is customer history involved? My parents have never ordered from Amazon; if the same thing happens to them on their first purchase, what would the resolution be?
They probably give users the benefit of the doubt the first time, then flag them if they do it too much. At the scale of amazon, the cost of a product is less then the cost of the time to chase up every single report of theft.
Shipping packages is actually pretty environmentally friendly. The alternative would have been to drive a 2000 lb vehicle a couple of miles to pick up a 1 lb garment bag, making 0.05% of the total weight the payload. The other 99.95% of the fuel is going towards moving deadweight back and forth.
Shipping usually aims to hit anywhere from 10 - 90% payload, greatly increasing the efficiency by which carbon is used.
I did some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations a while back that showed driving to the grocery store used roughly as much carbon as shipping everything you were buying from New Zealand.
Of course what's even more efficient is shipping to a network of distribution centers which are in walking distance for most people, reachable by mass transit by others and reachable during trips that would have happened anyway for the rest.
You assume that waking productive human time (spent walking to/from the distribution center, or waiting for mass transit connections) is worth absolutely nothing.
really? aren't most trips to a store to buy multiple items? a drive to a nearby store is as bad as shipping the product from amazon's warehouse to your address?
also, packaging. both the process and the materials.
yes, but obviously that's not the comparison. shipping services have much longer distances to travel, they have the overhead of the entire system (trucks or planes for the long haul, trucks driving to your delivery address and from the pickup address, the associated costs of all the time spent by all the people involved) to overcome. i'm not sure who exactly wins in the end without real numbers.
and again, packaging should not be underestimated either.
Your goods come from somewhere regardless, and whether they are delivered to a store or to your home they have to travel that distance just the same. But with delivery trucks the miles driven by the trucks are amortized over all of the deliveries made.
No offense taken. Your point is fair. I do think this should be a calculated cost of business for Amazon, and I would buy less on Amazon if I didn't have the convenience that's offered to me by occasionally ordering similar items and expecting to most likely return one without a hassle.
That being said, I honestly didn't think all that much of the broader economic and environmental impact of my consumer behavior in this case and appreciate the comments reminding me of it. Thanks.
Serving the customer does not equal a customer service issue.
Amazon and most online retailers (at least the good ones) fully realize that they're going to have high return rates and account for customers doing exactly what Jason did (my wife does it regularly). This is a cost of doing business. You're competing against brick and mortar stores where people can go in and touch and see the actual product before they walk out with it. Would Amazon prefer it didn't happen? Sure, but Macy's and Barnes and Noble would prefer not to have to pay rent and hire retail employees too.
To be fair, you could easily see this as one of Amazon's "features", much like Zappos. Everyone orders from Zappos knowing that they can not only return shoes for free, but that it is usually encouraged to buy several and return the ones you don't want.
While Amazon isn't quite so blatant about that "feature", their incredibly awesome customer support, zero-hassle returns encourage this kind of behavior...effectively making it a feature.
I often wonder if Amazon's acquisitions of Zappos and Quidsi (Diapers.com, Soap.com, etc.) are simply to experiment with different "features" without risking changes to Amazon.com.
He's likely the customer they want after all. There must be some delicate balance between "buys 2 bags and returns one" and "buys zero bags because returns are a pita".
Not just environmentally but also the small cost that you are passing on to everyone else that buys from Amazon by making them handle the return. If everyone shopped at Amazon this way, they wouldn't be able to sell their goods as cheaply as they do.
Please consider using a brick and mortar store to physically compare products first. Amazon has a nice mobile app that lets you purchase an item very quickly by just scanning the barcode (using the mobile's camera).
Obviously not a big deal as a one-off, but if this is a consistent shopping habit I would really hope you reconsider it.
How about if you use "a brick and mortar store to physically compare products first", you buy the item in the brick and mortar store. They already shipped the item, so you are not hurting the environment further by wasting energy getting another one to you. If everyone shopped at "brick and mortar stores" this way, they would close. People in your community would be fired, and you wouldn't be able to compare products personally.
