Warning to Amazon.com music customers: watch those charges
The Amazon.com mp3 service was excellent. There’s a free download every day and many of the prices seem to be be below those charged by iTunes.
Then a strange thing started happening with my account. Amazon.com started making billing mistakes and – now this is really strange – they were never in my favor. First an allegedly free download would show up on the receipt as a 99 cent charge. A $1.99 album would be charged at $6+. These errors were getting so common in the past few months that I got in the habit of checking each receipt and asking Amazon to correct each incorrect charge.
The first time the error occurred, Amazon refunded the whole amount via a credit to my charge card. In other words, not only did Amazon refund the money it overcharged me, it essentially gave me the album for free.
The next several times, Amazon did not refund the full amount, but did refund the difference between the advertised price and the inflated amount Amazon charged me. In each instance, I had to request that Amazon correct the charging error. Amazon never was proactive about it. So do the math. Let’s say 200,000 people are charged $5 for an album advertised on Amazon for $1.99. Let’s say half notice that Amazon overcharged them and ask Amazon to correct the error. That still means that Amazon makes $3.01 in unearned profit from each of 100,000 people. That’s a total of $301,000 on a single download offer. Keep doing that and pretty soon Amazon is making a lot of money b just offering something at a low price that it would honor only for those who demanded it.
Then today an entirely new thing happened. Amazon, after repeatedly giving my money back when I noticed it that it overcharged me, said it just couldn’t do that any more. Instead, Amazon said, I had to spend the amount it overcharged me on additional downloads! It was going to get my money one way or another!
Here is the actual text from the email I received:
Hello,
I’m sorry for the inconvenience caused to you in this regard.
Because of this circumstances, I have manually applied a $5.97 credit to your account. Please use this credit towards any Amazon MP3 Music Downloads in our store.
Please understand, at this time, we aren’t able to give a partial refund for the order. Hence, I have applied the promotion credit to your account.
When you make a purchase, any available promotional balance on your account will automatically be applied to your order total. You will be able to see your promotion amount applied in your Order Details after your purchase completes.
I hope this helps. Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com.
If Amazon can’t give a partial refund today, why could it last time it messed up, and the time before that and the time before that?
The moral of this story is: buyer beware.
Pretty original, aina?
This entry was posted
on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Commentary, Miscellaneous.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Warning to Amazon.com music customers: watch those charges
The Amazon.com mp3 service was excellent. There’s a free download every day and many of the prices seem to be be below those charged by iTunes.
Then a strange thing started happening with my account. Amazon.com started making billing mistakes and – now this is really strange – they were never in my favor. First an allegedly free download would show up on the receipt as a 99 cent charge. A $1.99 album would be charged at $6+. These errors were getting so common in the past few months that I got in the habit of checking each receipt and asking Amazon to correct each incorrect charge.
The first time the error occurred, Amazon refunded the whole amount via a credit to my charge card. In other words, not only did Amazon refund the money it overcharged me, it essentially gave me the album for free.
The next several times, Amazon did not refund the full amount, but did refund the difference between the advertised price and the inflated amount Amazon charged me. In each instance, I had to request that Amazon correct the charging error. Amazon never was proactive about it. So do the math. Let’s say 200,000 people are charged $5 for an album advertised on Amazon for $1.99. Let’s say half notice that Amazon overcharged them and ask Amazon to correct the error. That still means that Amazon makes $3.01 in unearned profit from each of 100,000 people. That’s a total of $301,000 on a single download offer. Keep doing that and pretty soon Amazon is making a lot of money b just offering something at a low price that it would honor only for those who demanded it.
Then today an entirely new thing happened. Amazon, after repeatedly giving my money back when I noticed it that it overcharged me, said it just couldn’t do that any more. Instead, Amazon said, I had to spend the amount it overcharged me on additional downloads! It was going to get my money one way or another!
Here is the actual text from the email I received:
Hello,
I’m sorry for the inconvenience caused to you in this regard.
Because of this circumstances, I have manually applied a $5.97 credit to your account. Please use this credit towards any Amazon MP3 Music Downloads in our store.
Please understand, at this time, we aren’t able to give a partial refund for the order. Hence, I have applied the promotion credit to your account.
When you make a purchase, any available promotional balance on your account will automatically be applied to your order total. You will be able to see your promotion amount applied in your Order Details after your purchase completes.
I hope this helps. Thanks for shopping at Amazon.com.
If Amazon can’t give a partial refund today, why could it last time it messed up, and the time before that and the time before that?
The moral of this story is: buyer beware.
Pretty original, aina?
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Commentary, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.