Just over a week ago, I recieve an offer via Amazon Assistant. For those who don’t use it, Amazon Assistant is a browser plug-in that provides information on offers, orders and can make it easy to add items to your Amazon Wish List.

The offer was simple – go into Amazon Assistant at least once over 5 days and they’ll give you a £5 credit to spend. Great.

But it didn’t work.

After doing what they ask, Amazon Assistant will look a bit like this…

Excellent. It says that the credit should appear within Amazon Assistant after 48 hours. However, the Terms & Conditions (which you can read here) says…

Your promotional code will be available 72 hours after earning the fifth point.

Which is, kinda, confusing. But, hey, 3 days at most.

It’s now 5-6 days since I completed it (depending on when you count from) and my Amazon Assistant still shows the same.

So, yesterday, I turned to Amazon’s support where they offered no explanation or apology but, instead, assigned a £5 promo credit to my account.

One thing that is worth noting about this offer (which you may not appreciated unless you read the T&Cs) is that the credit may only be redeemed against items dispatched from and sold by Amazon and doesn’t include products sold by third-party sellers, even if “fulfilled by Amazon.co.uk” or “Prime Eligible”. Which is a lot of excluded stuff (I had to do quite the search on my Wish List to find anything that I could use it for). Also, some promotional codes don’t appear as part of your Gift Card total, and there’s no way to know you have it until you go to buy something that qualifies.

I’m not sure if Amazon Assistant is just stuck for me or if it’s a general thing. But nobody at Amazon seemed bothered (and the person on Twitter that I first spoke to didn’t seem to know about the offer, either).

And promising something which you don’t deliver is not good, either.

Update

After reaching out to Amazon rather more officially, I received a response from a member of the Amazon.com leadership team.

I’m sorry you weren’t able to take advantage of this promotional offer before it expired. Our promotional offers function much like a coupon in a physical store. They are valid only for the length of the promotion.

What? I get the feeling that they didn’t actually read the information I sent about this. The Amazon Assistant offer hasn’t expired and is still running now.