We’ve got another case of a reader getting burned by slow notification of shipment delays from Amazon. We expect that delays are reasonable this time of year—the Amazon warehouses must look like the Snickers machine at a Harry Potter convention—but this whole ‘We can’t fill your order but we won’t tell you until it’s too late to order again’ thing is awful.

Mark dl V’s self-described sob story after the jump.

So today I wake up to my computer this morning and find an email from Amazon, stating that an item in my large Christmas order would be delayed until after Christmas. Much to my delight, apparently about 85% of my order has been delayed to ship until December 27th at the earliest. Merry Christmas indeed.

About an hour later, after doing multiple searches to find Amazon
s customer service number, I call and speak to a customer service representative. While I
m upset that the order didn
t ship, my primary complaint is that it took them over four days to notify me that the items would be delayed in shipping, which leaves me with little time to replace them. Apparently one, and only one, of the numerous items that I ordered was unavailable, so they delayed shipping the entire package. So instead of taking any sort of initiative and shipping everything else on time, as I was promised, they instead chose to delay the entire shipment. Glorious.

But then comes the kicker. When I ask them to cancel the order, they say they can
t do that because the order has already begun shipping. So in the hour between receiving the email and me calling them, the order had become IMPOSSIBLE (the word they used) to cancel. This blew my mind. One would think that if an entire order was going to be delayed to ship until after the Christmas holiday, you would have some sort of opportunity to cancel the order, since it won
t do you any good when it arrives.

When I suggested to the customer service representative that I should be given some sort of solution to this problem, I was offered the following:

I could
hope
that the order arrives before Christmas. And if it doesn
t, I can always just return the items to Amazon, then wait who knows how long for them to re-credit my account.
Or if I wanted, I could re-place the order with the gentleman, and out of the kindness of their heart, Amazon would pay the two-night shipping fee, assuring that I wouldn
t buy the items from another retailer and return their shipment.

A true group of sweethearts.

Want more consumer news? Visit our parent organization, Consumer Reports, for the latest on scams, recalls, and other consumer issues.