Tag Archives: Amazon

Amazon Reward Points Scam

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Come on folks — don’t fall for this!

I’ve been getting so many of these in email lately that I figured everyone else must be, too. It’s a scam. Don’t click any of the links. Throw it away.

Amazon Reward Points Scam

If Amazon.com was writing to you, they would use your name, not your email address. There is no Amazon.com Loyalty Department. When you point to one of the links, it displays a URL that is not on Amazon.com.

If all that fails, look at it logically: are they promising “reward points” or a “$50 Amazon Gift Card”? A real promotion would be clear. Don’t let the placement of a few Amazon logos fool you.

Why I Buy So Much on Amazon

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It’s all about quick and easy shopping.

I buy a lot of the things I need for my home and garden on Amazon.com. It’s gotten to the point that the UPS truck is at my place several times a week to drop off packages.

For a while, I felt kind of guilty about that. After all, the Wenatchee area where I live, has plenty of shopping opportunities. I should be supporting the economy by shopping locally.

Trouble is, the things I need aren’t always easy to find. Or they might take several stops to track down. Or — worse yet — I may simply forget to look for something I need while I’m out and remember a day or two later when I actually need it.

Hose Fitting
I went nuts looking for this $3.25 item in stores around town. Found it in five minutes on Amazon.

Here’s an example. I needed an irrigation fitting that would enable me to connect my automatic chicken waterer to my garden irrigation system. The idea is that when the timer starts up the irrigation system twice a day (for 10 minutes each time), it would pressurize the waterer’s water feed and top off the chicken’s water trough, which is shared by my barn cats. The irrigation hose already runs right past the waterer. Why run another hose across the garden entrance? One fitting and 10 minutes of effort and I don’t have to worry about water for my chickens or cats for the rest of the summer.

One fitting. You think I’d be able to track it down on one of my many visits to Home Depot or Lowes, right?

Wrong. Try as I might, I couldn’t find what I needed. In any of the four stores I tried.

Then I sat down at my computer and, in less than five minutes had found and ordered exactly what I needed. It would be at my doorstep in two days without any more driving or searching or frustration.

Do you know how many stores I visited, looking for a microwave that would fit on my kitchen’s microwave shelf without looking like it belonged in a dorm room? Home Depot, Lowes, Sears, Save-Mart (the local appliance store), and even Walmart. Basically, every store that sold microwaves. But again, a few minutes on Amazon and I’d narrowed down the search to the ones that fit and matched my other appliances. Then it was just a matter of picking the one I like best. A few days later, it was on my doorstep.

I bought the wrong vacuum cleaner bags for my old ShopVac three times (and returned them three times) before I did an Amazon search, found what I needed, and ordered them. I didn’t even bother trying to find the vacuum cleaner bags for my household vacuum; I just ordered them on Amazon.

I needed ghee — a clarified butter used in Indian cooking. Local supermarkets didn’t have it. Amazon did.

New battery for my Roomba? Where could I possibly find that locally? Found it on Amazon in minutes.

Want to help support this site?

Use this link when you shop at Amazon.com. A tiny percentage of your purchase will be sent to me as a referral fee. It won’t cost you anything extra and you’ll still get the great product selection and service you expect from Amazon.

And I think this is the reason online shopping poses such a threat to brick and mortar stores. It’s quick, it’s easy, it’s affordable, and it often comes with free shipping — including return shipping if you decide you don’t like it.

It’s Friday and the UPS guy has been at my home four times (so far) this week. I’m expecting him today with that irrigation fitting. Yesterday, I apologized to him for so many trips down the two miles of gravel road to get to my home. He said he didn’t mind. When I jokingly suggested that it was people like me keeping him employed, he laughed along with me and agreed.

And I’m just happy to be able to save time shopping so I can get more important things done.

Dancing in the Moonlight

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Triggering memories with just a song title.

This morning, at 3 AM, a mouse walked into the humane mousetrap I’d set at the bottom of Alex the Bird’s cage. As it struggled to get out, the rattling of the little plastic trap woke me up. At 3 AM.

I’m not sleeping well these days and once I was up and had silenced the trap I couldn’t get back to sleep. I reached for my iPad and checked out Twitter and Facebook. My U.K. friends are always up in the middle of my night and I thought they might have something interesting to say or some interesting link to follow. Something to keep my mind off the personal problems that are making sleep so tough these days.

