We interrupt this regularly scheduled beginner series post for this special announcement of a prime example of a misinformed and quick to judge customer on Amazon.

I apologize for interrupting the flow of the upcoming series of beginner posts, but I just received an email from a customer and thought that this would be a prime example for anyone new to bookselling or booksellers that have never received a customer email like this.  I hope this post will give you a little taste of what could happen with a customer service issue and give you some ammo to fire back if this does happen.

Let me explain the situation and then I’ll let you know how I approached it.

Yesterday, an order came in on Amazon very soon after I had listed it for a large law book that was accurately listed at 2:55PM.  It was for $17 and I had made about a nickel for it so I was pretty happy.  This happens all the time anymore so I didn’t consider it any big deal.  I noticed it yesterday because I will occasionally go in and just take a peek at my orders even if I’m not processing them at the moment.

On every Sunday I process orders in the morning so I went about my business and processed all my orders in FillZ at around 10AM today.  For some background information in FillZ, when the order is marked complete, it will send automatically send a shipment confirmation to Amazon which then sends a shipment confirmation to the buyer so this means that this buyer got a shipment notification at 10AM.  Because of this, the buyer actually thinks that the order was actually sent off when they get this confirmation, but it’s not necessarily true.  FillZ is just telling Amazon that the order was “processed” and was completed. (This information will come in handy to you later in the post).

This evening, I sat down after a great dinner of lasagna with my wife to my computer to check email.  I happened to notice an email that was sent at 2:05PM from a customer requesting a cancellation for a book.  This is normal because sometimes customers may accidentally purchase the wrong book.  This was no exception as the buyer purchased the 7th edition that I had listed and he was really looking for the 9th edition.  You’ll get all kinds of comments asking for a refund which most are very cordial.  This request simply bugged me for some reason.  It simply said, “return please …9th is the ewest edition – not 7th”.  I took this as I had incorrectly listed the book which was not true.

In any case, I promptly issued the full refund and removed the book from the stack of books that were by my door with postage applied and applied for a refund through Endicia so I could get my postage balance credited.  I’m always a little irritated with customers do this but I know that everyone makes mistakes and it was no big deal to me.  However, this did not compare to the irritation that ensued after I got a 2nd email from this customer.

Around 7pm tonight, this buyer must have  noticed that he received an email from Amazon stating that the book was shipped on a Sunday (I told you that FillZ process would come in handy, didn’t I?).  I’m sure he thought this was odd and was skeptical that the order was actually “shipped” on a Sunday and decided to issue a prompt and derogatory email without checking his Amazon account.

Here is the email to me:

“Notice – if this book item is not stamped shipped – today – 11/22/2009

you have intentionally committed fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud.

Penalities are substantial.”

Can you imagine my reaction?  I noticed this email only about 10 minutes later after I had issued a full refund for his order.  I was flabbergasted!  This customer had the nerve to accuse me of “fraud, mail fraud and wire fraud” and then to tell me that “penalties are substantial” just lit a fire under me.  This customer did not think before sending this email and decided to just fire and think later.

After I read this, I was probably too quick to reply to him and this was my reply.  I probably should have stopped after the allegation piece

You’re order was refunded in full today and the package was stopped from shipping out.  I don’t appreciate these allegations.  You do not have a full understanding of the process that a third party seller goes through when selling on Amazon.

I was glad though that I had issued him a prompt refund and was able to fire back to him very quickly.

It’s all over now and I believe this is the first time I’ve had a customer flat out tell me I’m committing some sort of fraud and try to scare me.  99% of the time, customers will be very nice in asking for refunds and question things rightly so before getting upset.  This was just one customer that decided to not think first and fire off a snap email which he now probably wishes he didn’t.

The takeaways from this post are:

#1 Always issue a refund ASAP if the buyer requests it. Buyers will appreciate the prompt attention and not be concerned that you may be difficult to get their money back from.

#2 Cool down if you receive an unwarranted email from a buyer. You may be 100% and they be 100% wrong but if you respond wrong, you may be loosing out on a possible repeat customer.

#3 If you use a service like FillZ, understand how it works in the background. If I didn’t know that this customer had gotten this email earlier, I would have probably been thoroughly confused why he had sent his email to me.

What do you think you would have done in this scenario and do you think I handled it well?  Also, do you have any stories of similar customer service issues?  I’d love to hear them as well as other readers of the blog.