Amazon Is Capturing Bigger Slice of U.S. Online Holiday Spending
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
As a (late) holiday shopper and Prime member, their shipping guarantees are top notch though. No praying that it arrives in time.
(Whereas Amazon says, order within x hours for delivery tomorrow, a lot of other shops here just feel like "Usually shipped within 1-2 days, if your hair is green, Tom is working in the office and your order number ends with 4")
Didn’t turn out to be a big deal, but folks shouldn’t take those guarantees for granted.
If a few hours pass and in the meantime that warehouse sells out, you might be past the cutoff for the next warehouse that has it in stock.
(Not an Amazon employee, just an extremely frequent customer...)
Except for the USPS last-mile shipments, I've rarely (< 5%) had Amazon miss a guaranteed delivery date. On USPS last-mile shipments, they only seem to make about 2 in 3 on-time, which means I get a free month of Prime everytime they miss. I'm almost to the point of trying to figure out the pattern that gets last mile USPS to pickup free months instead of doing the "no rush" which only nets me $1 or $2 towards e-books and video rentals.
The precision with which they can tell me when to expect a package at checkout is definitely an advantage over shopping elsewhere.
Our family also discovered something great this year: Wishlists. By creating and sharing Wishlists we were all able to get a much better picture of the specific items and areas of gifts that each family member was interested in. It results in much more lucid shopping than blind guesses and/or plain text communication.
I was able to get everything I wanted shipped in 4 days to 100 Mile House British Columbia, including Clearing Customs, from amazon.com, not even amazon.ca. No worries about carrying packages while traveling, was able to specify everything exactly as I wanted.
There is zero chance I would have been able to do something exactly like that in the local computer shop (The Source), and probably wouldn't have been able to do it in Vancouver at the large computer retailers.
http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating....
An ordinary person is very unlikely to read it, much less buy it.
My point isn't a story about a particular product, but to say that I'm not as surprised as I once was. During the holidays I had two boxes of food etc delivered (one Prime Pantry, one regular purchase) that were busted open or otherwise required my cleanup.
Amazon is truly becoming the online Walmart: cheap, compelling, but you expect the worst.
I think I'll still do some shopping on there next year, I just wish they had cheaper gift wrapping and card options.
For the record, Amazon charged me 3.95 per item for gift wrapping. I don't know if it changes based on the size of the item, whether you're a Prime member (I am), or other factors. But it's not always $6.
Another way to look at it is that $90 is about a regular night out. The choice is between investing 1 evening of your time to save for 1 night out later, or instead invest nothing but lose one night out that you need to spend in front of the TV.
YMMV, but probably the tipping point in GP specific situation is that he also had to post them all by himself, which is a huge pain and is probably alone worth it to have amazon do it.
Physical stores can't even implement the obviously better solution of getting everyone in one queue, and then directing them to the next open register (except for TJ Maxx and Marshalls and a couple others)
Wrapping is a cinch compared to all that.
Not to mention the cost of standing in line. I spent 30min at the post office mailing a SINGLE package back in mid-December.. and I thought I was ahead of the christmas game!
Once I was already there, and 'only' 10th in line, my time was pretty much sunk anyway.
I'm struggling to understand how that is any more of a pain than trawling around town to find appropriate gifts, then completing those very same steps. And with Amazon, you at least have the option of their (admittedly overpriced and ugly) gift wrap.
My parents bought my daughter a present and got the gift wrapping option and it was this amazing blue velvet gift sack. We saved it so we can use it again it was so nice. In fact, for the $6 my parents paid, we couldn't get a bag that nice ourselves.
I guess my point is, YMMV.
The return process does not handle this well.
I know it's more expensive to do it myself, but it's one of the few things I'm truly terrible at, and my family/friends all seem to derive great joy from my lack of skill, so I have begun to enjoy it myself.
I guess if I were concerned about the value of the cost of having someone else gift wrap a present for me, I would be more concerned about why I didn't care enough to do it myself but felt the need to purchase something for them. The only gift wrapping I paid for was 10$, and from Rapha, a high end cycling clothing company - because they give you a fantastic magnetic closing box with special tissue wrapping on everything inside it. (and I still put the entire gift wrapped box in shitty target brand wrapping paper anyway)
"There's always parking at Sears."[1] (Yes, Sears is that desperate.)
I'll be interested to see how they plan to tackle the in-store experience. There are obviously the perishable aspects of grocery store products which, with intense and continual establishment of their current strategies, will eventually present opportunity to become a viable part of the company. But on another end of things, shopping as a hobby is something to overcome. No amount of UX or UI (in current stages, at least) can compare to the coveted experience that shoppers seek when going to a mall. This is an area where Amazon might find value in AR. Ex. being able to try on an outfit without leaving your house.
An obvious method would be to open their own physical stores but that would probably just be a "tiller on the car" fix.
Whatever direction the company goes, I look forwards to seeing what Amazon has in store. (Seriously though, no pun intended.)
Plus--I've always liked Bestbuy. I bought a iPad mini ($under 350.00) at 12:59 p.m. Pacific time, on the 23rd of December. For $12.00 it was delivered to my door at 11 a.m. the next day.