Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Fucking Customers!

WTF? I notice that my Amazon feedback rating took a hit today. Wondering why, I clicked in to see what horrific acts of fraud I had perpetrated on my unsuspecting clientele....what do I find? A fucking cassette tape (yes, a cassette tape, one that is about 2 decades old) didn't play up to their satisfaction. Did the customer contact us about the issue? No, of course not, it's so much easier to must leave a bad rating with Amazon. They paid 40 fucking cents for the tape. It doesn't play well, according to them, and I'm not arguing, it could play like shit for all I know. The tape was released over 19 years ago. Somewhere along the line it might have decided that it didn't want to play properly, I don't know.

My problem isn't so much with the stupid ass customer who is too lazy to just send an email and get a full fucking refund, no questions asked, but rather with Amazon (and the other big boys of multi-seller online retail) who don't make it mandatory for buyers to go through some sort of mediation process before leaving negative feedback or ratings....or whatever the particular site chooses to call their system of rating sellers.

If this buyer had simply emailed with their problem, I would have replaced the tape without question and they would have had a new one in days. If I did not have another in stock, I would simply have refunded their purchase price plus shipping and took a multi-dollar loss on the whole transaction, simply to be a good etailer and keep the customer happy.

Instead, I get to keep the roughly 75 cents I made on the sale while keeping the negative rating that will hurt my products' placement in search results on Amazon. And I'll have to ship like 1000 things on time to get enough bonus points to make up for the negative rating. The customer gave a 2 out of 5 stars for a defect in a product that I did not even produce. I just sold it. My shipping wasn't slow. My shipping wasn't to the wrong address. I shipped what was ordered and it was delivered fast to the customer. Yet instead of the record label, Project 3, getting the negative review, I did. And all the while I'd have been willing to try to make the customer happy,.  ARGH!