tombiro.com

So, back in April I had gotten an Amazon.com gift certificate, and had promptly used it to pick up a few things, including a print sub to Dwell and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I’d expected to land on Saturday, given that I had guaranteed publish date delivery. Well, I apparently wasn’t the only one who didn’t get their copy, apparently, and I’ve heard the same from elsewhere.

This morning, I used Amazon’s help option, which takes you to a page where you can contact them directly from the site regarding your order in question. While the unfortunate thing with the site was that it didn’t see this order for me to “auto-populate” the fields with because it wasn’t “recent,” even though it said I was looking at recent orders and recently shipped orders, it did take me to an option where I could have someone call me right away. Actually, you type in your number, put in your order number, and it calls you right back, but then someone answers the phone. So, after maybe a minute of hold time, I got a great customer service rep who took some basic info from me to connect me to my account and order in question (the first question was the order, not like keying in all your crap only to answer it all again when you call the cable co), and he checked out what was up with my missing HP7. After about 30 seconds, he verified that I was good to go with regard to the guaranteed delivery, hadn’t set it up incorrectly, and that given the guarantee offered to me, they would refund that purchase to me within 24 hours, and that the book was mine to keep.

Am I bummed that I don’t have the book just yet? Sure. Am I kinda over it because I got my book paid for by Amazon.com and they stood by their word, really with no questions asked? Absolutely. Now, I’m sure if I were a parent of two and my kids had planned on spending Saturday afternoon or Sunday reading the book I might feel differently, and would probably have gone out and bought it at the store had it not shown up by 7pm on Saturday evening anyway, but that’s neither here nor there. Great example of good business sense, and hopefully for Amazon (and UPS / USPS) there aren’t too many people who didn’t receive their HP7 this weekend, or the dollars involved might look a little different when it all shakes out. I mean, it’s not like they make money on it anyway.