Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games | Hacker News Reader

Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

videogamer.com

156 pointstomtoise142 comments

I don't get it. As an incentive to sign up for Prime it makes no sense; Prime needs to offer me things I can't get elsewhere (or at least not for the same price), not return to me things that I can easily get elsewhere. I just spot-checked Amazon US's price for GTA 5, 39.88 [1], and it's the exact same price at Wal-Mart [2], so it's not an exclusive deal or something. (Nor did I spend several minutes hunting for a comparable price; it was the third hit on Google for "Grand Theft Auto 5 PS4" for me. Google being what it is now, YMMV.)

I don't mean "this is a bad idea". I mean "I don't get it". What's the point?

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PlayStation-4/dp/B0...

[2]: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PS4/41049186

My guess:

- They cost more than the free shipping threshold, giving shipping away free

- New games are low profit to begin with

- Amazon sells enough of these that they are already in every distribution center

- Every unit Amazon ships probably arrives in a "Prime" amount of time anyway, giving away expedited shipping for free

This is just bringing some video game sales into alignment with what Amazon wanted Prime to do all along.

Amazon makes very good money on a sale that they don't control. If the costs of making that sale (or supporting returns, etc) is too high they benefit significantly by letting marketplace sellers take all the risk.

> Every unit Amazon ships probably arrives in a "Prime" amount of time anyway, giving away expedited shipping for free

Just to add a note that this isn't always true. Sometimes they withhold shipping even though they have the item in stock at the nearby distribution center.

This is definitely true. Back in the pre-Prime days (ie, 5+ years ago) Amazon would send your package as soon as they possibly could, and even with the super saver shipping you'd still often get your order less than the minimum 5 days.

Now I'll order something on Amazon (not a Prime member) and they'll sit on the package for a week and then overnight it to me.

I'm not a fan. Paying more for faster shipping didn't used to mean that cheaper/free shipping always took longer, it just meant that you were guaranteed to get it quickly.

This may be because it's cheaper/better for them to ship other orders instead of yours, since they can only handle a finite amount of orders per center at a time :)

More likely their distribution network has improved so much that it's no longer cheaper for them to ship stuff slowly, and they make money from non-prime next-day shipping.

It's a financial hack. Amazon has low margins so cash flow is king.

They make money off you either way, when they sit on the order for 5 days, they probably book your revenue a month before they need to pay for the product.

Do they charge your before the order actually ships? I don't think they do.

Charging your credit card might not coincide with their definition of revenue recognition.

What if a customer cancel the shipment?

The point is that they don't hold the inventory.

They buy stuff on net-30 terms, and ship stuff to you the day it arrives. WalMart does similar things for many products -- they make vendors carry inventory until it arrives at a DC.

Unless they've changed something recently, they don't. I haven't paid enough attention lately to be sure.

That is one of the two reasons I signed up for prime in the first place, I'd always get super saver and 99.9% of the time it'd arrive in 2 days. All of a sudden it started taking the full time.

I don't remember exactly what the other reason was, but it involved a one time money savings which was > the cost of a year of Prime at the time.

So I can imagine that this was originally a bug. Probably at some point they reached the capacity of things they could physically get out of their warehouse and onto a shipping truck per day, regardless of whether that truck is heading to other trucks or to a plane. So you need to prioritize, every day, the things that must go out overnight to meet the deadline. If you're full and you have things that could be shipped tomorrow, they wait tomorrow. Then tomorrow, or a week later, or whatever, those things are now on the list of stuff that must go out overnight.

Ideally your capacity isn't filled up by the must-be-overnight stuff. But if you're busy for a few days, suddenly a bunch of regular stuff turns into must-be-overnight stuff. And that delays next week's regular stuff, which then turns into must-be-overnight stuff next week. and there's no way to recover from this automatically. You could recover if you manually added more shipping capacity, or if you told customers that ground shipping would take even longer (so you can spend a few days clearing out backlog), or something.

That said given that the current state incentivizes customers to do exactly what you did, I wouldn't want to be the manager who prioritized fixing the bug....

Wouldn't that explanation only work if their load is high enough that they frequently hit the limit on how much can be shipped per day, but they rarely hit the limit on how much can be shipped per 5 days?

If the load is lower than this, then deferral of non-Prime orders would rarely be needed. If the load is higher than this, deferral would rarely help.

If their load is in that window where deferral can help with load, the amount of deferral for a given warehouse should vary from order to order all the way from no delay to several days.

