Amazon's fall?

This first appeared on LinkedIn.

Tasha & Girl makes artificial-chemicals-free fruit spreads from Pune. Before I wrote this, we believed firmly that Amazon was the only aggregator which had ‘cracked’ the Indian market, and not just Indian customers, but also Indian sellers. They knew where the pain points of each were exactly and how to address them using technology, massive economies of scale, and laser-focused customer-centricity. That is why we decided one fine day in 2019 that we would shift our entire business to them and concentrate on selling only on Amazon and nowhere else, not even offline (which had huge issues of breakages, pilferage, and payment delays) or other aggregators, which were not strong enough in the consumer segment.

However, that has changed, and quite recently too. Over the past month or so (maybe 5-6 weeks), their customer service has deteriorated to the point where one wonders if they are indeed a multinational company worth hundreds of billions of USD having a vision of becoming Earth’s most customer-centric company. Or maybe they have decided that sellers (which are 50% of their ecosystem, if not more) are no longer to be treated as customers, even though Amazon makes most of their money from sellers.

First they changed their EasyShip scheduling. Earlier, we could ship as soon as we had our products packed and ready, which was normally within one working day (which is why we put 2 days as our lead time in our settings). Now, we can’t do that. Amazon decides the pickup date for us and we cannot choose to ship early. As of yesterday (7th Sept), if you ordered my product, we’d get a pickup date of 12th Sept, which is 5 days away! What has started to happen is that a customer places an order, waits patiently for 3-4, or even 5 days for the product to ship, and then loses nerve and cancels, thinking that we messed up. We not only lose a customer but also our reputation in the market. Our customers have started to think WE are the cause of delays, when the reality is that we sell a bottled product that is already manufactured and ready (we are sitting on around 30 metric tons of it, packed and ready to go), and we only have to pack it in the corrugated box, and stick the label (Air Way Bill) on it for despatch, all of which takes less than 10 minutes. But Amazon’s pickup schedules are so arbitrary and delayed that we end up looking bad. As if WE did not have the product ready in time and are tardy and unprofessional. Having cancelled the order, now the customer may take to social media and broadcast their displeasure, or complain to us on our mail or website or Customer Care phone. It becomes difficult to handle such a customer because they insist that a company like Amazon can do no wrong and once they order and pay for the product, it becomes our responsibility to deliver it. They aren’t wrong, you see. They trusted us with their money and taste. But then, we trusted Amazon to handle the process as advertised too, didn’t we? And they have left us high & dry. Besides an irate customer, of course, there is the lost revenue and the potential revenue from that customer in the future.

After their pickup policy, they changed their phone support timings, for reasons we cannot fathom. Even now, the call disconnects automatically many a time with a request to call back between 9 a.m and 9 p.m, when actually their timings have changed to 10 a.m to 2 p.n, and even then with wait times of 30 to 40 minutes often. They also changed their seller chat so that it is rarely or never available (not one single time in the past at least a dozen times during working hours on working days has it worked for us, with us getting a message that everyone is too busy to chat right now!). And about the mails, don’t even get us started. First, the bots. Then, the templated responses. And finally, the dismissive answers. It is completely frustrating to even get them to acknowledge your problem, leave alone offer practical, efficient, and quick solutions to them. And honestly, we do have genuine issues with pickup scheduling and customer cancellations. Solving these would not benefit us alone, but also others, and more importantly for the company, Amazon itself!

Oh, did we say they charge us for cancelling the order (in the interests of full disclosure, they claim it will be reversed in 10-15 business days, but why charge us at all?). First they do not allow us to schedule a pickup, then they shut all the avenues of raising the issue, refuse to respond to communication, and eventually do not even allow us to ‘Mark as Shipped’ the order which we have sent using an external private logistics vendor. Then, they send us a mail that says that they will charge us for the referral and closing fees, taxes included, and also demote our rating because of this! This is after their mail (automated, of course) that states that nothing will be charged nor will our rating suffer due to cancellation from acts of omission by them.

We did try and raise this issue. But as explained earlier, Amazon’s chat is never available (at least the dozen or so times we tried, all of it on working days during working hours), the tickets raised are left unattended (for days!!…we have a ticket raised on 31 Aug, which is 8 days ago, and it is unresolved), phones (with reduced timings) have wait times of 30-40m (we even waited that long and spoke to them, and all we were assured of was ‘we will escalate this issue’, and that was 3 days ago!), and mails are unanswered (we have a mail we sent on 5th Aug still unresponded to).

Finally, we took to social media and tagged them on Twitter. Their response: ‘Please fill in this link.’ Sigh! Their solution to our problem of ‘Hey there, why don’t you answer our emails?’ was ‘Please write us a mail about this.’ Do you see a pattern? Anyway, we did fill up the link and got a wishy-washy reply that mistook us for CUSTOMERS and not SELLERS. So much for attention to detail (by the way, they do not even have a form for seller issues that are flagged on social media…says something about their focus, right?). OK, back to the point: We wrote back within 12 minutes of receiving this silly (and erroneous) mail, clarifying that we are sellers (and the ‘orders’ we mention are not what we are due to receive, but what we wish to despatch) and specifying our problem at length and in some detail. That was 3 days ago. No reply. When we tried to raise the issue once again on Twitter, you guessed it: We were asked to fill in a link! Round and round we go! A to Z. Z to A. Like the Amazon logo.

There seems to be no solution to this. It is painfully obvious that Amazon is short-staffed, and its personnel are under pressure for something other than customer-centric service. Whatever it is, it is actually harming their cause, becoming an obstacle in their growth, and stopping them from achieving their vision. All this without helping their customers, their specific reason to exist as per their own intent statement.

We hope this is temporary and they pull up their socks once again. But at least as of today, we see no signs of this going away. We wonder if we should just wait for the competition (you know who) to launch and put our eggs in that basket. Or should we shift our marketing efforts to the other aggregator, Flipkart?

Whichever way you look at it, it sure is a huge comedown for a brand that was, not long ago, well on its way to truly becoming a delight to work with, regardless of whether you were buying or selling on it. When it was launched in India (in 2012, if we remember correctly), we looked up to it and wanted to emulate its best practices and brand positioning. Today, we watch in horror as it becomes hated on both sides of the table. I have seen some real tragedies in my life. But I would never have, in a thousand years, believed that Amazon will go lax in its processes and lose focus from customer-centricity.

The worst part is that it isn’t going down alone. It is taking the hard-earned, but brittle reputations of its sellers with it. A Jeff Bezos may even survive Amazon becoming a footnote in internet history because he’s made what he has to of it and has etched his name in the books as a swashbuckling pioneer. But a Tasha & Girl, and millions of such small startups and businesses, with the blood, sweat, and tears of small families and individuals that have made Amazon the centrepiece of their go-to-market strategy, will not only not survive this slow but sure destruction of their brand value, but will actually take down the founders, the employees, the suppliers & vendors, and at times, even customers to their doom for the mistake of trusting Jeff with their delicate reputations.

Lord Byron put it so well in his ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’. If I were Jeff Bezos, I’d pay heed. Every man who thought he was Napoleon was brought down by hubris, even Napoleon himself.