For those of you following “AmazonFail” (can we stop with the fail appendage now?)

Hello,

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Thanks for contacting us. We hope to see you again soon.

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Vijayalakshmi S.
Amazon.com
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~ by Skennedy on April 14, 2009.

Posted in Uncategorized

9 Responses to “For those of you following “AmazonFail” (can we stop with the fail appendage now?)”

  1. I think the “broad catagories” stuff is a bunch of BS. The LGBT book titles I’ve seen in the update posts could well fall into those “broad” categories.

    jadesfire55 said this on April 14, 2009 at 12:28 pm

  2. More details?

    Was this a response you received to a query, or something you saw somewhere else?

    yakavenger said this on April 14, 2009 at 12:30 pm

    • Re: More details?

      This is a response I received to an email I sent to customer service essentially saying that I would not patronize them until this was resolved to my satisfaction.

      atdt1991 said this on April 14, 2009 at 1:01 pm

      • Re: More details?

        I’ve seen this on other blogs this morning…which means other people have gotten this response from Customer Service, or it’s adapted from a press release, or both.

        jadesfire55 said this on April 14, 2009 at 1:15 pm

        • I am absolutely certain that they have formulated a canned response. For which I’m grateful, because otherwise my email would have been answered by some lowly customer service grunt who would have little authority.

          atdt1991 said this on April 14, 2009 at 1:18 pm

  3. Their official story today is that it was purely a coding mistake. That doesn’t quite explain the “too bad” letters they were sending to authors who complained about being delisted all the way back to february, though.

    I don’t know – I like amazon. They have everything, cheap, and ship really fast, but it’s just not acceptable to pull this sort of thing.

    holyscapegoat said this on April 14, 2009 at 2:01 pm

  4. Do you like me?
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    ariock said this on April 14, 2009 at 3:32 pm

  5. Sorry that anonymous post was me. I’ll repeat for the record – I thought I read (through links posted from here or twitter) that there was a guy out there taking credit for amazonfail as a prank/hack of their book rating system. Was THAT a prank?

    Anonymous said this on April 16, 2009 at 2:18 pm

  6. There’s no way to prove it one way or the other, but Amazon is officially saying that one of their employees in france was confused about the difference between the tag “Adult” and the tag “Sexual”, and tagged things incorrectly on a fairly massive scale.

    atdt1991 said this on April 16, 2009 at 2:23 pm

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