Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you've never had a problem shopping from Amazon.com, then you really are not experienced enough to be giving the "gift" of Amazon to someone else. Wait until you've experienced your first screw up, and then evaluate. I received a gift certificate, but have had trouble using it, because Amazon.com's outsourced customer service does not handle issues well. They are apparently scripted to say that an appropriate person will contact you within 48 hours, but in my experience, follow up contact is not timely. When contact is made, it has been to tell me that the issue was not well documented by the prior agents and to start over explaining my concern once again. After that, I was told, once more, to wait 48 hours for follow-up that did not come. Rinse and repeat. The problem is that Amazon.com has apparently fire-walled these folks in Bangalore (or some other asian town) from the rest of the company. Therefore, there can be no quick responses to customer concerns. For me, after five contacts, I spoke with a "team lead" who indicated that prior agents had not documented the subject matter of my prior calls (even though I was promised a pompt resolution by those agents). Add to all this the fact that during the recent holiday season, Amazon.com raised the price of the item I wished to purchase more than once, at the same time that the item's manufacturer was offering it for considerably less. This makes having my "gift" money tied up in an Amazon.com account less than ideal. Do not expect that the person to whom you intend to give a gift will not have to deal with the customer service department. Try to be forward-thinking enough to consider that a problem might occur. If it does, the recipient will likely have a very negative experience, regardless of the variety of products offered by Amazon.com. When I asked an Amazon.com customer service agent why Amazon.com was charging 150% of what the manufacturer was selling the product for directly, I was told that the additional expense should be considered to cover the expert customer service available at Amazon.com. This is terribly amusing, considering that the only thing that the agents tend to do is instruct the customer to wait 48 hours for someone else to address the problem (which, in my experience, does not happen). If you are set on letting someone choose their own gift, you should consider a pre-paid Visa or Mastercard. That way, the recipient could use the funds at Amazon.com if he or she so chooses, and is still free to purchase something locally from a person who could not avoid responding to a customer's concerns.