Amazon.com: Adoption Unfriendly?
ell I have moved from annoyed to pissed. Yesterday, you might recall, I tried to start a baby registry at Amazon.com. For some unknown reason, Amazon requires that you have a due date or arrival date listed in order to create this registry. I, however, have no such information since we’ve not been matched and can have a placement at any time. Sure, I could make up a date, but that is not the point here. For people who are adopting, they need the flexibility of creating a registry without an arrival date. Why is that so hard for Amazon to understand.
Yesterday I wrote my complaint e-mail to the vast morass that is Amazon.com customer service.
I’m a little annoyed about the Amazon baby registry. My husband and I are adopting and as such we do not have a “due date” for our baby. Yet I cannot seem to create a registry without a due date and that isn’t fair at all. Please let me know if there is a work around for this problem or I’ll set up our registry elsewhere.
Today I get the following useless reply from Amazon.com:
Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.
I sincerely apologize for inconvenience you may have experienced with this situation in regards to the baby registry feature.
I understand that you would want to create a baby registry without a due date or the arrival date, but as per the baby registry restrictions or policies due date for the baby is mandatory while creating a baby registry.
I am sorry for the inconvenience you may have caused but we do not have any other alternative in creating the baby registry without a due date. If you need further assistance, please visit our online Baby Registry help pages:
http://www.amazon.com/help/registry/Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.
Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:
If yes, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-y?c=rdrxxeuy3470919952
If not, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/rsvp-n?c=rdrxxeuy3470919952&q=hcm2&nc2c=1Best regards,
Sujay
Amazon.com Customer Service
http://www.amazon.com
Now I don’t know about you, but this bothers me. It’s bad enough that my uterus doesn’t work to allow me to get pregnant, but now I have to face the indignity of not being able to set up a registry because my adoption process doesn’t fit into Amazon.com’s rigid view of how babies enter families? This truly unacceptable. I’m tired of situations such as these geared to make the adoptive parent feel “less than.”
I don’t think that Amazon should just be able to give the ol’ that’s the way it is, reply in this situation. They need to understand that the due date or arrival date should be optional.
The difficult part is that Amazon.com is one of those sneaky companies that doesn’t post its customer service address or telephone number. To register your complaint, you need to visit their website for their callback service or send an e-mail to orders@amazon.com.
However, with a little digging, I’ve found the following addresses and numbers for Amazon customer service and Amazon corporate. I hope that you will join me in contacting them in some way to let them know that they need to change the policy on the baby registry for we adoptive parents-to-be.
Amazon.com Customer Service
Amazon.com, Inc.
Customer Service
PO Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226
Phone toll-free in the US and Canada: (800) 201-7575
Phone from outside the US and Canada: (206) 346-2992 or (206)-266-2992
Another direct line: (206) 266-2335
Amazon.com Headquarters
Address: 1200 12th Ave., Ste. 1200
Seattle, WA 98144
Phone: (206) 266-1000
Fax: (304) 781-4960
Please let as many people know about this as possible. Meanwhile, I’ll be registering at BabiesRUs.
You’ll be distressed to learn that babys-r-us is part of Amazon. You are better off going in and registering anyway. Much easier and more fun (IMHO).
It does suck that you have to put a date down however I can see why they would need one. Without it – the registry would probably exist forever. They probably have a cut off date associated with the registry (probably after the baby is a year or two old) otherwise they wouldn’t know when to delete it and then would be stuffed to the gills in old registries.
Juls
Actually Amazon and BabiesRUs separated their registries sometime last year. There was a notice about it on the website.
But I guess I will disagree about the languishing registries. My wedding registry is still listed there, now 4 years later. And how many freaking wish lists are there spinning around on the site? I honestly think it isn’t that big a deal for them.
I wonder if other registries have a similar problem? Does it work at BRU? I am more disturbed with their response to your letter than the actual “rule” which is in all probably more of a computer glitch thing.
I kind of picture in my mind a twenty something unmarried male tech support guy writing this response. Maybe a letter to someone who might actually care at amazon might get you a kinder reply. Not to defend them, but a huge corporations can’t account for every reply that gets sent out. I find there is often a lack of service in customer service!
I haven’t even thought about registering. But then I didn’t for my wedding either!
I hope BRU handles this better! Hey the best way to get your message across is to take your business elsewhere!
