DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

A very simple premise for this blog post: Amazon is awesome.

Now, no doubt many people will disagree, and Amazon is by no means without its problems, but if you buy lots of movies online like me, then buying from Amazon makes sense for several reasons.

First of all, there is price. Let’s take buying Blu-ray movies, there are lots of online stores like DVD Empire or Barnes & Nobles that you can buy from, but in most situations, you’ll find Amazon has the best price. There are some specialist Blu-ray stores that will offer cheaper shipping, which in turn means a cheaper buy, but for the second reason below, you might still want to get it from Amazon even if it is slightly cheaper.

The second reason is why I wanted to make this post. Let me explain what happened to me recently. Living in Australia, with the British Pound taking a beating in terms of exchange rates, I decided to buy some Blu-ray movies from Amazon UK. One movie was a gift for a friend. The price was good, but nothing to write home about, but I made my buy in any case. The goods arrived in super quick time, but upon opening the package, I found that the movie I bought as a gift was not shrinkwrapped. This would make it difficult, although not impossible, to give it away as a present.

I contacted Amazon UK immediately, and got back an answer within hours. They were going to send out a replacement to me and I would no need to send back the original item as shipping was too expensive. Normally, they would do this straight away, but the guy handling the issue wanted to ask me first as this was a gift, and re-sending another copy might mean it would be too late – very thoughtful (the alternative was a refund). I said it was okay, since I did not have to give the gift until 2 weeks later, and my replacement was sent without an hour of my answer and arrived also in the same speedy manner as the original package.

And this is why you should buy from Amazon, even if price is a bit higher – they have great policies in regards to exchanges and returns, and while I’m sure there are just as many horror stories about dealing with the customer service, it won’t be higher than other online stores. And if you get sent the wrong item, or a damaged one, then you too can be confident that your issue will be dealt with and a reasonable outcome will be sought. Unlike some stores where everything seems to be a fight.

In the same period, I also had to deal with an Australian online store about an item I ordered but had not arrived for 3 weeks, even though normal shipping times were 2 or 3 days at most. Now I got the right resolution in the end, when they re-sent the item and I received it in within days. But I had to first, at their request, contact the post office, and make enquiries and other things before they would believe that the item was indeed lost, and not just held up somewhere. The post office request was met with deaf ears, since they normally only deal with senders, not receivers, and for that extra bit of customers service, the online store in question should have known this fact and sent out the replacement item straight away. But of course, not all stores can take the loss that a giant like Amazon can, so it’s understandable and since I got the resolution I wanted, it doesn’t matter too much (for a movie that I don’t have time to watch anyway).

Anyway, the next time you shop online, I hope you take this into consideration, because it if has happened to me, then it might happen to you too.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 5:53 pm and is filed under High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.