Amazon screws up for the second time with Wii pre-orders

For the second time in just a few weeks Amazon has put up the Nintendo Wii for pre-order without emailing it’s customers which signed up to be notified first. The first incident which took place on September 15th caused quite a stir on the Amazon community. People who had signed up for the notification where never notified. Instead, the Wii pre-order just showed up on the page and whoever was lucky enough to be reading message boards at that time was able to grab one.

After taking a considerable amount of heat, Amazon went into damage control mode and posted the following statement on their gaming blog:

For a brief period on Friday, we did offer pre-orders for the Wii, however, the rate at which pre-orders came in dramatically outpaced what we had anticipated, so we suspended pre-orders until we are able to get a firmer commitment from Nintendo regarding how many units we’ll have for sale.

Because the pre-order window was so brief, the e-mail many of you signed up for notifying you that pre-orders were available was never triggered to send out. We apologize and have fixed the system to ensure pre-order e-mail notifications are sent in advance.

So everyone who signed up waited for the email to arrive.

Breaking the promise of notifying customers once again, early this morning the Nintendo Wii appeared back on Amazon’s site available for pre-order. Once again, no one got email notified that had been on the list, and once more all the pre-orders were snagged up by people who were lucky enough to find out through message boards and blogs.

The Amazon community is in an uproar with angry messages and posts flying back and forth. For the second time Amazon has managed to anger, disappoint and let down everyone who signed up for to be notified.

What can you do about it? Absolutely nothing. You can try to email them, but more than likely you will just receive a cookie-cutter response back just like this one:

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

In addition to our large selection, one of the benefits we try very
hard to offer our customers is convenience, and we have not met that
standard in this case. Please accept my sincere apologies.

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience caused. We hope to see
you soon at Amazon.com.

Please let us know if this e-mail resolved your question:

Now, I do realize that this might not be a big deal to some, but I am sure that there are people out there which have not yet gotten their pre-orders in. Maybe they were depending on Amazon to come through with their promise and email them, so at least they would have a chance to place a pre-order.

Is Amazon too big to care if a few thousand people are pissed? Maybe. Regardless, this is awfully poor customer service.