8 January 2009

Bad Amazon

January 11, 2009: Updated below

Erica and I have been getting rid of some of our excess book inventory via Amazon’s “Seller Central.” Since I’m no longer doing the academic thing and we don’t have infinite space, it seemed the prudent thing to do (and at least a few of my books were too valuable to simply give away).

About an hour ago, their “Seller Performance Team” sent us an email notification that our seller account had been suspended, because they had “significant evidence” that our account was associated with a previously-suspended account. I’m not sure what kind of evidence they have—we’ve never opened a seller account before this one.

I hope whatever “evidence” was a false positive. If not, someone’s using our information illegally. Or it’s that Amazon didn’t like that we finally associated a bank account with our seller profile a mere five hours before they suspended our account. This way they’ll get to collect interest on our seller account balance for an additional 76 days.

Overall I’ve liked the service that Amazon provides—and I like ordering things through them. If there isn’t a positive outcome from this situation, I don’t relish boycotting Amazon; I’ve been a pretty loyal customer for over a decade. But that’s what I most certainly will do. (I’ll also do everything I can to dissuade others from using their service.)

As it stands, they’re banning us on false grounds. I don’t like doing business with organizations that operate that way.

Update: This is quite possibly the worst customer service experience I have had from Amazon. Their response boiled down to: “Thanks for contacting us! Your account is closed. We won’t tell you why. Have a nice day!” Awesome.

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