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Comment by dcole2929 | Hacker News Reader

My biggest problem with Amazon at this point is Prime. The free 2 day shipping use to justify the cost of Prime by itself, but at this point more often than not I don't get my stuff within the 3-5 day period, so I don't even know what I'm paying for. And it's not like I'm off in the middle of nowhere, I live in a major US city. Then when you add in the incredibly lacking search functionality, and the fact that you can no longer trust the reviews you get a company that has completely lost the trust of it's users.

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but at this point more often than not I don't get my stuff within the 3-5 day period

If they miss their 2-day shipping guarantee then you call CS, complain, and get a free month of Prime added. Ad infinitum. A way to increase your chances of missed 2-day shipping is to spread out your item orders so it gives them more opportunities to screw up. This also increases their costs of S&H across the entire logistics chain and maximizes the usage of your Prime membership. Plus it feels like every day is Christmas when a new random Amazon item is coming in.

Another key is to order stuff that weighs a lot (40lbs+). Last time I did FBA the UPS rate for Amazon shipping was ~50 cents / lb . So if you're getting a 40lb item (especially if it has weird dimensions) they're likely not paying much lower than $15-20 to get that to your door in 2 days.

It sounds like you get something out of this more than stuff, you get the fun of gaming the system.

> Another key is to order stuff that weighs a lot (40lbs+). Last time I did FBA the UPS rate for Amazon shipping was ~50 cents / lb . So if you're getting a 40lb item (especially if it has weird dimensions) they're likely not paying much lower than $15-20 to get that to your door in 2 days.

This is like overeating at a buffet to feel like you got your money’s worth.

When companies become openly consumer-hostile, we should expect consumers to become company-hostile. It's true that this leads to an antagonistic race to the bottom, but the alternative is a leisurely stroll to the bottom as one party pulls the other along by the neck. I don't know of any way to really reconcile this; trust is easy to lose and hard to earn, and in an environment of perpetual betrayal no party is eager to be the first to risk having their trust be taken advantage of.

My point is that Amazon or the buffet owner will not be brought down by a few customers who are a net loss to them shipping wise. They have already done the math.

You can either use amazon because you’ve decided you need it or you can actually stop giving them money and recommend others do so. That is a much bigger threat to them. Continuing to use prime and buying things you don’t need from Amazon isn’t being “hostile” to Amazon.

Well it's even easier than that. They'll just ban you.

http://time.com/money/5288702/amazon-return-policy-ban/

It's like card counting at a casino. Even if you're technically within the rules, you'll still get walked to the door.

As an aside: I canceled prime long ago. Couldn't be happier. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16937290

This approach would seem to negate the whole "convenience and simplicity" motivation behind using Amazon Prime.

> Plus it feels like every day is Christmas when a new random Amazon item is coming in.

I feel bad doing this, because I know these packages are coming in via air, truck, boat, etc and batching is significantly more efficient.

It's gotten harder to get a free month of prime (I used to take advantage of that, whenever a package was late). Now they tend to just apologize, when before they offered you compensation immediately.

I've found that now what they do is just give you delivery dates that aren't 2 days in the future, even when in stock. Sometimes I've had orders on Monday with ETAs of Friday, with prime, in stock (no notice on the page saying extra processing or out of stock).

This is what drove me to cancel Prime. After having this happen to me three times (adding Prime items to cart and getting all the way to the end of checkout before noticing the lack of two day shipping).

> complain and get a free month of Prime added ad infinitum

They will only do this 12 times a year. You can also request that they give you the late item for free.

A few bucks either way on price (including shipping costs) don't matter much to me either way. What I do value is my time. And that is what missed delivery dates and time on the phone both cost me. "Spend time dealing with customer service" is another cost with no associated value to me.

That might be why it is so hard to complain.

Amazon lost one of my packages (they were delivering it themselves).

No biggie by itself, but the apology mail did not lead to a reimbursement. Instead, I had to go to the website, and go through a dozen of steps that really felt like they were here to make me decide it is not worth my time.

Great way to lose my confidence in the company ..

If too many people try to abuse a service like this, it is likely the benefit will be taken away.

https://www.howtogeek.com/fyi/amazon-stops-giving-a-free-mon...

I don't know that I'd call it abuse. I'd expect Amazon to fall afoul of advertisement and consumer protection laws in many jurisdictions if they claim "guaranteed" delivery times, and their response to missing said guaranteed times is "do nothing".

I pretty much solely buy things from Amazon when their algorithm screws up and chances of counterfeits are low. I've bought several metal cabinets by a major manufacturer with free shipping for a price that had to be lower than the cost of shipping itself; much less the cabinets.

Were they beat up in transit, and take forever? Oh most definitely, one was even lost somehow; however they were so undervalued it was worth the fact they were bound to screw up.

I'm in the UK, and we get free next day delivery with a Prime sub.

In 3 years, we've had only a handful of deliveries that haven't arrived on time. I only cared about 2 of those, and on both occasions they gave me a free month of Prime after I sent a single, short email saying delivery was late. Pretty amazing customer service, especially for the UK!