My recollection from before I got Prime was that almost all my free shipping 5 day orders shipped the same day, and then over a very short time that changed to them almost all being delayed by an amount that depended on how far the warehouse was from me. I lived in the same city as their biggest warehouse, for instance, and orders served from there were almost always delayed 4 days and then overnighted. That indicates that the deferral was not based on load.

Just do an Uber and surge that price!

If you use free delivery, they seem do this more often than not lately.

For years free delivery would often be as fast as other methods, sometimes next day, even if ordered late in the day.

Now they will usually sit on the order for a suspiciously consistent 48hrs before it goes to picking status.

I don't mind, it's very rare I really need something next day.

I have an open order right now they've been sitting on for 5 days. It's fine with me. I don't need the instant gratification and don't make enough orders to justify Prime. Just pretend you're living in the era of Sears & Roebuck ca. 1916 and you get your order turned around in the phenomenal time frame of 10 days with doorstep delivery rather than waiting a couple months and having to make the voyage out to the train depot to pick up your stuff.

Granted I don't buy video games with Prime, but my orders with free shipping due to price threshold tend to be significantly slower than Prime, often taking weeks for items of all Prime eligible items. I live in one of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S.

> ...my orders with free shipping due to price threshold tend to be significantly slower than Prime, often taking weeks for items of all Prime eligible items.

I've had the opposite experience (and posted about it here before). Since I joined Prime last year, I've had issues with the guaranteed 2 day shipping taking 3-4 days or sometimes a week. I don't live in the backwoods either; I'm well within the Atlanta metro area (though not quite inside the perimeter). Before I joined Prime, even a non-Prime eligible item would tend to arrive in 1-2 days.

I did call Amazon about the issue several months ago, and they offered me gift card credit equal to the non-Prime shipping cost of all shipments that didn't meet the guaranteed date, and since then I've only had one late shipment. It definitely pays to contact them about it; I know from working for a company that sells on Amazon that the customer is treated like royalty whenever there's an issue, whether it's with Marketplace or Amazon direct sales.

I've had the opposite. Shipments supposed to be delivered on monday delivered on saturday or sunday. And promptly lost because I ship to a business address that is closed on the weekend. Infuriating watching it state delivered on a sunday at 3pm when I know it's going to be lost.

I swear I've had amazon ask me if it was alright to deliver to a new address on weekends. Maybe that's a recent feature?

There is a flag. They sometimes ignore it.

Prime in the UK is next day, and whenever they miss that they give you a free month of prime, which was essentially getting me prime for free. I gave up in the end because the waiting in was getting too expensive

Where do you live? I always get prime deliveries on time, and increasingly I get them same day if order before noon I think.

There were a whole selection of reasons for delay, including repeatedly giving the wrong address to the courier and continuing to use Yodel years after it stopped being funny. You are basically heavily dependent on your location relative to the dispatch warehouse, the courier's depot, whether your driver is overloaded, and whether your driver is a ring-and-run type.

Previous to buying Prime, I ordered things that would be in a "Preparing to Ship" status for a week before actually shipping out. Upon contacting Amazon they informed me that they literally will not ship for a period of time if you got the over $35 free shipping deal. I complained and told them that was bullcrap and I didn't know that and I needed the things the next day and they overnighted them to me but still I was surprised. They basically admitted they'll hold things to make sure that shipping takes longer!

This is likely true, but for a less nefarious reasons. It's very unlikely they received your order and were sitting around twirling their thumbs until the last possible moment.

Instead Amazon has algos that know exactly when they need to get an item in the mail to make it before the deadline. Every time an order comes in, the pickers list is updated.

Meaning that every time a customers order comes in with a tighter deadline, their order will be picked prior to yours, until you deadline is sufficiently close (or there is a lack of more pressing orders) for your items to make it to the top of the list.

I'm pretty sure it is for nefarious reasons. For the last year or two (maybe more), Amazon has never failed to deliver my free shipping (non-prime) orders in 1-2 days from when they ship. Since this would be a disincentive to subscribe to Prime if they shipped it within a day or so of receiving the order, they just do nothing for 4 or 5 days so that it arrives in the 5-8 day quoted window.

Its clearly in their best interest to push people to subscribe to Prime to recover their costs, their order fulfillment is so streamlined that a standard free shipment and a prime shipment probably cost the same in 95% of cases.

I agree that it's crap, but why would you use the Super Saver Slow Shipping for something you needed the next day?

