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I feel really bad for the guy and I hope this gets enough media attention for Amazon to actually care about helping him. But this is the world we are headed to

by byuu 10y ago

I feel really bad for the guy and I hope this gets enough media attention for Amazon to actually care about helping him. But this is the world we are headed toward with people continuing to stake their entire livelihoods on services with almost non-existent customer service. Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it. If they won't give you a phone number that rings through to an actual human being promptly, you shouldn't allow yourself to become dependent upon said service continuing to work. Let alone base your entire income and the incomes of employees under you on it. That's just incredibly irresponsible.

ikeboy 10y ago
Fwiw seller support has a phone number that gets a human within a minute or so.
- byuu 10y ago
  Well, you know what I mean. You need someone that will actually help when there's a problem beyond selling you more services. For major companies, this stuff is easy to find out, thanks to people sharing their experiences as in that Reddit post. There's entire websites dedicated to countless horror stories of Paypal locking out small business funds arbitrarily with no recourse. Google is infamous in never responding to their customers. If you're going to base your entire income on it, then do a day or two of research. Try and find stories from people who have had serious account issues: stolen identities, suspended accounts, you name it. Call and talk to people at the company and ask them what their policies are. If you get Amazon on the phone and ask them, they'd tell you their phone support team won't help if your account is suspended. Make them go on record. If they lie, you have a solid legal case to bring forward. It's okay to take some risk if you have a backup plan. Okay, Google shuts down my business e-mail account. But I have all messages downloaded daily, and I can switch tomorrow to this VPS e-mail server I set up. That's fine. It's not okay to be so cavalier if an account suspension will cost you your home and require you to lay off two employees. Again, I'm not trying to rag on the poor guy this happened to. Hindsight is always 20/20. I'm trying to warn people against getting into the same situation he found himself in.
  - bryanlarsen 10y ago
    The problem is that very few people start out relying on services like Amazon. They're a normal small business and then decide to try and sell some excess inventory through Amazon as an experiment. It goes well so they sell some more. 12 months later they've hired 5 people to deal with demand, the original business has withered, ...
    - dhimes 10y ago
      As we've said over and over on this site: It's always a risk when you build for somebody else's platform. You need to mitigate that risk.
callinyouin 10y ago
> Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it. While the point you're making is certainly valid and most of these big companies we've come to rely on have next to zero customer service, I just wanted to say that in the case of PayPal I recently had to resolve an issue with a purchase (with Musician's Friend, who I will never, EVER do business with again, but that's another story) and their customer service was actually pretty decent. Granted, I had to make a couple phone calls to them before I got a "good" agent that was able/willing to resolve my issue, but I'd take that experience over calling the likes of AT&T or Comcast any day.
- ido 10y ago
  I too had good experience with paypal on both ends (payer and recipient).
- byuu 10y ago
  My experience with Paypal has been great as a buyer, bad as a seller. I personally know someone who had their account suspended because apparently Paypal doesn't like emulators -- something not stated in their terms of service. When this happens, they lock you out of your funds. No warning, no notice, hope you didn't need those funds to pay bills. Your experience may have gone well, but even a cursory Google search for "Paypal sucks" returns 1.5 million results. That doesn't inspire confidence in me. If I instead search for "Stripe sucks", I get 970 results, and most aren't related to the credit card processing company. I would never offer Paypal as a way to buy things from a small business I ran, unless it was large enough that I could afford to lose a month's revenue from them. AT&T, at least in the non-essential personal utilities space ... yeah they are complete garbage as well. I paid for the three-month DirecTV Now plan. The service has yet to work on any of my PCs. They do not support the service by phone at all. Their online chat has been busy all 20 times I've checked it. They don't respond from their Twitter account. They direct you to a forum to post about your problems, and then don't respond to issues there. They refuse to issue refunds. I don't know what I would do if I needed commercial internet service. Probably go for having open accounts with multiple service providers.
  - jrochkind1 10y ago
Pigo 10y ago
I'll admit I've never considered what a position that puts you in, but it makes sense. Especially if you have employees, that's incredibly vulnerable. I suppose I figured if you were doing enough business with a company you'd reach a level of support indicative of how much money you're generating for them. Just like many banks have specialized agents for fiduciary level money.
- pc86 10y ago
  Is scale part of the problem? I could generate $2 million a month in sales for Amazon and it'd be a drop in the proverbial bucket.
