Amazon

The best support is IMO provided by Amazon. I always got a response from a human within 24 hours. They even called me back once to tell me they got the “suggestion” I sent (not an issue) and were happy to take it into account.

In English:

• https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us (You can skip the login)
• https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html?skip=true (direct)

In French:

• https://www.amazon.fr/gp/help/customer/contact-us(You can skip the login)
• https://www.amazon.fr/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html?skip=true (direct)

Notice: not being logged in, you could be missing the option to chat with someone.

eBay

It has always been much less obvious for me to contact eBay. They are much more pushing the customers towards automatic answers, making impossible for us to report an issue not foreseen in advance (like recurrent delivery issue with their shipping carrier not able to take not correctly of “long” addresses). However, in French, it’s still assumed to be possible to contact an employee via this form:

French: http://ocsnext.ebay.fr/ocs/cuhome (Select a topic and you will have the opportunity to write a message to an employee or give him a phone call. Authentication required). Ex. or direct link for an undelivered item: http://ocsnext.ebay.fr/ocs/cusr?query=1479

ONCE submitted, you will get an automatic answer with standard tips to solve your problem. REPLY on this email if you really want a human to read and react on your question!

Notice their system tells it can take up to 76h to get an answer…

In English, you will only be able to give a phone call or you will be suggested to contact the eBay community.

English: http://ocsnext.ebay.com/ocs/cuhome (much much less straightforward, you have to do the right choices and won’t always be able to write a message to an employee. It sucks !)

Amazon provided me the very best level of support when I submitted an issue I got with an undelivered item bought on.. eBay (I buy so much on Amazon.de and Amazon.fr that I didn’t pay attention when I sent them my complain, instead of contacting eBay). As I immediately noticed my mistake, I resubmitted the problem to eBay. But an employee of Amazon answered within 24h, being sorry about that issue and trying to find among my orders the item mentioned in my complain (asking if I bought this item via a subcontractor, or…)…. On eBay side, I have been waiting for an answer during a whole week and they were unable to help!!! I had to figure out myself that my address being too long for the system of their carrier (the carrier available “out of the box” for sellers of ebay.uk). My address had been truncated! I told eBay that I this was the issue but they didn’t handle the problem. I was unable to contact the carrier as this one refused any contact with end-users. I only got my order after about 2 months 🙁

Again excellent and quick support from an Amazon’s employee: DHL regularly fails to deliver my orders because they use deprecated GPS and don’t find my address (I am in a new residential area built in 2011). DHL neither tries to call me nor try to check my address on Google Map (One kind employee did it once. I saw he had a google map printed next to him). They simply set “Unknown Address” on the delivery and contact the expediter. As I am a customer, they don’t allow me to provide them a new address (or explanations) by phone. And as my address is correct, the expediter can’t give them any additional information. I hate DHL!

I did submit this issue to Amazon.de as I recently missed 4 of their deliveries. I got an answer 2 hours later (on Friday 23:23!). Amazing Amazon !

See here.