The view from here: Amazon.com is fumbling and stumbling

The existence of a monopoly or near-monopoly is inherently undesirable, even under the best conditions (i.e. if it were managed by perfectly incorruptible, ethical, and competent executives and always delivered the highest quality of goods and services at the lowest possible prices). When the juggernaut begins to develop tics and faults and to malfunction, its existence goes from being concerning in the abstract to explicitly disappointing.

One day, you’re thinking that the U.S. DoJ should probably break the company up and impose constraints that would foster the rise of alternatives and prevent Amazon.com successor entities from buying out or hamstringing them all. The next day, you’re checking shipping costs for the few battered and bruised competitors that have managed to survive thus far and giving serious consideration, despite all of the horror stories you’ve heard over the years, giving buying on eBay a shot after all.

That’s how my view of Amazon.com has shifted in the past few weeks and, if you’ll read along through the rest of this blog post (or at least give it a discerning skim), I’ll tell you why.

PROBLEM #1 (New-ish): Purchased items getting shipped, arriving in Hong Kong, and getting stuck in limbo, never to be delivered.

Two items, each from a different Amazon.com order, have recently fallen, it seems irretrievably, into something analogous to an oubliette of eternal undeliverability. They got to Hong Kong, a rapid-fire burst of three identical consecutive tracking updates showed up on Amazon all at once, and then they were never seen or heard from since. I’ve screen-capped the tracking, taken care to blur out the bulk of each of the tracking numbers as well as the book cover images, and inserted the combined image below, placing the older shipment on top and the newer shipment underneath.

The final trio of logistics updates are the same (Package delayed in transit). Even the timestamps are identical (one hour apart at 6PM, 7PM, and 8PM):

8:00 PM   |   Package delayed in transit
7:00 PM   |   Package delayed in transit
6:00 PM   |   Package delayed in transit

When an Amazon.com purchase is of something new, like a just-released novel or movie or (e.g.) an air fryer, I buy directly from (sold and fulfilled by) the beast (Amazon.com) itself. If I’m hunting for specific books or films, especially if they were published or released years or decades ago, Amazon itself may not have a new copy to sell to me and I have no choice but to buy secondhand, from an Amazon Marketplace seller. In those instances, I aim whenever feasible to choose items that are in Amazon’s own warehouses (sold by Joe Schmoe but fulfilled by Amazon) — if for no other reason than to save on shipping costs. In cases where there are only third-party Amazon Marketplace listings and none of them are in Amazon’s safekeeping, I may chance it, but only if my desire for the item is sufficiently strong that I’m willing to accept the additional cost of the seller’s shipping process and wait longer for delivery. But that’s a once-in-a-blue-moon sort of thing.

The first Package delayed in transit book in the screen captures above was one of these rare cases where I bought through Amazon but the seller was holding the item and it was shipped by the seller. Amazon’s tracking says Shipped with Royal Mail but the tracking number provided doesn’t match any known logistics/courier service and plugging it into a multi-carrier tracking site (17track.net) didn’t turn anything up.

When it had gone a few days beyond Amazon’s estimated delivery window, I contacted the seller (necessarily mediated by Amazon.com as it is impossible to contact sellers directly through any other channel) to inquire about the tracking number. Their response was that the shipment was un-tracked but that I could try showing the postal number (which they had entered into Amazon as the tracking number) to my local postal service (this would be Hongkong Post) and see if they could find it.

Here’s where that order currently stands:

Delivery date currently unavailable

We’re sorry your delivery is late. We’ll notify you if there are any updates. You can also cancel for a refund if you prefer.

The second victim of Package delayed in transit was a sold-by-Joe-Schmoe-but-fulfilled-by-Amazon purchase, part of an order of used books, all of which (obviously except for this one) have long since arrived.

It was the only part of the order to be entrusted to Kerry eCommerce Limited. Occasionally, Amazon will use Kerry for a lone book or DVD and they’re a bit slow and the tracking updates are usually entered into their system or Amazon’s system late, but the stuff arrives eventually. The tracking number starts with KEHK (Kerry Express Hong Kong) but KEHK’s tracking has no record of it. They may not have even laid hands on it. Perhaps they only handle the last-mile/once-it-reaches-HK part of the logistics and some other entity moves Kerry/KEHK parcels to Hong Kong and that other hypothetical company or organization is who has lost my book(s).

