I do. I was accused, in my days at Yahoo, of "single-handedly keeping e-commerce alive". I was the king of next-day-air packages, and the receiving department would ask me if everything was ok if they were doing their rounds of delivery and didn't have anything for me. Suffice it to say that I have experienced the gamut of customer-service.
During the dotcom boom, by and large, customer service was awesome. Companies seemed to actually care about their customer, were polite, delivered on the goods or services they claimed to offer, and life was all-in-all good.
Contrast that with today. My posting of a couple days ago about DVD.com seems to be the tip of the iceburg. I just went round and round with the halfwitted customer service rep at Barnes&Noble.com, wherein he tried to explain to me (falsely) that "FedEx Overnight delivery is 1 to 2 business day committment". I explained to him that, NO, FedEx Overnight Delivery, as a product, is an overnight committment, or your money back, or the shipping fee is completely refunded, per standard FedEx policy. So when my package is late, YOU can get your shipping funds refunded, thus I want my shipping funds refunded.
I've been studiously avoiding Amazon for years (they lost me at the One-Click fiasco), but I've yet to really hear complaints about Amazon, although I have been hearing more and more rumblings about bad customer service from the folks at B&N.
Pretty soon I'll actually have to visit retailers, pay for parking, etc., and that'd really annoy me. :(
I still order lots of shit from Amazon. And, by and large, it shows up just when it's supposed to. I only find myself going to B&N when I can't get something via Amazon, and that's really rare.
That reminds me, I just finished reading "21 Dog Years". What an amusing book.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743225805/
I pretty much always buy stuff from Amazon if they have it.
Two shipping related experiences from the last year or two:
Me: "I had ordered 2 day shipping; but it took UPS three days to come with my package"
Amazon (probably within a few hours): "Sorry about the inconvenience; I've refunded $x for the shipping charge to your credit card".
And some months ago:
Me: "I just received my order 123 in two packages. The shipping slip did include the Foobar movie, but the package didn't."
Amazon (within an hour): "We'll ship it to you overnight as soon as possibly." (and they did).
Once in a while they have been slow to get a larger order shipped, and it seems like it takes longer for them to assemble the order if you don't pick a fast shipping option. The good news about that is that they are nice about telling how your order is progressing in the system.
I've spent umpteen thousand with Amazon and apart from the thing with the occasionally long time to ship a huge pile of stuff then I haven't had any bad experiences.
- ask