Amazon stops access to buyer e-mails

It seems Amazon is finally clamping down on access to buyer e-mails addresses. I can think of a few legitimate reasons they've done it -- I'm sure they get frequent complaints because of sellers sending spam (on purpose) or viruses (by accident, I hope).

But there's no doubt about it, customer service is going to suffer because of this. The Web-based contact forms we're supposed to use now to contact customers are really not adequate.

The buyer e-mail addresses are still available from inside the "Sold Ship Now" e-mails and through your payments account on Amazon's site. But it appears that Amazon is moving toward a system where all buyer/seller contact will need to go through a Web-based contact form.

Here's a good perspective on this issue from a regular reader, Ribanna's Books:

It is posing all kinds of problems.

I will now have to squeeze my highly personalized shipping confirmation email into their little square box. I am a small bookseller and my business thrives on highly personalized customer service and emails with a personal, yet professional touch. I now feel like a little Mom and Pop place just having been taken over by some large corporation. I am no longer allowed to fly my own colors, but are forced to use their impersonal corporate form to provide my highly personalized customer service, which supposedly distinguishes me from the big corporate giants. ???!!!

How can this work? Isn't this some kind of contradiction in terms to handicap the small service providers to carry out what they do best, i.e. personalized customer service?

Whereas the uniformed look might work for their corporate image (and Borders), it definitively does not work for small personal businesses, which is what most of their Marketplace sellers are. And this is the niche we are supposed to fill. Why can't they let us to our job and provide something Amazon does not provide?

Is it really too unsafe? Everybody has the chance to create an email address
just for mail ordering if they are concerned with safety. Besides, withholding email addresses might be a smart move in the name of increased safety, but does that mean we have to be squeezed into a form? Do these two things need to go together? A blank page would have done the job much better.

At least Amazon should allow us to write our own headings to make it more personal.

Which takes me to problem 2: Out of the 10 emails I will be sending out to my customers this morning, already the first 3 needed a heading which Amazon had not thought of. What do I select?!

To give an example, I urgently had to tell the customer that his book slightly differs from my description (I discovered a name stamp inside, I omitted to mention in my item description). Before I get the customer's okay on this, I cannot ship out his book. So I am holding back his book.

"Additional order information" as a heading in no way conveys the urgency of this situation. If this customer is like many of us, a busy person and receives many, many emails a day, he's not going to pay any attention to an email with this lame heading. He's going to dismiss this as some Amazon form letter confirming his order.

I need a heading that has words like "urgent" and "please contact me or your book cannot ship", "shipper has question regarding your order" to successfully get the customer's attention in this matter.

The other 2 emails were similar problems, where the heading does not address the problem I am contacting the customer about. That's already 3 out of 10
on the very first day.

I am an ardent believer in contacting customers to remove their negative feedback (and this includes 4 stars). It works 80% of the time and helps me to maintain my feedback. I invested a huge amount of time and effort into devising just the right kind of message and improving it over and over until I got it just right. This includes the heading! It needs to be just right to capture people's attention so they will actually open the email, but not too pushy.

Having to revert to a corporate form from Amazon with a lame heading (which heading? "feedback request"?!) is just not going to cut it. If Amazon needs to severely handicap the way our own personal business emails will look in the future, at least they need to let us write our own headings.

At least half of my bad feedback is already a direct result of Amazon's complicated system that leaves customers upset and confused. Now they've introduced another level of confusion. Bravo!