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gregg — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 18:11:34 +0000

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1641 S. Lansing St.
Aurora, CO 80012

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gregg — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:11:30 +0000

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Amazon to Customer: "Bugger Off"

gregg — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:10:20 +0000

So it started when Amazon blocked my Seller Account. They have restored it, but I won’t be a satisfied customer until someone from Amazon corporate responds to the letter I sent to Jeff Bezos.

Then Amazon blocked my daughter’s Seller Account. We think its because she is on my Amazon Prime membership as my daughter, but they haven’t really told her the reason.

So she wrote back to Amazon customer service to ask exactly why her account was blocked:

I don't understand why you won't reactivate my account. The other account that was closed belongs to my father, Gregg Marshall. I am a different person, Amanda Marshall, and therefore have my own account. Is there some policy that doesn't allow for more then one member of a household to have a seller's account? I am getting very frustrated that is matter is so difficult to resolve. I would think that the different names on the credit cards and bank accounts linked to my Amazon account would be enough to verify the fact that this is not a duplicate account but the account of a separate person. Thank You.

So how does Amazon respond? They tell her to stop asking because they aren’t going to tell her why:

Hello from Amazon.com.

Thank you for writing. After a review of your account by an account specialist, we have decided your account will remain blocked.

We regret we are unable to provide further information on this situation. Further correspondence regarding the closure of your selling account
will not be answered.

The closure of this account is a permanent action. Any subsequent accounts that are opened will be closed as well.

Best regards,

Seller Performance Team
http://www.amazon.com

Really? We closed your account, we won’t tell you why, don’t ask why any more because we won’t answer. Can Amazon be so arrogant to believe they don’t have to answer why they closed an account to a customer???

Maybe they’d answer someone who’s reading this. Email seller-performance@amazon.com and ask them why they close accounts and not tell the customer why! Thanks.

Can Amazon Make it Any Worse?

gregg — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 23:03:05 +0000

First, I have yet to receive any response to my letter to Jeff Bezos, either from him or any other Amazon representative.

Terrible customer service.

In the mean time the drones at Amazon have finally reviewed my first email and re-instated my account. Of course, as I mentioned in my last post, I was coming to the conclusion that after deducting the Amazon fees, shipping costs and the costs of the packaging I was using, my net proceeds were effectively zero. And that does not include anything for all the time spent listing, packing, printing shipping labels, and confirming the shipments.

Guilty by Association?

About a week ago my daughter, who has also been a big Amazon customer, got a suspended notice on her sellers account when she tried to log in.

No notice, either by email or on her Amazon account notices page.

So she sends an email to ask what’s going on:

There was no email sent to me by Amazon.com to inform me of why my account was suspended. Yet when I login in to my account it alerts me "Amazon.com has suspended your account" and directs me to the notice page. The only notice that is in my seller account is from 2 years ago about entering credit card information. Why has my account been suspended and why was I not notified?

Amazon’s drones (I call them drones since the emails I have gotten, and my daughter has gotten, indicate they are not being composed by someone who is paying attention to the message using pre-scripted email text, if they are generated by a human at all) replied:

Thank you for writing. We are unable to provide detailed information on how we link related accounts.

However, we have thoroughly reviewed our records and confirmed that we have significant evidence that your account is related to another previously blocked account.

Your seller account will remain accessible to you. Please take steps to resolve your pending sales.

Any remaining funds may be reserved for up to 90 days from the date the account was blocked. After 90 days, the funds will be disbursed, provided we do not receive charge-backs or A-to-z Guarantee claims against your sales. If you have further questions about your disbursement, please email payments-funds@amazon.com.

While we appreciate your interest in selling on Amazon.com, please understand that the closure of an account is a permanent action. Any subsequent selling accounts that are opened will be closed as well.

So my daughter replies:

Amazon,
I assume this is because I share a prime account with my father, Gregg Marshall, gmarshall@repconnection.com. His account was suspended but was later unlocked and he can now sell again. From what I understand there was some miscommunication. Since his account was unlocked can I expect the same to be done to mine? How long until I can resume listing items?

To which the drones have responded:

Hello from Amazon.com.

