I paid for Amazon Prime because I’m rich and lazy. Besides, I spend about 15 hours a day at work, now.

This means whenever I have an urge to get a spatula, I just order it and it gets sent two day shipping at no charge. (Yes, I’ve actually done shit like that.)

But the new thing is they tried to sell me digital access, which, while a neat idea, is like a dumb ass version of Safari so no thanks.

Doing that must have caused a big mess up in their order flow because it just sent the stuff to my old company using my old billing information. I went to my accounts page to correct it but because the Amazon Prime thing, my order was being processed and I couldn’t cancel.

Dave IM’d and said it was a convenience tax.

(Just think what would have happened had I had 1-click turned out.)

[Updates after the jump]

Response from Customer Support

Of course before I wrote this blog I queried customer support with a more polite version of this blog entry and a longish explanation of what happenned. Here was the response:

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

I’m sorry if there has been any misunderstanding and for any resulting disappointment it may have caused. Please allow me a moment of your time to address your concern.

Unfortunately, it’s too late to make this change to the shipping address because the order has already entered the shipping process. I hope this will not prevent the package from reaching you.

If the package cannot be delivered, it will be returned to us by the shipper, and upon receipt of the return we will issue a full refund (including shipping charges).

If you would still like to receive these items, please return to our web site. For your convenience, I’ve added the items to your shopping cart so you can place a new order to be shipped to the correct address.

When you return to our site, just click the Shopping Cart icon at the top of our home page. On the order summary page that appears before you click “Place Your Order,” click the “Change” button next to the shipping address in the upper left to change the address. Once you’ve verified that the address is correct, click “Place Your Order.” If you are shipping to an address you have not used with us before, you will be asked to re-enter your credit card number for security
purposes.

For future reference, as long as an order is not listed as “shipping soon,” you should be able to change the shipping or billing address online by going to Your Account and clicking the link to “Change shipping address.”

If you have any further questions, please visit our Help pages:

http://www.amazon.com/help

Further, in future, we would assure you that, you wouldn’t come across such a situation and we would serve you in a better way.

Again, please let me apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced as a result of this particular order.

We appreciate your business and hope to see you again soon at Amazon.com.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

If yes, click here:
[Some unique URL]
If not, click here:
[Some unique URL]

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.

Best regards,

[Some Indian name]

Two hours later I got a shipping confirmation.

My reply

Okay, props to them for actually their name instead of some generic American sounding name. But beyond that, fuck them. You send to a company address… my books are being read by Plaxo right now and I’m just going to have to call the shipper and complain and Amazon’ll just have to eat it. (Don’t believe me? The same shit happenned with a Fry’s return and my ex-gf. They shipped my 750GB SATA replacement drive to her instead of the address on my last shipment.)

So I clicked on the “thumbs down” and replied. Which I might add I had to look up my order and ticket information even though you generated a unique URL. How moronic is that?

How about doing something about it instead of spitting back four paragraphs on what I already told you?

The problem is that:

1. You have like a 10 second delay for Amazon Prime members between queuing and cancelling orders. So basically if something goes wrong with the order, I’m screwed because I paid you guys for better treatment!
2. Something is wrong with the order flow when trying to upsell me some digital download (why do I want to pay for that when I already subscribe OReilly Safari?). It bypassed the regular confirm address and billing pages and just sent it like I was one-click (which I’m not).

Geez, you have A9 recording everything, just pull up my browse history and see for yourself!

Solution: Find something similar on Safari and add it to my infinite bookshelf. Get my money back from Amazon?