DEAR AMAZON DOT COM

this is the thread where ILX users can describe their preferred feature additions/ interface enhancements to amazon.com because that seems like a better bet than contacting a call center in India. Note: this is not for customer service complaints, that shit is boring.

Dear amazon.com,

It would be pretty sweet for both you and me if your MP3 store offered the option to see all the downloads available for an artist in a list, with checkboxes, so that I could check (or uncheck, whatever) all the tracks I don't already have, and buy them in bulk, with a discount. Or without a fucking discount. Seriously.

bez0s graduated from my high school and apparently they always contact him to give money back (school is from the 60s and was 120% overcrowded when i graduated - i'm sure it's worse now) and apparently he always rebuffs them. dunno if that makes him an asshole or not or explains why amazon has dumb community service procedures

Dear amazon.com,

If you could come up with an interface that didn't have 2704 images and little tracker scripts on top of the fucking flash ads from your home page right down to the goddamn "is this really the sweater you wanted?" page, that would be vaguely convenient to most of the world that believes in shopping from their home broadband instead of their T3 at work.

daerest
you have to login twice if you want to buy something. takes too long to get to the comments, "other items like this" litter the page. we have an excellent local bookstore (vromans) i try to look in for common stuff but for ex: their website doesn't even let you see item availability in store, it's get it shipped or walk in. they gotta get with it.

J0rdan if you got rich would you give money to your high school? I guess I would but I would probably earmark that shit so it doesn't go to like typewriters or something.

WELL YOU SHOULD GIVE A SHIT ABOUT MY LOCAL BOOKSTORE

yeah i don't know. like i said i'm not passing judgement or anything - and i'm sure the guy donates to actual important things like darfur or something besides his underfunded public high school - but i'm sure he could've spared $25 thou or something

i don't buy shit off amazon and im bored and had a small anecdote idk

no it's cool, but I think to be effective this thread should totally be abt amazon.com interface enhancemeat and we can maybe have another whole thread about the possibility that a rich american motherfucker might be a dickwad (not in any way am I denigrating the idea that such a rolling thread of that nature could be a ton of fun and education)

have a friend there?

It might be easier for me to forward your suggestions to the appropriate people if they weren't laced with swearing and sarcasm...

lol 2:42 am

1. you lock the target

Dear Amazon, accept Paypal payments plz thx.

Dear Amazon:

Please put an unambiguous, obvious login button on your front page.

Dear Amazon:

Subscribe and save is great, except when suddenly you decide to ship next month's stuff 3 weeks early. wtf? The email sent a week after I got the stuff was weak. Please to get act together on this, b/c I like the idea a lot.

(xpost) also: Amazon, once I've logged in, please put an unambiguous, obvious logout button at the top of the page. Because clicking "if you're not snoball, click here", and then getting bounced back to the front page with no confirmation that I've successfully logged out, doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

It would be kind of funny if clicking on that link caused someone to show up at your house with a bag of candy. Maybe they should do that.

"oh shit you clicked on not snoball, this candy is not for snoball!"

dear amazon dot com can we have some sort of setting so that when I visit my goddamn wishlist it does not automatically display in "normal" "unpurchased" mode, or frankly can we have any kind of user settings at all besides "to one-click or not to one-click" because I kinda hate knowing exactly what I'm getting for xmas unless I make a concerted effort to avoid certain links on your site

"I could've sworn I put a thing on my wishlist just the other day, where'd.. oh"

You can set that in preferences somewhere - it won't show you what's been purchased for the entire month of December. Everything stays on your list but the little "purchased" or whatever boxes say "hidden" instead.

ha. found it, thank you! man this interface is a fuckin' kluge.

Dear Amazon.com,

Thanks for allowing me to convince some sucka to buy my Bonnie Prince Billy CD for $18 on ur website lol

PS if you can help me convince some sucka to buy my Beat Happening boxset for $104.99 I will recommend you to friends and family

man this interface is a fuckin' kluge.