Amazon isn't always the cheapest (altho they usually are, or are very close), but their customer service is great, and if I have issues they make returns really simple. This is the reason I buy more stuff from Amazon than from anywhere else.

I should add, I've never (knowingly) had any counterfeits from Amazon, and don't personally know of anyone who has, but it seems from HN it's a much bigger issue in the US than in the UK.

They changed that policy last year. You're no longer guaranteed a free month of Prime to compensate for shipping failures. CS reps can still give you this if they choose, but people are now being denied, especially if they've already been given free months before.

Prime may be "2-Day Shipping" but they state in their TOS processing time may make an item take longer than 2 days to get to you. I've have "2-Day" shipping items take a week to get to me and they just point to the TOS.

>The free 2 day shipping

The dark pattern the retail side now seem to employ is listing everything under the 2-day shipping Prime label, but not _actually_ shipping it for several days to weeks. Sure, they technically honor 2-day shipping once they actually ship, but as an end user, if something listed as 2-day shipping takes 8 days to be delivered... it isn't actually 2 day shipping.

It used to be go to amazon, enable the "Only Show Prime items" filter, and BAM, get your item 2 days later. Now the prime label is completely useless. You've got to manually investigate each option to see when it will actually be delivered. God help you if you mindlessly decide to change the color on the product page and expect the shipping date to hold.

I started ordering at Target. They have a similar program for free "2-day" shipping (through USPS, so the same issues as Amazon. Averages 2-3 days) if you sign up for their credit card.

Obviously a vastly smaller selection, but the prices are competitive and often cheaper than Amazon at this point. Feels good breaking away from Amazon as I was only shopping there from the momentum of what was once a good company.

I can second Target. Like Prime, you also get 5% off and you can open a debit card, if you don't want to open an extra credit card.

Thanks for the tip about the Target debit card. I'd heard about their credit card but didn't want to open a credit account. Their debit card links to your existing checking account:

https://www.target.com/c/redcard/-/N-4tfyn

There is also Google Shopping/Express, which works with major retailers including Target, and from unknown reasons I was able to order from Target via Google Express for cheaper than directly from Target..

> and the fact that you can no longer trust the reviews you get a company that has completely lost the trust of it's users.

Aren't many (maybe most) of these fake reviews done through Amazon Mechanical Turk? It's like instead of taking the cost to moderate the reviews, they decided to monetize them. Why pay money, when you can earn it?

> Aren't many (maybe most) of these fake reviews done through Amazon Mechanical Turk? It's like instead of taking the cost to moderate the reviews, they decided to monetize them. Why pay money, when you can earn it?

I know a lot of them come though Facebook. There hundreds of groups (like this one https://www.facebook.com/groups/amznlove/), where sellers are soliciting fake reviews in exchange for free product and PayPal refunds and commissions.

Here's the Washington Post article that describes this practice: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/how-merchant...

Here's a page that came up after a quick Google search that appears to be a review solication howto: https://www.amzfinder.com/blog/top-100-facebook-groups-list-...

>I don't get my stuff within the 3-5 day period

That's crazy because I'm in Canada and it's the reverse. I don't care about the free 2 day shipping because I usually get it quicker using their actual free shipping.

I used the free 2 day shipping of Prime a few time in the past using the student discount but each time, they ship the day after, which still means I receive it in 2 days. When I get the free shipping, more often than not, they ship it the same day and I receive pretty quickly. It's like on Prime they still hope I'm going to buy the overnight shipping while not on it they just ship whenever they can.

I have to agree with you, because I've never received a package late, and I've gotten a couple in < 24 hours. Maybe Canadian shipping is better?

IMO Prime to me is about more than shipping. I actually don't shop on Amazon often, though my wife for sure appreciates the quick shipping (we live in a suburb).

Prime Photos/Amazon Cloud Drive has been my most used Prime perk, probably. I use it a ton as a Dropbox alternative (it's not as nice as Dropbox but whatever). Followed closely by Prime Video. Then Prime Music, which I actually don't use on purpose but allows our Echo to 'just work' when it comes to playing music (I often forget to say "...on Spotify") especially themed stations. Twitch Prime is a thing I don't use much, but happy to be ad-free there. Not sure how they do ads anyway.

Honestly I think Prime Video alone is worth the subscription.

$10 per month for prime video alone would be worth the subscription? Netflix is $8 and at least its UI doesn't completely suck. Every time I used prime video in the past it seems like one of the intended dark-patterns of the prime video UI is to direct you to as many pay-to-watch videos as possible, even if you were browsing by the "included in my prime video account" filter.

Exactly. My 2 day shipping is always 4-5 days. I am not including non shipping days in this, either. My last item was a small SSD that took 5 days to arrive.It was bubble packed and about the size and weight of a Blu ray movie case.

I ordered SUV tires from Tire Rack, and they had them to me in 18 hours.

2 day shipping on their end is wildly misleading.

Interesting. We order on Prime multiple times per week and I can think of once, maybe twice where they didn't get it to us in 2 days. Conversely, I can think of times where it came in 1 day also.

Same experience here in a metro.

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