#Part 2: Amazon
In my case with Amazon, it was not another user who complained on me. Like you would normally read about when it comes to Amazon Seller accounts. It was just Amazon and its stupid algorithms that suspended my account.
The biggest problem is not even the technical errors or the algorithms being stupid. It’s being unable to contact the company and talk to a human, to make an appeal and explain what happened, or to get an explanation rather. It’s even within my rights under GDPR to have my phone number changed. Next time, I have promised myself, I will file a GDPR request for Amazon to change my phone number. I will not use the normal phone number settings page. Because that can get me suspended apparently.
If I can only find their GDPR request form… they hide that too. As well as their customer service number!
I called Amazon yesterday, on the local phone number, which I had to save to my phone to be able to call them when I need to. Their chat contact is broken since a few days back (for the n-th time in the last several months). After going through the maze of questions on the site, and you click on the chat button, it only keeps saying there was an error and to come back and try later. So in this situation your only option is to send them an e-mail and wait for reply, no matter how urgent the issue is. You can’t even call them, because they don’t list their phone numbers. Unless of course you were smart enough to save it last time you found it. So I had it saved last month, and now I could use it to call them. Their invoicing department answered, despite calling the regular customer service number. They have two numbers. They then transferred me to the regular customer service.
I wanted to know the registration date for my account. Because they don’t have the courtasy or foresight to display it on my account page. A very simple but specific query! They told me it’s 18 January 2012. But not before holding in line while they “contact a specialist”, then authorizing account access by SMS.
It’s these “account specialist” people behind the curtains that review account suspensions too, I’ve been in contact with them before, but they don’t use normal language but rather standard templated replies and so you can’t really talk to them.
That SMS didn’t arrive in time, and no e-mail was received either with authorization link. Normally, which is presumably a long standing bug in their system, when I give them the phone number to send me that link, they send it by e-mail. But not on this day. Maybe they fixed the bug. So I gave them the e-mail address, and I received the link almost instantly. After authorization, they went on to “contact a specialist” for a second time, and then came back with the date above.
The thing is… I don’t think that date is even accurate. My oldest e-mail from Amazon CO UK is from that date, and it talks about a password reset. So I think I change my e-mail address on that date… the account itself is older than that. But they don’t know it. Such a broken system they have! And they are the world’s richest company! At the very top of Fortune 500, above Google, above Apple, above all the top petroleum companies.
Oh yeah, and that SMS of their came through… but only 23 minutes after the call! LOL. I’ve seen this before with Amazon. Thos messages arrive like echoes from the past after a call. I would speculate it’s because of too many SMS messages queueing up and being scanned by AI to eliminate phishing and such. It’s riddiculous! They are riddiculous.
Anyway. I think you and I both have wrong expectations from these companies. They are not your usual corner shops down the street where the seller or owner knows every customer by first name and last name. Those days are long gone. The rules that apply to small businesses owners don’t apply to these big companies, they are above the law. If they lose 1 or maybe 2 or even 10 users… well so be it. They have a sea of millions upon millions of users throughout the world. These companies practically run on and are sustained by people/users, not on electricity or petroleum.
It’s easy to miss that we now live in a world in which turning a computer off and on again doesn’t solve 95% of the issues, because some smart tit at Microsoft decided that things like Fast Startup was a good idea, which prevents full power cycle.