It sounds like they needed it the next day after they called support, at which point they had already waited some time without it shipping.

Good point. Still sounds like the commenter expected it before the guaranteed date, but maybe Amazon just screwed it up that badly.

The guy above is correct. The order said 5-8 days and I ordered it on Monday and needed it Saturday. 5 days could have possibly allowed it to arrive on time even within the window and I had past experiences where Amazon had just shoved stuff in the mail and it arrived in 2 days. HOWEVER, they waited until Thursday to even start the shipment process because then it would've arrived on/around Tuesday of the next week making it 7ish days which is the longer of the range as well.

> New games are low profit to begin with

AFAIK, they aren't. There's apparently enough margin that Best Buy and Amazon both have membership clubs that yield 20 percent off preorders.

The low profit part cannot be true. In the US prime members get a 20% discount on new games!

Amazon believes it has enough brand stickiness that enough people don't even consider non-Amazon options that this will be an effective way to incentivize upgrades compared.to the cost in shoppers that do consider non-Amazon options. If there marginsnon the items are low enough this isn't that unlikely to be true, even if a large percentage of customers do consider other options.

I guess they try to hit people like me. I have only one online shopping account connected to my real name. It's on Amazon. Back then I got it to buy books in english. It worked pretty well for some time with other products too.

However. Seeing this, I would rather pirate the game then allow them to force me into Prime.

Thanks to the messed up DHL delivery guys here I already started to discover shops in my area again. Especially for electronics and other fragile products.

This has the be the weakest justification I have ever seen for piracy and believe me, I've seen a few.

It wasn't supposed to be one. I assumed the sentence following this would outline my usual way to acquire products besides amazon.

I wanted to show that even if I had no choice, I wouldn't buy into this.

Is it likely that these products would sell out if available to everyone? I think probably not, but it would make sense if that were the case. Amazon should ensure availability for Prime customers to prevent poor experiences. Imagine paying for a Prime subscription and then seeing that the popular product you want to buy from them is out of stock. You might think "well, what am I paying them for?"

Because amazon wants subscription revenue because subscription revenue is valued by analysts. So they do whatever they can to get people on prime.

Calm down. Probably some engineer made a mistake that caused a bunch of items to be incorrectly labeled as prime-only. A bunch of vidya nerds couldn't buy they favorite shooter anymore, made a post about it, and Amazon rolled back.

As others have pointed out in this thread, this makes no sense as a deliberate move.

Completely deliberate. As others pointed out, they've already been doing it, on less popular products that caused no backlash. It's there in the article up top, pre roll-back:

UPDATE: Amazon has provided VideoGamer.com with the following statement in response to this story:

"One of the many benefits of Amazon Prime is access to exclusive selection on a number of great products. Customers who are not Prime members can sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, or they can purchase those items from a Marketplace seller."

For a company that calls itself "The Everything Store", becoming the "Everything except if we think we can squeeze you for more money" is going to push people into the waiting arms of Walmart and Jet and Google Shopping intermediary.

Costco charges everyone $50/year. If Amazon wants to do that, just drop the non-Prime offering entirely, give everyone a 1 year free trial, and stop the nonsense games.

You still can buy from 3rd party though, but no free delivery from Amazon.

Amazon charges vendors up to 40 percent rake just to be fulfilled by Amazon. They are swindling the living crap out of 3rd party sellers while also maintaining their position as lowest price on most products within their own sham site. Very often these days Walmart or another online vendor will have cheaper prices than Amazon. The way Amazon treats its employees and the underhanded business tactics toward customers are going to be the end of them. They became a meme - just Amazon it Bob!! But Myspace was a meme too. Fuck up a phone, make your employees miserable, and foster a culture of dark doing customers.. and Amazon will fall just like Myspace. A name recognition can only take you so far. (fyi I recently worked as a dev for them in Seattle and left due to a hostile work environment so I do have bias but also a unique perspective.)

Interesting that Amazon is "swindling" third-party sellers.

How much do Home Depot, Walmart, Sears, Costco, and others charge the (zero) third party sellers that they allow onto their platform?

Most of the "oldbiz" buy the goods and sell them from their own corporation -- this is because they have actual retail stores. Amazon does not. I do not know how much their rake is for 3rd party online goods though -- I see "Sold by Pharmapacks", etc.. often on Walmart and the price is usually not competitive at all compared to "Sold by Walmart.com" items. Mostly has to do with the shipping price.