I know - it took me ages to figure out how to change the shipping address for the wish list. Actually, I'm not sure I ever did find that....

quiz based on Amazon's 'Statistically Improbable Phrases'

So they finally screwed up an order (left out an item) after ~8 years and god knows how many orders. Not a bad track record.

An old email account is suddenly getting loads of spam from something called AmazonLocal. Won't let me opt out, won't even recognise my email address. I contacted their chat support and got some bloke who advised me to TELEPHONE AMERICA in order to stop the spam. Basically Amazon is seriously >< THIS close to losing all my business for life.

Eventually I got directed to some web form to send an email to some mob who had better stop the spam or else I will go fucking ballistic

I sent an email to their AmazonLocal help thing, saying they are sending spam to an email address that they claim is not on their system, and please stop immediately. The reply: 'We can't help you coz you don't have an account with that email address. Please call this international phone number instead'

1. DERP
2. UM NO

The 'request cancellation' feature is weird. This has happened to me multiple times now:

1. I have, say, four items on order to be shipped simultaneously. I want to cancel all of them. They're apparently shipping soon and so cancellation isn't guaranteed.

2. I request cancellation, and I get an email a few minutes later saying that they could only cancel two of the items.

3. I then go back to the cancellation page and cancel the two remaining items. They're cancelled successfully.

Is Amazon just trying to make it difficult to cancel orders?

i ordered something for next day delivery, realized immediately that i ordered the wrong thing, and it was already too late to cancel my order.

I wish I'd known before I joined the "waitlist" a Black Friday deal that apparently you're meant to go to your basket page (which doesn't open automatically or anything when you do so) and hammer refresh repeatedly to see if it becomes available? I was imagining it would pop up and tell me or send me an email or something, so I missed it.

Wouldn't mind as it was a kind of crazy stocking filler and maybe all good people are boycotting Amazon over this tax evasion thing, but damn, I have no ideas what to get anyone this Christmas, and two December birthdays coming up which I'm drawing just as much of a blank on...

The Black Friday deals are almost impossible to get. You can click within a fraction of a second of the items going live and not have any luck. Amazon seems to have jacked most of its prices up in the last few weeks. I'm finding that independent music / film stockists are actually cheaper a lot of the time now.

Despite not popping up when my "deal" was available, I can't get rid of the pop-up telling me that it was available but I didn't claim it in time!

I've done most of my Christmas shopping online these past few years and to begin with Amazon was brilliant for it but the past two years I've had trouble with them: slow postage, items arriving battered and dirty, and last year I got an email telling me 3 items wouldn't be delivered until March, so I looked at the pages (which still said "in stock", but I thought that must be out of date) and ordered a new copy of each from a third-party seller, and then before I could cancel either order they'd both been dispatched and I had to pay postage to send one of the sets back, even though in my opinion it was Amazon's fault I'd got two.

"Two day shipping" on a book order placed by March 8 (book was in stock, usually ships within 24 hrs, etc.)

Date Time Location Event Details
March 13, 2013 10:35:00 AM Forest Hills NY US Out for delivery
March 12, 2013 11:00:00 AM Forest Hills NY US Arrival Scan
March 12, 2013 06:26:28 AM Fedex Smartpost Edison NJ US Departure Scan
March 12, 2013 06:26:00 AM Fedex Smartpost Edison NJ US In transit to pickup location
March 11, 2013 10:10:00 AM Fedex Smartpost Edison NJ US Arrival Scan
March 10, 2013 09:41:00 AM US Shipment has left seller facility and is in transit to carrier

Like, why did the book need to spend an entire 24 hours in my NEIGHBORHOOD before going out for delivery? Why did it need to spend nearly 24 hours in Edison, NJ, probably a little over an hour's drive from my neighborhood?

