Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Zoo Tycoon 2/Amazon/A Little Boutique

It is nice to have something positive to post.  It was a bad experience that ended well.

We purchased a computer game for my son as a gift from A Little Boutique in the Amazon Marketplace..  The game was Zoo Tycoon 2 made by Microsoft.

The game arrived and my son and I tried to install it.  It got through disk two and asked for disk three.  We inserted disk three and clicked ok.  It asked us again to insert disk three.  No matter what we did it would not recognize disk three.

I contacted Amazon and told them about the defective disk.  They gave me a link to print with a mailing label and return slip.  I printed them and returned it.

A few days later I got an email stated that they had refunded me just over two dollars.  They said they deducted the following:
        Return Shipping Fee Refund Deduction: ($4.98)
        Restocking Fee Refund Deduction: ($7.95)

leaving me with just over two dollars refunded.

I contacted Amazon and I asked them why there would be a restocking fee on a defective item.  They told me it was a mistake and refunded the entire purchase.

I was very concerned that having purchased online would make it impossible to get a full refund or an exchange.  This was barely more hassle than returning it to a brick and mortar store.  It was actually a positive for shopping online.

Around the same time I got a message asking me to review the purchase.  I gave a neutral rating to the seller, A Little Boutique.  I meant for it to go on the product, Zoo Tycoon 2.  In the comments I talked of the problems with disk three and that Amazon had made it right, but that I couldn't give the transaction five stars, since we were sent a defective product.  That defective product was not the fault of A Little Boutique, since it came in a sealed package from Microsoft, but it did leave a potential dark cloud on A Little Boutique and on Amazon.

A while after I left the neutral review I was contacted by A Little Boutique.  Their representative apologized that we had received one of the bad copies of Zoo Tycoon.  She stated that there is a known issue with some of the disk 3s.  She stated that Microsoft offers a free replacement disk.  If you end up with one of these defective disks you should look into contacting Microsoft and getting a replacement disk.  My hope is that they would ship it to you for free.  I also hope Microsoft will come up with a way get people that buy this program the replacement disk without the customer having to hunt it down.

The representative from A Little Boutique said that she noticed I lived within driving distance of their headquarters and she would like to bring a replacement copy replacement copy of the program to me.  I live about an hour from them.  This was very generous.

She looked and found that she was mistaken and there were no copies of the game left at their facility.  She immediately ordered a copy from another vendor and put my address as the delivery address.

This level of service is well beyond what we expect these days.