This all started back around Christmas 2011. I bought a camera on Amazon.com, and then ended up returning it because it didn't suit my needs. The problem was that I had closed my account on Wells Fargo shortly after buying it, and the original Amazon.com policy is to refund back only to the original card.

So fast forward to 2012 February, the refund gets processed. Of course, I ask Amazon to please just give me store credit instead of trying to process the refund. Unfortunately it was a no go, and they told me to please contact my bank or to expect a check refund from the bank. Well I can tell you after several months, none of that happened.

I finally just went to Wells Fargo yesterday and asked someone to look all this up for me. It turns out they wipe their records clean after X number of months so they have absolutely nothing on the computer system for me. The rep also said there would be no way a refund / credit would have been processed after the account was closed. I didn't want to call him a liar but Wells Fargo had been a pretty shady bank to me over the years.

So I went back online and contacted Amazon.com for some assistance - via email. Their response was the same, so naturally I filled out the feedback form and let them know what I thought about their policy. They asked me to give them a chance to correct it and offered to have them call me immediately to resolve.

25 minutes on the phone, and its finally resolved. Most of it was just waiting for their team to figure out a way to process the refund to me - store credit isn't possible, but a work-around was. Basically they would refund an amount from a previous order to my account.

All-in-all, Amazon did not lose me as a customer. Amazon and Costco rank right up there for me in customer service and it's still my favorite place to shop.