That's because Walmart doesn't offer third-party fulfillment (to my knowledge). They allow select third-parties onto the selling part of the platform (but again, not open like Amazon), but fulfillment remains the 3rd party's problem to handle, which is why the shipping price is still an issue there.

Amazon is providing far more of the value chain than other e-commerce sites, and it's no surprise to me that they're charging for that. If that doesn't work for a given seller, they shouldn't use Amazon. If enough people don't use Amazon, Amazon will have to adjust. I see no evidence that the latter is occurring in great numbers.

"Calm down."

An attempt to claim the higher ground by casting someone as hysterical. Why do you feel the need reach for such a pointlessly large rhetorical stick for such a little discussion?

(Yes, I'm doing a bit of a higher ground play myself. I don't deny it. You earned it.)

I don't think many people here particularly give a crap about the video games. It's the entire notion of "prime-only" items that's problematic. So your assurance that marking these particular items as prime-only was a mistake doesn't really help.

Amazon put a lot of effort over the years into establishing themselves as the best place to buy nearly everything online. Now they seem bound and determined to throw that title away. Between rising prices, add-on items, confusing marketplace sellers, a refusal to sell certain products that compete with Amazon branded products, and now this ridiculous Prime tie-in, I find it more and more difficult to find a reason to buy stuff from them.

Trying to shove "subscribe & save" in my face 3-4 times during the process of choosing and purchasing a product is annoying, too.

Yes, I get it, you make more money in the long term when people subscribe.

I wish there was a global opt-out for it.

I've never noticed this actually. Example of a product that does this? I tried Sub&Save for Tide a while back but the one I wanted kept getting cancelled and I was offered an alternative so I stopped trying and went with buying it at LocalStore,Inc.

Yep. This has made Subscribe & Save nearly useless for me. The convenience factor is entirely wiped out when I run out of laundry detergent because I missed the e-mail stating the product is now no longer eligible.

Amazon became a killer app for me (and most, I presume) due too the UIx. You clicked a button and you generally got pretty-close-to-cheapest priced product delivered very quickly.

Now it's just getting complicated, and you have to expend energy to ensure you're not getting actively ripped off by looking at only Prime items/etc.

Completely agree. I was an original Prime member when it first came out which was before price increases, add on items, restrictions and bullshit. After learning about how they treat their workers as well as them adding sales tax on to things that were previously untaxed (state law). I look elsewhere for a lot of things and if I can't find something other than on Amazon I buy from the 3rd party retailer. Paying for the shipping is still cheaper adding shit I don't need/want to meet the $35 threshold and faster.

When you factor in the well-documented pattern of how badly they treat their employees (both warehouse and corporate) it gets even harder to justify.

Oh please - I've read the NYT article, but I haven't seen anything otherwise that corroborates it. White collar friends that work there are very happy. Wage workers there have gripes but nothing abnormal for the industry.

The beauty of Amazon is that if you want to buy product X, produced in America, for a living wage, you can. You can also purchase it from a different seller where it was made in China and pay less for it. It's not the responsibility of Amazon to determine what is right for you. YOU make the choice, they just deliver product to you.

Whether or not Amazon is the best place to buy something depends on your sensitivity to price. You can almost always find a better price somewhere else, and that's been true for many years. Amazon's selling points are convenience and selection.

This Prime thing and the blocking of Chromecast and Apple TV are extremely anti-customer. At least pricing and add-on items make some sort of sense.

Ever since there started being discounts for Prime-only members I knew it was the beginning of the end of my using Amazon.

My last online order was with Walgreens. I never tried them before but I googled for the product I had in my Amazon cart, it was cheaper at Walgreens, I added a few things to get up to $35 for free shipping, those things were also cheaper than on Amazon. I got the delivery faster than my last few free standard shipping orders with Amazon.

For a long time Amazon was the "default" in my mind for shopping online and I see now there's no reason it should be that way anymore.

> Ever since there started being discounts for Prime-only members I knew it was the beginning of the end of my using Amazon.

For me the opposite happened: i'm now shopping more at amazon than before because I decided to subscribe to prime again. Here (Austria) prime now delivers in one or two days even to the most remote regions which previously was something they did not really do. I also get instant video, amazon music and a bunch of other stuff thrown in for free and the returns are amazing.

The value I get out of it is very much worth it. I don't see any other online store catching up with this service any time soon.

