From a buyers point of view, there seems to be a double standard of service at Amazon – one standard for their sellers and (a lower) one for themselves.

Over the Christmas period and suffering from poor weather conditions it was inevitable some items would not arrive on time or be lost. How that was dealt with by companies can be illuminating.

On Amazon when you purchase from third parties they give you a contact seller and file a claim button. This makes it easy to notify a seller about a problem and obtain a refund – it is not so easy to do this with an Amazon purchase.

After wading through help pages and clicking through previous orders one at a time I finally manged to contact Amazon CS about an item not received. Hardly a one click process and the first time i tried the help pages were down and unable to display previous orders so had to try again later.

After a day or two I received a stock reply from Amazon asking me to wait a week before doing anything as they did not have enough staff to answer emails. I then had to contact them again and ask for a refund which was done about 3 days later – with no contact in between. Judging by Amazon’s own forums there were many unimpressed with this.

Amazon set targets for their third party sellers and mark them on performance levels including timely responses and the number of returns and refunds.

Why can’t Amazon work to the standards they set for others?