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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.
By whom? By people who are incapable of autonomously complaining when something wasn't what they ordered or didn't work as it was supposed to?
I've gotten spam asking me if the product was working well TWO DAYS before it was scheduled to be delivered. And then repeated spam about the same product when I don't answer the first one. I've had them offering to give me money to write a positive review or feedback.
Count me in the "don't buy from spammers" column. And the companies behind the Amazon Marketplace are not who I ordered the product from -- that was Amazon. "Sold by" means nothing when I'm actually on amazon.com buying it.
I doubt Amazon will do anything about this, just like they don't do anything about the outright scammers and misrepresentations.
Its certainly appreciated, however when its for a $2 roll of tape that is where its silly.
If I purchased their product, I've initiated a relationship with this company
No, you haven't. You've initiated a relationship with Amazon. You're on the Amazon website and you pay Amazon. You don't deal with the vendor directly, and there is no business relationship to use as an excuse for unsolicited commercial email.
What I would have a problem with is getting a barrage of e-mails from companies that sell similar or competing products espousing the virtues of their superior versions.
What about companies that barrage you with requests for positive feedback and reviews and wanting to know how the product you haven't gotten yet is working out? You have to realize that the "how is it working" part of the email is just an excuse to spam you for good feedback, since they KNOW you can't tell them how well it works before it has even arrived.
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.
Really? When you're in the mall it's not the individual vendors who you're buying from, it's the mall you're buying from?
Amazon.com is not a mall. I am not in the spammer's store when I buy from Amazon, and I do not hand my money to an employee of the spammer. I am dealing with Amazon.com. And you can tell the difference, because you often CAN go to the spammer's website and deal with them, and often MUST go to their website to find technical information about the product. But you can tell, and you know, when you've left amazon.com and gone to the spammer's site.
When I order something FOB from a manufacturer while I'm shopping at a distributor's website, I am not a customer of the manufacturer, I do not pay the manufacturer, and I have not created a business relationship with that manufacturer. If I need customer service on that order, I talk to the distributor and it is the distributor who gets my money. What they do with my money after that is their business. And just like Amazon, that distributor doesn't want me talking directly to the manufacturer to buy the product because then the distributor doesn't get their cut of the sale.
You can argue, "I gave my money to Amazon, but not to the mall," and this is true.
Which absolutely destroys your mall analogy. Why did you even bother posting it when you know it is patently absurd?
If I purchased their product, I've initiated a relationship with this company and I do not mind the follow up e-mail.
It isn't a "followup" since there is no human behind it, and there is generally no way to directly respond to the email. It is just machine generated spam, trying to generate a statistical response. If I receive one message, I delete it. If I receive another from the same vendor, I go to Amazon and give them a one-star review. If you do this too (and I hope you do) then do NOT mention the spam as a reason for the bad review. If you do that, Amazon will remove the review, since reviews must be about the product and not the company selling it. So just make something up instead.
If enough people do this, the spam will stop.
An even better solution would be for Amazon to allow the customers to opt out of having their email shared with vendors.
You blockhead. They do that because, I assume, you are reviewing THE PRODUCT through a PRODUCT REVIEW. Your review will appear under THE PRODUCT listing on Amazon, which is used by both Amazon, that Marketplace vendor, and all the other Marketplace vendors.
You honestly haven't figured this out yet? Despite the fact that when you search for the product it displays an Amazon purchase link (usually) and things like "24 new from $XXX.XX" and "5 used from $XX.XX"?
You want to go to your order history, click on the order, and magically there will appear a button labeled "Seller Feedback." Seller feedback is expressly supposed to be about the company selling it, so I'm not going to buy any cover-your-*ss follow-up that claims that you were referring to that button.
Hint: there's also a "Package feedback" button that you can use to complain about Amazon's packaging for the Amazon warehouse-fulfilled orders, which might actually provide feedback to the people who packaged the order.
Stop polluting the product reviews with made up issues because you can't be bothered to figure out how to review a vendor properly.