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Amazon Marketplace Shoppers Slam the Spam (fortune.com)
Spammy follow-up email messages are turning off Amazon Marketplace shoppers. Shoppers who buy from Amazon's Marketplace typically like the convenience and prices. But many are also unhappy about the barrage of emails that sellers send them after the purchase, notes Fortune. It adds: Sellers deluge often inboxes with requests for product reviews, inquiries about how the process went, and sales pitches for more stuff. Considering the comments on social media, feedback from friends and family, and in posts in Amazon.com's customer service forum over the past two years, this problem is not getting any better. There appears to be no way to opt out of this email flood, which is odd, given Amazon's self-professed zeal for great customer service. One shopper in Amazon's customer forum thread posted a response from an Amazon service representative that apologized for the notifications and noted that the feedback had been forwarded to the company's "investigations team."
This kind of customer service used to be appreciated. A follow up asking if the product arrived on time and if it was what they wanted and such was a nicety. I have gotten a few and as long as they aren't multiple ones or a random one asking me to buy other things from their amazon shop I don't care.
Sellers deluge often inboxes with requests for product reviews, inquiries about how the process went, and sales pitches for more stuff.
This is considered "best practice" in the industry. Presumably, some early mover clocked an increase in sales etc. using these tactics, and now their efficacy is taken as gospel.
I don't really see how this is Amazon's fault though.
I think transaction review requests are fine. Consider the situation on ebay, where it is basically expected of every buyer and seller to leave feedback. On Amazon there isn't that kind of tight-knit community culture. As a buyer I try only to buy from sellers with a high percentage of positive feedback. I think it is well within sellers' rights to solicit this feedback because it makes Amazon a better place for future buyers.
Product review requests, on the other hand, come from Amazon itself. Typically third-party sellers are not asking for this type of review, nor do they care. These serve mainly Amazon and other customers. Many buyers are clueless about this difference and review sellers by saying "I hated this product!" or leave product reviews saying "It arrived late! 1 Star!". C'est la vie.
The only real issue would be with getting enrolled in direct marketing campaigns as a result of an Amazon purchase - something I'm sure several third party sellers are happy to facilitate. These are the situations in which you have to unsubscribe, and I can't help but think they are a drop in the proverbial bucket these days. Gmail, for example, automatically sends unsubscribe requests to emails that it detects as bulk marketing like that.
all emails come from the same address so I just have a "Fuck Amazon" filter in Inbox for anything coming from marketplace.amazon.com
email is easy to ignore or filter. phone call follow-ups would be over the top imo.
"Nobody cares if I got my package or not!"
Most people today are self-absorbed whiny morons, good luck pleasing them.
If enough people do it, they'll start to get put onto gmail's spam lists....
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
All of these emails come from the @marketplace.amazon.com domain. I just set up a filter to auto-archive anything from there.
It must be a uniquely American thing to equate massive levels of attention with good service. As a Brit now living in the US, all the unwanted interruptions you get when you're just trying to enjoy a slow, peaceful restaurant meal really took some getting used to.
I swear servers actually wait for you to fill your mouth before they comes over and ask "Is everything OK" every 30 seconds.... and whats with the rush to clear plates from the table? especially even before everyone at the table has finished eating? That's considered the height of bad manners in pretty much every other country I've ever lived in or visited.
Give one email address to computers, and reserve another one just for known humans. 35k unread from assorted semi-autonomous systems? Who cares. If you actually need something in there you've got search and filters. That way human correspondence doesn't get lost in the noise.
I dont want all the canned please rate use etc emails. I do want to get hey it came broken can you send the part or do I have to replace the whole thing etc. Those all come from the same domain.
No sir I dont like it.
I bought a car from a used car lot. They are known for well kept upper end vehicles. In the last 12 months, I've received 2 emails from them. At 3 months, an email asking how I felt about the car and if there were any issues I'd like them to address, and then another reminding that I was due for service.
That is follow up that I appreciate.