SwellJoe 10y ago
Why is a phone the gold standard for support? If I have to talk to someone on the phone, it means I have exhausted every other possible method to resolve my problem, and I am furious with the company for making me talk to an idiot in real time. What I want is an issue tracker that has responsive, accountable, people on the other end. That's my ideal support experience. Phones are the worst case scenario.
- benbristow 10y ago
  Because you're pretty much guaranteed an instant answer for every question you ask. It's live 1 to 1 and instant. They can't patch you or put you in some backlog.
  - zedadex 10y ago
    Please hold while I transfer you to someone who has a counterexample to that statement. hold music plays
  - SwellJoe 10y ago
    I don't want instant answers. I want right answers, in a timely manner. That's entirely doable in a ticket system. Not so much with phone support...at least, not in my experience. Phone support generally has a script. When your problem diverges from the script, the person on the phone is of negative value. I want my problem triaged to someone who can solve it, not hear how very sorry they are and how much they appreciate my patience. If I sound bitter...well, I really hate phones. My favorite support experiences have never been on the phone. Chat maybe, email maybe, phone never.
    - FussyZeus 10y ago
      > I don't want instant answers. I want right answers, in a timely manner. THIS. TIMES. A. MILLION. Call centers put pressure on employees, especially good ones to wrap up calls quickly to keep their numbers high (because shitty policies result in a ton of people calling) meaning that even if you get a rep who legitimately wants to help you, they are punished in their job if they try too hard to do that (or take too long.) Sidebar; Maybe this is a generational thing, I hate the phone. I hate being on the phone, I hate using the phone. If I have to talk to sales reps I'd much rather do it over email/in person, but not over the phone.
scottydelta 10y ago
with the recent google stunt where they blocked 200+ email accounts, I have been planning to move over to some other paid email service and replace all of the google products that I use. The only thing I cant replace is the android and I need a gmail account for it to work :-/
- byuu 10y ago
  Yeah, that one terrified me as well. I was strongly considering setting up their e-mail for domains service until I read about that.
- jaxondu 10y ago
  You can create a Google account without a Gmail account. Look for the link "I prefer to use my current email address" when creating a Google account.
amirmc 10y ago
> ... you shouldn't allow yourself to become dependent upon said service continuing to work. This is easy to say but can be difficult in practice. Even if they did provide a phone number, there's still no guarantee. Any business is going to have to depend on multiple individual providers, any one of whom could inadvertently shut you down. Your bank, your energy supplier, etc. Trying to mitigate for such scenarios is near impossible as a small business. It's worth remembering the flip side of the current story. This individual was able to sustain their family and two employees from this business. That's impressive. That an innocuous change on one device can have such a negative impact, with no warning, is a heinous oversight on Amazon's part.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
>Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it. You mean the companies a lot of us here work for and should be able to have some influence over but ... don't because they let us play with "Oooooh shiny!" and because we'll be moved on to the next place in a year and a half? Those companies? We are part of the problem, too.
SN76477 10y ago
What I see is a world that cannot deal with unique situations. I had an issue with fraud on my paypal account. I got refunded, at the same time I got a automatic draft. My account then went negative because it didnt pull from my bank account which is my usual source of funding. Telling paypal that a mistake had been made and it was their fault they didnt really know what to do. I got passed around 12 times over a few dollars. They basically didnt know how to handle a unique situation. I have similar experience with my bank. Customer service teams are homoginized to only deal with volume, they are never trained on how to solve problems. These automation issues just let that same system float to the top.
- cowpewter 10y ago
  Were you talking to their fraud department? Did you also talk to your bank's fraud department? I've actually gotten pretty excellent customer service from fraud departments. Not so much with the regular front-line customer service departments.
gthtjtkt 10y ago
Yes, blame the victims for working to support their families. That will surely be productive... Amazon does have a seller support line. So what do you want people to do? Google "Selling on Amazon sucks" and then base their life on the opinion of some random strangers on the internet? What about the 99.9% of people who sell on Amazon and have positive experiences but don't bother to write about it? If we held other employers to the same standard using GlassDoor reviews, half the country would have nowhere to work. "Honey, I could be making thousands of dollars a month selling this product I created on Amazon, but I'm going to take a part-time job instead because Joe Schmoe said Amazon has poor service. I'm sure little Timmy won't mind going hungry as long as he knows I did the responsible thing according to byuu."

