A payment failed without any action or notification

This morning, I was shocked to find out that Amazon failed a payment and did not bother to refund the amount though their site says "Your refund has been initiated". I have been paying my electricity bills through amazon pay - it just saves all my consumer details - I have added the consumers from my native place as well - if for some reason, I have to pay it online.

The apartment supervisor gave the current electricity bill today and when I went to amazon pay, it even showed me that I pay the last bill on 17 Dec 2021. But when I click on Pay, it fetched the old bill.

The mismatch in the amount triggered my suspicion. And when I looked closely, the date was even from last month. So I started investigating more about it. Looked at my card account, the amount was never credited. It was debited on 17 Dec as shown in amazon site, but then no one bothered to follow up the failure of payment to the vendor. What do you call this ? A poor software design that did not trigger any alert, if the payment failed ? And worst that that - they tell you "Your refund has been initiated" , but then what happens next is not their responsibility ?

And the worst part is to figure out how to reach them on call. Have you ever tried to call them for any issue ? It took quite a while to get to this screen.

And it is not straight forward from here as well.

Could this not have been simpler to get a button to call them from a order ? Almost took more than a hour to find out to how to call them. I wonder, why no regulator ( consumer related regulators) does not notice this! Billions of Indians use the site and many of them even are not competent to raise an issue. And on top of that, there are other malpractices by delivery guys - they can decide if they deliver you or refund it citing your absence. But you cannot call their customer service in a straight forward way.

And now coming to the call - I recorded it on purpose - to save what I am committed. It's an audio file converted to mp4 to post on @threespeak - I am not aware, if we have any platform here on HIVE where we can post only audio files (M4A format), do let me know, if you have idea. If you hear the conversation then you will find how responsible they are - he started telling me, the bill was paid on 17th and today was 19th, so wait for 3 business days for it to reflect in Billers site. I had to remind him that, it was from 17th last month. By this time, it should have reached some definitive action. How even you do not notify me , if it failed !! You could have given a mail or message. So if I did not discover this, then I would have lost the money - sometimes I pay the bills from another payment app PayTM - recently they charge when you pay from credit card, so I moved to amazon pay. These payment companies make you habituated first and then start charging you - that is how they make money showing billions of profits because of high number of transactions.

Apart from the polite apologies that has been taught to the customer service representative (CSR), all I heard is that they will look into the issue and resolve it. The CSR thinks, the payment is done from their side but the vendor did not update, so they will seek a refund and credit that to my account, but my point is if it failed, they should have taken care of this automatically and fixed before I noticed.

I am going to tag this to amazon official account on twitter, at least they should know how their software works. This is a classic case best suited for a consumer case - but doing that is not easy as well. Someone should build a consumer review platform on HIVE - the best fit to have all the details captured transparently.

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