Comments on: Getting your Microsoft Tax Refunded: 10/10 for Amazon UK! [Updated]

By: SamD

SamD — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:02:53 +0000

Sorry, David…somehow I missed your Christian name!

By: SamD

SamD — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:58:17 +0000

Thanks Gerard, I’ll bear that in mind and try that if I have no luck with either of the other channels. At this stage I’m currently writing an email to Asus (despite their customer service rep’s negative response on the phone and similar claim that he’s never heard of such a situation [surely this can't be true, unless he's only been working there about a week?!]), as according to the wording of the EULA (see above) it is the manufacturer who should be contacted, so I will try them first.
Cheers, Sam

By: David Gerard

David Gerard — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:10:46 +0000

Sam – under UK trading standards law, your contract is quite unambiguously with the retailer, not any of their suppliers. Fobbing you off to the suppliers is actually *illegal*.

http://www.tradingstandards.gov.uk/ contains many marvellous phrasings to use in letters to politely indicate that you are not going to put up with being messed around.

By: SamD

SamD — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:57:14 +0000

So, the current situation is that I sent a message to the Amazon retailer and they tried to phone me, but they didn’t get through. Apparently as retailers, they have “never come across such a situation before”, but they have given me the customer support numbers of both Windows and Asus. I’m guessing both of those will tell me to contact the retailer and I’ll be trapped in a cycle. Let’s see what happens…

By: SamD

SamD — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:27:47 +0000

Thanks, I’ll give them a try and I’ll try to remember to post back to let you know how it goes!

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:05:43 +0000

@Sam,

I’m really not sure who would be classed as the retailer in this instance. It is probably the Amazon seller who you need to approach rather than Amazon themselves but I am not really sure.

By: SamD

SamD — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 09:12:21 +0000

Hi Alan, you the man!

I’m just wondering, I bought my eee PC from an Amazon seller, i.e. not Amazon themselves – do you think I should contact the seller to try and get my refund, or Amazon directly? Do you think that buying from an independent seller through Amazon reduces my chances of success?

It’s hard to believe that in this enlightened day and age, we have to ask questions like this…

Sam

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:44:45 +0000

@Daniel,

That’s great! The more people who do this and blog about it the better. You got a big refund there too. I find it strange how there seems to be no consistency in their approach but in general Amazon do seem to “get it” fairly quick.

Thanks for telling us your story.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:44:25 +0000

I got a $122.39 refund from Amazon.com USA. I bought 2 netbooks which came with XP, after an 8 minute call I had 122.39 x 2 = $244.78. Each netbook had a price of 300, so $300-122.39… was great.

Here is the complete info: http://comunixcr.blogspot.com/

By: Alan Lord

Alan Lord — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:58:19 +0000

Excellent post on your blog James! I’m glad my own story inspired you to do the same. Thanks for sharing the story.