My email spam rules send most Amazon communications to the spam folder and I'm an Amazonaholic.
I had one particularly bad case where they kept sending the messages under the guise of "hey, if you liked our product, give us review" with, of course, lots of "buy more of our stuff" content.
So I gave them a review that said it was a pretty good product, but it was from a spam happy vendor. Surprisingly, they paid attention and stopped it.
I get these Amazon marketplace emails too. It takes like a micro second to delete them and move on. I mean how much crap do you order from Amazon that you are overwhelmed with all these emails? I like the suggestion to make a specific email just for online shopping, and that way all that stuff goes to a email account separate from your personal or business email. Come on people stop the complaining and think about solutions. I actually decline many request but occasionally when I have delivery issues or delays I give feedback or reviews. Otherwise I just hit delete, it's not like your penalized for deleting and not responding.
My thoughts have been that these marketplace sellers think they are on EBay and need to get a positive on each and every sale. Maybe they do... on EBay. But on Amazon there is plenty of opportunity to leave feed back in the reviews and buyers like me look to those reviews primarily and consult the star rating later. Not everything is EBay, thank god, and these guys need to learn the difference.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
While I can certainly see the point of view that it can be annoying, I'd rather get the emails than not. Every time I've had an issue with a defective item, being able to respond to the seller's email and either get a refund or a replacement has been quick and easy. They seem almost desperate for you to give them a good review. Going through Amazon itself when a problem arises is a little more tedious. I do think you should be able to opt out if you wish though.
This is absolutely what I've been experiencing. About 75% of my Marketplace transactions get a "follow up" email. Usually my failure to respond results in a second email before they give up. If I do leave feedback, and it is anything less than 4/5 or 5/5 for the PRODUCT, I'll get calls on my cell phone (credit card number of record) about 10% of the time. I average around 75-100 small Amazon purchases of a few dollars each during the year (I really hate going out to stores), and so I get at least one or two calls every quarter. Amazon says they are either unable to offer any action or to block only that seller. What really shocked me was when one Marketplace seller called me on behalf of the manufacturer when I complained about the design of a particular TV wall mount, offering me a free one if I'd change the feedback. Amazon needs to get their house in order.
Isnt this technically a violation of the (you) CAN-SPAM (whenever you want) Act?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
they know that they can send you info about your purchases via emailso they also spam you a little, they know they are getting past spam filters, (both software and in the mind/eyes of the users) they are not malicious or evil intent or anything, they just want to sell more stuff, i just delete them, they are using my money to mail me things i like to buy so i dont want them to be annoyed with me,
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
I usually get a single email from Amazon marketplace vendors asking if I am happy with the product and giving a contact if there is a problem.
On several occasions, I have used this contact to ask questions or report problems and I have found the vendors to be very responsive. I've even had defective products replaced with no hassle on several occasions.
Most of the time, I don't have a problem or question and I just delete the email. I don't view it as intrusive.
These days, it seems every contact with any business will generate a follow up email or survey. I tend to view these as good customer relations, not spam. To me, it's only spam if they keep sending me more email with offers to buy more stuff. That rarely happens.
If you want to experience real spam, just buy something from Bed, Bath and Beyond. You'll get multiple daily emails for all kinds of junk... just don't do it.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
There appears to be no way to opt out of this email flood, which is odd, given Amazon's self-professed zeal for great customer service.
Well, when you buy from a Marketplace seller you're not buying from Amazon, so...
1 star... "It works great for opening cans of Spam, because that's what the seller keeps sending me to leave a review." Anyone that sends me email spam automatically gets a 1 star review and warning about spam in the review.
I am evaluating a well known security scanning package. Found a bug that would be a showstopper for us and have their engineer escalating to the tech team.
In the meantime, am getting buried in spam from marketing. The last email I sent them was along the lines of "the only thing I want to hear from you is that you've fixed the bug". It is really pissing me off.