Obviously not a big deal as a one-off, but if this is a consistent shopping habit I would really hope you reconsider it.
I don't actually shop that way, I take my chances based on Amazon ratings (not a hard thing as I buy mostly electronics and media). My only direct concern is that he keeps Amazon prices low for my own benefit.
I don't really see the point in artificially trying to keep business models afloat that can't compete. If anything, it's harmful to the free market. It might warm your heart a bit, but the overall benefit to society is to cast your vote (your $) for the most efficient business method.
If you use Amazon exclusively then no problem, all is good.
My only concern was that the advice artificially keeps a business model afloat (Amazon) that relies on the existence of brick-and-mortor stores. Its like people using the local hardware store for advice then buying all the parts at Wal-Mart.
What's hurting the brick and mortar store is not the "going in to compare items" part, but rather it's the "buying on Amazon instead of from the local store" part. You may as well say, "If everyone bought online instead of at the store the stores would close."
That might be true, but it might not. If he wasn't able to shop this way, he may have bought 0 bags from Amazon. Amazon would then stock and move fewer bags, reducing their volume discount and driving up the warehousing price for that SKU.
Your advice might actually raise the cost of that item. (Return) Shipping is but one variable in the huge equation that is an Amazon sale. Only Amazon knows for sure.
the small cost that you are passing on to everyone else that buys from Amazon by making them handle the return.
That's not really how pricing works. A retailer sets the price that maximizes their revenue, not based on their costs. If jason_shah stopped doing that it'd probably just mean a (very small) increase in their profit margin.
If everyone shopped at Amazon this way, they wouldn't be able to sell their goods as cheaply as they do.
That wouldn't be very smart off them. I think it's more probable that they would just limit the conditions of returns.
That's not really how pricing works. A retailer sets the price that maximizes their revenue, not based on their costs. If jason_shah stopped doing that it'd probably just mean a (very small) increase in their profit margin.
How do their operating costs not factor into their revenue? Are you saying that when gas prices go up, retailers just absorb the extra shipping costs and don't pass it on to consumers? I was always taught that's not the case. Genuinely curious as I only took ECON101.
Often they don't, 'though gas prices are a special case since they affect every retailer, and their margins are often razor thin as they are.
But consider Kindle vs paperback prices on Amazon for the same book. If costs were the most important thing in setting prices, the former would never be more expensive than the latter; but we see it often is, because demand sets the price, not cost.
However browsing items for a particular category on their site is not so easy.
When you go to a specific item, you should be able to see what categories it's stored in, and then browse those categories directly (like breadcrumbs). But that's impossible on Amazon.
They seem to have the ability though - if you pick a part that is not for your particular car, it will show you what categories it's in. They should make that option for all items.
All the retailers I've worked with (both brick & mortar and internet-only) see returns as a small cost of doing business. An easy returns process makes customers happy and keeps down credit card chargebacks. If you are selling on the internet, handling a small percentage of returns is considerably cheaper than having a retail presence.
You can look at Zappos (now owned by Amazon) for having an amazing liberal return policy. you have 365 days to return things and they pay for the return shipping. It's all to give you a safe feeling and buy multiple items.
In most cases large retailers force their vendors to cover the costs of returned merchandise that they can't resell (due to opened packaging etc).
One of the main reasons I'll buy from Amazon is that the transaction carries zero risk for me. If there is any problem whatsoever I know it's going to be resolved to my benefit.
> In most cases large retailers force their vendors to cover the costs of returned merchandise that they can't resell (due to opened packaging etc).
Yes, and this can increase costs to the consumer. Cost is cost. It has to be born by someone in the chain and it's pushed on to the consumer if possible (granted in the competitive retail space it's harder to make consumers absorb costs).
It's a pretty powerful consumer right - I'm guessing one reason it doesn't get abused is that the process of returning items has a small cost involved, even if that's just walking to the post office or waiting for a courier to pick a package up.
