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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I generally agree, but 3 is in abeyance right now; I'm getting faster delivery times from other places. And regarding 2, Amazon has been training me for a while (via slow-ship discounts and the Amazon Day thing) that I don't need everything right away. I don't know about everybody else, but that has definitely made it easier for me to try out other vendors.

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Precisely. I don't know when the switch happened but Amazon seems to be using their own drivers to deliver and not Fedex.

The delivery quality is worse than bad, and has lead to us getting boxes stolen because Amazon drivers dump them at the quickest most convenient place for them - like Amazon drivers are incentivized to maximize time efficiency and every second counts. It's super painful.

We're now using other websites to buy from simply because their delivery takes approximately the same but goes to our door.

Quality of service can never be high if employees need to piss in bottles

I’m not sure what’s going on with Amazon recently, but they’ve on multiple occasions told me that an item won’t ship or arrive until well into May, only for it to turn up next day. (edit: this is over the last 3 weeks for context)

I wonder how much of their slow delivery is them under promising and how much is them actually not being able to get things out in a day or two. None of the other vendors I’ve worked with, except Nespresso oddly enough, have been able to match Amazon’s actual performance.

I wonder if it’s just because I happen to be close to a lot of warehouses? Still very weird for Amazon to be sandbagging themselves regardless.

There was a giant banner at the top of their site that explained there was global health crisis and shipments of non-essentials could be delayed. They'd been asked (told in some cases) by governments and others to prioritize eseential product shipments, so they did. They also told suppliers to stop sending non-essentials for FBA. If they had capacity (and items on hand) they've been delivering non-essentials (I've gotten some of my stuff sooner too). There was a big article that blew up here about how France was going to fine them for shipping non-essentials/putting workers at risk and gave them 24 hours to change their entire warehouse workflow/technical systems (Amazon responded by saying they'd need to shutdown for a bit to avoid the fines as they reworked everything to comply).

And on this note, I was talking with my neighbor yesterday and he's having a related issue that only became an issue when Amazon enacted this covid-response policy. It used to be that it didn't particularly matter if your products were accurately mapped into Amazon's categories as long as they were searchable. Now, however, Amazon is refusing to ship (or receive FBA stock) for non-essential categories. My neighbor is a shoe salesman for a brand that has a full medical & industrial line ... but they weren't tagged into medical equipment categories at Amazon so he can't ship replenishment inventory. Amazon isn't allowing these mapping adjustments to be made at all right now for fear of abuse.

Also, when FBA stock depletes, sellers have the individual option of whether to direct ship or not. Some are, and some are using expedited shipping, but others are either not shipping at all or are using the cheapest freight possible.

Yep. And in the circles I'm in, some are already setting up stores outside Amazon... that's not going to bode well for Amazon when all these sellers suddenly realize they don't need Amazon anymore.

I wonder what major global event could have caused that in the last two months.

The issue isn’t that things are delayed, the issue is they are saying an item isn’t going to get here until May when they know full well that it’s been put on a truck and will arrive today.

They are advertising their shipping speed as being worse than it is, causing people to think competitors are faster, when, typically, Amazon is still superior.

Edit: needlessly inflammatory language

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