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
Overstock is so much worse. It's insane
I bought one or two things over there a couple months ago, and received a barrage of emails daily. An absolute unmitigated shitstorm of spam. And they came from several different addresses (domains?), and were assigned to several different mailing lists, so marking one as spam and/or unsubscribing wouldn't stop the deluge.
I think it's mostly under control now, but what a mess that was...
This signature is false.
Amazon Marketplace Shoppers Slam the Spam
Hey, this is a family website! Take your smut elsewhere, pervert. I don't care what you do in the privacy of your own basement, but I don't wanna hear about it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I get these all the time and I give them bad reviews every time.
Imagine going to the grocery store and buying a weeks worth of groceries and after a couple days vendors and mfg's whom you never had any contact with for the groceries you just bought start sending you email to see how the product was, if it worked and to give the (always) a 5 star rating.
I get enough email as it is, I don't need to be spammed by the companies of the products I buy.
If a product stands out, I normally leave a product review, if it is something cheap and common many times not. I give more positive reviews than negative ones since if there is something wrong with the product I will have already contact the "vendor" or Amazon about it anyway.
I completely left the amazon eco-system over this. Loss of convience sucks.. but no more spam for every thing i purchase...
I have many email accounts. Some only for family, some for friends, some for business... and some for spam or folks I'm pretty sure will spam.
I have one account with aliases that are good for 24 hours, 72 hours, 1 week, then are never used again.
It's a pain in the neck, but once you've set up mail servers all day long, you get to the point where puppet or salt can set up your server, configure it, and cron maintains the throwaway accounts.
The biggest issue is family or friends that get hacked, or servers that don't do SPF. DKIM I refuse to use. It does nothing SPF doesn't do (that I care about) and it does break mail lists and legitimately forwarded emails. DKIM is needlessly involved and needlessly breaks things I do care about.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Unsolicited email from vendor after transaction completed = less than positive review
They ask you to give them a 5 star rating = "I was going to, but now I changed my mind."
I have a host of eMail addresses and aliases ... roughly 10 are in common use. I don't get a lot of spam, because I have never given out or published my eMail addresses willy-nilly ... there were times, ten years ago, when a dozen messages a year were the norm for me, today it's about five messages a week. One eMail address is used exclusively for purchases via PayPal and my two Amazon accounts (I have a US and Canadian account with them) and since I am an electronics hobbyist, there are a fair number of small purchases from Japan, the People's Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, and the Republic of China (Taiwan).
100% of my spam messages are addressed to this same address. I get zero spam to any of my other eMail addresses, which are used regularly.
My guess is many of these small Asian operators are using bogus or obsolescent versions of Windows to run their operations, and are regularly pwned, and are unaware of the situation themselves.
. . . . I had a Marketplace Seller who sent me a request for Feedback for 8 consecutive days.
I gave them feedback: One Star, titled "Adequate Item, but seller spams for feedback"
Amazon sent me a nastygram saying my review wasn't "helpful". . .
Have not left a review for a Marketplace item since, , ,
I get one email asking how packaging or service was. And I ignore it. I don't get repeat emails. What are these people buying?
FTFA: “I buy literally everything on Amazon, from hangers to batteries,” noted one disgruntled shopper.
Oh. So "Shoppers" don't "slam the spam". Some extreme Amazon shoppers slam the spam. Gotcha.
I live in the same state as Amazon so shop Newegg.com due to the taxes, all of my purchases are through them. I've gotten nothing related to my purchases, and use no filters (other than what Hotmail.com and Gmail.com might provide).
It is patently outrageous that I receive emails that I didn't request. It is MY email. How dare you sir? First they sent me emails with 25% off coupons to stores I frequent, next they sent me pre-approved notices for credit cards to participate in so called e-commerce, then they dared to ask me if I received the widget I ordered and if I "enjoyed their service." Sir, I did until you violated the sanctity of my inbox to ask me.
The worst part of this violation is that I can't read the truly important correspondence without first spending the milliseconds, nay seconds, to ignore said email. If only their was a way to ignore, skip, or filter these violations automatically! It's enough to make me long for the days of snail mail when I could be assured to only receive that for which I explicitly asked.
