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That story is just...insane. I'm glad I have a separate account for my maybe-one-day-business and one for personal use but still they need to let them talk to a

That story is just...insane. I'm glad I have a separate account for my maybe-one-day-business and one for personal use but still they need to let them talk to a real PERSON before locking out an account like so. I can only imagine what would have happened if he didn't post to a website where it gained traction. If it wasn't upvoted out of reddit's new, would he just be completely screwed? Damn...

pjlegato 10y ago
It's very disturbing how often we're seeing stories of someone's whole life being ruined due to some trivial error followed by poor / nonexistent customer service at Amazon or Google, and only getting their life back after they 1) plead for assistance from the general public on social media and then 2) happen to luck into getting upvoted rather than buried.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  I agree many companies could do a better job of being accessible. Providing good customer service is challenging, especially at large scale. I am reminded of when Postmates first launched, and they provided a customer service phone number for assistance with orders. Eventually that number was replaced with a message saying "phone support is temporarily unavailable while we migrate to a new system" and asked you to send an email instead. Temporary must have become permanent, because it's impossible to reach someone if you have a problem now. (Part of me wonders whether their claim about it being temporary was even true at the time, or was a deliberate falsehood intended to placate customers until they'd had a chance to try the new email-only solution.) Anyway, one thing I'd like to add, that I think is important to keep in mind, is that there are two (or more!) sides to every story. This is especially true for stories we hear from an aggrieved party on the news or social media. We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_reddit_employee_ama/cl1ygat/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r... A similar situation happened to GitHub founder Zach Holman when he got ousted from the company -- his accuser had a soapbox in the form of her blog and Twitter; the general public only learned more sides of the story when employees decided to post some of their behind-the-scenes perspectives anonymously online. Be careful drawing conclusions about any particular situation without hearing all sides of the story.
  - BinaryIdiot 10y ago
    > We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r.. https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r.... That's an awful example. The employee completely stopped responding after that so we don't know how much of the truth it was (like you said there are two sides and there were tons of rumors he was advised by his lawyer to stop talking; who knows what happened after that). What's worse is this type of behavior by the CEO was downright despicable. Why? Two scenarios. 1. The employee was correct and it showed other employees that the CEO is willing to lie and berate them in the open public should they have a dissenting, public opinion about the company. Feedback, even if encourages, would completely stop after this event. 2. The employee was a liar and really was terrible. The CEO now has created a permanent remark that cannot be taken back regarding this person's work ethic. Now the employee can't redeem themselves. They can't learn from past mistakes. Every employer in the future of his employment can google search him and have this come up. Unfortunately this is likely to come up more and more as kids grow up with Facebook, post photos of themselves being drunk or otherwise and then seeking employment as they grow up. Both sides were awful in this example.
    - Pyxl101 10y ago
      It seems like you are responding as if I'm holding up those situations as examples of how people ought to behave -- as if I'm for or against what happened in them. I'm not. My purpose in pointing out those examples is solely to demonstrate by example that there are multiple sides to a story. If you look at trends, people to tend to tell their story in a way that's favorable to them, while making their opponent look like a villain. Certainly not everyone tells the truth, because stories told by different people about the same event are incompatible! I find the examples I mentioned so shocking and interesting because they are examples of high-conflict situations where you can (to different extents) see both sides, where you can meaningfully evaluate a theory of what happened.
dsugarman 10y ago
If you have ever logged into both accounts with the same IP, they can tie the accounts together. That is not a hypothetical if, they will ban an account if someone logs into Seller Central from an IP of a previously banned account.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  Source? While they could certainly do this IP addresses are shared quite frequently due to NAT. It seems inevitable that a banned IP address will login to another account at some point. I can't imagine they ban IP addresses lightly.
  - dsugarman 10y ago
    I've seen it happen and also have spoken to people within amazon who have confirmed. They might do it with cookies instead of IP addresses but if you log into a banned account from a computer that regularly logs into a non banned account, your account will be banned, period.
kbenson 10y ago
I can understand locking accounts, since it's all automated, and they probably get a ton of bogus stuff programmatically submitted all the time. That said, as soon as someone has over a thousand dollars in your warehouse or over a $1000 pending payment to them, it should get shunted to a person for review and resolution. At that point it's obviously not some automatically submitted account and form, and what's more it's likely to quickly escalate to legal action against Amazon (regardless of what their contracts say, getting Amazon lawyers to respond is expensive, so they should want to avoid that).
rexf 10y ago
Even if you have separate accounts, you may have to be careful around backup e-mail addresses > One user reported that an account that hadn’t been used to purchase a Pixel was suspended, apparently because it was listed as a back-up address for an account that had. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-suspends-customer-accounts-for-reselling-pixel-phones https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...

pjlegato 10y ago

It's very disturbing how often we're seeing stories of someone's whole life being ruined due to some trivial error followed by poor / nonexistent customer service at Amazon or Google, and only getting their life back after they 1) plead for assistance from the general public on social media and then 2) happen to luck into getting upvoted rather than buried.

