Mon, March 22, 2004

Back when Amazon.com first started selling music and movies in addition to books, I used to shop there all the time. Over the years, their treatment of their customers has declined a bit, and last fall I had an experience with them that made me decide to more or less terminate my Amazon.com business. I'm sure there will still be times when I need them (rant though I may, I realize that boycotts are pretty impractical and probably involve extra driving on my part), but most of my purchases with them in the last three years or so have been things I could've bought at the same price or cheaper at a local store, and I just used Amazon because I liked them and thought it was fun. My Wish List is still with them – because that's just damn convenient.

Anyway, a few years ago, I signed up for an Associates account with them, which basically enables you to earn credits towards future Amazon.com purchases by sending them traffic via your website. If anyone had ever clicked on any of the "Buy such and such" links on my site and bought those items from Amazon, I stood to earn around 30¢ apiece. Since I now buy from Amazon so rarely – and nobody was clicking in the first place – I decided to close my Associates account. I wasn't going to bring this up, but they have a section in your Associates profile where you are asked to enter a "site description." I had forgotten about it, but here it is. I probably created it two or three years ago:

If there is something that you want, we have it. If there is something that you need, we love it. If there is something that you dream of and that fills your heart with joy, we know how to spell it. If you haven't visited us yet, we're not surprised. But, you'll be happy if you do.

Ha. Kind of cute. I'll have to use it again sometime; it still basically applies. Like I said, I wasn't going to bring it up, though, except that I'm already writing about the cancellation process as a result of how dumb it was.

First, (surprise!) there is no link anywhere on the Associates site for "cancel my account," nor is there a mention of it in the FAQ or anywhere else. This is preposterous. Sure, you don't want people to bail, but if they want to, it's insane to think that you can deter them by simply making it hard to figure out, and that it's in any way decent or defensible to do so. I gave up after about 20 minutes and just sent email to them.

They wrote back today to say that they will cancel my account but they have to receive email from the address associated with that account. (For whatever reason, when I set it up, I used partnership@ph7media.com instead of my personal address – they all go to the same place.) I think they referred to that as a security measure, which is preposterous. A secure way to cancel my account would be to have a link or a form on the Associates site, since I have to login to access that site. I have to provide my email address and a password. If Amazon doesn't want to terminate the account because I sent email from the wrong address, that's fine, but to claim that it's about security is fucking loony. If you use an email program to send and receive email, you already know that you can type anything you want into the email address field of your account configuration and the message will be sent "from" that address. That's what I did when I replied. It's easy as pie and it proves nothing (certainly not whether I have a password to receive email at that address or anything like that). And even if you don't use an email program, you can still change the "From" header to anything you want by customizing it in your preferences on Yahoo! Mail prefs or whichever service you use – or employing one of dozens of online anonymous email forms. How insane!

So, Amazon.com employs a decidedly less secure method of account cancellation, purely because they want to make it difficult for people to cancel their accounts from the site in a convenient fashion. How crooked. Well, I already knew how dumb they are.

And I didn't bring this up to Amazon, by the way. You don't want to reply from the email address they want to see and say, "By the way, anybody could reply to you from this email address," because that's when they send the S.W.A.T. team to your house or something. I remember checking out at a drugstore years ago with my credit card and it turned out that I hadn't signed the space on the back of the card. The cashier refused to accept my signature on the charge slip until I signed the card so she could compare. I silently complied, because I knew if I said, "I just signed that slip, so if I sign the card now, of course it will match no matter who I am," she would call the police and start crying.

Oh well.

By the way, none of this is the reason for my ongoing but seldom-enforced boycott of Amazon.com, which I just realized I've never fully detailed to you, my faithful readers. Sorry about that! I'll see if I can't churn that rant out soon. (And I did! See Priming the Pump.)

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