I realize they're not the shipper here, but

they needed to give it to the usps (serious answer)

I live three blocks from the forest hills post office, so that makes the whole thing funnier to me.

For whatever reason Prime two-day shipping is not what it once was.

It seems about the equivalent of the old "super saver" shipping. There's also this add-on item thingy now, which is kind of a de-facto $25 requirement, again, like super saver. I don't actually pay for my prime, so it's hard to complain, but it still leaves a bad taste.

I keep picturing my book hanging out at the poast office like "maybe I should head over...nah fuck it that was a long ride from Edison, I'll just go tomorrow."

post office

i ordered a couple things for delivery from amazon, a 2 day and an overnight, and they were both not delivered by ups because there was no one at my (residential) address to sign for them. i went online as soon as i saw the delivery exception for the one item and paid $5 to have it rerouted to another address, and they didn't even deliver it the next day. i called ups and it is really amazing how unhelpful they are. anyway, i got home after a long annoying week at work, groggy from a cold and basically in a shitty mood, and i just straight cancelled my other order and told ups to return to sender, and then fired off a complaint to amazon saying why would they send a delivery for signature to a residential address on a weekday and how ups are useless and they should find a new delivery partner. having got it off my chest the red mist cleared and i was super embarrassed at this bratty, petulant, entitled message i had sent. but a little while later i got a polite, thought out email that at least pretended to consider my complaints and they gave me a $15 credit. so...thanks amazon, sorry about the whiny message.

and, it goes without saying, fuck UPS for all eternity

I've had UPS not deliver a next-day Amazon package, claiming no one was home, even though my gf was home all day waiting for the delivery.
Problem was, their own tracking showed the "not home" tag was in a different city (the local hub).
I'm sure Amazon customers get bumped way down the list for fucks given by UPS, but they're still terrible in every way.

that's good of them! I haven't had a lot of UPS issues myself but deal with their failings in my dayjob so you have my commiserations

I ordered an iphone case for Mr Veg for his birthday, (iron maiden themed, per his request), but it seemed to be taking forever for the thing to ship after I ordered it. Today I got a message from the seller, something about being in hospital, can't drive a car, I want to refund your money.

kinda bummed but glad he didn't just go to ground on me. And I found an alternative case elsewhere so it works out ok. Hopefully the money refund doesn't turn into a big song and dance.

Timely revive. Today I'm over at my friend's apartment, waiting on her boyfriend to get off work so we can all go out. He's placed an order that's due today on his Prime membership. It hadn't come in by late afternoon. We check the office, it's not there. My friend calls her guy, he checks the website, oh guess what, it's delivered to another apartment, same unit but three floors down. My friend gets it only to find it's wet and smelling horrible. Boyfriend had ordered some "Muscle Milk", A twelve pack. Two exploded and baked in the 98 degree heat for a few hours, putting a wet hole in the box bottom, which was rapidly disintegrating.

To top it off, the package wasn't misaddressed or even signed for. The driver just said 'close enough' and dropped the thing...on the ground, with force.

Oddly enough, the two cds in the order escaped unscathed.

i get ups to hold my deliveries at their facility. driving over there is preferable to waiting around for them.

Stoner Prime

is this the thread where i share my recent dismay at finally realising, 17 years after i first shopped there, that the 'smile' in amazon's logo also points to the letters 'a' and 'z' in their name, suggesting the a-z breadth of their services?

srsly i was so shocked i had to sit down for a minute and wonder what else i've been failing to notice for the majority of my adult life

(open goal for zings there, i know)

wait until you hear about the fedex logo

tbh I am happy when I fail to notice obvious symbolism like that, means I'm just glossing over corporate branding

heres their candy box
https://www.amazon.com/b?node=14809330011
and they're offering a dash button where they send you more candy when you hit it. can't imagine that will be abused in any way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient-controlled_analgesia

Handmade caramels? One possibility. Decadent brownies? That's another. Chocolate-covered gummy bears? Not ruling those lil' guys out.

diabetes

i mean

Lately, whenever I find myself idly considering an Amazon purchase and am prevented from doing so because they've inexplicably decided to sell that item only to Prime members, I decide that I absolutely have to buy the thing right then and that I will reward another retailer for not being a gaggle of douchnozzles about who they're willing to take money from. And then I pretend that Bezos gives one quarter of a shit that he just lost $20. Feels good.

