Amazon toolbar BS

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Awrrr
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#1400603 5-Oct-2015 22:39

There may be a degree of misunderstanding here. If so my apologies for not making it clear, but again my issue is not so much with the Amazon link per se, but with their response when I complained about it.

No extra toolbar program has been installed and there is nothing to uninstall. Just to be sure, I just checked. My browser includes a toolbar with a number of tool buttons I can choose to make visible or not. If I remove one it only disappears from the toolbar but remains available if I right-click the toolbar and choose to activate it. So it can be disabled, but not deleted.

Somehow Amazon has added its own link to this collection. It regularly activates itself with no action on my part and then appears on the toolbar along with the other toolbar buttons I have selected. I can deactivate it but I cannot delete it. If I deactivate it, it reactivates itself after a short time without any action on my part. I object to this behaviour as a matter of principle because I don't want it and I didn't ask for it. Also, my toolbar is very full because I have enabled most of the tools. Every time the Amazon link reactivates itself, this causes several tools to disappear because the toolbar exceeds its allotted space and an arrow to view the invisible items appears. So the unwanted Amazon icon is causing actual problems by taking up space. I didn't ask for it. I want to get rid of it. That is the basis of my original complaint.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

freitasm

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Geekzone

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#1400622 5-Oct-2015 23:32

What browser is this?

Every browser I know allow you to uninstall add-ons - IE, FX and Chrome. There's no browser I know that have add-ons that can't be removed. If that's the case for you I suggest you uninstall the browser and use one that's not carrying this.

andrewNZ

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#1400638 6-Oct-2015 06:59

I think its time for a screenshot.

MikeB4

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#1400647 6-Oct-2015 07:54

This happened to me when my son installed Vuze to download something, I noticed a small Amazon icon. Looking at what was installed last and deleting it, namely Vuze removed said link. It has never returned

Edit; it did not show on Edge only Chrome.

freitasm

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#1400649 6-Oct-2015 07:58

I am start to think if this is really an Amazon bundled thing or some "developer" added a toolbar with his Amazon affiliate code. In this case the Amazon support person probably don't know a thing and just used a canned "we're sorry" response.

Yes, the topic is about the response but we don't know if this is an official Amazon thing or not.

old3eyes

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#1400665 6-Oct-2015 08:16

Rikkitic:
old3eyes: I actually find the Amazon search app on my Opera browser very handy..

That's fine but it has to be a matter of choice.

It is on Opera that is based on Chrome browser.. You get asked when you access the Amazon site if you want to install it..

Regards,

Old3eyes

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#1400773 6-Oct-2015 10:33

freitasm: Easy: don't install "free" software that brings bundled add-ons.

Even Java UPDATES do that now, bundles a browser toolbar/addon & changes the home page & search engine.
AVG does as well, not good for a program that should be removing that sort of thing :-)

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#1400776 6-Oct-2015 10:37

The 'fix' is to reset/default your browser, IE , Firefox & Chrome can all easily be reset to default, disabling all addons & toolbars.
Sometimes the toolbar can simply be uninstalled (eg, ASK toolbar)

Sometimes its a symptom of malware infection :run malwarebytes over the PC.
Some download sites (eg CNET) actually add this sort of thing into the programs installer.

andrew027

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#1400929 6-Oct-2015 12:07

As your anger is more about the response you received than the toolbar link itself, here's some background...

That is an awful response. It's poorly worded and looks like it belongs in a scam or phishing email. That said, I used to work in customer service for an online retailer who shipped 95% of their product from Hong Kong and had their main office in the UK. When the UK staff were home in bed there were four of us here in New Zealand, working from home, accessing a shared inbox to respond to customer emails. We provided product spec.s, checked on order status, cancelled or resent items, processed refunds, etc. We were minnows swimming in Amazon's mighty river, but a lot of the same principles apply, particularly from the individual customer service agent's perspective.

1: Saving time. I started with a target of answering 15 emails an hour, increasing to 40/hour after four months. That's 1.5 minutes to read the email; work out what the customer is saying; go into our back-end system and find the order (difficult if they didn't provide the order number); determine what happened (not always what the customer said happened); decided what we were going to do about it; complete any action action to fix the problem; reply to the customer's email; and add a comment to the order to say what we had done. We had dozens of email templates covering almost everything that could go wrong and we'd customise these by copy/pasting details like customer name, order number, item ordered, product spec.s, etc. There is no way we could hit our targets without a lot of impersonal automation.

2: Buying time. 60% of our emails were "my order hasn't arrived" and at least 80% of those hadn't waited the full delivery time we specified on the site for their country. The first response was "Please wait the full XX days" followed by "sometimes items get delayed in the post - please wait a further two days". Almost every time the "palming off" worked and we wouldn't get another email from the customer (see #1).

