Amazon Is Awesome

I’ve been a fan of Amazon.com for a long time…

• Each December, I do as much of my Christmas shopping there as possible.
  
• For several years, Amazon has been ahead of the curve with cool features like creating your own wish list and providing recommendations for you based on your previous purchases.
• I’ve always been a big fan of Free Super Saver Shipping, and last year, I took advantage of Amazon Student, which provided me with a year of free 2-day shipping.

One of the only problems I’ve ever had with Amazon occurred last week when I tried to get a refund. I had wanted to order ESV Bibles for my High School graduates but I stupidly messed up the order and ended up with three Bibles that I needed to send back.

The mistake was my fault, so when I found out that although I could get a refund I would have to pay the return shipping, it was no problem. Then, a couple days later, I got an email from Amazon customer service saying that I had been credited with 50% partial refunds on each of the Bibles. There was no explanation as to why I was only getting a partial refund, so I was frustrated and sent an email complaining about the situation to customer service. How does Amazon respond?

Within 3 hours (I got the email at 11 PM on a Friday night), I got a response apologizing for the inconvenience and offering me a full refund, including the price of shipping (which I should’ve had to pay since it was my fault in the first place).

When I got the official notice of the refund, it was notated as a “Goodwill Refund,” presumably because rather than arguing with me, they just refunded the whole price in order to foster goodwill with me for the future. It certainly worked.

Well done, Amazon, and Customer Service Representative Afshan Khanam…I will remain a loyal customer for a long time.*

*I have heard of some potentially shady business related to Amazon removing books from peoples’ Kindles, but as a non-Kindle user, I have no experience with this. If people would just read books in the proper, traditional, bound, printed, and papercut-risking way, it wouldn’t be an issue.