Post about "#amazonfail"

Like many others, I was surprised to read Mark Probst’s Amazon Follies blog entry detailing Amazon’s removal of his gay-themed work from their sales rankings, and like many others, I sent the Internet bookseller the proverbial strongly worded webmail from my Amazon account:

Your removal of rankings for gay and lesbian literature is certainly your right. This is your marketing portal and it is your right to operate it as you wish. I have a suggestion, however, which might make the use of your real estate when my page comes up more effective, because as of today, you’re wasting a lot of space.

I’m not your biggest customer, but I make most of my hard media purchases through your site; almost 100% of my online ones. I sometimes take advantage of your suggestions, because you had a high degree of credibility that your inference engines truly tried to deduce what I would like, based on my searches and prior purchases.

I say “had” because your actions have caused your credibility to disappear for me, and I trust for tens of thousands of others. If you’re willing to “adjust” your sales rankings for criteria other than sales, aren’t you also likely to “adjust” your suggestions based on things like quantity in stock, or shelf life of programming manuals?

I’ll still buy from you, because I like your service and I like your policies, and I trust that I will be well treated by your partners when I use your portal to order from others. But that franchise you had with me, where I chose you and didn’t even go looking at your competitors: that went away the minute your ranking manipulation became public.

As we came to learn, the worst part of Amazon and the cause of the worst of this mess is their crackerjack customer service team wherever Amazon outsources. They handled my customer complaint with the same thorough analysis and investigation that everybody from MSNBC to Francine St. Marie has pointed out. So I wasn’t surprised when I received the same boilerplate answer that the Seattle PI, AP and most of the legacy media received from the PR hack that is Amazon’s current mouthpiece. I answered:

I today received your response to my concerns regarding sales ranking. Your boilerplate mass-mailed response, from an address that made sure I knew was specifically set up so that I could not respond, only served to infuriate me.

Congratulations. As you’ll note my original comment to you was rather mild mannered. I liked your policies and customer service, other than my obvious complaint of course, and while I’d be ordering from you again I just wouldn’t avail myself of your suggestions. After all, I couldn’t trust them.

Your public response to this issue, and your lame denials that fly in the face of your other communications to authors has substantially reduced my desire to shop through you. Perhaps your next communication to me can achieve the result your public relations and customer service departments so anxiously appear to seek, and I’ll write you and tell you that hell will freeze over before I ever shop with you again.

Keep up the good work.

A couple of hours later, I got a copy of the same exact “ham-fisted” letter, with the addition of a link to advise them if they had answered my question or not.