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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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.

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.

>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.

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