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28 Jan 2009 02:06 pm
I’ve been kept a bit too busy to write anything of substance lately, and for that, I apologise.
With that in mind, instead of substance, I bring you a rant. Feel free to treat it as such.
Lately, Amazon’s shipping policies have begun to annoy me more and more. Part of this is because their marketing leads to expectations that are unrealistic. The foremost of these is shipping.
On the Amazon site, I’ll often find items I want that are in stock, and have these little adverts on their pages saying if I want the item by the following day, I could order next day shipping, or some such. This implies to me that the order it available and ready to ship. And, in fact, if I choose the item and order next day shipping, it will arrive the next day.
However, if I choose the same item and choose super-saver shipping, which they advertise takes 5-7 working days to ship, the problem is that it will usually not even ship out for 10-20 days. In several cases, they’ve run out of stock before they bothered putting the item in the queue, and my item doesn’t get shipped for months. What’s even worse is that, if the item does come back in stock, they still won’t ship the item for another 10-20 days starting from the date it comes back in stock, often leading to another sold out condition, and this sort of perpetual wait on things I’ve ordered.
I’ve written to complain about it, sometimes a month after I’ve ordered, and have been constantly fed the “We’re sorry for the inconvenience, but your item isn’t in stock” or “We’re very sorry, but your item will take 5-7 days to arrive” line when it takes but a quick look at the order time and stock record to know that the line with which they’re responding is completely irrelevant in my situation.
If the item took 5-7 days to ship and actually shipped within 1-3 days of the purchase, I’d have no issues at all. But the fact that, if I spend more money on shipping, the item is processed immediately, but if I rely on their heavily-marketed “buy more stuff and get free shipping” concept, it rarely gets processed within a couple of weeks annoys me.
I thought, in fact, that it might have something to do with a ploy to push people toward the Amazon prime service. However, I signed up for the Amazon prime trial, and the items I ordered during that trial with the free Amazon Prime 2-day shipping took the same 10-20 days to process and ship. Needless to say (although I’m saying it anyway), I did not sign up for the rather expensive Amazon Prime service after the trial period. Who wants to pay $80 for the same indeterminate and excessive wait times?
It’s gotten so bad that, lately, I’ve begun ordering books and items from independent Amazon Marketplace sellers because they get the books to me faster, and I pay much less in shipping costs. As the only alternative to having my items in a timely fashion is paying for shipping anyway, and the shipping from independents seems to start at $2-4 cheaper, it baffles me just what sort of message Amazon is trying to convey.