Hoping to get a nice kettle for a cheap price on prime day

The recent advent of Amazon's "Add on" items is particularly bullshitty.

Fuck amazon. Buy local

In many ways Amazon is the new Sears & Roebuck from the period when it was purely a mail order catalog, sold everything under the sun, and delivered it to the doorsteps of millions of rural dwellers via the US Postal Service. Their main competition was the local dry goods store. Sears & Roebuck probably sweated its warehouse labor force, too.

totally posting from my locally handcrafted artisanal laptop

I know Amazon is terrible but I live in New York fucking City and sometimes I can't find things I need anywhere that won't take a special half-day trip and I don't have half a day to go to 6 Duane Reades in different neighborhoods looking for the right shade of eyeliner. Not that Duane Reade is "buying local" in the first place; there basically aren't any non-chain drugstores anymore unless they're really bougie ones.

amazon feeds my veruca salt "ragh its not at the library i want it now" book tantrums

considering how much food/product i buy from warehouse chains i think i had to give up anti-corporate righteousness long ago

They seem to have switched to plastic bubble wrap mailers which kind of sucks

Jeff Bezos is the best-dressed tech titan, according to Vanessa Friedman of the New York Times. https://t.co/h3nSyVMNdf pic.twitter.com/MyYsMG1i4u

— CNBC (@CNBC) August 3, 2018

Well thank god for that I guess

jeff bezos: the tallest dwarf in tech

sounds like you guys aren't convinced

Luck be a lady tonight...

https://splinternews.com/officials-have-no-idea-what-their-cities-promised-amazo-1828120650

i just used imessage to send my wife a link to some printer ink cartridges on amazon and a full-length video ad for canon printers popped up in the message thread inline with the link

what the actual fuck

When I search for books I'm having to scroll further and further past irrelevant sponsored books (who are these people and how do they get sponsored? They mostly seem obscure) and books that have nothing relevant in the title.

There are many products that are now a completely miserable shopping experience on Amazon because of the degree to which the site is clogged with phony chinese brands called stuff like "AIEOO" and "PEBE-JO." Many of these products turn out to be literal garbage even though they all miraculously have 4.5 star ratings.

Basically the site is only useful now if you either already know what brand you want or it's something where generic low quality is fine.

I got tricked into buying one of those stupid goddamn “manufactured by Amazon” pre-recorded CD-Rs this week, I swear to god there was nothing on the page indicating this wasn’t an actual CD. Should have done more research, I don’t know if the album ever even came out on cd at all...

The Bosom Manor Feast of Three Kings Special is brought to you by PEBE-JO, makers of fine air fryers, office chairs, USB cables, and insulin

I love how the pagination experience is still complete Web 1.0 crap

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/12/amazon-still-hasnt-fixed-its-problem-with-bait-and-switch-reviews/

i am going to quit prime after it expires in april. i don't care that much about fast shipping and it doesn't have anything else to offer me. and amazon is evil and bad and hated, of course.

So apparently Amazon has either accidentally, or purposefully, started limiting the number of CDs or LPs an account can order per week. There's a whole thread about it over at the H0ffman forums and I've seen scattered comments about it on Reddit as well (one even implying the same thing is happening to DVD/Blu Ray orders as well).

Anyone encountered any issues lately?

What? Why?