The current status of this book:

Estimated to arrive by April 25

We’re sorry for the delay. Your package is still on its way, and we estimate that it will be delivered on or before April 25. We’ll share any updates as we get them.

Amazon’s modus operandi with late deliveries is to tack on some extra time and say the shipment should arrive within this secondary, completely made-up extended delivery window. For the Royal Mail book, this secondary interval has also elapsed and Amazon.com now seems willing to give me a refund. As far as I know, Amazon doesn’t use the extra time to prod the logistics providers (or their subcontractors and possible sub-subcontractors) to find and deliver the delayed parcel in these cases. The delivery window is simply automagically extended and no other action is taken. Oh well. In a few more days, the extra-time clock will probably run out for the Kerry book as well.

Of course, a refund doesn’t take into account the time expended in making the purchase, waiting for the item to arrive, and then waiting some more for Amazon’s extra delivery timespan to run out. More importantly, a refund doesn’t do anything about the disappearance of what is likely one of the few remaining extant copies of a relatively rare or obscure book disappearing, likely to ultimately be discarded or found damaged and then discarded by an unknown somebody in whichever unknown nook or cranny in Hong Kong where they’ve fetched up.

Two shipments in less than a month have met the same unknown fate. Has Amazon.com noticed? Who knows?

If only there were some way for me, on my own initiative as an until-now relatively satisfied customer who hates to see companies deteriorate, to contact Amazon and warn them that some step in the logistics process being utilized both by generic postal mail deliveries into Hong Kong and by/with Kerry eCommerce Limited seems to have hit a fatal snag, so that they could look into the problem or, at least, temporarily grey-out Kerry eCommerce Limited from their automated pick-a-shipping-company algorithm and begin sending some non-customer tracer parcels of their own to Hong Kong via Kerry, periodically, to see whether the problem had been resolved.

Unfortunately, Amazon now employs an extremely annoying menu-based customer service screening process and a useless LLM-y chatbot to head off customer service chat requests. Reaching a live human customer service representative, in and of itself, is no longer something one can take for granted. Then, even if you jump through the chatbot hoops and stick it out and get a South Asian gentleman or gentlewoman, they invariably seem very limited in what they can do and, in conversing with them, I have begun to suspect they’re following pre-programmed decision trees, are perhaps employing scripted replies during a chat session, and may even be using some sort of automatic translation software throughout the conversation. As an experience, it’s less pleasant than it’s ever been and even if I were able to get to speak with a genuine flesh-and-blood person, I doubt they’d have any means of alerting someone at Amazon outside their own walled-off contract-customer-service-call-center bubble to any issue I’d be attempting to raise.

PROBLEM #2: Amazon cancelling parts of orders, after they ought to have been shipped, due to lack of stock (i.e. Amazon doesn’t know what it has or doesn’t have).

My last order was of two sets of DVDs, each of a single season of a different classic educational science/history television series and of the hardcover books that had been published at the time in connection with the shows. Think of some 1970s or 1980s PBS series, perhaps a re-airing of a BBC original. All were decades old and were purchased on a “sold-by-X-but-fulfilled-by-Amazon” basis. In other words, the items were stored in Amazon warehouses. Both books shipped and one set of DVDs shipped. Each was dispatched separately. Thankfully, none were sent with Kerry/KEHK. They should begin arriving soon.

The other set of DVDs was going to be the last item to ship until… Amazon discovered they didn’t have the items in question, sent me an email about it, cancelled that part of my order, and (very oddly) completely deleted it from my order history as though it had never existed. That order shows only three items now. Cue the spooky music.

So that’s where we are. I’ve been an Amazon.com customer for years and years and years and, if memory serves me accurately, I’d never experienced one of these fishy last-minute order cancellations until relatively recently. Disappearing parcels were also heretofore an unheard-of occurrence. Now, within the space of a single month, I’ve had 2 books from 2 separate orders vanish into thin air after getting to Hong Kong and Amazon has deleted part of one of my orders after shipping off the rest.