Special Offers ads questions

[rcentros]

Originally Posted by John F

I guess we are both wrong. Looking at the price of the Paperwhite, I see $119 (U.S., no sale price). To get it without special offers, you need to add $20. So that looks like 16%?

Yes, you're right. I never was good at math. I don't know how I came with 8.5%, but it looked good at the time.

If I was in the market for a Paperwhite, I would wait until it went on sale (which happens several times a year) and buy it for $100. Then, if I didn't want ads, I could pay the extra $20 and still be paying the "regular" price for the Paperwhite.

[Lady Stardust]

Originally Posted by mathil

Well, you should be glad; the customer service person must have made an exception specifically for you. As I said, the removal of the special offers is not supported by Amazon.co.jp for their Kindles, and it specifies so on the Special Offers information page:



(very) rough translation: "The display of ads in Kindle models that are sold with Special Offers cannot be removed. If you do not want to see the ads, choose a model with no Special Offers."

In my case specifically, when I (belatedly) realized that there was no button in the Content and Devices page, I tried contacting customer service in the hope they would take pity on me and remove them. I contacted them repeatedly, telling them that I was a foreigner and did not realize that Amazon Japan had a different policy from my country, and that I was willing to pay what was required; they told me that I could send my Paperwhite back and buy another one, but I'd moved back home and wasn't living in Japan anymore, so I couldn't do that. They excused themselves and told me there was nothing they could do. I contacted them several times and always got the same response, which is why I then tried registering it to my Italian account. Thankfully, that worked, and then when I reregistered it to my amazon.co.jp account the ads were gone.
So, what happened to you is not the norm. I'm happy for you, but if users want to buy Japanese kindles and use them with their Japanese accounts/billing information (I keep mine because it's the only way of buying ebooks in Japanese) they must be aware of the situation.

Yes, I understand, and it is written for the users clearly that the ads cannot be removed and that if they don't want the ads they should buy the non ad version.
So I was the one at fault, since Amazon clearly wrote it, and I understood the policy. I just didn't know how it works, didn't like it, and in the end they removed it. I contacted them via chat and emails and after two days they agreed to my suggestion to take 2000 Yen from my credit card and remove the ads. They didn't have to do this, but they did (this was in the end of 2017). I could have also simply returned the Oasis and bought non ad one, and Amazon still wouldn't have been at fault. But I wanted my Prime 4000 Yen discount and I wanted Oasis as well.