I agree that the response to the complaint is worse than the infraction. I had a devil of a time with one of my registries…Target maybe? It required a due date that was in the future, but Celia was already home by the time I got around to registering. Surely, this is not unusual as you realize after you get the baby home what you really need. I just made up a date. I do know how it feels to feel “less than” by these slights. At some point, they stopped bothering me, but there was a time when this and any other anti-adoption sentiment would have pissed me off big time.
That is just insane. And their response? Lame, so very, very lame. Check out a book called 21 Dog Years. It’s about just that–Amazon and customer service and the whole racket. I am composing an e-mail to them right now.
I take back what I wrote – I didn’t research it – you are right – it’s totally fucked up.
Ugh. That is an abysmal, inexcusable response. Even if that’s their unchangeable policy, it’s inexcusable. Bot-like springs to mind.
I do know from experience that at least Babies-R-Us and Target’s registries require a due date. In the case of Babies-R-Us, I talked with one of the store personnel while registering and told her we were adopting. She was very helpful, and suggested we go ahead and select a due date 9 months away; if we weren’t placed by then, she assured us it was easy to change. It was. I was a little upset at the time about *having* to change the date, but it was easy enough to do. I wish I could talk about Target, but I seem to have blanked that experience out.
As an Amazon employee, let me begin by apologizing for the Customer Service response. It is quite possible the the Customer service representative wasnt aware of the options you have. Let me explain,
Although the ‘due date’ terminology doesnt really cater to adoption, you can enter any date you please for that column. Once entered, and information can be changed anytime you want, just like any other customer information on Amazon. This way, you should be able to change your date at any time, to any date.
I tried creating a fictious account to test this, and it worked.
I’ll try to forward this to the people at CustomerService to see that this doesnt happen again.
Dear AmazonEmployee,
I appreciate your reply here, but there is a point I am trying to make that I’m not sure you completely recognize. One of the hardest things for an adoptive parent-to-be is the not knowing when you’ll match or if you will match with expectant parents who wish to place their child for adoption. I do understand that I can make up a date and change it at will. However, the date is the problem.
Putting in a date causes anxiety about whether we will match before that date. What if we have to wait over 18 months, 2 years? The problem is in having to enter a date at all.
What I am asking is whether there is a means of making the date field optional, period. BabiesRUs has added an “are you adopting” field to their registry. Go the next step and add an “are you adopting” field and then not require a date for those who are adopting. Would that be all that complicated? Considering the fact that you can track my purchases, make recommendations based on my previous orders, and stock everything from groceries to hardware, would making such a change really be that hard?
Aside from the value of an adoption option from a customer service point of view (and it’s actually a little hard for me to put that aside, but I will for this point), the extra snippet of code that would be required to make adoptive parents feel included is a relatively easy thing to include.
The problem is that Amazon sells their checkout/store as web services to brick and mortar companies that want a profitable web presence. Since the software is a product in it’s own right, Amazon uses things speed and simplicity to market it to other companies. The adoption exception may have been part of the original design at some point, but could have been cut to increase performance. This also means is that there are a lot of other stores that practice the same discrimination, if unintentionally. Chances are, they don’t have a choice. The value in Amazon’s web services is that they’re “turn-key.”
Of course, calling them is a waste of your time. A CSR on the phone has no authority or instructions to do anything other than apologize.
Matt,
Thank you for your comment. I do understand that the registry system was undoubtedly set up in this manner out of simplicity and not outright lack of concern about adoptive parents to be. Most likely the designers never even considered adoptive parents in any appreciable manner in their baby registry thought processes.
I understand that the CSR cannot effect change. My hope is that if enough people in my situation complain, Amazon’s higher ups will deign to take notice and make a simple change to their systems. Pie in the sky dreaming, I know. But I can hope.
i just wish they’d add the piece of code and be done with it. How hard can it be? Maybe that’s a simplistic viewpoint, but if the customer wants a feature, add it! It’s not like you are the only person in the world adopting, there are so many folks that are trying to build their families through adoption.
It all boils down to the bottom line, as usual.
Yep, they’re whacked in the head for not being sensitive to this situation. It’s easy coding. They should just do it.
Well, why not screw with their heads in kind? Set your due date out by 15 months or so, of course if the program will let you.
You can have the longest pregnancy in their database. Hehehehe…..
OK, so while we are on the topic of baby registries. Can aomeone please direct me to a place that I can find a sample baby registry for an adoptive parent? My baby will be between 7 and 10 months old. Do I need all the same stuff? What do I HAVE to have versus would be nice to have? HELP….
I would think that everything would be similar except for the size of the clothes. Good luck!