WallyOPD

My grandmother is 95, lives in a small town, and is mostly blind, so when it comes to Christmas-time I place orders for her on Amazon.com for presents to my Mom (and my Mom does the same for presents to me). One of the items my Grandma picked out was being sold on Amazon by Macy's. I'm in Colorado and this item is being shipped to my Mom's house in Arizona. Here's the timeline of this order:

November 20th: Order placed, Amazon gives me a delivery estimate of 12/1 to 12/4
November 21st: Refund initiated by Macy's
November 22nd: Order shipped
November 24th: Order delivered (my Mom has never received it, and I never received a shipping notification so I didn't even know it was overdue)
December 2nd: Email from Amazon informing me that Macy's has not confirmed shipment of the item
December 8th: Email from me to Macy's asking wtf is going on with the order
December 10th: Call to Amazon to find out wtf is going on with the order, they recommend I send another communication to Macy's asking them to cancel the order, which I do
December 11th: Macy's responds to my 2nd email informing me that they have canceled the order
December 14th: Macy's responds to my 1st email informing me that they show that the item has been delivered and providing me a UPS tracking number, which is when I finally learned about the 3rd and 4th items in the timeline

At this point I'm thoroughly confused. Why did they initiate the refund on the 21st if they were going to ship the item on the 22nd? Why was no email communication sent regarding the refund (I had to drill down on the order details on Amazon's site to find out that information which I didn't do until December 8th)? Why didn't they provide shipping confirmation to Amazon? My Mom has read off the merchant names of all packages she's received and none of them said Macy's, so does Macy's ship Amazon orders under a different name or was it stolen? Since Macy's thinks they have shipped the order, are they going to try to charge my Grandma's credit card despite having initiated a refund and confirming that they've canceled the order? Would Amazon allow that?

I'm flying down to Arizona this Thursday so I will be able to open all of the packages that have arrived which will give me a little more information. This is the first time I've ordered something on Amazon's site that was sold by another merchant, and it will also be my last. This has just been one giant clusterfuck.

DirkUSA

Wow, my brain hurts now. Clusterf... is the proper word for this!

hindolio

umm yeah.

al_bundy

with a lot of these old companies and legacy IT it's hard to do something like sell online with real time inventory and customer service. Amazon has a new infrastructure. so you get all these crazy problems because the backend IT systems are a hodge podge of different systems to make things work.

WallyOPD

Update (no less bizarre than anything else that happened so far):

It turns out the item did arrive on the 24th. When my Mom had been reading off the merchant names on the boxes she had only been reading the ones that had arrived since December 1st. As to the refund, it appears that the item ordered for some reason has 2 UPCs in Macy's system, and when they received the order from Amazon they split it out into 1 of each UPC then proceeded to cancel the order for the 2nd UPC. Their system then sent this cancelation to Amazon which refunded the money, since as far as Amazon was concerned there was only the one item to begin with. So essentially:

Amazon - Thinks I ordered one item and it was canceled so they refunded my money
Macy's - Thinks I ordered two items and one was canceled so they still wanted to bill Amazon for the 2nd item
I - Hate both of these companies

I called Macy's and explained the situation, they conferenced me in with Amazon. The Amazon rep apparently woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, she wouldn't let the Macy's rep get a word in edgewise and called her rude and nasty. We ended up having Amazon process a retro charge since the item was indeed shipped and delivered.

Unfortunately, I ended up ordering the item from another merchant on the 10th after I thought I canceled the Macy's order and that one is scheduled to arrive today, so when I get down there on Thursday I'll have two of them and I'll have to return one.

DirkUSA

Ok, so, if you wouldn't have contacted amazon or macy's you would have gotten your item for free, do I understand this right?

WallyOPD

Apparently, yes. I suspect at some point someone would have figured out what happened and the charge would have been placed on the card retroactively, and since it was on my Grandma's credit card I figured it was best to play it safe.

DirkUSA

That is very nice of you.

danwiz

WOW! But, in Amazon's defense - I buy stuff listed by a non-Amazon seller all the time and have never had any kind of problem at all. I have bought everything from cameras to disk drives listed on Amazon, but sold by a 2nd company for a cheaper price than Amazon. So, don't let this one transaction scare you away from doing business with Amazon/2nd seller.