Or, better yet, use subaddressing, also known as plus addressing. I use a different subaddress for every merchant site I buy from and keep track of it all in keepass (along with unique random passwords for each). When I start getting spam to that address, I change my address on the site and move on. Some places, like AliExpress, don't allow plus signs in email addresses, so I configured my mail server to also use the underscore as a sub address delimiter. It's a good thing, since AliExpress is particularly bad for this. I'm up to address kurt_ali4 now there. Each time I happen to buy something from a bad apple vendor where I forget to check uncheck the "allow merchant to see email address" box for, I increment my subaddress suffix, redirect the previous one to my spam folder, and the flood of spam abuptly stops.
So, to summarize, subaddressing + keepass are your friends for dealing with <strike>state-sponsored terrorism</strike> merchant-supported spam.
Hello, I understand your concern related to the changes you wanted us to make. I have made all the necessary changes to your account. I assure you that you won't face the problem again. I've issued a $5.00 promotional certificate to your Amazon.com account, which will automatically apply the next time you order an eligible item sold and shipped by Amazon.com. The promotional certificate doesn't apply to items offered by other sellers on the Amazon.com website and won't cover the purchase of gift cards, sales tax, gift wrap, or additional shipping costs. On a personal level, I appreciate your patience, cooperation and understanding in this matter. It is our privilege to have you as our valued customer & we want to make sure you are always taken care of. Thanks for your precious and valuable time.We look forward to seeing you soon.
By making user feedback part of the performance metrics system (eg how often the seller gets the buy box) and by presenting higher reviewed products first in search results Amazon has basically incentivized this behaviour on the part of third party sellers.
Amazon generates a temporary email address for Marketplace orders. The merchant does not get your actual email address. Almost all of the merchant emails I've received have an unusbscribe link. It'll unsubscribe the generated address, so your address is not revealed. Hasn't been much of a problem lately.
I get a lot of these. I buy used books on Amazon, all at least graded "good" or better. In Amazon's description, Good means the book includes a dust cover. About a quarter of the books I order arrive with no dust cover and they get a one-star review and an explanation why.
Then the e-mails start. The seller wants to give me a discount to make things right. I explain that I've already wasted as much time on the order as I'm going to and it's well worth whatever discount that they might give me to let people know that they messed up.
Next up is the full refund offer email. I reply, asking if they even read my email. I explain that they're wasting even more of my time and I'm even less inclined to remove my review now as I was before.
Occasionally at this point I get the begging email. What can we do to make this right? Let us know and we'll do it. I reply that if I hear from them again, I'll order from them again and give that item a one-star review too.
That shuts them up.
It's gotten horrible out there. Amazon at least provides a way to report fraud. Craigslist..... 80% of all apartment ads are "www.roomsters.com", a subscription service that posts fraudulent, low cost apartments to lure subscribeers to their site. Then they pull an "Ashley Madison", with repeated fake invitations if you fail to show further traffic, and offer bargain basement subscriptions "$10 for one month!!!" that they actually charge $30 for, leave it running, and refuse to cancel the service. The other 20% seems to all be out of state "I can't show you the place, but you can drive by it, and here are some pictures.
Buy into one of *those*, and the check is sent to a money laundering "mule" who is suckered into "Making $$$ from your own home!!!" ads and wires most of the money to Nigeria. Between these crooks, and Roomster, Craigslist is now useless.
Amazon at least provides a way to give feedback on specific sellers. Craigslist has *nothing*. That "Prohibited" box on the top only blocks *you* from seeing that ad again, managed with cookies, and doesn't actually stop a single fraudulent posting.
This is probably obvious to most of you, but would be a night and day difference for the rest. Just keep two email accounts; one for humans, another for "robots" - and never mix the two. I have done this for at least 9 years. I get about one spam email per month on the ~decade-old human account, with no spam filter! The account that I give to the online stores, etc., is spammed up pretty good, but I don't bother checking it at all unless a purchase is significantly behind delivery. (Disclaimer: I use a non-free email account, one that comes with my [small company] Internet service.)
