You might remember, that I asked for a DVD player donation some weeks ago. Surprisingly I really found a donator for a brand new DVD player from my Amazon wishlist.

Everything was fine until last week. Unfortunately, the DVD player I selected for my wishlist was crap. It wasn't able to playback normal DVDs (originals not copies!) nor the promised divX files. It seemed, that the sound was always a bit behind the picture. Every few seconds, the picture resynchronized with the sound. The result was frame-drops. Very annoying. The divX playback simply freezed the complete player after a while. Apropos freeze... The player crashed from time to time. The only working solution was to completely shut it down and restart it. In my opinion, this is an absolutely no-no for a consumer device like an DVD player.

Anyway, the player had to go back to Amazon. No problem most of you might think and thought this too. In Germany you have 30 days to send back somethign you ordered at Amazon. Okay, the order was a bit older so I contacted the customer service and got a friendly and fast answer that I can send the player back to Amazon and they will check it. Please note, that I mentioned in that mail the DVD player was a gift and was not ordered by myself!

So I sent back the player to Amazon. Because I didn't get any response I feared the package didn't arived in the shipping department and so once again I wrote a mail to the customer service. The answer was a surprise!

They told me, that the received the player and booked the money to a credit card with the end number XYZ. Ohhhkayyy... The problem, that was not my credit card. They sent back the money to the donator.

On first view this is not a big problem but after I thought about it I was a bit confused. I mean, where is my money for the shipping cost the promised to give me back? And am I wrong? If someone make me a gift, is the gift not my property? So why can Amazon take it away from me and give the money to someone else?

After some mails and a phone call I got my shipping cost back but I'm still waiting for a reasonable answer about the DVD player. All I heard until now is, that it's bad luck. They can't get back the money from the credit card and I should contact the donator. But hey, this is not his problem and I won't contact anyone if Amazon made a mistake.

They just forgot to tell me in the first mail, that if I send back the player I'll never see it again. If they had told me that, I don't think I would have send it back.

Anyway, today I wrote Amazon another mail and I hope I got some customer friendly reply. Very sad because until this complaint I never had any problems with Amazon. :-/ I hope this will be solved soon.

Greets,

Thomas