Poll: Amazon.com Nerfing Free Shipping Times?

[IvoryTowerDenizen]

Sunday afternoon we ordered a flat screen TV from Amazon and chose the free shipping method.

Est. delivery date is Thursday.

We got it today (Tuesday).

Damn. Free shipping with a one day turn around.

[Mangetout]

@iamthewalrus_3

I do not believe that Amazon is purposefully delaying packages in their warehouses just to convince people to pay more for shipping, although it’s certainly possible.

I do believe that Amazon is capturing all the efficiency gains it possibly can, and that means that the free-shipped stuff is at the absolute end of the queue. If there’s a little space left on the truck, your package might go on. But Amazon has very complex models for how much space they’ll need, and how to minimize their costs that there usually isn’t space on that truck most of the time. There’s probably some weekly and seasonal use cycles that make it more efficient to ship things out on particular days.

To an outside observer, these might look very similar.

You could test this by, say, ordering the same thing to be shipped free to you every day for a week or two. If there really is some slack in the system on some days, then I’d expect that your packages would clump up. You’d get several on some days (when there was extra capacity), and none on some others. If Amazon was just delaying packages, then I’d expect that you’d receive them at the same intervals that you ordered them.

Anyone want to drop $200 or so to test this?

Having worked in distribution, I agree with this suggestion.

A distribution company may have contracts with a number of different carriers, all offering a number of different services and often with a number of different price breaks or discounting overlays. They can play all sorts of gambles with these options - and, as you say, with the normal ebb and flow of order volumes, workload, staffing levels, etc.

So for example, there might be a discount deal for consignments that can remain as a full pallet through the first few routing nodes (i.e. they’re pre-sorted for a route, or part of a route).
Even if the consignment ships end to end in 24 hours, there is still a benefit in having some slack in the customer’s delivery expectation, because this allows you to hang on until you have a full pallet.

As I said though, it’s a gamble - because you might wait and find yourself hard up against the delivery deadline, without achieving whatever cost-saving trick you were aiming for - in which case, you have to fall back on a more expensive option to get the goods there when you promised to, but you gamble (and plan) that you’ll save more often than you overspend.