I found a Facebook update from a pilot friend who’d just returned from an overseas contract. I’m assuming he won’t mind if I reproduce it here:

I have not used Pandora on my phone for about a month.This morning before I select Pandora to plug into the jeep I am singing “Dancin’ in the Moonlight”! It was the last song I had on A month ago! I did not remember that, but my subconscious did!

Ball and Chain Ad
Image from killingtime2 on Flickr.

And that triggered a memory from forty years ago…sitting on my bed in the attic bedroom I shared with my sister, listening to “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest on a Panasonic “Ball and Chain” AM radio. My radio was dark blue, my bedspread and the wallpaper were pink. It was 1972, the year the song came out, and I was about 11 years old. I was just beginning my “music enlightenment” — discovering that there was more music than the Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole my parents listened to on their console stereo downstairs. I tuned into WWDJ in those days, a Hackensack, NJ-based pop radio station.

I remember fiddling with the tuning dial on that radio, picking up weak signals from faraway places like Chicago and Philadelphia and Boston.

I clearly remember listening to other Top 40 pop songs on that silly little radio: Precious and Few (Climax), Also Sprach Zarathustra (theme from 2001; Deodado), Crocodile Rock and Bennie and the Jets (Elton John), Your Mama Don’t Dance (Loggins and Messina), My Maria (B.W. Stevenson), Ain’t No Sunshine and Lean on Me (Bill Withers), American Pie (Don McLean), An Old Fashioned Love Song and Shambala (Three Dog Night), Does Anybody Really Know What Time it Is? (Chicago), Oye Como Va (Santana), Angie (Rolling Stones), Pick Up the Pieces (Average White Band), I Shot the Sheriff (Eric Clapton), Killing Me Softly with His Song (Roberta Flack), My Love (Paul McCartney and Wings), Alone Again (Naturally) (Gilbert O’Sulllivan), Brandy (Looking Glass), A Horse with No Name (America), Without You (Nilsson), I can See Clearly Now (Johnny Nash), The Candy Man (Sammy Davis, Jr.), I Am Woman (Helen Reddy), Nights in White Satin (The Moody Blues), Song Sung Blue (Neil Diamond), Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree (Tony Orlando & Dawn), You’re So Vain (Carly Simon), Superstition (Stevie Wonder), Let’s Get It On (Marvin Gaye), Photograph (Ringo Starr), Half-Breed (Cher), Brother Louie (Stories), Love Train (The O’Jays), Will It Go Round in Circles (Billy Preston), Kodachrome (Paul Simon), Give Me Love (George Harrison), and Time in a Bottle (Jim Croce). With a little help from Top 40 songs lists, I can go on and on. What kids today call “oldies” is what I listened to on that silly little radio in the early 1970s.

I was listening to that radio in my bedroom when Jim Croce‘s death in a plane crash was announced in 1973.

In 1973, I began buying record albums and playing them on a portable turntable set up in a corner of our room. I still have those albums, many of which have the year of purchase written in the upper corner of the album jacket.

In 1974, WWDJ suddenly switched to an all-religion broadcast. By then, I’d begun exploring FM radio with WNEW-FM, a real rock station, on the same console that played Sinatra for my parents downstairs.

All those memories, triggered by a Facebook update.

This morning, when I sat down at my computer, I decided to play Dancing In the Moonlight. I was very surprised to find that it wasn’t on my Mac in iTunes. Easily remedied: I went to Amazon.com, did a search, and had the MP3 playing within minutes. 99¢ wasn’t much of a financial burden for a music-based flashback.

For a moment, in my mind, I was back in that old attic bedroom with that silly little radio on my bedside table, listening to its tinny sound. Back then, could I ever imagine that I’d be listening to the song from my computer, plugged into a surround-sound system in an RV in the middle of Washington State? I don’t think so.

And to my Facebook friend: thanks for triggering the memory.

The $49 Kindle

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This should be free.

KindleTwo days ago, one of my Facebook friends posted a status update that linked to a CNET article titled “Get a Kindle with Special Offers for $49 Shipped.” The article detailed the hoops you’d have to jump through to get a 6″ refurbished Kindle for just $49. The device normally retails for $69.

No Need for a Kindle

I don’t have a Kindle. I never wanted one. I had a NOOK on order when they were first announced, but since B&N took so damn long to deliver and the iPad was announced while I waited, I canceled my NOOK order and bought an iPad. I’ve upgraded it for various reasons ever since.