You might look into PriceBlink. It's a pretty slick extension that automatically finds better deals for the items you're browsing.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/priceblink/aoiidod...

Somewhat similar experience but with the old brick and mortar. I get taxed on Amazon purchases and a speaker package ended up costing the same as buying from Amazon and even then I was buying through a reseller on Amazon whereas I can get stuff handled faster and easier should I have issues. Besides, Best Buy price matches Amazon nowadays anyway.

This is a weird move. I think if I didn't already have prime, I'd just go somewhere else rather than be motivated to subscribe. Hopefully this is just an experiment—I suspect this is ultimately going to be self defeating.

It is majorly self defeating. A transaction on Amazon has very little friction, because they already have your payment details, you have a history and you know the quirks of the site.

By forcing people to consider alternatives, it is making people experience that initial friction elsewhere, but once they are setup there the friction is less. It won't take very long to discover other retailers have better prices, better shipping and less quirky sites.

Essentially this is nice gift to Amazon's competitors. Amazon will find out just how "sticky" those competitors are, but this stills seems silly.

Also, Amazon should want to know everything I buy to better offer me value that allows them to get more sales from me.

They've been doing it for over a year, so it's very unlikely it's only an experiment. The Amazon forums thread complaining about it has 267 participants, and was started in December of 2014.

https://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon/ref=cm_cd_notf_thread?_e...

One explanation: * People who buy video games on amazon and don't have prime aren't likely to get prime. * They're losing money on the free shipping offer (given video games tend to be >$35, may have thinner margins than other products).

I'm not saying this is their reasoning, I'm just saying it could make sense.

Wait, what? This is ridiculous. Amazon is a shop first and foremost, and this is exactly the sort of thing that I'll drive me to other alternatives.

It's especially silly for games, where the console manufacturers offer their own stores (both for digital and physical copies of the games). Heck, if you're buying them digital, it's about as little friction as using Amazon, since they have your payment details from other online services you use through the system (like Xbox Live).

It's not just games: I tried to buy a Panasonic bread machine on Amazon UK back in January but it was a 'Prime Exclusive'.

I bought it instead from Argos nearby for the same price.

A few days later it was no longer 'exclusive'. Presumably just more Amazon psychological experimentation.

Edit: model is SD-2500

Similarly, Pampers nappies have only been available to Prime customers for some months now.

Not everywhere. In Japan they are available to everyone still.

You can still buy these games on the same catalog page if you're not a prime member from a third-party seller.

Here's some math for you; I don't know how much Prime is in the UK, but assuming the cost is close to the US:

Non-Prime postage = $11.00,

Prime for a month = $11.00.

$11 - $11 = they will lose zero sales from doing this.

Non-Prime postage in the US is $0 if you spend at least $49.

This seems oddly customer-hostile, which is something I've grown to expect from tech companies but not Amazon in specific.

One can't help but wonder if the damage this does to the brand outweighs the strategic gains through Prime subscriptions. After all, selection and availability is a huge part of Amazon's secret sauce to success, more so than customer service, shipping speed, or any other concern.

If customers lose the ability to assume that they can get anything on Amazon, it's hugely damaging to the brand.

Amazon is the only place I have seen blatant user-targeted dark patterns. "Order within the next hour to ship today". Four hours later: "order within the next 2 hours to ship today". Never mind the lowest-bid delivery acting like this is the first package they've ever handled (a phone call, really?), or email spam from checking a price.

I believe a short time after a company acquires a reputation, customers develop a blind spot and you can count on reality being the opposite of that reputation.

I think their shipping windows are often just messed up. I've had the opposite situation too, where it says that an item must be ordered within the next 2 hours and then when I get to checkout the window is already passed for the day.

I'm wondering whether the ship timer on the item page isn't quite accurate, and the one on the checkout goes through and does a warehouse-by-warehouse check to see where the nearest warehouse that has stock and also isn't closed is. As east-coast warehouses close you might get additional availability windows from west-coast warehouses, and their algorithm might not be doing an exhaustive search of when the last possible warehouse that has stock will close.

I'm not saying that it isn't a dark pattern, but there are still some "incompetence" explanations before we need to jump to "malice".

Typical conversion rates hover around 3-4%. That is if 100 items were viewed, only 3-4 times they are bought. So, to decrease load on your sourcing engine, it makes sense to cache the "next 2 hours" calculation results and recalculate exactly during checkout.

