What is Wrong with Amazon’s Customer Service?

Getting the company to address a problem with their software remains an ongoing nightmare

Update, November 20, 2024: The situation described below has been resolved. Yes, I took on Amazon, a global behemoth, and won, but I had zero help from customer service. The problem was resolved because I managed to find an Amazon forum on which I could register my complaint, and it was there that an Amazon developer saw my complaint and acted on it. Spoiler alert: Amazon added an individual option to the drop-down menu, which is exactly what I asked for because it was needed. It took Amazon three months to correct the problem. In all fairness, I suppose it would make sense that a software glitch that has a global reach would take some time to be fixed.

So why keep this post up at Medium when the situation has been fixed? Because Amazon’s customer service remains appalling, and I want people to see my letter of September 8 to understand just how bad a large company’s customer service can be. Don’t get me started on Verizon.

September 8, 2024

Dear Amazon,

I’ve been selling stuff on Amazon for more than twenty years, but last month my Seller Account was frozen on pain of being “inactive.” Inactive? How is that my problem? I have no control over who will find me and buy anything I’m selling. Sometimes I’ve gone months without selling something, but now you’re telling me you need to verify my information to reactivate my seller account? Why? You already know where I live and you already have my bank information.

But let’s say you’ve established some new security procedures and that because of these new guardrails you’re asking everyone with a seller account to reverify their personal information. Okay, let’s do it.

When I go to the necessary page, I’m confronted with this:

A business location? I don’t have a business. Some people have set up formal businesses on Amazon, but I’m just a guy who occasionally wants to get rid of stuff. The activity on my seller account has always been sparse and infrequent; it’s hardly a “business.” Ah, but below the box it reads “If you don’t have a business, enter your country of residence.” Okay, fine.

So after I typed “United States,” a new box appeared directly below the “Business location” box:

“Business type”? You just asked me for my country of residence because I don’t have a business. Why are you now asking me for a “Business type”?

So then I thought that maybe after clicking on “Select an entity type” that I would see a drop-down menu of some kind, with “Individual” or maybe “Self” as a selection, and that when I click on it I would be taken directly to a page where I would upload my information and therefore bypass any business-related issues because, once again, I’m not a business. This is what happened next:

Look at those four options (ignore the incorrect use of hyphens in the first two): Privately-owned business, Publicly-listed business, State-owned business, and Charity. It’s clear that I’m blocked from proceeding because there is no nonbusiness option for me to click on. But what would happen if I clicked on “Privately-owned business”? Maybe an “Individual” prompt would pop up? Let’s see:

Look at the header of that third box: “Business Name, used to register with your state or federal government.” That confirms that I am unable to proceed with Amazon’s request to upload verifying documents — as an individual. Is Amazon indirectly telling me that lone individuals are no longer allowed to have seller accounts, that everyone must have registered businesses? But this much is clear: Without an option for individuals, I cannot proceed to the next step. So what is an individual to do? Maybe there’s another method I could use?

It was at this juncture that I contacted Seller Support via email. I wrote that I do not have a business, that I’m trying to upload some verifying documents, and that I’m blocked from doing so because there’s no option in the drop-down menu for “Individual” or “Self.” If you had that option, I wrote, I could directly upload the verifying documents that you need from me and then I would be done. So how can I, as an individual, bypass these business-oriented requests?

Amazon’s email reply:

We cannot provide support on this matter because your request is not related to seller identity verification or related processes.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Is Amazon’s customer service run by bot? How is my email, which was explicitly about the seller-identity verification process not related to “seller identity verification or related processes”? How could I receive such a response when my problem with the verification process was the precise reason I sent a message?

What’s worse is that the company’s response was a do-not-reply email, which meant that I had to start over and go through the process of contacting Amazon again. But this time I would speak to a representative.

After telling this person about my problem and the nonsensical email response I received, the rep suggested that I resubmit my complaint at Seller Central but this time be a bit more detailed about my issue. So I did. This was the new response I received:

We cannot provide support on this matter because your request is not related to seller identity verification or related processes.

In an article about the history of Amazon’s logo, the writer notes of the current design that “the bright orange exudes energy and friendliness, reflecting Amazon’s commitment to customer service.”

“Commitment,” you say? Hmm. I suppose the representatives I spoke with were friendly enough, but if we’re defining “customer service” as a way to get a problem resolved, let the record show that I’ve contacted Amazon numerous times about this matter: via email, a chat box, and conversations on the phone. The result? My issue remains unresolved. Short version: I have received no customer service from Amazon.

There are only three ways for Amazon to resolve this problem: a) a software engineer fixes the drop-down menu by adding “Individual” as an option (or provides some other method for people who do not have registered businesses to upload the verifying documents), or b) someone at Amazon could kindly reactivate my Seller Account because you already have my identifying information, as stated in the first paragraph above, and that for the life of me I can’t figure out why Amazon would need personal information from me when you already have it.

Thanks for reading this, and I hope you resolve this issue soon.

Barry

Barry Lyons is a freelance writer living in New York City. He also has another complaint: Kamala Harris and the Apostrophe S.