I love my iPad. I use it for all kinds of things, from monitoring the weather (Weatherbug, Intellicast apps) to planning and tracking long flights in my helicopter (Foreflight app). I also use it as an ebook reader with the iBooks, Kindle, and NOOK apps.

Ironically, it’s the Kindle app that I prefer. Amazon has a good selection of books and can synchronize them between up to 5 devices. There are Kindle readers for iPad, iPhone, and Mac OS — as well as other devices. So I can buy a Kindle ebook and read it on any device at any time — and keep my pages synchronized. No, it doesn’t support the kind of Interactive features available in books created in iBooks Author, but since Apple takes so damn long to approve those books, there aren’t many to choose from. And if there was an Interactive book I wanted, I could look at it in iBooks. If I had just a Kindle device, I couldn’t do that.

In my mind, the Kindle is an extremely limited ebook reading device. While I know some folks think the Kindle Fire is pretty close to an iPad, they’re only fooling themselves.

A Sucker for a Good Deal?

As an ebook author, I always wondered what my books would look like on a real Kindle. So there was a certain desire to get my hands on one — even temporarily — to see what it could do and how it looked. $49 seemed a pretty low price to pay to satisfy my curiosity, especially since I had a $300 credit on my Amazon.com account from selling my iPad 2 to them. So there wouldn’t even be any out-of-pocket cost.

So I jumped through all the hoops — not an easy task on a day when my 3G connection was in full frustration mode — and bought one.

It arrived today.

My Observations

Kindle with Packaging
Smart packaging. Really. (But no, that isn’t a cup of coffee on my Kindle. It’s one of the ads that appear automatically when it powers down.)

Amazon obviously took some cues from Apple on the packaging. They designed a simple cardboard box just the right size for the device and the USB cable that comes with it. Tasteful, simple. Slap a label on it and throw it in the mail. Amazon calls this “frustration-free packaging” — and it is.

When I first pulled out the Kindle, I admit I was somewhat impressed. It was very small and lightweight — like a thin paperback book. I could imagine myself reading a book on the device — throwing it in my purse and pulling it out when I was having lunch or waiting on line somewhere. Of course, I already do that with my iPad — would I take one instead of the other? I doubted it.

I plugged it into a power source to make sure it was fully charged. It came to life, prompting me for my language.

And that’s when the frustration began.

You see, I’m so accustomed to a touch-screen that I couldn’t immediately figure out how to use the buttons. To make matters worse, every time I tried to press the Select button (in the middle of a 5-way controller), I wound up pushing either the up or down button on the controller. Seeing the button I needed to “press” onscreen and not being able to just tap it was driving me bonkers.

But I got past that — at least at first — and got my next surprise: a wifi connection was required to use the device. For some reason, I thought all Kindles had built-in wireless capabilities. Silly me.

So, for a bit more irony, I connected the Kindle to my iPad’s wifi hotspot. That got my account set up so I could start looking at my library.

Around then, I was a bit irked to see that the bottom part of the screen was taken up with a banner advertisement. This 1/2 inch ad appears on the Home screen and changes periodically. I’m not sure where it comes from, because it appears even when wifi is disabled. Right now, it’s advertising an HGTV show called “Design Star.” I don’t think there’s any TV show that could possibly interest me less. Odd that Amazon.com, which knows what I’ve been reading about and buying for the past 5+ years, can’t target an ad toward my interests.

I fumbled around a bit and then realized that I really needed to learn more about how to use the Kindle before trying to read one of my own books. It doesn’t come with any printed documentation — which is really no surprise — and I didn’t have much trouble finding and opening the manual that’s included on the device. I read up about it but before I could do anything else, I got a phone call and stepped away.

When I returned to the Kindle, it was displaying a fullscreen ad.

Apparently, when you leave it alone, it displays a “screensaver.” In the world of Kindle, screensaver = advertisement. It took me a while to figure out how to make it go away. I had to power it back up. The screensaver remains on screen when the device powers itself off. Repeatedly turning the device on and off displays a different “screensaver” each time it’s powered down.

I realized then that Amazon had gotten me to pay $49 for an advertisement delivery device. That’s downright offensive to me.

I played around with it a little more. I found the page turning buttons unintuitive, requiring me to push down instead of in. That might seem like a minor distinction, but with a device small enough to hold in the palm of my hand, it seems more logical to turn a page by squeezing it instead of using a finger on my other hand to press down while holding it. And, of course, my brain keeps telling me to press the right button on the 5-way controller.