Thank you for writing. We understand your concern in this situation.

However, we will be unable to reinstate this account. Sellers may operate only one account on Amazon.com; we are unable to make an exception to this policy.

Thank you for your understanding of our decision.

Best regards,

Seller Performance Team
http://www.amazon.com

We’re talking separate accounts, separate email addresses, separate billing (she has her own credit cards, etc). The only linkage between the two accounts is she is listed, as a child, on the family Amazon Prime membership.

Really Amazon, could your internal systems be so messed up that my account is ok but my daughter’s account is blocked???

Farewell Amazon?

gregg — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 01:28:48 +0000

I have to admit I have a reading problem. If there were a 12 step program for book buyers, I’d have to join. The problem with all those books is they take space. At some point you can build any more bookshelves. Older books are moved to storage, but eventually the collection gets out of hand.

My wife dropped some “subtle” hints the book collection was getting out of hand. The last time that happened I ended up recycling 800 pounds of my college notes.

My solution? Sell the books, and some CD’s I haven’t listened to in several years on Amazon Marketplace. After listing a few books, I decided I needed a faster way, so tech support pointed me to the paid version that let me use my trusty bar code scanner to scan the book’s bar codes to list the books or CD’s. It also let me download shipping information to feed to PayPal’s shipping system.

Things were going along smoothly, eliminating a half dozen books/CD’s every few days, until one Friday afternoon I get the following email:

From:    Amazon.com Seller Performance Team [seller-performance@amazon.com]
Sent:    Friday, May 21, 2010 2:06 PM
To:    me
Subject:    Notice: Your Amazon.com Account

Hello from Amazon.com.

This message is to inform you that we have blocked your selling
account. You may no longer sell on our site.

We took this action because it has come to our attention that you may
be selling recopied media. As stated in our policies, recopied and
otherwise unauthorized media infringe upon copyrights and trademarks
and are illegal to sell.

If you still have items to ship, please take appropriate steps to
resolve your pending sales. Your Seller Account will remain
accessible and you are encouraged to refund or ship pending orders.

Any remaining funds are being reserved in your Amazon.com account for
90 days from the date your account was blocked. After 90 days, the
funds will be disbursed minus any A-to-Z Guarantee claims or charge-
backs. If you have further questions about your funds please write to
payments-funds@amazon.com.

While we appreciate your interest, please understand that the closure
of an account is a permanent action. Any subsequent accounts that are
opened will be closed as well. Thank you for your understanding with
our decision.

Regards,
Seller Performance Team
Amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com

I read the first two paragraphs and fire back a response:

From:    me
Sent:    Friday, May 21, 2010 5:32 PM
To:    'Amazon.com Seller Performance Team'
Subject:    RE: Notice: Your Amazon.com Account

First the item I sold I also purchased from Amazon.

Second I disclosed I wasn't sure if the item was real or not because
it looked handwritten but I've seen that done occasionally and the
cover artwork appeared to be legitimate.

IF the item was a copy, it was sold in ignorance.

Gregg Marshall, CPMR, CSP
Speaker, Author, Consultant

Then I went back and read the whole email. The last paragraph really got me mad. They’ve closed my account, it is permanent, and there is no appealing the decision. Given it was the weekend, there wasn’t much I could do—except cancel all the open orders I had with Amazon, mostly pre-orders of books that weren’t released yet, cancel my Prime membership, and sign up with Barnes and Nobel.

The following Monday I sent this letter to Jeff Bezos:

May 23, 2010

Jeff Bezos
Amazon Incorporated
1200 12th Avenue South, Suite 1200
Seattle, Wa 98144

Dear Jeff:

This letter is in reference to the attached email I received from Amazon, but first some history:

I've been a customer since at least February 1997, very likely earlier. That's the oldest email receipt I have, but I know that I don't have copies of any Compuserve emails which predated my own servers in late 1996.

Until this weekend, when the text of the email sunk in, I still had the Blue, and the Purple, Amazon Mugs sent to me for Christmas in those early years. They used to go with me to Starbucks and to many business meetings and conferences.

