An elderly man has been hit with a huge bill after ordering just two door hinges on Amazon. Michael Ord described the £734 ($974) shipping charges as 'absolutely ludicrous' after purchasing the items online for about £30 ($40).
Basically, he went online to buy some hinges to fix the fridge in his Ducati motorhome, and ended up paying enough money to buy several brand new fridge freezers. Ridiculous, really.
As the items came from the US, he could have expected to be charged about £15 ($20) for the hinges (which still seems a lot) but ended up with a total of around 50 times that.
The 83-year-old pensioner, who is from Portchester, near Portsmouth, tried to argue his case against the retail giant, but found them to be 'unhelpful'. Luckily, they then relented and refunded the amount, claiming that a 'system error' led to the misunderstanding.
Ord said: "When I purchased the hinges, I couldn't see a shipping cost associated to it.
"The item itself only cost me £30, so when I saw more than £760 missing from my account I was incredibly confused.
"I got straight on to the bank who pointed me in Amazon's direction - but I found them to be very unhelpful. I would have been fine if it was a reasonable shipping cost, but to be charged £734.34 is absolutely ludicrous.
"I had assumed there would be a shipping cost because it was purchased from an American company, but I would never have imagined something like that."
Once he had contacted the company, he found that their systems didn't allow him to even talk to a real person. That's something that you might want to do if, say, hundreds of pounds had gone from your account for a couple of door hinges.
He continued: "All of the phone calls seem to be automated these days, so you never actually talk to someone about the problem you're having. I sent some emails across as well and never received anything back from those either."
Bloody hell. Annoying as this mix-up undoubtedly was, he sounds like he is pretty tech-savvy for a bloke that is 80-odd years old.
An Amazon spokesperson said: "It's not our policy to comment on individual customers. The charge for the order was the result of a system error, but a fix has been put in place to prevent that from happening again."
Despite the problems, in the end, Ord is just happy to get his money back. He added: "I never thought I would be getting the money back.
"I was very fortunate that Amazon eventually paid attention to what happened to me."
Fair play to him. That's much more patient than most people would be.
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