by byuu 10y ago

ikeboy 10y ago

Fwiw seller support has a phone number that gets a human within a minute or so.

byuu 10y ago
Well, you know what I mean. You need someone that will actually help when there's a problem beyond selling you more services. For major companies, this stuff is easy to find out, thanks to people sharing their experiences as in that Reddit post. There's entire websites dedicated to countless horror stories of Paypal locking out small business funds arbitrarily with no recourse. Google is infamous in never responding to their customers. If you're going to base your entire income on it, then do a day or two of research. Try and find stories from people who have had serious account issues: stolen identities, suspended accounts, you name it. Call and talk to people at the company and ask them what their policies are. If you get Amazon on the phone and ask them, they'd tell you their phone support team won't help if your account is suspended. Make them go on record. If they lie, you have a solid legal case to bring forward. It's okay to take some risk if you have a backup plan. Okay, Google shuts down my business e-mail account. But I have all messages downloaded daily, and I can switch tomorrow to this VPS e-mail server I set up. That's fine. It's not okay to be so cavalier if an account suspension will cost you your home and require you to lay off two employees. Again, I'm not trying to rag on the poor guy this happened to. Hindsight is always 20/20. I'm trying to warn people against getting into the same situation he found himself in.
- bryanlarsen 10y ago
  The problem is that very few people start out relying on services like Amazon. They're a normal small business and then decide to try and sell some excess inventory through Amazon as an experiment. It goes well so they sell some more. 12 months later they've hired 5 people to deal with demand, the original business has withered, ...
  - dhimes 10y ago
    As we've said over and over on this site: It's always a risk when you build for somebody else's platform. You need to mitigate that risk.

callinyouin 10y ago

> Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it. While the point you're making is certainly valid and most of these big companies we've come to rely on have next to zero customer service, I just wanted to say that in the case of PayPal I recently had to resolve an issue with a purchase (with Musician's Friend, who I will never, EVER do business with again, but that's another story) and their customer service was actually pretty decent. Granted, I had to make a couple phone calls to them before I got a "good" agent that was able/willing to resolve my issue, but I'd take that experience over calling the likes of AT&T or Comcast any day.

ido 10y ago
I too had good experience with paypal on both ends (payer and recipient).
byuu 10y ago
My experience with Paypal has been great as a buyer, bad as a seller. I personally know someone who had their account suspended because apparently Paypal doesn't like emulators -- something not stated in their terms of service. When this happens, they lock you out of your funds. No warning, no notice, hope you didn't need those funds to pay bills. Your experience may have gone well, but even a cursory Google search for "Paypal sucks" returns 1.5 million results. That doesn't inspire confidence in me. If I instead search for "Stripe sucks", I get 970 results, and most aren't related to the credit card processing company. I would never offer Paypal as a way to buy things from a small business I ran, unless it was large enough that I could afford to lose a month's revenue from them. AT&T, at least in the non-essential personal utilities space ... yeah they are complete garbage as well. I paid for the three-month DirecTV Now plan. The service has yet to work on any of my PCs. They do not support the service by phone at all. Their online chat has been busy all 20 times I've checked it. They don't respond from their Twitter account. They direct you to a forum to post about your problems, and then don't respond to issues there. They refuse to issue refunds. I don't know what I would do if I needed commercial internet service. Probably go for having open accounts with multiple service providers.
- jrochkind1 10y ago

Pigo 10y ago

I'll admit I've never considered what a position that puts you in, but it makes sense. Especially if you have employees, that's incredibly vulnerable. I suppose I figured if you were doing enough business with a company you'd reach a level of support indicative of how much money you're generating for them. Just like many banks have specialized agents for fiduciary level money.

pc86 10y ago
Is scale part of the problem? I could generate $2 million a month in sales for Amazon and it'd be a drop in the proverbial bucket.