And did I mention the delay when turning pages in the books it’s designed for reading? The current page kind of blurs or darkens out before the other page appears. Like a blink. I thought they’d fixed that problem.

As for the much-touted annotation feature, to enter notes on this Kindle, you have to deal with its keyboard. That opens a whole new world of hurt. The keyboard has tabs for symbols, lowercase, uppercase, and international characters. You need to get to the right tab to type the right character. (God help you if your wifi password is a mix of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols; it could take quite some time to enter those characters.) Then you need to use the 5-way controller and its center button to highlight and select characters. Rather than presenting them in standard QWERTY order, they’re alphabetical. I could imagine myself forgetting what note I wanted to type before I’d typed the first few words.

Even defining words requires you to use the controller to navigate to the beginning of the word you want to define. I’m not sure if I’d care enough to bother.

My Conclusions

Before actually getting my hands on this, I thought, hey what’s $49? Seems like a good deal to me. But in the less than 60 minutes I played with the Kindle, getting more and more frustrated every time I tried to do something, I realized that this device should be free, like razors used to be.

Do people actually like this device? Use all of its features — including the nightmarishly designed keyboard? Tolerate its never-ending stream of uninteresting ads?

I can’t and won’t. I’d lose my sanity trying to use this regularly. I could burn a $50 bill and get more satisfaction for money spent.

This puppy is going back to Amazon. I’m sure there are plenty of other suckers out there who think it’s a good deal. Let them give it a whirl.

Amazon KDP Select Double Fail

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A contractual failure followed by a customer service failure.

As detailed in this blog post, I enrolled one of my ebooks into the Amazon.com KDP Select program. Almost immediately, I began seeing weird numbers on my royalty statements for the book: Sales at unit prices of 9¢, negative royalties, free books in a period when they were not authorized.

I immediately began a long and frustrating email correspondence with Amazon.com’s “customer service” staff. In this blog post, I’ll share the chain of correspondence that began in January and ended just the other day.

My original message, sent on or around January 10, 2012:

Subject: WTF? Positive unit sales with negative royalties?

This had better be a mistake.

1/7/2012 shows net unit sales of 13 yet net royalties of MINUS (-) $1.40. How is that even possible? Also, why is the royalty rate only 35%? I am set for 70%.

1/7/2012 also shows net unit sales of 169 at 70% royalty. The book sells for $3.99, yet you’ve calculated an “average offer price” of 9¢. How is THAT possible? I never authorized a selling price less than $3.99 except for 12/25 (free).

What’s going on here? Please explain WITHOUT using some canned response that does not apply to my situation.

The response from someone named Prasanna came on January 12 and, as expected, it contained a bunch of canned information:

Hello,

I can certainly understand your concern about the reports reflecting the royalties in negative. I checked our records and was able to confirm that the all the sales made in the week ending 01/07/2012 were completely free sales due to the free promotion you offered for your book.

However, among those free sales, I noticed that there was a refund that was made for your book which was for a sale made in the previous month. It is due to the refund for the sale made in the last month, the royalty amount is appearing as -$1.40.

Further, with reference to the 35% royalty option, I’ve found that one or more copies of your book were sold outside of countries where the 70% Royalty Option is currently applicable. The 70% Royalty Option is only applicable for sales to customers in these sales territories:

Andorra
Austria
Belgium
Canada
France
Germany
Italy
Liechtenstein
Luxembourg
Monaco
San Marino
Switzerland
Spain
United Kingdom (including Guernsey, Jersey and Isle of Man)
United States
Vatican City

Sales to customers in other locations will receive a 35% royalty. These sales are recorded separately in your royalty reports at the 35% rate.

At this time, the reports don’t show the specific location where your titles were sold. I’ve shared your request for this feature with our business team for consideration as we make future improvements.

Thanks for using Amazon KDP.

This did not make sense. I had authorized only one day as a giveaway for my book: December 25, 2011. That’s the day I advertised it as being free on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. There should be no free book sales in January at all.

I replied on the same day:

I’m sorry, but this is NOT true. The book was offered for sale for free on just one date: 12/25/11. That is NOT in the week ending 1/7/11.

Kindly explain why there were unauthorized giveaways of my book.