The delivery was on the west coast, so it's not like they could ship further for a better timezone. Furthermore I think the times were more spread out than I said - something like 3 hours later, the new shipping cutoff was 6 hours away. They also hiked the prices mid-session, and clearing state restored the previous ones.

When an organization grows large, the distinction between deliberate malice and beneficial incompetence becomes less meaningful. Inferring an organizations broader culture can be informative, but the net incentives are the same.

It definitely did not feel like a data consistency issue. And the "dynamic pricing" is obviously malicious, but it's the sort of machine-vs-human maliciousness we've been groomed to accept as "the free market".

I don't have a particular grudge, and buy from them if they're the lowest bidder. I just don't understand what appears to be single-minded affinity for them.

>Amazon is the only place I have seen blatant user-targeted dark patterns. "Order within the next hour to ship today". Four hours later: "order within the next 2 hours to ship today".

That could be a reaction to facts on the ground. To give you a guaranteed shipping window, they need to estimate sales. If sales come up lower than expected, the cutoff moves a few hours.

You see this kind of thing all the time in airline seat pricing.

Or maybe the transportation resource Amazon had to use to ship later in the day had some cancelations?

It's impossible to build a distributed system that has fully consistent results. That is usually the reason for inconsistencies between the detail page and checkout page promises.

I guess you've indirectly answered my question - Amazon has its own reality distortion field. Are you really not aware that every other merchant and shipper has specific cutoff times? It's based on truck schedule rather than link capacity - the essential measure is weight, which primarily necessitates more fuel.

The only "distributed system" in question is Amazon's own computer system. In which case no, it does not really seem that difficult to distribute a basically static scalar field.

Um, if someone else cancels, they free up the resource (volume or weight or number of packages). This allows some other package to use the resource. This essentially makes it non-static, since it depends on the number of shipments that will consume that specific resource.

Your reply seems to suggest that you can get a truck to carry infinite capacity just by using more fuel. Not sure if you meant something else.

Space/weight limits of trucks are not the critical factor - sure, they're "infinite" if you insist on thinking in the wrong paradigm.

This isn't the Internet where links have a bounded capacity and zero marginal cost. The trucks/planes have their schedule - more packages mean more fuel is used, not exhaustion of discrete slots. Delivery services do not make money by queuing packages.

What? Trucks do have a bounded capacity. A truck cannot carry more than x kgs of packages or y liters of volume. Are you arguing against that?

If Amazon had asked for a single truck from UPS at 5 PM from warehouse A (the number of trucks ordered is a business decision), it can only allocate x kgs of packages or y liters of volume to that resource.

Edit: Just to clarify, the number of trucks may often be decided waaay in advance.

I'm arguing that the capacity of the truck generally does not matter. A toilet bowl has a bounded capacity too. But by the time you're thinking about it, you have a different sort of problem.

The cutoff windows they do give are too long to support your theory (what if demand then spikes?), unless Amazon also retracts those windows (which would also be customer hostile). I'm not saying the constraints you describe are impossible, just highly unlikely based on how every other merchant/shipper works. The tiny gain from optimally packing trucks does not seem to outweigh the additional complexity required to do so.

It echoes their decision to not carry the AppleTV, and to direct searches for AppleTVs to the FireTV. It's arrogant and customer-hostile. And ultimately, the result in my case was that I had a perfectly pleasant buying experience with Apple.

I never got Prime before because the cost would amortize to an expensive shipping rate for me based on how many orders I make. And I didn't need the other Prime benefits.

But their hard selling it to the point of hostility to non-Prime customers (higher prices) has added an element of stubbornness to my objection to it. Both Prime and ordering on Amazon in general.

Once a user has Prime, they tend to order more from Amazon.

Well sure. If loyalty programs didn't overall favor the merchant, they wouldn't be offered.

giving discounts for Prime members is not the same as being hostile to non prime customers.

This makes me want to not have Prime anymore. It seems so clear that it's only a matter of time until they start trying to extract even more money from the prime members as well. Why would I fool myself into thinking they'd treat us any better when they think we're semi-locked-in/less likely to leave because of the subscription.

Seems like a test to see how the practice goes.

Really don't know what the hypothesis or plan is that would lead to good conclusions though.

If Amazon decided to go the Costco / Sam's Club route and charge just for access to their store, I'd probably just shrug and pony it up. I mean, I already pay for it now, and I'm not doing any analysis to find out how much I'm using it and what it's saving me vs. other options.

