blog @ pebbl

Dear Amazon,

I would like to highlight an issue that has recently caught me in regard to your confirmation step. My reason for complaint is that I actually find your ordering process very good and was surprised to be caught out by a problem, and would like to improve the process for others if possible.

Put simply, the attached order has an estimated delivery of a month, there was no prior mention of this on the Seller's item page — I have contacted them in complaint of this — and when going through to purchase there were no alarm bells triggered by your system. Unfortunately I do not have a screen shot of the page I saw when ordering but I am very certain it was similar to this one:

It should be noted the actual seller I purchased from is different to that pictured in the screen shot.

As you can see the estimated "dispatch" is larger than anything else, and gives the illusion that the item will arrive quickly (especially as this text can change between estimated dispatch, estimated delivery with no colour difference — I originally understood that date to be delivery). When I purchased the item it was along with a number of others, which means spotting the small 7-23 days is even more unlikely, added to the fact that 7-23 days might be standard for them, but is in no way "standard" to me.

It is my feeling that anything that could take longer than a week to deliver should come with a warning note, or perhaps a highlight icon, or even just a colour difference in the text. Even when I scanned the other pages of order information, or the final order email nothing really stood out:

The problem was exacerbated by the fact that the range was a month long, because even the days matched up. Most other items I ordered had a range between Monday to Thursday of that week, whereas the attached order was Monday to Thursday of next month.

Basically it would have helped a great deal just to have some notifier that things were out of the ordinary. I've put a number of orders through Amazon, over a number of years, and have never had an unexpected delivery period of that length. Perhaps I've managed to avoid ordering from Sellers in China before, but that could bring me on to another point that Item pages are generally location agnostic, and perhaps should mention the Seller's origin.

Thanks for your time,

I look forward to your response.

Reply — received in under an hour

(I think they may have misread the tone of my email, it was not such a big deal, but good to hear that comments have been passed on.)