SwellJoe 10y ago

Why is a phone the gold standard for support? If I have to talk to someone on the phone, it means I have exhausted every other possible method to resolve my problem, and I am furious with the company for making me talk to an idiot in real time. What I want is an issue tracker that has responsive, accountable, people on the other end. That's my ideal support experience. Phones are the worst case scenario.

benbristow 10y ago
Because you're pretty much guaranteed an instant answer for every question you ask. It's live 1 to 1 and instant. They can't patch you or put you in some backlog.
- zedadex 10y ago
  Please hold while I transfer you to someone who has a counterexample to that statement. hold music plays
- SwellJoe 10y ago
  I don't want instant answers. I want right answers, in a timely manner. That's entirely doable in a ticket system. Not so much with phone support...at least, not in my experience. Phone support generally has a script. When your problem diverges from the script, the person on the phone is of negative value. I want my problem triaged to someone who can solve it, not hear how very sorry they are and how much they appreciate my patience. If I sound bitter...well, I really hate phones. My favorite support experiences have never been on the phone. Chat maybe, email maybe, phone never.
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    > I don't want instant answers. I want right answers, in a timely manner. THIS. TIMES. A. MILLION. Call centers put pressure on employees, especially good ones to wrap up calls quickly to keep their numbers high (because shitty policies result in a ton of people calling) meaning that even if you get a rep who legitimately wants to help you, they are punished in their job if they try too hard to do that (or take too long.) Sidebar; Maybe this is a generational thing, I hate the phone. I hate being on the phone, I hate using the phone. If I have to talk to sales reps I'd much rather do it over email/in person, but not over the phone.

scottydelta 10y ago

with the recent google stunt where they blocked 200+ email accounts, I have been planning to move over to some other paid email service and replace all of the google products that I use. The only thing I cant replace is the android and I need a gmail account for it to work :-/

byuu 10y ago
Yeah, that one terrified me as well. I was strongly considering setting up their e-mail for domains service until I read about that.
jaxondu 10y ago
You can create a Google account without a Gmail account. Look for the link "I prefer to use my current email address" when creating a Google account.

amirmc 10y ago

> ... you shouldn't allow yourself to become dependent upon said service continuing to work. This is easy to say but can be difficult in practice. Even if they did provide a phone number, there's still no guarantee. Any business is going to have to depend on multiple individual providers, any one of whom could inadvertently shut you down. Your bank, your energy supplier, etc. Trying to mitigate for such scenarios is near impossible as a small business. It's worth remembering the flip side of the current story. This individual was able to sustain their family and two employees from this business. That's impressive. That an innocuous change on one device can have such a negative impact, with no warning, is a heinous oversight on Amazon's part.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

>Companies like Amazon, Google, Paypal, you name it. You mean the companies a lot of us here work for and should be able to have some influence over but ... don't because they let us play with "Oooooh shiny!" and because we'll be moved on to the next place in a year and a half? Those companies? We are part of the problem, too.

SN76477 10y ago

What I see is a world that cannot deal with unique situations. I had an issue with fraud on my paypal account. I got refunded, at the same time I got a automatic draft. My account then went negative because it didnt pull from my bank account which is my usual source of funding. Telling paypal that a mistake had been made and it was their fault they didnt really know what to do. I got passed around 12 times over a few dollars. They basically didnt know how to handle a unique situation. I have similar experience with my bank. Customer service teams are homoginized to only deal with volume, they are never trained on how to solve problems. These automation issues just let that same system float to the top.

cowpewter 10y ago
Were you talking to their fraud department? Did you also talk to your bank's fraud department? I've actually gotten pretty excellent customer service from fraud departments. Not so much with the regular front-line customer service departments.

gthtjtkt 10y ago

Yes, blame the victims for working to support their families. That will surely be productive... Amazon does have a seller support line. So what do you want people to do? Google "Selling on Amazon sucks" and then base their life on the opinion of some random strangers on the internet? What about the 99.9% of people who sell on Amazon and have positive experiences but don't bother to write about it? If we held other employers to the same standard using GlassDoor reviews, half the country would have nowhere to work. "Honey, I could be making thousands of dollars a month selling this product I created on Amazon, but I'm going to take a part-time job instead because Joe Schmoe said Amazon has poor service. I'm sure little Timmy won't mind going hungry as long as he knows I did the responsible thing according to byuu."