I pit Amazon.com

Yeah, I’ve noticed this.

Amazon sellers complain about site maintenance and changes that slow down their sales. It’s never happened to me, but they say that (especially on weekends), buyers can’t buy. (The Amazon seller board is a revelation.)

On a more positive note, this week I complained to Amazon about delays and got an e-mail apologizing and saying they’d be filling the order and not charging me for the book or for shipping. If that’s going to be their standard response, they’ll be giving away a lot of books.

I used to get books from Amazon in just a few days. Now it’s at least a couple of weeks, unless I’m buying just one book, and then it’s about a week.

No shit she has a legitimate gripe.

I’m happy to report that since then, I’ve had no arguments with Amazon, and I re-ante’d up for another year of Prime. I love it. It’s gotten to the point that I order everything I can from them. Last week I ordered toilet paper from Amazon. Why? Because I hate going to the grocery store and having to lug home toilet paper. It’s too big, and I end up with 2 or 3 extra bags to schlep around. I joked with Mr. Athena about buying toilet paper and garbage bags on Amazon (since we were out of those, too, and I keep forgetting to buy them) and he rolled his eyes. I started to wonder… could you buy toilet paper and garbage bags on Amazon? Yup, you can. The garbage bags are only sold by non-Amazon places, but Amazon itself sells toilet paper. I ordered it. It was cheaper than buying it at the store, and I didn’t have to schlep it around.

I’m with the OP on wishing that there was some way to only search in Amazon.com, not the stores. Ordering from Amazon makes sense for me - no shipping charges beyond my yearly fee, 2 day shipping, and it’s super easy with 1 click. It’s a big hassle to find something you want only to find that it’s from “Toiletpaperworld.com” instead of Amazon.com. (and yes, there is a Toiletpaperworld store on Amazon. I’m not the only one who mail-orders asswipes.)

Hmmm… now what else can I buy from Amazon…?

I forgot. Since this is the pit…

Fuck you to all you people playing holier-than-thou about the free shipping. Free shipping sucks. I don’t want my books in two weeks, I want ‘em now, and when you don’t happen to live next fuckin’ door to Amazon, it doesn’t take 2 days for free shipping to get them to you.

Damn goat-felching free-shippers. You guys are probably the reason why my Amazon Prime stuff didn’t show up in two days that one time last September.

I got an offer before Christmas to try out Amazon Prime for 2 months free of charge. You had to give them a credit card for future billing though. It was one of those “get people to sign up and hope they forget to cancel programs.” I used it for Christmas gifts and then cancelled in January without having to jump through too many hoops. I hope they offer it again next year. :smiley:

Another happy Amazon.com Prime member here.

To answer some questions:

  1. Amazon.com Prime Shipping is offered on items that qualify for Super Saver Shipping, in general. This means small items like books, DVDs, and so on. That 25+ lb Calvin & Hobbes anthology wouldn’t qualify, and neither would that 50" TV, but a good many other items do (such as tiolet paper, knife sets, and the like).
  2. The only way I know of to search Prime items is to use Google. site:http://www.amazon.com , “eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping”, and whatever search terms you want. Kinda twisted.

In any case, I like Amazon.com Prime 'cause I can order whatever I like and have it arrive in 2 days, instead of waiting weeks till I have $25 worth and then waiting 2 more weeks for ground shipping; plus, overnight is $3.99. I doubt highly that the delays in Super Saver/Ground shipping are intentional–2nd day and overnight items should have a higher processing priority, and it happens that since Prime was started, there are a lot more items shipping by 2nd day & overnight mail.

Amazon.com screwed my order once that I know of. I ordered #7,8,9 in a series. They shipped 2 copies of #7 and no #8. I emailed customer service. They sent #8 overnight for free–without even waiting for me to return the 2nd copy of #7.

Here’s the deal with free shipping, best as I and my postal worker husband have been able to figure out.

Their free shipping (at least when done via USPS; I’m not sure the free shipping is done through another carrier) is a special class of “media mail” (aka “book rate”) - it’ll probably take freaking forever as it basically has zero priority level assigned to it, but it has tracking included, unlike regular media mail. I kept watching my Amazon packages get delivered to one particular sorting center - not the one assigned to my region for the regular mail - and then nothing would happen on package tracking for around a week, sometimes two. Then suddenly, wham, package shows up on my doorstep with one “arrived at [local post office]” notation that morning. (I know it’s not the carrier sitting on it, since for a while my husband was our letter carrier, and now one of his coworkers is.) As near as we can figure out, that particular sorting center handles most/all of the Amazon account packages, and they pretty much ‘get to it when they get to it’ because it’s cheapo media mail rate and not under any particular deadline, unlike most other mail categories which has specifications about how soon it must be shipped out. So sometimes you get it fast, sometimes you don’t.

So if I really don’t care one bit how quickly I get my books, I use the free shipping. If I have any kind of deadline at all for it (even “Christmas a month away”) then I pay for the cheapest shipping possible to at least ensure speedier handling.

