So a week and a half ago, I filed a fairly substantial order with Amazon…a concert album by Jefferson Airplane, a concert album by Talking Heads, Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill, and two discs of early music featuring hot-shot viola de gamba player Jordi Savall. Also the second volume of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novel and Madhouse: A Tragic Tale of Megalomania and Modern Medicine, about the early 20th-century New Jersey psychiatrist Henry Cotton and his unusual surgical methods of dealing with asylum patients.
Totalled out at around $110, so I figured I’d save myself a few bucks and opt for the Free Super Saver Shipping.
None of the above material is terribly obscure (for me, anyway), and there was no sign that any of it would take more than a few days to ship.
My “estimated delivery” is the second week of August. I’ve re-visited my account several times over the past few days to see if it’s been changed to something more rational, but not so far.
Is this something new? Is this the new method of discouraging people to pick free shipping?
If I go back and change my preference to “regular shipping, please bill me the fifteen bucks,” will I get my shit sooner?
Probably not. Amazon has just been slower then molasses lately. It sounds like one or more of the more obscure items isn’t in stock, or is on back-order. If you give them permission to break it into two different shipments, you’ll get most of it right away. At least, that has been my experience. YMMV.
Just a WAG, but perhaps one of the items has had its stock depleted very recently. That would be enough to hold the whole shipment back, if you chose the cheapest options. A couple of times Amazon has happily surprised me when such a situation arose, sending me the other stuff separately first (soon after ordering) “at no extra cost to me”.
The first is Les Voix Humaines, which features solo material for bass viol and cello by J.S. Bach, Telemann, Hume, etc. Savall plays it all on viola da gamba.
Second is Harmonie Universelle, which has more obscure composers and adds other instrumentalists and vocalists.
I buy stuff from Amazon fairly often and always use the Super Saver shipping. Most of the time the stuff arrives within 3-5 days, usually ahead of whatever inflated estimate they give to try to pressure you into paying for shipping. However, I’ve had largish orders that took several weeks, probably due to one or more items being backordered. I wouldn’t assume conspiracy just yet.
It’s the Madhouse book which says 6-11 days shipping. That means it’s backordered or needs to be special ordered. With SuperSaver shipping, Amazon won’t begin to prep your order until everything is in stock (even tho’ once they start prepping your order, they may choose to ship things seperately). I always make sure everything I choose for SuperSaver says “shipped within 24 hours” which means Amazon actually has it in stock in the warehouse. If it were my order, I’d cancel it, reorder the stuff that’s in stock and do a seperate order for anything that’s not in stock…
I often do this. As a rule I tend to split large orders into as many smaller ones as possible whilst each still being above the Free Shipping threshold. I also try and group together items with simmilar estimates.
I actually live in an Amazon warehouse. No one’s bought me yet, which is sort of a pity since the “handling” you chumps are paying for is pretty sweet.
Unless of course some asshole chooses the Super Saving shipping, in which case I’m left high and dry.
We have the exact opposite issue. Super saver shipping normally gets items to us in 2-3 days, often faster than the normal for-pay UPS shipping, which is almost always a day or three late.
Case in point, we ordered a huge amount of items on Wednesday of this last week via Super Saver; it arrived on Saturday.
I ordered stuff recently from Amazon with free shipping, and it’s giving me a similarly late estimate. I almost always use free shipping when I order from Amazon, and this is the first time it’s been this slow. Usually it comes way before I’m expecting it. My theory was that they knew by now that they had my business, so they could screw me over a bit and nothing would happen.
Some of it was semi-obscure classical CDs, and I got an e-mail saying there would be a bigger delay for them. I cancelled one; the other finally shipped today. I swear both of them said 24 hours when I made the order.
The second week in August is pretty bad. I always get the free shipping and often it has taken 5 weeks to get. Once it shipped in two days and I got it less than 5 days after ordering. But that was only once.
I have never had it as bad as you, but my experience typically is more than a month.
I usually use the free shipping option as well. I’m still waiting on an order from 3 weeks ago. But, this is one of the first times I’ve had a problem. I figure, even if they made me pay for shipping, I’d still be waiting. They would just have a new excuse to explain why.
This happened to me with Amazon UK recently. I kicked up a shit because all the stuff was said to be in stock but the delivery date kept slipping back a week at a time. Got a bunch of hand-waving waffle back but the stuff turned up in 2 days.
I never use the Free Shipping option, because I’m in a separate country and it’s not available as an option. My deliveries are often of varying lengths of time. It’s usually because they have to find the items I ordered elsewhere, most often in Germany for some reason.
YESS! This is a huge pet-peeve of mine. Why do they screw over the free shipping option when its out of country? Are the shipping costs that much higher that they won’t absorb it? How about a little discount then on shipping if you cross the threshold but are out of country?
There are so many things I would buy from amazon UK/CA/DE if they didn’t have such an oppressive overseas-shipping policy.
Others have already pointed out that the best way to speed your order is to cancel it and re-organize it in smaller orders.
But on a seperate note, I’d like to recommend that if you’re getting the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you’d probably also like Heroes & Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and A Blazing World: The Unofficial Companion to the Second League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, both by Jess Nevins. They’re excellent annotations to the the two series and used copies are available for under four dollars.