It is annoying to get unsolicited email begging for product reviews. I will generally review a product when I deem it appropriate.
When one of these companies sends follow up mail asking how it went, I usually just deleted it (as has been said, I am not looking for a relationship). When the mail asks me to submit a review, though, I will usually do so - and it will be one star, citing the unsolicited begging.
Until Amazon does something to control this problem, I figure that negative reviews, specifically calling out the problem, are the best way to handle it.
I but products on Amazon so I can deal with Amazon. I recently bought something and it included a card from Amazon to contact the 3rd party if there were any issues. I'm sorry, I bought it from Amazon and want to deal with Amazon and not Joe Bob and his garage store.
For purposes of getting the best price, im finding it harder to get a good price on many items on amazon, i can often find it cheaper elsewhere, not to mention the email for reviewing the purchase etc. etc.
Every email comes from XXXXXXX@marketplace.amazon.com where XXXXXXX is an anonymized address. No order info comes from an @marketplace.amazon.com address, so this is solely used for anonymized, recorded (by Amazon,) buyer/seller communications. Set a filter to drop all @marketplace.amazon.com mails to "spam" or to "begging" or whatever, and live a carefree life.
The details, as I understand them (and I am not affiliated with Amazon, plus this may have changed, but this was the experience I had with these emails, so far) :
Amazon does not share your email address with the sellers. It allows the seller to send a message to a buyer, but anonymizes the process, including your response to the email, and saves a record of the emails. If the seller actually wishes to engage you outside of this system, they have to ask you to mail them at their regular email address, often referencing your order number, rather than replying to the mail they sent through Marketplace, so it's trivial to avoid releasing your email address, if you don't want them to have it.
I do find it silly when the email arrives before the product, and I normally ignore all of these, in general, no matter when they arrive. Note, however, that if you are looking to get discounted or free products, a friendly reply to one of these, mentioning that you reviewed their product favorably will often result in an offer to give you a free or heavily discounted (80% off) similar product, in exchange for your "fair and unbiased review," which most folks still disclaim in their reviews. To be fair, in those free/discounted sales, they absolutely follow-up like crazy people, begging you to let them know if there is ANY problem. Amazon is a large marketplace, and a lot of small sellers compete... having your product show up with one star less than the same product from another competitor will result in you being lower on the search rankings, and your competitors will eat your lunch.
I have so far only once given in to the temptation of the fair and unbiased review for a hugely discounted product (I think they charged me $3 for a $21 item, free shipping, of course... they gave me a coupon code to use at checkout, so it was bought through amazon the usual way, but discounted in the final step,) and I actually liked it enough to buy a few more at regular price, later, rather than sticking with the first product I bought from them.
Also, I've found that any replies to the sellers tends to result in Amazon soliciting you for answers to questions about the product (perhaps this is a coincidence, but it definitely seems to occur much more often on the very few products for which I actually replied,) so, definitely, don't reply if you hate getting random emails. (I use an email address that I consider to be junk-laden already, so I don't stress about extra crap going to that one.)
The simple solution is this: anytime you get these unsolicited emails with no way to globally opt-out from Amazon, just go give the product a 1 star review and say: "I will continue to issue 1 star reviews until Amazon allows me to opt-out".
I've been doing this for a while, sometimes Amazon will come and delete your review and say it's not allowed because it's not about the transaction. That's totally fine. The goal is to make this so burdensome for Amazon that eventually they will allow us to opt-out of these emails. If they receive a few thousand of these reviews a day, eventually policing them will be so expensive in man hours that they will be forced to allow us to opt-out globally and preemptively from these messages.
I enjoy the instant emails asking for 5-star ratings and a great review as soon as my card is card and the product isn't close to shipping out yet.
Would I like to purchase another one? Why not wait until you ship it before asking me?