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| Amazon Xbox 360 customers still disappointed |
| Sunday, December 11, 2005 at 23:24 by Andy Holliday |
More than a week after the launch of the Xbox 360, many would-be 360 gamers have still not received their beloved next-generation consoles as expected.
As we reported on launch day, many Amazon customers were devastated when their orders did not arrive, even though they were of the first punters to place their orders. This caused further annoyance when it became apparent that many customers who ordered AFTER the early-birds received them on launch!
Many desperate people have had to resort to paying over the odds from places like eBay and in more than a hint of irony, Amazon's own marketplace! Thus showing that the only way you are currently guaranteed to get a 360 through Amazon's website is to pay more than double the RRP!
Since then, a huge amount of interest has been generated on the internet; our article has received literally thousands upon thousands of hits and generated a large amount of comments from Amazon customers with similar stories.
Other websites have been dedicated to the saga: itemsnotyetdispatched.co.uk and Digidots to name but two, with the latter collecting over 800 names of most aggreived customers who were left stranded on launch day.
AV Forums also have a couple of threads dedicated to the story.
Whilst customers of another internet-only retailer Play.com, have aired similar complaints of items not being dispatched fairly, it is Amazon that seem to have generated the most of the annoyances.
AV Forums have had a massive 100,000 views of their Amazon / Xbox 360 thread.
On the forums and our comments boards, the grievences have been exacberated by Amazon's apparent failure to let customers know exactly what happened. Amazingly, Customer Services at Amazon are still trying to deny that some customers who ordered after the 17th August received their items shortly after launch. Amazon's PR department have also not got back to us recently with updates.
This prompted some customers to get in touch with us or post evidence to the contrary on some internet forums.
Another source of great concern to customers is with a feature of Amazon's ordering service; if you place a pre-order with Amazon and you decide to make a small alteration to your order such as change of payment information if your credit card has expired or you decide to change payment to first class to speed up the order, Amazon treat it as a new order and consequently customers lose all priority.
No customer who we know of were warned of this at the time of making changes. This has been confirmed to us by several conversations and e-mails with Amazon Customer Services.
Many customers also received a note on their account in the run-up to the launch assuring them that the consoles would arrive before Christmas 2005. A screen similar to the following was visible on customers' accounts:
Many customers feel that Amazon shouldn't have allowed that statement to appear on their accounts if Amazon couldn't guarantee an arrival prior to Christmas. Needless to say, pretty soon after launch, Amazon removed the Dec 24th statement from customer accounts.
We're sure that many thousands of Amazon customers will receive items on time from them this Christmas and most of the let-down customers who didn't receive on time have received £10 gift-certificates, however this will be of little comfort to those who banked on Amazon delivering a 360 for themselves or their loved ones this holiday season.
We hope that this week brings better news for those who missed out and that plenty of consoles arrive from Microsoft. With rumours circulating that BBC Watchdog are on the case for this week's show on Tuesday, we hope that Amazon respond positively and openly and do all they can to ensure customers are dealt with fairly and have their good-will restored. We will keep you posted with updates when we receive them.
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