Pyxl101 10y ago
I agree many companies could do a better job of being accessible. Providing good customer service is challenging, especially at large scale. I am reminded of when Postmates first launched, and they provided a customer service phone number for assistance with orders. Eventually that number was replaced with a message saying "phone support is temporarily unavailable while we migrate to a new system" and asked you to send an email instead. Temporary must have become permanent, because it's impossible to reach someone if you have a problem now. (Part of me wonders whether their claim about it being temporary was even true at the time, or was a deliberate falsehood intended to placate customers until they'd had a chance to try the new email-only solution.) Anyway, one thing I'd like to add, that I think is important to keep in mind, is that there are two (or more!) sides to every story. This is especially true for stories we hear from an aggrieved party on the news or social media. We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_reddit_employee_ama/cl1ygat/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r... A similar situation happened to GitHub founder Zach Holman when he got ousted from the company -- his accuser had a soapbox in the form of her blog and Twitter; the general public only learned more sides of the story when employees decided to post some of their behind-the-scenes perspectives anonymously online. Be careful drawing conclusions about any particular situation without hearing all sides of the story.
- BinaryIdiot 10y ago
  > We often don't hear the other side of a story, because many companies have privacy policies or laws that limit their ability to talk about their customers or employees. For example, it's extraordinarily rare to get the kind of insight into a situation that we got when Yishan Wong posted on Reddit to correct the lies of an employee who falsely claimed to have been fired with no reason and without cause: https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r.. https://np.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2iea97/i_am_a_former_r.... That's an awful example. The employee completely stopped responding after that so we don't know how much of the truth it was (like you said there are two sides and there were tons of rumors he was advised by his lawyer to stop talking; who knows what happened after that). What's worse is this type of behavior by the CEO was downright despicable. Why? Two scenarios. 1. The employee was correct and it showed other employees that the CEO is willing to lie and berate them in the open public should they have a dissenting, public opinion about the company. Feedback, even if encourages, would completely stop after this event. 2. The employee was a liar and really was terrible. The CEO now has created a permanent remark that cannot be taken back regarding this person's work ethic. Now the employee can't redeem themselves. They can't learn from past mistakes. Every employer in the future of his employment can google search him and have this come up. Unfortunately this is likely to come up more and more as kids grow up with Facebook, post photos of themselves being drunk or otherwise and then seeking employment as they grow up. Both sides were awful in this example.
  - Pyxl101 10y ago
    It seems like you are responding as if I'm holding up those situations as examples of how people ought to behave -- as if I'm for or against what happened in them. I'm not. My purpose in pointing out those examples is solely to demonstrate by example that there are multiple sides to a story. If you look at trends, people to tend to tell their story in a way that's favorable to them, while making their opponent look like a villain. Certainly not everyone tells the truth, because stories told by different people about the same event are incompatible! I find the examples I mentioned so shocking and interesting because they are examples of high-conflict situations where you can (to different extents) see both sides, where you can meaningfully evaluate a theory of what happened.

dsugarman 10y ago

If you have ever logged into both accounts with the same IP, they can tie the accounts together. That is not a hypothetical if, they will ban an account if someone logs into Seller Central from an IP of a previously banned account.

BinaryIdiot 10y ago
Source? While they could certainly do this IP addresses are shared quite frequently due to NAT. It seems inevitable that a banned IP address will login to another account at some point. I can't imagine they ban IP addresses lightly.
- dsugarman 10y ago
  I've seen it happen and also have spoken to people within amazon who have confirmed. They might do it with cookies instead of IP addresses but if you log into a banned account from a computer that regularly logs into a non banned account, your account will be banned, period.

kbenson 10y ago

I can understand locking accounts, since it's all automated, and they probably get a ton of bogus stuff programmatically submitted all the time. That said, as soon as someone has over a thousand dollars in your warehouse or over a $1000 pending payment to them, it should get shunted to a person for review and resolution. At that point it's obviously not some automatically submitted account and form, and what's more it's likely to quickly escalate to legal action against Amazon (regardless of what their contracts say, getting Amazon lawyers to respond is expensive, so they should want to avoid that).

rexf 10y ago

Even if you have separate accounts, you may have to be careful around backup e-mail addresses > One user reported that an account that hadn’t been used to purchase a Pixel was suspended, apparently because it was listed as a back-up address for an account that had. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-suspends-customer-accounts-for-reselling-pixel-phones https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/google-su...