I have Amazon Prime and, for the most part, in truly rocks. I can buy stuff so fast that I could do while in line to get my morning coffee, and it literally arrives the next day.
Any issues I’ve had are with 3rd party sellers that work through Amazon. I bought some new bed sheets for my queen sized bed, and not only did they mess up the order and send me one king sized set the same color as one of the queen sized sets that I purchased, but one of the sets was all wrinkled and didn’t look as good as the sets I’ve bought from Macy’s.
My local health establishment ran out of one of my favorite supplements, so I searched Amazon. They had it through a 3rd party retailer, but it was FIVE TIMES as expensive. I managed to find it on line through another site for the appropriate price.
Also, there isn’t next day delivery when it comes from a 3rd party retailer. You have to deal with their time frame.
Anybody else have issues with 3rd party retailers working through Amazon?
Don’t buy from Third Parties unless you have to. Whenever humanly possible, even if you have to pay a bit more, always get the items that say “Ships and sold from Amazon” (or at least ‘ships from Amazon’).
Amazon typically (up until recently anyway) has stellar CS and will bend over backwards to make things right. Buying from a third party is essentially like buying from eBay. Every seller is different, every seller has their own rules and they have to really mess up before Amazon will step in.
As for shipping, they’re shipping it from their own location with their own money. They don’t have Amazon’s infrastructure, so shipping is always going to take longer. Especially if it’s getting drop shipped from China.
To be fair to **Jasmine **the default assumption, in my mind, is when a company uses their web site and their logo and their checkout system to purchase something, and doesn’t do too much to try to differentiate between their products and third-party sellers (in fact they entice you to look at third party sellers with “May be cheaper…”) and those third party sellers are shitty then yeah, the company does have a problem. With shitty third party sellers.
It really just comes down to customers realizing what’s going on and avoiding third party sellers, either by being told or having their own bad experience. Amazon will either start vetting their sellers more, or stop using them altogether.
It’s not terribly obvious that each third party is their own entity with their own rules (similar to ebay). Also, you’re still giving your money to Amazon and buying via their platform, so I think it’s fair to at least put some of the responsibility on them to keep third party sellers in line and adhering to some basic standards to make it easier to use the service.
Another thing to note, because the OP brought it up, is that Prime is meaningless when it comes to third party sellers. Prime (specifically prime shipping/returns), only applies to items that are sold and shipped by Amazon.
If they haven’t done anything yet, I’d be surprised if they do anything any time soon. Many of those sellers use false information on their pages, use incorrect pictures, fake reviews and more often then not, I can tell by the reviews that the page has been used for multiple different items over the years. If you’re buying a phone charger, the reviews shouldn’t be talking about how good the elastic waistband is and then further down you see a picture of a watch.
Also, I was watching something about people selling on Amazon. One of the problems they mentioned is that Amazon will look at what third party sellers sell the most of, then bring it in and sell it themselves (usually cheaper). They’re basically using the third party sellers as a risk free way to find out how well a product will do.
In one case, a seller sold paintball guns. He sold 10 or so different models. After a year Amazon started selling the two guns that he sold the most of and priced them low enough that couldn’t sell them any more.
Amazon didn’t have to do any market research, they didn’t have to bring in 10 models to see what happens, they just looked at his sales.
Amazon also doesn’t have any way, that I could see, to report a clearly “switched” item that you describe.
I came across an item last week that had reviews that were describing several different items, none of them the item being sold. I looked all over for a “report” button on the page and found nothing. I went to customer service chat and they didn’t have an option for reporting a misleading item. So I just chatted and gave them the URL and waited a bit to no reply and left the chat. Didn’t seem like their CS people even had that in their script.
Maybe there’s something on the desktop version but nothing on the mobile app.
I still have hope that Amazon will do something if there’s enough press about bad sellers. I feel like the problem is relatively “new” and is ramping up so something will change at some point.
I’ve looked as well. The best I could come up with is to click the button to report that there’s something wrong with the description. It’s all I could do to alert someone that there’s an issue here.
I also see some listings that offer to pay people to leave good reviews, but again, no way to report it.
Thank you for the responses, which have been very interesting and informative. I will conduct myself more cautiously from here on out. As usual, it comes down to, “caveat emptor”.
I once ordered a whammy bar from a seller in China that never arrived. They tracked it only as far as the US border, and claimed I must have gotten it. Amazon refunded me when the seller refused.
I think that as a broad general rule you all are correct. That said, I’ve dealt with a few third party sellers that are outstanding. I do thoroughly read reviews, especially the ratio of 5 to 1 ratings.
I only shop online with a credit card (Not gift certificate or debit card) so I know I can charge it back.
I find anything that looks like a cheaply made item shipped from China, I can use Banggood. I have got one or two nice things there. Disclaimer, if any of you want to buy off of it, buy at your own risk and since it ships from China it’s slow.
My pet peeve with the third party sellers is since Amazon only lets you charge when something has shipped, if you preorder something they immediately charge you and pretend it has shipped even when they don’t even have the product in their possession.
Has Amazon quietly done away with 2-day shipping? I ordered a few things on Monday, which was the first time in several months that I’ve ordered from Amazon. None of these things were their “Prime Day” deals, just stuff I needed that Amazon had good prices on. They are scheduled to arrive Friday. All were Prime.
In the past the 2-day shipping has been solid and I don’t think anything I’ve ordered has taken longer than the stated 2 days to arrive. But now that no longer seems to be the case.
No they haven’t. As a matter of fact, most stuff that used to be 2-day is now 1-day.
But, yes, the promised delivery date for nearly everything this week is delayed. I think it’s due to the Prime Day overload. The good news is that a lot of the stuff that I ordered this week is getting delivered early (before the promised date).
Two day shipping is still a thing, but more and more often, the item won’t ship for a day or so. If you call them on it, they’ll reiterate that it’s two day shipping, not ‘you’ll get it within 48 hours of clicking the buy button’. If you’re going to go after them for a issue with shipping speed, it has to be past the day they’re guarantee arrival on.
What I’ve noticed, however, is that there’s no more (or very little) Same Day and Next Day items. Every time I’ve asked them about it they’ll keep saying that it’s probably not available in my area or that none of the items I’m looking for are available for same/next day.
I’ve explained to them over and over, that the next/same day option don’t even show up in the search filters, there’s an Amazon warehouse about 20 minutes away, their site specifically says I’m in the delivery area for next/same day and, most importantly, I’ve been doing it for years. It just recently disappeared.