No clear answer on that, customer service doesn’t seem to give a consistent answer or clearly understand the issue. But apparently lots of people, including a friend of mine who sent me screenshots, have gone to order LPs or CDs, and gotten an error message about exceeding the purchase limit for an item and it keeps being reset to 0. Apparently no issue on household items or books, just CD and vinyl, but it won’t let them buy even one.

Trawling around the intent it appears that customer service has given the following “answers”:
- there is a limit of 4 CDs or pieces of vinyl purchases per week
- there is a known issue and it is being worked on
- there is an issue with the bar codes for CD/vinyl that they somehow all start with the same two digits and it has suddenly started triggering “bulk order” alerts that they use to detect resellers, even though it is different artists/titles
- people with this issue should switch to a business account instead of a personal one

So who knows. Seems to have started on Friday. There are also reports about the issue on down detector as well.

Intent = internet, lol thanks phone

I always feel weird linking direct to other forums, but there are more and more people reporting the issue on the H0ffman forums. Pretty easy to find over there, if you are curious.

Googling around also led me to Y Combinator news thread about it (which also points to the H0ffman thread for reference, fwiw) and I saw that someone just posted this a few minutes ago:

I tested this just now, sure enough when I get past four CDs I can no longer checkout.
I did another quick test, and it appears it affects Vinyl as well.

So it seems to still be an issue. I guess time will shake out whether this is a purposeful decision or a glitch. The 4 per week limit seems to be a pretty commonly reported threshold.

And I got the error message myself now this morning. Bought two albums last week, Wednesday, and ordered two more on Sunday. This morning I tried to pre-order the wide release of that Charles Mingus RSD thing and got the "allowed value = 0" message. Happens with any CD I add to my cart, new, used, from Amazon direct, from third party seller - no dice. Ordering a book and some household stuff went through just fine though. Odd.

Yesterday, Congress demanded documents from Amazon citing my reporting focusing on CEO Dave Clark.

Today, Clark announced he's resigning 👇https://t.co/uigU7i1XJ2

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) June 3, 2022

oh he's the CEO of "worldwide consumer," whatever that is. i was thinking of andy jassy.

Had some packages seemingly get swiped off of our front step yesterday, immediately after delivery - got the notification, walked to the front door about 45 seconds later and they were gone.

Long story short, found them ditched around the corner from our house. The Amazon driver had made the absolutely bizarre decision to hand them directly to a random group of young kids, like 11 years old, walking by our house instead of bringing them up to the door. The kids took advantage of the opportunity but were apparently disappointed to only find a laptop desk for my wife and a Soft Machine CD in the box, since it was opened and thrown on the ground. Not sure if the driver asked and they told him they lived at our house or what, but... c'mon.

amazon delivery these days varies between "knock on your door and let you know your package is here" and "throw it over the fence near your house"

It's frustrating how many new albums and CDs show up for pre-order at like $12.99 with free Prime delivery but, come the actual release day, suddenly the only option is $18.99 + $6.99 shipping from a third party seller. I've pretty much given up pre-ordering music from them.

Dear Amazon Music, I don't give a fuck about podcasts, maybe give me an option to turn off the recommendations?

Shout out to @Amazon for discontinuing one of the only positive things about their operation: #AmazonSmile. pic.twitter.com/HriOcWLvwk

— 𝔹🎉🎊𝕞𝔹𝕣𝕚𝕘𝕘𝕤 (@BriggsBoom) January 19, 2023

https://amp.theguardian.com/technology/2023/may/31/amazon-workers-walkout-seattle-layoffs

I don’t remember what they general strike thread is called and it’s fallen off the main page, otherwise this would’ve been posted there.

does anyone have experience using one medical since the amazon acquisition? if so what is your experience

I used it as a pay-per-visit service by text for my last three UTI flareups. They told me after the last one that they wouldn't treat me for it again since I'd had all three of them within six months, but after the last course of antibiotics didn't work, I contacted the provider for another, different antibiotic within the two-week free follow-up and it seems to have cured what seems to have been a chronic UTI.

bumping...