This time, Anuradha replied on January 14:

Hello,

Please know, the Prior Six Weeks’ Royalties report shows the sales you’ve made over the past 6 weeks. The total “units sold” and the “units refunded” will fluctuate each week depending on which day you view the reports and the number of sales made over the combined previous six weeks (to date). Keep in mind the “Week ending” column shows the date that the week ends instead of the week beginning.

Thus, as communicated earlier, the refund which is reflects in week ending 01/07/2012, was for a sale made in the previous month. Hence, the royalty amount is appearing as -$1.40, in week ending 01/07/2012.

Further, the price at which we sell your book may not be the same as your list price. This may occur, for example, if we sell your book at a lower price to match a third party’s price for a digital or physical edition of the book, or Amazon’s price for a physical edition of the book and it appears that your title was price matched with a third party’s web site (to match the competitor’s price).

I hope this information is helpful. Thanks for your understanding and for using Amazon KDP.

This information was not helpful. There could not be any “price matching” because the book was available only on Amazon.com due to their KDP Select requirements.

I replied on the same day:

I did not authorize price matching. At least I did not intend to. If I did, kindly tell me where I can de-authorize it.

There is no other version of the book to match to. Amazon has an exclusive for the ebook title. THAT WAS REQUIRED BY AMAZON. The only currently available print copy of the book sells for $14.99. How is 9¢ matching that?

You are obviously picking prices out of thin air and it MUST stop.

On January 18, Violet replied:

Hello Maria,

Our price for your title, Making Movies: A Guide for Serious Amateurs is $3.99 and it was never offered for $0.99. You can confirm the price here:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005ZSZMCS

I hope this helps. Thank you for using Amazon KDP.

Of course, this didn’t help either. I replied on the same day:

No, this does NOT help. Your reports indicate that you sold over 100 copies of the book for 9¢. WHY? You told me it was price matching. There is no price matching since Amazon has an exclusive on the book.

WHAT IS GOING ON? It certainly seems to me that you are either lying on my royalty statements or selling the book for a lower than authorized price. Which is it?

Violet replied again on January 21:

Hello Maria,

I’ve raised a request to the concerned department to check why your title was offered for a lower price in the week ending January 7, 2012.

I will contact you with more information by the end of the day on Wednesday, January 25.

Thanks for your patience.

And then again on January 30:

Hello Maria,

I wanted to send you a quick e-mail to let you know that I’m still researching on this issue. It usually takes 1-2 business days for this sort of research, but in this case it’s taking a little longer. I’m very sorry about this delay.

I’ll be in touch shortly with an answer for you. Thanks for your patience.

I guess “shortly” has a completely different meaning to the folks at Amazon.com than it does to most folks. I didn’t hear from Violet again until March 20 — more than two months after my initial support request. She finally admitted that Amazon had screwed up:

Hello Maria,

I apologize for the delay in getting back to you.

Your books’ promotion did not occur as scheduled on December 25th, and began instead on January 6th. A technical error then caused the promotion period to last longer than expected, but this issue has now been resolved.

We’re sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused. Thanks for your understanding.

So let’s get this straight:

  • Amazon did not do my free book promotion on the day I authorized it.
  • All the advertising I did that day to generate interest in a free copy of my book was not only wasted but must have looked like a cheap lie to the people who followed the link and couldn’t get a free book — thus damaging my credibility.
  • Amazon then ran the free book deal for “longer than expected” — a length of time that is still a mystery to me — thus giving away free copies of my book for longer than I wanted the offer to run.

I replied to her message the same day:

Screw-ups like this, and the amount of time it took you to answer my question — more than TWO MONTHS — are why I’ll never be in KDP Select again.

I promoted that book as free on Christmas Day. So I look like a liar to everyone who attempted to get the book that day on YOUR program for free.

By extending the sale beyond the allowable time, you gave away more copies of my book than you should have. How will you compensate me for those lost sales?

You’re already ripping me off — in comparison to other ebook sellers — by charging a bogus distribution fee and cutting my royalty rate to certain countries. You are clearly using your position in the marketplace to take advantage of authors and publishers.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

But I know you don’t care. It’s business as usual at Amazon.com.

Even though I replied to her message by using the same technique I’d been using all along, the automated response I got said:

Our Customer Service department didn’t receive the e-mail message below. If you still need help, please visit one of the pages below so we can quickly provide you with additional information or give assistance via e-mail or phone.

In other words: fuck off, we’re tired of you.

Think KDP Select is a good deal? Think Amazon actually cares about its publishers? Think again.