I was a Prime test member and had a Prime membership continuously since 2005. When I joined Barnes and Noble's equivalent this weekend, I was surprised to find it priced 68% less.

If you take the trouble to pull a lifetime customer value report on me (gmarshall@-repconnection.com), you'll find I've spent tens of thousands of dollars with Amazon since 1997.

You can imagine how upset I was when I received the attached email (as yet my initial response to that email goes unanswered except for the automated acknowledgement). I could have understood the blocking of the account while the matter was investigated. In fact I fired off my explanation after reading just the first paragraph.

Of course then I returned to the email and read it all. Imagine my shock when I read that the closure of my account was a permanent action and any subsequent accounts would be closed as well.

The items I had listed on my seller account were books and CD's I had bought from Amazon over the years and finally reached the point of needing more space for future purchases.

Really Jeff, permanently closing the selling account of a long time customer on the basis I might have sold recopied media. No investigation? No appeal? The only other organization I know of with a "guilty until proven innocent" policy is the Internal Revenue Service, and they have an appeals process.

I am absolutely flabergasted any company would have the arrogance to implement such binary policies that don't account for any customer history, reputation or intent. I can only hope that the acquisition of Zappos will infuse their customer service focus to Seattle.

I will miss One-click. But I'm sure my wallet will appreciate the cooling off period that will likely keep me from instantly ordering books while I am listening to speakers at conferences.

I've written many articles about Amazon in the past. I'm certain this experience will serve as a case study for articles and talks in the future.

It's with much disappointment and reluctance that I move on to Barnes and Noble. Although I think I'll also renew an old friendship with The Tattered Cover here in Denver.

Sincerely,

Gregg Marshall, CPMR, CSP
Speaker, Author, Consultant

I did get curious about what my lifetime customer value actually was, it wasn’t quite as high as I thought it was, but I have spent at least $11,402 that I have the email receipts for.

There are several things I think Amazon has done wrong in this situation:

They didn’t consider the circumstances. If I were one of the many merchants making a living selling products through Amazon, Amazon’s response is one thing, but such a draconian response to an individual who hasn’t listed more than one of anything certainly doesn’t make a lot of sense.
They didn’t look at my customer history. Not only was I a good Amazon customer, I had a perfect seller rating.
Their initial contact wasn’t a request for more information. It was the announcement that my account had been permanently been closed.
There was no appeals process. As I mentioned in my letter, even the IRS has an appeals process.
Why would you send such a letter/email to a customer on a Friday afternoon? That leaves the whole weekend without any response to emails sent in return, further frustrating the customer.

Since the emails and my letter, I have been in contact with a semi-automated customer service “person” who has restored my seller account. Not too sure I’ll be using that account until I hear back from someone at Amazon about the process failure.

In addition to calculating my lifetime customer value, I also took a critical look at whether it made any sense to sell the stuff on Amazon. I had been thinking it wasn’t working out, it turns out I was right. By the time I deduct the Amazon fees the cost of the padded envelopes I was using to ship books in, and the postage, I was barely breaking even, and that did not include anything for time spent. Sadly, there aren’t any used bookstores in the the area that will take business/technical books. I have found a charity that will pick up the books, although I have a feeling they’ll end up trashing them, at least I get the income tax deduction (which is a lot more than the net from selling the books).

The first three orders from Barnes and Nobel since this have gone ok (nothing spectacular). One thing I like is a book that I ordered and realized wasn’t going to be worth the time to read could be returned to the local Barnes and Nobel store instead of having to package and ship it back.

My question to all of you is: have you looked at your processes to make sure you can’t possibly drive off your best customers??

Have You Backed Up Your On-line Life?

gregg — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:26:11 +0000

I am a huge proponent of backing up. I know from personal experience that hardware fails, usually at the worst possible time and as far away from your last back up as possible.

I use local drives for daily back ups. I use network drives for weekly backup. I have important data burned on DVD’s and “stored in the cloud.”

A recent item in my RSS feed got me thinking (and acting)—What about my on-line life? I’m on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (not supported yet), Plaxo (not supported yet), Delicious, Flickr, Picaso (not supported yet?), Google Docs, who knows how many places I have parts of my life scattered.

