High-value Amazon orders 'switched for cat food', say customers

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan...shire-64874963

Sort of thing that you used to hear happening on Ebay.

On the one hand, I'm sure a few people will be genuinely upset... perhaps not entirely "devastated", but certainly jolly narked.

On the other hand, people can be utter drama queens, these days. I recall reading about someone who'd been deliberately tripped over by someone else in a busy shopping centre and suffered a nasty, messy wound. According to one eyewitness, there were people crying and screaming everywhere, while another described the scene as "like a warzone"...

But on the third hand, despite Amazon-loving protestations by certain people, I maintain my assertion that being faffed over by faceless corporations is to be expected when you allow them to get as powerful as they now are, and that the 'Care Experience' one customer enjoys comes at the expense of both other customers, and through the enforced demise of smaller businesses... Corporatocracy and corporate capitalism are supposed to be the domain of fiction novels and CDPR's computer games!!

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Originally Posted by Ice Tea

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-englan...shire-64874963

Sort of thing that you used to hear happening on Ebay.

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Read the article though and a lot of it seems to be international private sellers through Amazon. ["I thought I'd paid £400 for a new graphics card from the US and lo and behold it really was too good to be true."] No kidding! Yes Amazon should honour their buyer protection terms, but it's unhelpful that the report not making clearer that it is not Amazon directly that is the issue but private seller scams. Those can happen through any online trading site.

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Originally Posted by ik9000

Read the article though and a lot of it seems to be international private sellers through Amazon.

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Nah, I've been hit by this both at work and at home, and in both cases it was entirely an Amazon UK order. First time at work was a couple of years ago, a 3900X processor had been substituted for a box of Christmas fairy lights. It took months for our Purchasing staff to get Amazon to refund. More recently we had an SSD box turn up empty.

When I ordered this 5900X cpu, the AMD box turned up empty. When I complained they sent a replacement next day no quibble. I wonder if they had already caught the person in their warehouse that had stolen the part and were waiting for my call.

For me this has only happened around Christmas time, when no doubt Amazon have temporary staff in and it looks like some thieving toerags got through their hiring process.

I suspect Amazon are just wearing it as a seasonal problem for now, while heavily investing in robotics research for the long term.

Hmmm.

Despite ordering quite some £'000s via Amazon over lockdown and since, I've had exactly two problems.

1) A laser printer toner cartridge (refilled) that stubbornly refused to print. The 3rd party seller refunded immediately.

2) A product from Amazon arrived as, literally, an emply box. What was it? Stephen King's book (non-fiction) on writing, value about £7, IIRC. One all to Amazon and I had a delvery actually containing the book, next day.

That said, there are too many of these stories, especially when from people here, to just dismiss it as a risk.

But short of going to a shop in person, paying, and carrying the stuff out, you carry some this of this stuff wherever you order. And to be clear, we buy in person wherever we reasonably can. We have a John Lewis not far away, though I consider them to have significantly deteriorated in recent years, especially during and since lockdown. They just don't seem to have recovered. Also, we have a Costco pretty close too, and so far, their customer service has been good too.

But shopping in person like that has a negative, too, mainly, all sorts of distance-selling protections disappear.

So .... what to do?

One (well, two) thought that crosses my mind. We can't entirely blame Amazon for being .... sceptical .... when a customer rings and says "WTF??? My expensive camera / computer part / whatever turned out to be dogfood". I'm sure a percentage of customers will try exactly that to either get to free, or two for the price of one. But then, if it's a substitution whether in an Amazon facility or a courier facility (or a bent driver) Amazon can't be too scptical with miffed customers either.

Either way, I wonder what percentage of total parcels shipped by Amazon have this sort of issue? I'd bet it's absolutely tiny.

So maybe we all should prepare, and take evidence-led recautions with expensive shipments - have a boxcutter ready and open them while the driver is still there (which they will love - NOT), or maybe set up CCTV covering your hallway/door and video the whole process from delivery to box-opening, in one uninterupted run.

Other than that, we have a choice - pay our money, cross our fingers and hope to hell we don't get hit, or don't buy expensive stuff mail-order.

What WOULD help, IMHO, if if Amazon didn't have a thoroughly obnoxious habit of switching sellers on us if something goes "out of stock". As far as I'm concerned, who I buy from is a critical part of the buying process. And to select a product and save it, then suddenly find I'm buying from someone else is very, very, VERY damned annoying. Several times, I've been about to hit "buy" when remembering "hold on, check the seller" only to find it's no longer Amazon (UK) but some unknown (to me) seller with little or no history. I WILL NOT buy anything over a pretty nominal value from someone like that, and NEVER knowingly from a private seller, via Amazon. I'd rather either pay full price, wait 'til my selected seller gets more, or simply go without entirely. My single biggest gripe with Amazon isn't the risk of swapping the contents of parcels it's Amazon themselves bait-n-switching me on who the seller is, downright flipping regularly. ARGHHHH!!!!!!


/gone for an aspirin, and some blood pressure pills. :D