I forgot to note - once I ordered a book using free shipping, and although it had shipped out pretty promptly, it was well over a week in the black hole of the aforementioned USPS distribution center. I managed to get hold of the Amazon.com 1-800 number (I think someone had posted it here) and called, and the person I talked to said to call back after the last day of the estimated delivery date, which was a few days off, and they’d send me another copy if I didn’t get it. That day came and went, I called, and they used an express method of UPS to ship the book that day. I received both copies of the book on the same day :smack: and sent back the USPS-shipped one, unopened.

Not hard to fix. Wait until after every other item is available, & then e-mail them, politely, & ask what the holdup is. 4 times out of 10, the Amazon service centre in India just ships the balance immediately, charges you nothing extra, & even apologizes for the delay. They just don’t care.

If not, they just apologize, but hey! No charge for an e-mail, right?

In the Holiday Season, this works 5 or 6 times out of 10.

S’cool. :cool:

There is a way for them to do it. I know, because it’s happened to me. Once. I ordered a bunch of stuff and picked the FREE Super Saver Shipping, or Super Shipper Saving, or Whatever, and they shipped some of it out right away and a couple of the items a few days later.

Could have just been because they love me and knew that I needed new books right away.

There’s an Amazon shipping location within an hour of my home these days, so super saver stuff gets to me in 2-3 days average. Why pay $$ when it’s not going to do me much better? If I lived somewhere where there weren’t lots of local options, I might reconsider, but I can usually find what I want within 5 minutes of my house.

The only exception was one time when my daughter needed a book within 48 hours that we couldn’t find locally. So we ordered it at 6 pm for overnight delivery – and it arrived at 10 am the next morning! That had to be some kind of a record.

Slight hijack, but I think ultimately relevant: I was interested to learn that the most profitable year Amazon.com has had to date was 2005 when their net profits were $35 million. Barnes & Noble had profits in the hundreds of millions (gross profit of more than $1 billion) for the same period, the vast majority of it from their brick and mortar stores. Amazon has incredible visibility (type in any book or movie or appliance into Google and you’ll almost always have an amazon ad in the top few options if not the top) and sells far more titles than B&N and has presumably less overhead (9,000 employees rather than B&N’s 40,000+, no insurance or rental or maintenance for stores, etc.) and sells many varieties of goods B&N will never sell, yet is doing nowhere near the business of the bookstore chain.

I honestly think it’s because of things like this and the lack of “face to face” availability. People want a tangible place rather than the sense that their goods are coming from some totally unconcerned “void”.

You’re off by a power of ten. Amazon had a net income of $359 million for 2005 which was less than their $588 million for 2004. 2005 Q4 Earnings [warning: PDF].

B&N had a net income of $143 million in 2004. Gross profit $1.48 billion. 2004 Annual Report [warning: pdf]

Wise Fwom Your Gwave!

I had been toying with the idea of trying Amazon Prime. Recent events pushed me over the edge, in part as a service to you, the SDMB community.

I had ordered a power tool from Amazon and elected Super Saver Shipping, like usual. Said tool was listed as “Usually ships in 24 hours.” And after my order, I checked regularly, and yes, it was always listed as “Usually ships in 24 hours.”

The outside ship date on my oder – three weeks after I ordered – came and went. When I checked Amazon’s site, it told me the item was backordered and it would be another two weeks before it shipped. Yet the item page still said “Usually ships in 24 hours.” An email to Amazon customer service confirmed the delay, in spite of what the item’s page said.

So I decided to do a little experiment. Granted, it was going to cost me some money and potentially reward bad corporate behavior, but them’s the breaks. It’s a small price to pay in the name of science. I signed up for Amazon Prime, canceled my order, and re-placed it, electing for the Prime treatment.

Lo and behold, my tool arrived two days later.

So does Amazon give preferences to Prime customers over regular Super Saver customers, above and beyond just faster shipping? If my experiment is representative, then it would appear they do.

'Course, now I’m out $80, and I’ve always liked Amazon anyway, so in spite of their shenanigans, in the interests of getting my money’s worth out of a year of Prime, I’ll still order from them. But I’ll be very, very annoyed every time I do, I promise.

I work doing phone support for an Amazon partner, and we use the same shipping system as Amazon. (Same software, same shippers, sometimes even the same warehouses. Oh sorry, “fulfillment centers”.) Sometimes there’s some kind of technical glitch that makes orders just hang in limbo despite there being stock available to ship. Internally we just refer to these as “stuck” orders and while tech support always says they’re “working on the issue” nothing is ever done about it.

In your case I think your original order was just “stuck”, and wouldn’t have EVER shipped out no matter what kind of shipping you had chosen. Eventually the order would auto-cancel and you would be notified by email. In my experience, this just happens sometimes and there is nothing that can be done except cancel the order and place a new one.