There are essentially two different kinds of experiences I have when buying goods and services online. Amazon-tier and everything else. I prize the experience of using Amazon so much that they'd have to double the cost of Prime before I'd even start to consider switching.

Amazon has become part of the infrastructure of my life, like Google and my local coffee shop. The switching costs simply and utterly dwarf the cost of doing business with them.

I've also noticed Amazon now uses dark patterns to try and force buyers to sign up for Prime. The current strategy is clearly to pressure users into signing up Prime by absolutely any means available.

Complained about this a year ago, few people cared: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9565929

What's so amazing is that they're only hurting their own business. Nobody sane is going to buy a $99 Prime subscription to buy a $10 Blu-ray or a $60 game. We're just going to discover that Target or Best Buy sells it online for the same price and offers free shipping, and buy it there.

So does anyone have a less crappy alternative to Amazon? After canceling my prime membership this year it's gotten even worse trying to use them. Their shipping fees for non-prime users are insane.

Even if you can get free shipping on Amazon items, the amount of time they spend stalling the shipment is ridiculous. It's better to boycott Amazon because of their anti-consumer attitudes.

I doubt they purposely stalling the shipment. When they are waving orders at their DCs. Priority of standard shipping is last. Some companies charge to be in the first waves, like newegg and their expedited processing.

Well, there are both a Quora response and a Forbes article decrying their regression in free shipping (or non-Prime) timeliness, with some people suggesting that it is intentional. Most recently I made an order of three items from Amazon and had the chance to cancel all three items two weeks later, before it made it out the door during the "preparing your shipment" phase, and buy them from a local retailer the same day.

Several years ago, it was the case that any items bought from Amazon were processed within two to three days, and the shipping carrier was responsible for any delays. It seems like a strategy to convert more customers into $99/year Prime subscribers.

I don't know why either. It seems like they are reminding their customers that online shopping is not more convenient than the alternative.

Walmart.com and Walgreens.com are legit. Walgreens has 20% everything coupons quite often and advertises the coupon code at the very top of every page.

I have had good luck using random places found on Google Shopping. I always use Paypal to avoid entering credit card details and it is usually faster than Amazon. There are lots of well designed sites out their which actually show product details for more obscure things.

To be honest people shouldn't be complaining they can't get it from Amazon, but getting it from someone else

It's that simple

Why not both? Complaining is useful to the target of the complaint (if they care to pay attention) and often gets results.

I don't understand why so many people seem to think that complaining is somehow not a legitimate reaction to this sort of thing.

It is certainly a legitimate reaction

But as much as I like Amazon I'm not going to give them free consulting in such a divisive decision

I canceled my Prime membership a while back now for multiple reasons, but this is frosting on the cake. In order for me to cancel my auto-renewal I had to jump through scary 'cancel your membership' prompts to find the question about auto-renewal. The company has gotten slimier and slimier.

Exclusive markets are are what's wrong with browsers, video games, apps and the Internet today and now it jumps into the physical world as well. This isn't even about true exclusivity, which is a problem in itself, but more akin to crippleware. Non-prime members (still your customers) now have a worse experience than before. If companies that provide content and products just made it easier to find and purchase content and products, they wouldn't have to worry about locking in their customers.

This is another experiment to test their monopoly power (like the conflict with Hachette.) If it's successful, expect it to happen across more product ranges. Their monopoly power is built into their valuation; if they can't make it pay, they will eventually crash.

And remember, Amazon blocks even Prime members from buying Chromecast or Apple TV devices. Then they lie about the reasons, ranging from: "we're out of stock" to "too many user complaints" to "we aren't licensed to sell this" and on and on.

Amazon no longer cares about the customer as top priority. If you're a Prime member, quit. I've been a customer since 2003 and now am looking at alternatives. I even try to find books outside of the Kindle store, though I note they have strong lockin there. (I never thought it'd be a problem, since Amazon used to always put the customer so far up a pedestal.)

In Bezos 2016 Investor Letter, I didn't think "We want Prime to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member." meant this.

Only seems to be the US site, at least for now! It really makes no sense though!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00KL4AROO/ref=s9_simh_g...

Amazon UK had prime exclusive content for a while already. Some baby products for sure.

They actually do the same thing with other items as well. I was trying to buy a Dell monitor the other day, and it was reserved for Prime members only.

