My wife and I are newly married and were really excited about setting up our new apartment together. We thought we could rely on Amazon for a seamless purchase experience - we purchased over INR1 Lac in white goods from them during the Great India Festival hoping to benefit from the discounts. It turns out however, there is a reason Amazon gives such heavy discounts during this period – 2 out of the 4 goods delivered to us were damaged. Furthermore, the company has consistently(and rather insensitively) looked for loopholes in their policies to absolve themselves of responsibility and force us(the customers) to bear the brunt of the cost! Amazon India claims to have what they call an open Box Replacement’ policy, which essentially means that their delivery agent will unpack the item and allow the customer to confirm there is no damage before signing off on the delivery.
Now, logically this should apply to all white goods. Strangely enough, however, Amazon seems to selectively apply this only to certain products and there is no transparent communication to customers as to where this policy applies and how it works! Case in point – this policy does apply to the Samsung 345 L 3 Star Inverter Frost-Free Double Door Refrigerator which was one of the goods we ordered(Order No. 406-4245009-6314761). However, when the delivery agent informed us that the item had been damaged during transit, he neglected to inform us of this policy(at that time we did not even know it existed). More importantly, he failed to mention that items falling under this policy will not be eligible for replacement(according to Amazon Customer Service) unless this open box process is duly followed by the delivery agent. As a result, when we rejected the delivery this triggered an automatic refund instead of a replacement request.
Despite my best efforts to highlight to Amazon customer service this severe lapse in communication on their end, they refused to entertain my request to issue a replacement and I was forced to re-purchase the refrigerator at a higher, undiscounted price. I was essentially made to pay for their error. Why should any company policy impose such pre-conditions on the replacement of a product that they by their own admission have damaged during delivery is simply baffling! We also ordered an LG 6.0 Kg 5 Star Inverter Fully-Automatic Front Loading Washing Machine(Order No. 406-3139803-4093937). Funnily enough, this product does not fall under Amazon’s Open Box Replacement policy. Therefore, we were not given the opportunity to inspect the product for damage upon delivery. As we had to travel out of Mumbai for our marriage, we delayed our installation till 12 December upon our return. We assumed that in the unlikely event that any issues were discovered with the machine that could be legitimately attributed to Amazon, as a multinational company they would have the integrity to work with us to resolve them regardless of whether the replacement window had expired.
Unfortunately, once again we were sadly disappointed by Amazon’s cavalier and insensitive approach. Upon unpacking the machine, the engineer from LG discovered material damage to the machine preventing its installation. The engineer, who had performed several such installations in the past, was quite clear that this was pre-existing damage from delivery and that Amazon should be willing to replace the machine without any issues. We even went to the trouble of getting the Job Description report attested by LG certifying that the product had been unpacked by their engineer and found to be damaged to the extent that it could not be installed. In spite of this, and our attempts to explain to Amazon’s customer service that there was no one to unpack and inspect the product on delivery and that we had to delay installation past the return window because we were getting married, Amazon refused to work with us to resolve the issue, completely disregarding the fact that they are the ones that have delivered a damaged product, again, for the second time in one order – something which they themselves do not deny and has also been confirmed by the manufacturer.
Rather instead of replacing it, they are insisting that we have the machine repaired under warranty, which is absolutely not a satisfactory solution considering they are the ones that damaged it in the first place! Based on these experiences my wife and I are convinced that customer service is of decreasing importance at Amazon India. Their policies make no logical sense and seem to be designed exclusively to protect themselves rather than improve customer experience. This has been a most bitter experience for us, and despite being a long time Prime members we would no longer be inclined to purchase our products through this company!