Wot no goods?

No Amazon review either!

I wanted to post a review on Amazon the other day because one of their suppliers had failed pretty badly and I put together a reasonably lighthearted but pointed review about my experience. It was all factually true but the Great River Trading Company declined to publish it.

My review seemed unobjectionable to me….
“Led up the garden path and then let down – it never arrived“

“The worst thing is that I couldn’t rate it with zero stars!
I should have looked more closely but after I had ordered it I realised that it was being delivered on a slow boat from China! But then there was a very wide range of delivery dates that led to false hopes followed by a promising timeline indicator until it actually came to the day it was due to be delivered and then…. nothing! Amazon sent me a message – assumed missing in action. The supplier asked for more time. I gave them weeks more and still no product. No follow up, nothing. Very poor customer service – I shall not be using Chatham again.

That all seemed like a pretty reasonable
commentary to me. It also seemed potentially useful to other would-be buyers.
Containing all sorts of implied salutary lessons:
 – Check out where the goods are coming from
 – Check out the latest delivery date quoted
 – Be suspicious of a wide date range
 – Check out the supplier performance not just the product reviews
 – Take the delivery timelines supplied by the Amazon “track my order”
facility with a shovel load of salt. They seem to have no idea when goods are
coming from overseas and goods are suddenly declared “missing” the
day after the timeline runs out.

Now maybe more savvy users already do all this stuff, but a bit of revision
never hurt anyone.

To their credit, Amazon have promised a refund without any quibbles and I
have also had a rather strange pleading email from the supplier asking me to
withdraw my much shorter review of their performance as a company. I shall not
be doing this and I pointed out that they had simply not done enough or been
good enough to warrant more than one star.

It would be good if Amazon took a little more time considering these issues
from their customers’ perspectives rather than hiding behind a policy that
allows others to fall down the same kind of hole that I did.

The product, by the way, was one of those magnetic gizmos that allow you to
clean otherwise inaccessible windows. As a result, my inaccessible windows are
still a sad daily reminder of my inability to make a difference – even to my
own immediate environment!