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Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

I have actually come to the conclusion that Amazon has "trapped" me with service not price. I often buy stuff that's a little more expensive on Amazon just because I know I get a reliable shipment and know when it will arrive. The "order until X and we grantee delivery on Y" is one of the key features for me. I always hate guesstimating when things will arrive if they ship in 2-5 days etc.

I usually bulk order so stuff arrives on Saturday if they'd have a "worker friendly" shipping service that delivers after 18h I'd be all over that.

I'm annoyed by a lot of stuff including the fact that pretty much everything is "reduced price" and that you have to wade through 5* reviews for every product but at the end of the day they are a brand I trust to deliver my stuff on time and do the right thing when there's a problem with some shipment.

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I was like that also. For many years Amazon was the only shop I had my real name bound to.

That stopped when DHL started overloading their drivers or I don't know what happened there. I was unable to get my deliveries. Either they were left in the truck for the whole week or the guy send it back. Made up reasons why he couldn't deliver (even if he didn't try). The final event happened when I god a box that looked as if some animal chewed on it. There was a HD in there.

This as well as exclusives made me think. I started looking for good electronics shops in my city and found one. I went another way on my way home and visit a book store regularly now. Since there are still items I have to order online, I've found that other shops just waited for me to leave Amazon.

Since they are obviously on the way to slow destruction while the rest of the internet is moving on, I don't see a way back.

Bleah. I see from your comments that you live in Germany; in the US, DNS used to do deliveries etc., but starting about when the Great Recession hit, they've pulled out of just about every business line they had here, except for delivering stuff from companies to our government US Postal Service ... which they do worse than UPS or Fedex, Amazon doesn't in fact use them for this, I just directly notice this from some Amazon merchant booksellers.

A "box that looked as if some animal chewed on it" ... I think we have a higher population of animals who can do this, clearly no excuse for Germany ^_^. Seriously, after carefully considering various alternative vendors for a wall air-conditioner I new for my new home given my various constraints, I ordered one from Amazon, and UPS wasn't gentle on the box, even lost on of the 4 packing straps I'm pretty sure. But no damage except to a small section of the heating exchange fins, which never make it 100% anyway however you procure them, and can be tediously combed out. I've never regretted a big ticket item purchase from Amazon like that.

Back to DHL: does not give an impression of a well run company given the USA and German datapoints; can anyone else fill in the gap in over there? I'd expect UPS to try.

There are plenty of alternative parcel delivery companies in Germany (UPS, DPD, GLS, Hermes), and they're all generally OK.

The worst experience I've had was indeed with DHL, where they apparently loaded my parcel on to the truck every day for about two weeks, but never attempted delivery. Eventually I worked it out with the sender, and DHL returned the original parcel to them.

Otherwise, I get dozens of parcels from DHL per year without incident. Every company has horror stories, and I doubt they differ too much percentage-wise in terms of loss and damage.

The really frustrating thing about all this is that DHL used to be the good company. The one where you could rely on the delivery. It changed abruptly for me. There was one good delivery and then the problems started and never ended. I even considered getting one of those Pack Station accounts. Good that I didn't. The experience colleagues had from this was shocking. Wrong packages, missing packages, messy support and recently that hack. Horrible.

I live in a big Germany city, so I hope that drone delivery hype becomes a thing one day.

I've found Amazon to be less reliable the sooner it is promised in the last year or so. Amazon's next day delivery will generally either go missing for a couple days or not be delivered at all about 1/2 the time here in NYC (confirmed by a couple other Queens residents). Then you have to wait 48 hours before you can report it missing (despite it saying "delivered" but not being here), then place the lost complaint with service, then wait for the next order which doesn't ship next day. So, about 4 to 5 days for a "next day" delivery. And the last time this happened, 2 out of the 5 items were supposed to reship and I would get a refund and have to re-order 3 of them from said missing package. Except 3 reshipped. So I wound up being charged for and receiving two of one thing I ordered one of. Queue having to get on customer service chat again, package up the duplicate item, walk it over to a shipping location, wait for a refund.

For a company that's supposed to be all about logistics, Amazon kind of sucks at logistics.

Thought I'd tag my opposing anecdotal data point onto your comment.. I live in London. I've had maybe 50 next day Prime deliveries in the last year - none of which have been late, lost or other.

They are very good at logistics for me!

Here in Tampa, the "standard" next day delivery services (where there usually is a surcharge) is fine (using the standard Fed Ex or UPS option), and I've never had a problem with the standard 2 day Prime service delivered via USPS or the like.

However, for some products, Amazon offers a "free next day delivery" service option. These services tend to be offloaded on sketchy "courier service" companies with names like A1 Courier Services, Lasership, Ontrac, Dynamex, etc. These carriers get generally awful reviews (as seen here: http://www.amazon.com/forum/amazon%20carrier%20feedback/) and you hear a lot of reports of missing packages, late deliveries, etc. I've only used this option once, the item did arrive, but it was at quite a late hour (10PM). Based on the reviews, I would not use this service again.

I still use Amazon a lot, but they have become way sketchier over time. Knockoff batteries are but one symptom of this.

It was indeed one of these sketchy courier services. They dumped my package by the front door of our apartment building at 10pm on a Saturday night in NYC. Or they claim to have. An hour later when I got home it was nowhere to be seen. I waited home most of the day for it until I had to go out to a previous engagement, too. The previous time I had a next day delivery, they claimed to have attempted delivery mid-evening while I was at home but never even rang the bell.

Echoing mafro, this is a regional thing. Here in my corner of SW Missouri, Prime 2nd day delivery through the USPS is rock solid, and next day delivery, which I seldom use, is often through FedEx or UPS, who also don't screw up. From everything I've heard, you generally don't get good delivery service in big cities, although for Amazon I've heard they've been using some sketchy companies that only operate in such cities for that.

And I get the impression that bad Prime service through the USPS has more widespread problems. Amazon sure looks like it need to put more work on making this level of their logistics work much more uniformly, but I suspect they already are.

You know a lot of other retailers are starting to build out networks to accomplish the same thing? Wayfair, for example, has an extremely extensive Free 2-Day shipping program (and you don't even need to pay a fee for it).

I think Amazon is slowly transitioning in to a IT services company that also happens to sell stuff.

As opposed to what it used to be... a company that sold stuff and who also happened to provide some IT services.

While a benefit this inertia also creates a risk. It allows Amazon management to do the usual quarterly focused changes to push profit with no measurable loss to sales. Each one of these building cumulatively towards that tipping point for a flood of customers to head to the next 'good service' competitor. End of the day its a good problem and amazing they haven't challenged this further given years of people complaining about these false reviews.

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