Another Good Company

I don’t want to turn this blog into a rant about the places where I buy stuff, but I had another remarkable experience with an online purchase.  A week before Christmas, I ordered some software from Amazon.com.  I happen to like Amazon a lot.  They generally have decent prices.  They generally have the merchandise in stock.  They generally manage to deliver my orders on time, if not early, even if I choose the free shipping option, which I usually do because I’m basically a cheapskate.

For this order I chose to pay for their “standard” shipping since we were traveling right after Christmas and I was afraid that if it were delivered while we were gone, the package would end up in delivery purgatory.  I checked daily to follow the progress of my order.  Amazon makes it so easy compared to many other sites.  On the first day I was very encouraged to see that delivery was scheduled for December 24th since we were not leaving until the 27th.  When I clicked “Track Shipment,” it said that shipper was notified.  As the week wore on, this status hadn’t changed.  Okay, I figured, this is the holiday season, and maybe UPS wasn’t updating the system regularly.  Even though I knew intellectually that it was all done automatically when the package is scanned I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been picked up at Amazon.

December 24th came and went without any hint of a package.  A day after Christmas, I checked the status, and again it was unchanged from the day the order was originally shipped.  Something was wrong, so I emailed Amazon to ask what was up.  I got a reply within a couple of hours saying that indeed, the package was lost in transit or in the warehouse or wherever, and would I like a refund or have them reship the order. 

This is where the story gets a little odd.  The instructions were to reply to the email indicating my preference.  I replied asking them to replace the order, but to please ship it to arrive on January 2nd after we had returned.  I didn’t get any acknowledgement by the next day, so I repeated my response.  Shortly after, I got a notice saying that the replacement shipment was on it’s way and it was being shipped via next-day  (at no additional cost to me).  As if this was a good thing.  And normally it would be, right?  But we were heading for the airport in a couple of hours, and here we are again, in delivery purgatory.  So I email them again, explaining the situation, and asking them please to contact UPS and have them hold the shipment.  This time when their reply started with “I am sorry that this package did not reach you because of a problem with the shipping address,” I knew something was up.  We are probably dealing with an email-reading computer that was looking only for certain words, like “refund” or “replace” and could not understand the meaning of “Deliver on January 2nd.”  Such is life, I would have to deal with it when I got back from our trip.

UPS did deliver the package on December 28th as promised. As it happens, our cat-sitter was there when they delivered it so she was able to sign for it.  Purgatory avoided.  Luckily.  End of story.

Well, not quite.  Today, the doorbell rings at around 8PM.  Who could that be?  It’s DHL carrying a shipment from Amazon.  They shipped out another replacement!  Now that is service.

I’m going to return the duplicate shipment, of course.  But it is funny because just this past Saturday in the New York Times, Joe Nocera wrote an article commending Amazon for replacing a shipment that was delivered to a neighbor in his apartment house, but he never got it.  As he points out, Customer Service is a big deal for him, and it is for me, too.