I recently received an Amazon gift card. I decided to spend some of it on Batman Omnibus 1 written by It collects Batman #0-33 and Batman Annual #1-2. The list price is $125.00, but Amazon is selling it for $65.93. That’s a savings of 47%.
As soon as the box appeared on my doorstep, I noticed a problem. The box had a torn open corner. I took it inside the house and fully opened it. Unfortunately, I discovered the book was damaged too. There was nothing inside the box to protect it. No buddle wrap or anything like it to help protect the book. The only thing in the box other than the book was a partially deflated, two-chamber air pillow. There was nothing to stop the book from moving inside the box. Because the book weighs more than seven pounds, care needed to be taken to ensure the book was secure.
That wasn’t done. No care was taken. It looked like the omnibus was thrown into the box along with the air pillow, and then the box was closed up.
Amazon forgot how to ship books
Amazon sucks at shipping books. That’s ironic because they started out selling books. If Amazon was an eBay seller, it would eventually get its account shut down due to large amounts of negative feedback and an extremely high rate of return.
I set up a return on Amazon. I then took the damaged omnibus to my local UPS Store and they took care of the rest.
The following day, I checked my Amazon account. Not only were the funds not returned to my account, but Amazon failed to show that I had even returned the book to the UPS Store.
I contacted Amazon support via chat. After the support agent looked over everything, he told me he could see I returned the omnibus to the UPS Store and I would receive the refund “shortly.” I asked him to define “shortly.” He said 48-hours.
I contacted Amazon support on Friday, August 25 at around 12:00 PM EDT. That means my Amazon account should have another $69.89 in it tomorrow afternoon.
Do not buy omnibus comics on Amazon
I learned an important lesson from this experience. I will no longer buy comic book omnibuses on Amazon. From now on, I will only buy comic book omnibuses from InStockTrades. I’ve purchased books from them before and never had a problem. They package books for shipment extremely well. Their prices are often better than Amazon’s.
Update (30 August 2023)
I woke up this morning to see that Amazon finally issued the credit for the damaged Batman Omnibus 1.
It only took six days. Amazon originally said they would issue the refund the same day I took the book to the UPS Store. When that didn’t happen. I contacted Amazon support, and I was told the refund would be issued “shortly” in 48 hours. That didn’t happen either. Oh well, lesson learned. I learned more from this experience than I learned from one whole semester of community college.