We have been ordering Donna Celestial Seasonings DECAF Green Tea K-Cups from Amazon since before we moved to Oregon in 2019. There have been several different K-cup quantities over that period, but sometime late last year or early this year we started buying them in 96 count boxes. A few of months ago we couldn’t get the big boxes anymore so we found a seller that was selling the same thing, but they were listing it as 4 boxes of 24. This worked out well until early this month we repeated the usual order and when it was delivered it was a single box of 24…
We contacted the seller and they told us they even though they were the seller, the order was fulfilled by Amazon and we needed to contact them. Well, as you might expect, with Amazon there is no way to contact a real person by phone. Returns are dead easy, but because the tea is food item, returns were not allowed. After fumbling around their help center, I finally found a bot thingy and it took a couple of wrong selections before I did find a way to get it to refund our money or more accurately, added the total purchase price to a virtual gift card and we even got to keep the single 24 count box.
After the money showed up as a gift card in the Amazon account we reordered the 4 boxes of 24. It wasn’t two day delivery, but it was still free, so a few days later the order arrived. As you could tell from the title of this post, this second order once again contained just one box of 24 K-cups where we ordered and paid for ninety-six. This time when I found the bot there was no option that I could find to pick that would give us the purchase price and keep the money. I did find a way to have it put me in a queue to chat with an actual human. After a few minutes I was connected and after repeating my problem in a couple different ways, I got the same results as the first time, keep the 24 and the full purchase price in a gift card. Plus a guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again.
This time, thinking that the problem was the Amazon fulfilling part, we opted for a seller said that it was fulfilled by them not Amazon. We waited with baited breath to see whether we would get 1 or 4 boxes of 24, but when the packed showed up on our doorstep several days there was a large box that contained 4 boxes of 24 K-cups.
Was it the different seller or that guarantee from a chat bot? I don’t know, but we’ll see in a couple months when we order tea again from Amazon.