Amazon really blows me away with their end-to-end experience. The funny thing is that their site's UX leaves much to be desired, but it's highly functional and they still have a world-class brand even without a world-class frontend for Amazon.com. We obsess over our web app's front-end design, but often neglect the end-to-end experience.
Their site's UX is amazing. The aesthetic design could use some work, but the actual interaction and interface design on amazon is pretty great.
Their goal isn't to look pretty, it's to sell stuff. There have been many times when i've been looking at something on amazon, clicked the one-click purchase button, and then hours later realized i wasn't really sure i wanted to buy it, Amazon just makes it far too easy to give them my money.
Compare their site to Newegg for purchasing computer hardware. Newegg's filtering system blows Amazon's away, making it possible to easily find what you are looking for.
Amazon likes to give me similar hardware when I search for a part, cluttering up the results with things I don't want. If I search for a 7850 GPU, I don't want results for a 6950, 7950, 6870, 7770, 7870, Intel 3570K CPU, GTX 670, Intel 2500K CPU, GTX 480, 6850, GTX 560 Ti, and GTX 560. That was all just on the first page of search results.
Granted, you do want similar products in other cases, but the same kind of failure applies elsewhere.
Another annoying thing is the duplicate items as separate listings. Sometimes I will go and look for something like a Water Filter replacement and find 3 or 4 different listings for the product with multiple sellers under each.
Using Amazon to find a specific product is an unpleasant experience. Thankfully once you find the product you are looking for everything else is great.
Could you elaborate on how you think their site's experience leaves much to be desired despite being highly functional? I'm having trouble thinking of any time when I thought to myself "boy, I hate the process Amazon makes me take to do this task" and isn't that really what it's all about?
The main area I have complaint with is the discovery process for finding digital videos to watch. Once you've used something like Netflix, the Amazon process is awful.
Oh, good point, this is definitely true. I have Prime, but Netflix is so much easier to find stuff on (or even remember that there's stuff there to find) that I've never used any of the included free Amazon video stuff.
I buy a fair bit of stuff from Amazon, but it's hard for me to spend more than 10 minutes on the site without wanting to punch the monitor. Now, don't get me wrong. I love the attention to detail in every other part of their business. It's just their website (and similar things, like the abysmal Amazon MP3 app for Android) that are the problem.
I hate that I need to log in 3 times within the space of 5 minutes as I hit different parts of the site that apparently are considered more and more sensitive.
I hate the way they keep on misleadingly suggesting that items might be eligible for free shipping when they aren't (every possible signal from the user profile to ip geo-location should be indicating that I'm the wrong country for that).
I despise the way they keep on defaulting me back to paying in the wrong currency with their rip-off "amazon currency converter" with worse exchange rates than my credit card.
I can't believe that in this day and age they aren't able to synchronize anything except the most rudimentary profile data across their different domains. So the US site will keep on recommending a DVD I've already bought off the UK site, and the UK one will nag me about rating a book that I've already rated on the US one.
That's just a few things off the top off my head, not some long held grudge list.
It's difficult to comparison-shop for features; Amazon reviews are now the definitive source of consumer opinion, but you have to sort of agglomerate your own set of W-X, X-Y, Y-Z and X-Z comparisons to see why people chose one over the other (and account for the fact that all four of those reviews were on models that have since been replaced).
That's true in many ways. The actual site's UX isn't bad per se because it's pretty easy to find what you want, buy it, manage the order, etc. And yes, that's what "it's all about" at the end of the day.
I think I was caught in a little bit of Silicon Valley myopic thinking since their site isn't shiny and that's what is mistakenly considered as interchangeable with good UI design these days. That being said, Amazon.com the site does still need to improve UX in a couple key areas. Compared to more contemporary e-commerce sites, the ability to compare items and make sense of ratings (i.e. the flaws of the 5 star rating system) is where they need to make the most improvement IMHO.
It may have been an overstatement to say "their site leaves much to be desired" in all fairness.