As someone who buys video games on Amazon relatively often and isn't a Prime member, this is nothing new. Every now and then a game will drop in price a bit but be Prime Exclusive, and then a week or two later it will go back to its original price and be available to everyone again. It's mildly annoying, but I think this article makes it sound like a much bigger deal than it is.

Maybe they are doing this on some very low margin products? Are brand new video games low margin?

My guess is they are moving loss leaders towards customers that have a higher life-time value, and want to minimize sales to unloyal customers that cost them on a transaction basis.

They lost me from Prime when they started doing ads before the programmes and messing up every other delivery. If they want to lose the hundreds of pounds of orders I continue to make, and the hundreds more pounds of AWS spend, they have certainly managed to find an approach to achieve that

Except Far Cry Primal, those aren't new games.

They are doing this with physical CDs as well. For a recent album, I could buy the MP3 version, but I could not buy the CD without a Prime membership.

My assumption is if they had enough Prime members buying these exclusive titles they could probably just sell at cost from day 1, therefore driving more traffic to their website. This would obviously hurt local game stores considering they could never do that without a "membership". Although, some stores like BestBuy already do this sort of thing.

Weird but not surprising -- not that different from HBO / netflix negotiating exclusive streaming rights to content. Spotify and youtube's 'deal' departments are more important (and more controversial) than their coders / PMs.

If you don't like this, steer clear of strings-attached content platforms.

These games aren't exclusive in any way. They can be bought from a large from a large number of other retailers for a comparable price.

well, they're exclusive in 1 way -- amzn seems to be enforcing the party line that these are 'exclusive items'. If you're a shopper with limited attention, the headline matters more than the comparison shopping outcome.

Is there a reason for non-console players to even buy in DVD form anymore, instead of Steam or similar markets?

I mean, I get that if you live in Canada or Australia your bandwidth sucks and you have caps, but for most cases download speeds are way faster than DVD shipping speeds.

I've heard a few people express concerns around whether they actually own Steam games, and whether those games might suddenly be pulled or otherwise made unavailable without the courtesy of a purchase price refund.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but on the other hand, to the best of my knowledge that's never actually happened, so...

If you dispute a credit card charge with Steam, they'll ban your entire account even if the charge just relates to one game out of many in your library.

There's also the possibility of bugs or other errors causing items to disappear from the library. Searching around, it sounds like it's happened to a few people.

Maybe not Steam or games, but Amazon has remotely pulled back digital books they sold to their customers (with refund though): http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...

I know. That's Amazon, though, not Steam.

> whether those games might suddenly be pulled or otherwise made unavailable without the courtesy of a purchase price refund.

A legit concern, but so many physical games seem to be tied to shit like uplay I'm not sure avoiding Steam gets you anything.

And DVDs are often incomplete anyway, so you still have to download updates and authenticate to a keyserver to play.

I can't sign up for Prime. They don't offer it in the country I'm in.

So this amounts to saying that they don't want my money. Very well; there are other options.

Highly unlikely that they're going to implement this in countries that don't have Prime.

There is no Amazon site for Ireland.

I can buy things from any of their sites. However...

- Amazon.co.uk refuses to ship a number of items outside of Great Britain.

- Amazon.com has expensive shipping (obviously), and now this thing.

- Amazon.de doesn't usually help. Besides, I can't read German.

Looking at the Grand Theft Auto example, it's available from Amazon.com but not Amazon.co.uk; the latter, as mentioned, refuses to ship it to me. Amazon.com... might not; I can't tell, now can I? It refuses to let me add to cart without having a Prime membership.

So it looks to me like they've done exactly that.

> Amazon.de doesn't usually help. Besides, I can't read German.

The German Amazon site is available in English too. http://www.amazon.de/gp/switch-language/homepage.html/ref=cs...

Well, the site controls are. The item descriptions usually aren't.

On amazon.co.uk, you can frequently find a different seller that ships to your country though. I often get the message "this item can't be shipped to Switzerland". Then I click on "new and used from..." and there is the same item only one pence more expensive, but I can get it shipped to CH. No idea why Amazon can't be bothered to display the one I actually can order to CH first.

"Become a Patron member for exclusive content!"

I initially read it as 'non-Prime numbers' - it got me thinking.

I imagine it won't take them many AAA releases to have the numbers to see if this was a good idea or not. I'm fine with Amazon finding more ways to make prime worth it without taking away features from prime members or increasing membership cost.

Sounds no different than WalMart/Sam's Club.

Still not as bad as when they stole my Prime membership money.

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