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by joesmo 3831 days ago
The risk of Amazon shutting down your account, even as a Prime member, is too high to justify investment in any of their cloud services or hardware. Even if they don't actually shut down your account and just send you threats based on fictional terms of service that you've never agreed to, as they did to me, I would never trust them with anything sensitive again. I wouldn't be surprised if they start shutting down AWS services in the future for arbitrary violations not stated in any terms of service. This kind of behavior should not have to be tolerated by loyal, paying customers, yet Amazon has been doing it continuously for many years.
2 comments

Can you elaborate? I'd be curious to hear more. I'm trying to decide between Backblaze B2 and Amazon cloud drive for personal backup and archive.
They haven't actually shut down the account, they only sent a threatening email (see below). This was for around ~$100 worth of merchandise when I easily spend (or used to) $10-20k a year and had a paid Prime membership ($100 / yr). When I replied asking WTF they're talking about because what they refer to is clearly not in their "About Our Returns Policies" or anywhere on their site, their reply was confusing and did not assure me that this was a mistake or apologize. I've been boycotting them ever since because I fear another return will actually shut down my account and I have unfortunately purchased Kindle books.

If this is how they treat they $10-20k per year customers, I'm sure no one will think twice about threatening and shutting down others' accounts (there are plenty of stories all over the Internet about this if you'd like to search). I'm almost sure this is an automated email, of course, but that doesn't change things one bit, as their human representative who responded to my email wasn't much more helpful and tried to downplay the original email without assuring me that this was a mistake and that they would not shut down my account for extremely normal activity. There's absolutely nothing abnormal about any of the returns I had then or at any other time in the past. A lot of their merchandise is just pure shite.

--- ---

Hello,

We have noticed that you have returned a large number of your orders. While we expect occasional problems with orders, such large numbers of returns can suggest that customers are unaware of our return policies.

We want to call your attention to our returns policies because repeated misuse can result in the closure of your Amazon account. To learn more about our policies, search “About Our Returns Policies” in the Help section of Amazon.com.

If there is something we can do to help solve any recurring problems you are having with your orders, please reply to this email to reach an Account Specialist.

Sincerely,

Account Specialist

This is the problem with so many services tied to one account.

On a side note, I was led to believe your shutdown threat revolved around using Amazon's Cloud Drive in an unintended way.

Why did they threaten to shut down your account?
Probably doing something that violates TOS or something borderline illegal. I see cases like his all the time on various forums and they seems to be missing some important details...
There's nothing illegal about returning defective products. In fact, there's nothing in the TOS about returning too many products or anything like that.
Oh okay I see. I thought you meant you were using Amazon Web Services to do something or host something borderline illegal, which I have actually seen a couple times while working here.
Please see above comment.