Yeah, I’m guessing that aceplace57’s order included one or more items that weren’t eligible for free shipping.
Amazon does throw come-ons at you when you’re finalizing your order (like trying to get you to sign up for their credit card). But they have always been reasonably clear about what gets free shipping and what doesn’t.
My wife and I both have our own separate Amazon accounts.
She likes Prime because she loves the video streams of movies and TV shows and special series. She also tends to look to Amazon first for things she wants and utilizes the Prime 1-day shipping more often than not. This drives me nuts not only because we end up with zillions of little boxes piling up but also because it just seems anathemic to the ‘low carbon footprint’ movement.* :smack:
I, on the other hand, never seem to need anything from Amazon right away. Things I need this week are things I will shop for locally at the grocer or community retailer. I use Amazon to find things I can live without but happen to want and can’t find locally – and here’s a couple not-so-secrets:
Amazon Prime isn’t giving you the 1-day shipping free. Find an item listed with the Prime logo, then find its non-Prime counterpart. You’ll see immediately that the cost of ‘free’ 1-day shipping is built into the offered price for the Prime item. This, of course, is on top of your $99/year membership fee. You’re paying for the privilege of purchasing things with additional shipping costs built in. :dubious:
Amazon’s search engine algorithms are proprietary secrets. However, it’s been well documented that the results of searches are weighted to put Prime items at the top of the list.
Quite often, you can find items that are NOT offered with 1-day shipping cheaper on page 2 or 3 of the results list. That’s not quite redundant with #1 and #2 above. The fact is that the results are weighted to encourage impulsive buyers to click on the higher-priced items without drilling deeper into the results pages. By drilling deeper, you can often find the same NEW items cheaper – cheaper than Amazon Prime as well as earlier-listed offerings – even when the cost of shipping is added in.
How can Amazon offer Prime’s 1-day delivery and be 99% sure they’ll fulfill their 1-day claim? They do that with the warehousing option: “offered by Acme and fulfilled by Amazon.” Not only are they charging you extra by building the cost of
shipping into the item’s cost, they’re also charging the seller (Acme, in this case) an extra fee for storage space in their warehouses@-- on top of their normal percentage cut.
I noted above that I’m never in a rush to receive whatever I end up purchasing from Amazon. I’ll choose the lowest-cost shipping method which is sometimes 10 to 20 days for free and sometimes up to a week for a few dollars. Most of the time the seller has estimated a long delivery time$ and whatever I bought arrived well before I really expected it.# That ends up generating very positive seller feedback because, after all, the item arrived earlier than the estimated delivery date.
A year or two ago, Amazon was shamed for their practice of de-prioritizing non-Prime orders. When asked about the practice, they said the Prime subscribers got high-priority shipping and they felt no obligation to fulfill non-Prime orders within any particular time-frame at all. I don’t know if that practice was discontinued or persists to this day.
As many have noticed and commented, Amazon has started the practice of discouraging the Prime delivery option. They offer discounts for digital downloads or Pantry or other new programs as incentive to skip the 1-day shipping option. It’s half advertising for the new programs and half ducking the 1-day obligation on things they think may be running low or less available.
–G!