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Amazon.com and a completely invalid invoices…

My recent purchase of a digital stuff (Kindle book) proven that the world biggest Internet selling shop is completley not prepared for selling stuff (at least in area of European Union). Because for each purchase it is generating invoices that contains completely wrong and invalid data.

Yet, my contact with Amazon support team showed up that they don't give a shit.

The "quality" of some bugs listed below and Amazon's ignorance are so hight that I am actually completely destroyed to see how the biggest selling company in the world handles so crucial area like invoices. This simply passes my imagination and worst nightmares.

In details:

  1. Amazon is charging European Union's customers with VAT tax, but there is no place to provide VAT-ID! And it is simply completely not possible to print out VAT-ID on any Amazon's invoice. The funniest thing here is that they are actually adding their own VAT-ID to the invoice, but disallow your company from placing its VAT-ID. That is a pure madness.

  2. Amazon allows you to provide "Billing Address" and it appears on order's details, but it doesn't appear on an invoice. Can't find words to comment that out.

  3. I have two shipping addresses in my account. One for me (male name + city A) and one for my wife (female name + city B). Yet on an invoice, the "Issued to" field contains... a mixture of these two addresses (!!!): my (male) name + my wife's address (city B). I could imagine anything, but I would never imagine that someone at Amazon.com invents something like this! A mixture of two addresses ???

  4. I have my own (male name + city A) address set as (a) default shipping address, (b) 1-click address and (c) default "Billing Address". Yet, when generating an invoice, Amazon.com ignores all three default-like addresses and puts second address (or actually -- a mixture of these two addresses; see above).

  5. There are two separate... things that Amazon calls "an invoice". First, is a PDF document, generated when you click "Invoice" link in order's details. Amazon also have a button, titled "Need to print an invoice?", on the very same order's details screen. Which -- instead of sending user to the same PDF-generated invoice, opens up a HTML-generated document that contains a different data (a correct "Billing Address" instead of mixture of two addresses) and... an information "This is not a VAT invoice".

  6. The HTML-generated document, mentioned above, contains an incorrect date -- it always prints out current date instead of purchase date. This makes this view even more useless!

To summarize, Amazn have an invoice-generating system that is completely wasted and causes generated invoices to contain incorrect and invalid data (a mixture of two addresses!) and yet Amazon does not offer any option (neither for user nor for support team) to correct invoices, in case it would contain incorrect data.

This makes Amazon generating completely useless invoices. Isn't that against law that you sell things and provide incorrect sell receipt for all these sales?

I really thought this is a bad joke. How could someone at Amazon come to figure out such a complete madness when it comes to invoicing?

But, it turned out to be a reality worst than a nightmare. I have purchased, for my company, a digital goods in world biggest Internet shop and I cannot but that costs through company's accountancy, because Amazon offers me invoices that can go directly to trash! they contains a completely incorrect data with no option to fix it.

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