So I was intrigued to read that Lifestream Backup had re-branded as Backify, not for the rebranding, but for the reminder I don’t have a back up of my on-line data.

I’m now a trial user of Backify (with the disclosure I hope to talk them into providing a premium subscription “upgrade” to this blogger for blogging about them).

Signing up was quick, although I wonder what the mailing address might be used for.

Connecting Backify to my various on-line accounts was simple and fast, the hardest part being remembering passwords I’ve had stored in my password manager for a long time.

In the next few hours I expect Backify to back up all my on-line data to Amazon’s S3 service.

I wish they supported LinkedIn, Plaxo, Picaso, Twine, etc. which I assume they will add as time goes on.

I also wish they had an option to let me make a copy of my backup on a local drive (or if they do have that option to make it a bit more obvious on their website). It’s not that I don’t trust Backify or Amazon’s S3, but look at what is happening to a similar service storytlr, they are effectively going out of business by the end of the year. At least they have a) announced it in time to do something about it rather than orphan their users and b) they have committed to giving their users a way to export their information.

Even with my long wish list, I’m glad I have started to preserve my on-line life.

Desktop 4 Reincarnated

gregg — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:39:22 +0000

It’s hard to believe it was only last June (2008) when I had multiple systems failures, two desktops and two notebooks. One notebook never recovered (it was dropped and the extended warranty just refunded the purchase price so I didn’t replace it). I’m typing this on the other notebook, repaired by HP under warranty. The desktops, Desktop 3 and Desktop 4, were part of a 4 computer cluster I have in my office connected via the network and sharing a monitor et al via a KVM switch. I ended up replacing both with a single new HP desktop, which has been Desktop 3 ever since. It is a dual core processor with 3 GB RAM, dual 500 GB hard drives (one operational and the other as a backup using Bounce Back Professional) and Windows XP 32 bit.

A friend wanted to upgrade his system so I’ve been watching for a suitable computer. Over Labor Day, Micro Center had a sale on a Dell 435MT that was 80% of his ultimate computer configuration at 20% of the cost. He deferred, then agreed this week we should go ahead and get it. Fortunately it was still on sale. The old system had a Passmark system score of 356. The base 435MT we got for him had a Passmark score of 1680. I replaced the installed hard drive with a Western Digital VelociRaptor, using the "old" 640 GB drive as a back up drive. The Passmark score is now 1970. We’ll upgrade RAM later.

While buying his system I noticed an open box unit of the same computer so I got it. I didn’t upgrade the hard drive, so I have a system with a Passmark score of only 1680 versus the 410 of Desktop 3. It’s got 6GB of RAM now, and is running Vista, but my contacts at Kingston are working on their recommendations for more RAM and the end of this month I’ll upgrade to Windows 7. My unit had a 1TB main drive and I’ve added an internal 500GB drive for back ups. Total cost was less than $750, which is an amazing price for that much RAM, storage and a quad core i7 processor.

Vista’s Easy Transfer Wizard is currently calculating how much information is going to be transferred and I’m guessing that 200 GB is going to take a day or two to transfer across the network.

Then the “fun” of reinstalling all the software I use on the new primary desktop will begin.

But I find a new toy lots of fun.

Verizon Customer Service Fail

Amanda — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:43:57 +0000

One of the “deals” websites I get via RSS had a nice offer on a blue tooth headset from Verizon, so I ordered it.

Got my confirmation email and left for Arizona for a week.

When I got back today, I’m going through my mail and parcels and didn’t see the headset.

So I check the order status on-line. Status is “cancelled.” No reason why. Nothing.

And no notification. If I hadn't gone on-line to find out where my "will arrive next day" shipment was, I would never have known.

Think I’ll be switching to Verizon anytime soon?

Neither do I….

My Health Care Quick Fix

gregg — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 15:20:40 +0000

I usually watch political debates like the current one on health care reform with amusement and frustration—frustration about how facts get distorted by both sides, especially those “end of the world” TV ads.

I was at my doctor’s office this past week, visiting my physicians assistant (I can’t remember the last time I actually saw my doctor) for my annual visit so I can get my prescriptions extended for another year. It takes less than 5 minutes. Since I have an HSA, high deductible health plan, I saw the actual cost of my visit when I paid it--$140.00!

