In the previous few days I’ve been conducting an unplanned survey of the customer support of a whole lot of Amazon resellers. It’s unplanned and unwelcomed as a result of somebody despatched phishing emails to hundreds of Amazon resellers pretending to be an Amazon buyer and utilizing my e mail handle because the sender.
Any clued up recipient would presumably take a look at the e-mail header and shortly confirm that the e-mail originated in Italy and never from my account. Thankfully for me, most spam blacklist organizations used the header correctly to determine the culprits, and subsequently flagged the e-mail.
The primary I knew about this was the arrival of a flood of “undeliverable mail” bounces to my inbox. That is the instant bounce of spam despatched to invalid or not used addresses. It’s an automated bounce. While this wave of bounces got here in, I additionally began getting actual responses. Initially I used to be annoyed, however because the response fee elevated I made a decision to research the response and study from the expertise.
Clearly some statistics are unattainable to get, or are meaningless. As an example I do not know what number of sellers have been focused so I can’t work out the general response fee. Additional the undeliverable mail bounces merely mirror on the poor high quality of the spammer’s mailing record. Taking a look at the actual replies, nevertheless, was fascinating.
Vendor responses
Ninety % of the replies got here inside the first half hour, going as much as ninety five % within the subsequent two hours. The final 5 % got here inside the subsequent day. This means that Amazon vendor metrics has taught sellers to reply quick.
It’s not all excellent news, nevertheless. Some sixty two % of the replies have been automated customer support acknowledgements. Of these, just some thirteen % have been adopted up by an actual individual. I assume that the shortage of comply with-up was because of the resellers recognizing spam once they see it — and never inefficient customer support. However time will inform if I get any late responses from these automated-e-mail retailers.
All the remaining replies have been actual individuals with actual responses. Taken collectively, the replies have been as follows.
Some forty seven % requested extra info, just like the Amazon order quantity. An analogous proportion advised that I contact Amazon immediately.
The remaining few responses have been fascinating. For instance, one reseller requested, “Is that this spam?” One other, stated, irately, “I’m reporting you to Amazon for spamming.”
Most astounding have been the few who replied within the vein of “we’ve discovered your order, however please affirm your tackle so we will ship it out to you.” That’s astonishing. I can see why individuals ship spam.
Slicing throughout these responses have been the sizable minority who stated that that they had clicked on the hyperlink within the spam e-mail. I replied to all these and instructed that they reviewe their safety and anti-virus practices.
A remaining ongoing annoyance is the 5 to six % of shops that at the moment are sending me customer support “how did we do?” e mail surveys. I’m tempted to inform them!
My conclusions?
- Amazon has educated their retailers to answer promptly, however not essentially intelligently.
- Too many retailers don’t cope with spam correctly.
- A worrying variety of customer support brokers click on hyperlinks in emails.
- A legal has efficiently used harmed identify by way of the spam emails.