Amazon’s horribly misdesigned return process

I have been in general very happy about Amazon.com’s service. Their shipping is usually very prompt, and for larger orders that qualify for free shipping they would often even ship in parts so that those items that are immediately available could arrive first. This would add to their shipping cost, but the trade-off is that the customer would be gratified.

It is thus mystifying that their customer service in response to problems leaves much to be desired. First, they do not give a toll-free phone number either on the website or on invoices, even though such a number exists. Yes, that probably saves them the cost of a few phone calls, but do they really want irate customers? Besides, with information so easily available on the Internet through search engines, do they really think that they can hide the number? I should think it might have been better for them not to have a number at all than to have it and try to hide it. That is just bad public relations.

Furthermore, the supposed automated return process is severely flawed. Recently I received an incorrect book as part of a large order. I navigated through the return process on their website, and I was annoyed that the instructions did not allow for returning just one incorrectly shipped item. For every item in the order, there were only two choices: refund or replacement. I could not specify that I just needed to return an item, not the entire order. So I wrote some messages in the comments. The last page of the process instructed me to return items from the entire order, and supposedly could let me print a prepaid shipping label. It did not work. At the end I had to write an email asking customer service to send me a shipping label. They could’ve sent it by email, e.g., as a GIF or TIFF file. Instead, they would send it by snail-mail, further adding to the delay.

That was a frustrating experience. But at least they entered the replacement order for me with 2nd-day shipping. Meanwhile, I have to keep the wrong item in my already increasingly entropic study.

In retrospect, all this was probably the result of some optimization. Retailing is as much a science as an art. Amazon.com probably has sophisticated models that perform cost/benefit trade-off, taking into account the probability of incorrect orders. If the probability of errors is low, it probably made sense to use a low-cost solution to address those errors and devote more resources to satisfying customers on the positive side. Overall, the trade-off probably comes out ahead for the bottom line. Proof: I will very likely continue to shop with Amazon.com.