3: Liability. Most companies avoid admitting fault. Sometimes we were told things like "there are 5000 orders that should have shipped last week but are still in the warehouse, so we're going to blame the Royal Mail strike - send this new reply for the next 10 days". This was one of the two main reasons that I stopped working for them in the end - I hated lying. In your case, it's not clear Amazon are even at fault so they won't apologise or admit liability for something that's not their problem.

4: Money. Amazon might not have installed the link in your browser but someone somewhere in Amazon knows there's an affiliate programme where people can direct business to their site. In this case, Amazon aren't going to be hugely motivated to stop that traffic as it's still business to them, and perhaps the best you can hope for is a pointer to which other product(s) you might have installed that are responsible for the link.

5: Authority. The customer service person may not be allowed to go off-message and send a non-standard reply. I certainly got in trouble for it a few times. It means you've probably spent more time on that email than you should have, coming up with/typing your own response (see #1) and if the customer comes back later with a follow-up question, nobody knows what you've said or done.

Does that make any of this right? No, but it happens in almost every customer service environment I've ever seen and I wouldn't be overly harsh on Amazon, particularly as it's probably not them that installed the link in the first place.

gzt

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#1401050 6-Oct-2015 14:50

Somehow Amazon has added its own link to this collection. It regularly activates itself with no action on my part and then appears on the toolbar along with the other toolbar buttons I have selected. I can deactivate it but I cannot delete it. If I deactivate it, it reactivates itself after a short time without any action on my part. I object to this behaviour as a matter of principle because I don't want it and I didn't ask for it. Also, my toolbar is very full because I have enabled most of the tools. Every time the Amazon link reactivates itself, this causes several tools to disappear because the toolbar exceeds its allotted space and an arrow to view the invisible items appears. So the unwanted Amazon icon is causing actual problems by taking up space. I didn't ask for it. I want to get rid of it. That is the basis of my original complaint.

So you would like Amazon to fix the problem I think. It is not going to happen. If it is an official Amazon product then you probably already agreed to a EULA that precludes this responsibility.

There is a possibility it is not from Amazon. It could be from a 3rd party trying to get Amazon commissions. In that case again you may have agreed to this somewhere in a EULA, alternatively it could be a malicious program putting it there.

In any of these cases there is some technical investigation required to understand which. If you are not prepared to do that you may be firing at the wrong target.

Edit: yes it totally sucks

DizzyD

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#1401053 6-Oct-2015 15:02

Rikkitic:

I understand your disappointment regarding this. (I did not express disappointment. I told them to put their link you know where)

I'm surprised you got a response from Amazon.
If it was me you would not have even got a reply.

MikeB4

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#1401056 6-Oct-2015 15:13

DizzyD:
Rikkitic:

I understand your disappointment regarding this. (I did not express disappointment. I told them to put their link you know where)

I'm surprised you got a response from Amazon.
If it was me you would not have even got a reply.

Amazon care about customer service

Rikkitic

Awrrr
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#1401141 6-Oct-2015 16:54

andrew027: As your anger is more about the response you received than the toolbar link itself, here's some background...

Thank you so much for your response. This helps me make sense of things. I was angry because the reply I got had nothing to do with the email I sent and was clearly just a random compilation of boiler-plate paragraphs. I would have been happier with no response at all, or one telling me they couldn't care less and to go stuff myself. What made me so angry was the fact that it was so obviously clear the respondent had not read my email at all, and assumed I was so stupid I would not see through the reply. That really seriously annoyed me.

As to the problem itself, I finally bit the bullet and re-installed the browser. The problem is now gone, at least for now, and I still don't know exactly what was going on. I do agree that it was probably bundled with the browser (Slimjet) and somehow I let it through. The issue is not that it was incorporated into Slimjet, but that is started taking over my toolbar after I ordered something from Amazon. Anyway, it seems to be gone now. Thank you everyone for your replies and for trying to think with me on this. I hope this is the end of the matter. I did write back to Amazon complaining about their reply, but have heard nothing further. I guess the robot that decides what to do with these kinds of issues has had a malfunction.

Plesse igmore amd axxept applogies in adbance fir anu typos

gzt

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#1401154 6-Oct-2015 17:17

I have never used this browser. Apparently they have an affiliate program and they pay up to US$0.50c per download. Where do they get this and what is the business model?

All the privacy marketing aside, it is very likely that you are the product that they are selling.

I'm guessing that Slimjet is paid by the makers of the extensions that ship with the product. Take a close look at the bundled extensions and plugins etc.

andrewNZ

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#1401175 6-Oct-2015 18:00

Slimjet???

You said it was chrome in your OP. That's pretty average on your part guy.

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