Sunday 18 January 2015

Amazon needs better review-checker-bots

I saw Orphan Black season 2 for sale on Amazon, so ordered it, given how much I liked season 1.  When it arrived, however, the cover text was in Dutch.  I didn’t want to break the seal to check the internal language(s), so I returned it, and got a no-quibble refund.

I said as much in my seller feedback:
Item was stated to be in English, but cover (at least) was in Dutch. Returned for a full refund.
I got an email from Amazon, titled “Important information about your feedback”.  Oooh, important!  It said: “We regret to inform you that your recent feedback has been removed”, because: “Buyer submitted a product review instead of seller feedback.”

Well, I thought it was a seller review: the stated product (English) was different from what was delivered (Dutch), but I got a refund, so I wasn’t too unhappy with the seller.  But maybe my use of the passive “was stated” rather than “seller stated” confused the review-checker-bot’s grammar rules.

So I reworded it.
Seller described item to be in English, but item was not as seller described: cover was in Dutch.  Returned for a full refund.
I got an email from Amazon, titled “Important information about your edited feedback”.  The bot still thinks it’s a product review, yet one of the fields in the feedback form explicitly asks: “Item as described by the seller?”

Sigh.

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