Amazon Question

I often use Amazon.com to purchase stamp related books. I have a teenage son who uses their download service and on his birthdays we have been giving him a gift card to use for this- he uses my account, thus far it has worked well. This week he complained that his gift card had been zeroed out. In checking I find that on a number of purchases I made for my own stuff, Amazon deducted $5 routinely from the gift card balance. I do not recall anything on checkout to alert me they were going to do this.
I understand companies do not want ongoing balances out there on gift cards. But if they notified me they were going to do this, they sure concealed the fact when I was checking out. I have contacted them and hope to get some explanation. Meanwhile, if anyone shares their Amazon account with another family member, it may be a good idea to go back and check your transactions. Pretty sneaky, IMO.

I know this is frustrating. I have $700 on a gift card than I'm saving for a future purchase, and practically every time I have to click the "Change Payment Method" option. (Easiest way to spot this is to look at the Order Summary on the right side of the Place Your Order screen to see if there is a "Gift Card" deduction.)

I have no idea why Amazon does this. I suppose it could be that they want to zero out gift cards as soon as possible, but it might also be that they assume most people who have gift cards want to use them immediately and so have made this the default.

I do not know what this has to do with this forum, but it seems to me that you would contact Amazon customer service for this kind of thing. At least I would!

Peter

Peter- I thought I said I use my Amazon account to purchase books such as Scott catalogs. I did indeed contact their customer service and wound up exchanging messages with someone in India who could not grasp what I was saying. I finally gave up. Not sure if you are a mod- if you think this post doesn't belong here just delete it. Seems a little petty.

1840to1940- Yes I think they want to deplete balances on gift cards and resort to little sneaky things like this to do so. I had two book orders, each over $20 and they applied $5 on each from my son's gift card. I absolutely know there was nothing showing on checkout to indicate that the card was to be involved at all.

Stamps1962, thanks for the warning, and, keep on posting.

regards, Theron

Stamps1962, Greetings:

Thank you for a worthwhile post.

I can understand why Amazon would openly push you towards using a gift card balance; after all, they carry that as a liability on their balance sheet, and would want to clear it off of their balance sheet as fast as possible.

Why they would resort to snipping five bucks at a time is less obvious, except insofar as it suggests that people prefer to hold onto their gift cards, and this is Amazon's strategy for defeating that customer preference.

I do not know who administers the Amazon gift card program - it could well be managed by an outside contractor - but I would suggest that credit card processing fees are probably higher than gift card processing costs, so Amazon will show a better year-end result if they can divert more of their customers' purchasing dollars to gift cards from credit cards.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

IkeyPikey- I agree it is odd that they did it this way. I understand their wanting to cut down balances on gift cards but this just seemed sort of underhanded. From their standpoint if someone had entered the code for a gift card previously they cannot be blamed for assuming it was mine and not another family member. I know I was not notified when doing check out that part of the balance was coming from the gift card.

I have already suggested to my son that he set up his own Amazon account. He is getting a $100 card for Xmas so I think he needs to set up separate account using it. That way even if they sneak in a debit from the card, he's not really out anything- if that makes sense.

Amazon is one of those companies that has succeeded in sealing themselves off from their customers. You have to look long and hard to figure out how to contact customer service then when you do you get canned replies. Any personal reply is from someone who is lacking in English skills. There are a lot of other sources for books and other such stuff and I think I will start sending business their way.