Beware! Amazon’s ‘Subscribe and Save’ is screwed up!

If you use the Subscribe and Save service offered by Amazon you need to be vigilant or you could find you have been charged twice, and /or sent double the amount of products! Good luck when it comes to explaining their system glitch to the customer support team. Here’s what happened…

Monday 22nd May, I chose 3 products on their subscribe and save scheme and noticed that they had been dispatched almost immediately upon placing the order. Why am I complaining, you might say? There is a cut off date for sub&save every month allowing a person to make changes as required before the ordering window is closed and the dispatch and charging process begins. My ordering window for sub&save is 23rd May, and, as you can see, this was dispatched early!

The same happened again…

And again…

These all were coming out early ignoring the cut off date for ordering. You can see below the cut-off date for me: Last day to edit delivery: Tuesday, 23rd May. This allows customers to make changes to their delivery… in fact, to prove my point, I changed my order amount to reflect this below, changing my original order now to 10 units and 8 and 8 for the curry pastes.

Unfortunately, what happened the previous month was that I didn’t spot this potential problem and received double the sub&save orders; the ones that they dispatched early AND the ones already in my sub&save! So, last month, after talks with varying escalation managers, I finally found one manager that understood my problem, that Subscribe and Save weren’t waiting for the final confirmation cut off date before sending out items, causing, in my situation, to charge me and send me two lots of sub&save orders. The manager refunded me and said I could keep the goods. He also promised it would never happen again. I told him that he should make a note on my file that this had happened, he promised to do this.

So, I could see the same thing was going to happen again this month, so I contacted Amazon, explained the problem, and again, they just didn’t understand that their system was sending out sub&save items before the cut-off ordering date. Four people didn’t understand. Finally, a reluctant refund was promised and the sub&save rules spouted to me once again. They simply did not understand that their system is screwed up and sending out double amounts or sending products before the cut off date for ordering!

The only solution to this insanity was to not use Amazon’s Subscribe and Save option which is a shame as we are Prime members and thus lose out on savings. But I am not prepared to spend hours every month explaining their system glitch and to be given a reluctant refund for their cock-up! Amazon shoppers beware!

Update: Never received the promised refund. My husband requested an Amazon complaint email address to send this story to, enabling them to read it at their leisure and decide what to do about this ludicrous situation, he was given the following email address: hmd-snowball@amazon.co.uk

‘The snowball effect is a psychological term that explains how small actions can cause bigger and bigger actions, ultimately resulting in a big impact.’ This struck me as somewhat amusing!