It seems like there are easy improvements to search by ratings they could make. If I am browsing for a new book, I'd like to be able to search by number of reviews alone. Anything with more than 500 or so reviews is probably worth taking a look at. I also would like to filter out items with less than 'x' reviews or search by a ratio of number of reviews to the number of stars. This might hurt products trying to get off the ground, but I'd really like it as a user.
Amazon is fabulous, but that sort of real-time return policy workflow is for relatively low-mass & low-expense items from high-volume retailers.
Try returning custom car parts or, really, anything close to $1k USD which essentially mandates shipping insurance.
That said, I love-love the instant UPS-label "pick-up at your office or home" return workflow for the majority of stuff I buy from them.
The item is here in two days (Primed) and if I need the rare return, it's, at most, about 5 minutes worth of my time & attention. It's such a total win over the typical retail process for non-bespoke items.
Amazon has a great returns policy, and good, fast customer service.
Amazon lacks in the following areas (covered in another post):
1. The price filter doesn't really work.
2. Sorting doesn't work unless you choose a category (many items are miscategorised or match multiple categories)
3. Backwards shipping policy "What the heck, let's order it for tomorrow" on an ordered item often doesn't work because it's too late.
4. The ratings system gives too much weight to lightly-reviewed items.
5. Often the dispatch date for an order is shown on the checkout page, the expected delivery date would be better. Amazon AA batteries? 5 week delivery. Ouch.
Once I bought the most expensive Vita bundle on Amazon and a day before shipping they included some free stuff with the cheaper bundle (I think it was a Sony decision because other stores did the same). I sent a email to them simply asking why this was the case and they sent me $50 credit with no questions asked.
Not to derail all these comments about Amazon, but I think Jason's reminder that UX is just a subset of overall "CX" or customer experience is a good one. I spend a bunch of time reminding folks that they can't just look at one page, or one set of functionality in a vacuum, but instead need to see the cohesive whole, from the first ad a person sees to the quality of some autogenerated confirm message. It all counts. Functionality and design, btw, can be awesome, but if it's wrapped around a defective business process, you will still suffer. Making users jump through hoops, even hoops of diamonds and gold with ergonomic handles, can still suck.
Returning goods bought by mail order or online is the most basic service sellers have to implement. Refund if the product is not open and is returned at most seven days after purchase is guaranteed by law. If it is open a reason such as "does not fit" should be enough to be refunded.
Or is it the fact that the customer was refunded before amazon received the parcel? I am not impressed as my bank account is debited once a month, which means I usually still have my money when I send an item back to the seller!
It was already like that when I was buying things (especially clothing) through mail order twenty years ago. Or is it only in my country?
It's amazing that actually nobody noticed, including the author, the real problem which are vague descriptions of delivery dates, especially for international shippments. This made him to order two different items at the same time as he had no option to either evaluate shippment time in a more precise way or make a conditional FIFO-driven order. And this is the actual flaw in Amazon UX.
Or try think this way - your doorstep is part of Amazon's storefront.
Even though you have to make a deposite and wait much longer than real retails before perusing the goods at hand, you think they have great customer service.
Genuinely interesting, with no sarcasm.
I wish Jeff Bezos quit being such a dictating dick when it came to the home page. I mean seriously, I fucking love amazon, why the hell is it so fucking unintuitive and feel like a time traveling 95 site.
Once, I've had a package stolen from my doorstep, and they replaced it free of charge (fortunately it was just $5 guitar strings).
Last year, I bought a camera with a 18-35mm lens ($500) a week or so before leaving for vacation. It arrives 2 days later (thanks prime), but unfortunately Amazon Warehouse had shipped me the bundle with a 15mm lens. I contact their support right away— they propose that I return the camera and they send me the original 18-35mm bundle, but I tell the lady that I'm leaving in 3 days and would like to have the camera for my vacation. She talks with her supervisor, and 2 days later I get the 18-35mm lens in the mail (~$200 value) and they tell me I can keep the 15mm lens.
I spend a couple of hundred dollars at Amazon each month (research books are expensive), which is probably why I got such a great treatment— but I was pretty blown away.