My PA and I briefly discussed health care reform while I was getting my blood pressure checked, she listened to my lungs and heart and wrote the two prescriptions.

All this leads me to a proposal for health care reform the government can implement immediately for basically zero cost (at least by government standards). It has two parts:

Pass the Association Health Bill that has been floating around Congress for the past 5 years. That bill would exempt association’s from the ERISA laws that currently require an association health plan to meet each and every state it is offered in and offer a national plan to its members. That would create the buying group/cooperatives discussed already.
Sponsor, perhaps to the tune of $50 million or so, the development of an open source practice management application system for doctor’s offices with an emphasis on electronic records storage and electronic data transfer.

I am always amazed by the fact there are as many people doing paperwork in any doctor’s office as there are people providing medical care.

And why do I have to do a health history for every doctor I visit, or for that matter several times for the same doctor? All they get are my current memories of my history, I’m certain that no two histories I’ve completed are the same.

When I mentioned this to my PA, she objected to the costs of automating for their relatively small practice.

This is a case where having a universally available (for free) practice management system developed by, or at least sponsored by, the government makes a lot of sense. Even if the development cost were $50 million, that’s a drop in the bucket and could be justified just on Medicare claims savings alone.

Make that practice management system run on relatively low end hardware (aka netbook specifications) and be easy enough that doctors, et al use it themselves. From what I have been reading, there will be tablet computers with netbook specifications for way under $1,000 by the end of this year. Eliminating just one of the clerical support people in a doctor’s office would pay for those tablets in a matter of a couple of months.

Couple freely available practice management software with cloud computing for records storage and electronic data transfer and the savings will be significant.

Why do they make it so hard?

gregg — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 13:20:10 +0000

I have been helping a friend with a website that is exploding in popularity, was developed in HTML/CSS and has no intention of switching to a CMS, and has a registration/supporters page that has grown too fast to maintain with copy and paste.

I did a quick Excel formula that generated equivalent HTML to what GoLive produced and switched the registration form to a Google form that leaves the results in a Google Apps spreadsheet (eliminating data entry).

I have Excel 2003/2007 on my PC, she has Excel 2008 on her Mac, the thought was to write an Excel macro that would automate the maintenance of that page, so I did.

Whenever I got stuck, I had code examples in the Excel VBA help file and loads of examples via Google.

After a day of playing around with the macro (mostly learning how to dynamically identify how many rows are actually being used in an Excel worksheet), I had a fully functional pair of macros (one to facilitate preprocessing the updates before integrating to the master list, the other to covert the master list to HTML).

Guess what? Excel 2008 for Mac doesn’t have VBA support! Shame on you Microsoft!

I would never have expected Microsoft to leave out a major feature in the latest version of Excel.

In searching around for a solution we came up with the idea of using the latest version of Open Office, which had the same macro support across platforms.

While most of Open Office is absolutely compatible with Microsoft Excel, it would appear macros are not.

I did find a reference to Option VBASupport 1 that is supposed to enable VBA support in Open Office macros. While it did prevent the macro from being commented out, when I tried to execute it, I kept getting errors every time the code reached a VBA object. I presume some library wasn’t loaded (either during installation or at run time) and even the might Google search didn’t uncover an answer. Plus I figured if I couldn’t make it work “out of the box” my Mac friend wouldn’t be able to either.

So on to Plan B, convert my relatively simple VBA macros into openoffice.org Basic macros. Sounds like a straightforward process, right?

The documentation for the openoffice.org object model sucks! It really sucks.

Where VBA has lots of code examples in the help file, and even more via Google, I found there was virtually none for openoffice.org Basic (I’m sure that comment will generate lots of flames). Plus the documentation appears to have been automatically generated, consider this example:

While I’m sure this is useful to a bit head who lives with the interface every day, I don’t write programs all that often any more, so it is virtually useless.

And, sadly, there isn’t a lot of example code on the web (at least that Google found), and what is there looks pretty brute force.

So I struggle with figuring out obscure ways to do simple things (like select a column of cells)…