I find their delivery times dropping.. Last order, I ordered and paided more for same day rush.. that came by the end of the next day instead. They gave a $10 coupon but I literally picked the product based on it arriving that day and would have made a different purchasing choose if I knew it was coming tomorrow.
If you ignore shipping, maybe sometimes.
But I still find that 99% of the time, for items on Amazon.com that are sold by Amazon.com, it's cheaper on Amazon because of free shipping, while most others site charge $7-10 shipping or have a minimum of $75-100 for free shipping.
And even if you don't have Prime, the minimum for free shipping is just $25, and you can pretty much always add in stuff that you need to buy soon anyways (shampoo, paper towels, whatever).
And delivery times usually has zero to do with Amazon, obviously, they're best in class. With the pandemic and all, UPS and USPS are obviously straining in general. It's not like Wal-Mart, Kohl's, or any other online stores are any better. Despite their advertising, everyone knows you shouldn't be expecting UPS/USPS packages to be reliably arriving on time since March.
I was on my way to a meeting in Manhattan last year and it was pouring rain. I ordered an umbrella from the highway just north of the city, and had it in hand within 15m.
We need new leadership in NYC to fix this up!!
I had to show up onsite in Midtown with a few hours notice, and was able to roll off the highway somewhere in Rockland county and pick something up rather than look around.
Target and Walmart both have free shipping for orders over 25/35 depending on which items.
Our local Target also offers drive up service where they'll load items into your trunk for you, and you can combine orders so you pick up $30 worth of items same day and get a $5 item (not in store) shipped free since the total is $35.
2 day shipping and 5% off with Red Card makes it a pretty compelling competitor to Amazon. Especially with all the fake/potentially unsafe items on Amazon, I prefer to get food related items from Target if possible.
I think other stores see what's happening and are trying to crowd in. Best Buy, too, seems to have no trouble shipping me anything I want for free. It'll take a week, but most of the time I don't really care vs Amazon's 2-4 days. And with Best Buy/Home Depot/etc I at least know I'm not getting a knock off.
That is what has done it for me. Amazon has zero control over their inventory. I've gotten burned too many times at this point. Amazon is now a last resort or obscure items only retailer for me. That or I use it to find an item then buy it from the manufacture direct, funny how that has reversed from the old days.
I've even gotten unrequested refunds from amazon with a note about how the product I got was counterfeit. That's great and all but I needed the actual product not a refund and waste of time. Once you reach a livable income your time is worth much,more than saving a couple of dollars.
That said, I almost only buy the "shipped from and sold by Amazon.com" stuff, so maybe that's why. And if it's something that has obviously similar photos from a bunch of different "brands", I hop over to AliExpress to buy it at the source for 1/10 the price.
From https://www.inc.com/jeff-bercovici/amazon-dangerous-kids-pro...
I've bought 1,000+ items from Amazon over the past 10 years and exactly one item was counterfeit -- a camera battery from a third-party seller.
Honestly, worrying about counterfeits on Amazon, for items sold either by Amazon.com or reputable storefronts like Pharmapacks, just seems silly, it's so incredibly rare and easy to get fixed immediately with a single quick phone call to Amazon. And for third-party storefronts you've never heard of, it's no different than doing the same on Walmart.com or eBay.
Amazon removed it years ago because they do not want to be in the law margin retail business. They want to only be in the higher margin platform business. And that makes me not want to support Amazon.
For electronics products, some reviews go into excruciating details on what counterfeit v real products look like.
Then some products literally explain how to avoid counterfeit products, especially the smaller producers of goods with niche products.
Finally there are articles in the press about it.
eBay has less of this problem because it's set up to select sellers based on reviews. Amazon's stores are more obscure, and often don't have many reviews, or sometimes you get an item fulfilled from a third party without knowing about it. I'm not sure if that still happens though.
Yeah easy to refund but I spent 2 hrs insect treating my house now I have to do it again, not a pleasant task. Oh yeah now I have a roach infestation because the traps were fake. The effects are much farther reaching than you make it out to be.
I can't tell if you think this is excessively bad or excessively good? Seems reasonable to me - they're just a couple of bulbs?
> I don't really care vs Amazon's 2-4 days
Isn't the big thing about Amazon is that it's next-day shipping? I don't live anywhere near a major city and Amazon still manage to deliver to me in about ten hours now.
Amazon free shipping has been terrible here. Weeks, at best unless you pay for the express options. And yes Walmart is better. One of my recent online purchases (cell phone screen protector) was estimated at 3 weeks delivery on Amazon. I bought the same item from Walmart.com instead and had it in 2 or 3 days.
For Home Depot, assuming it's not a mistake, that's probably an investment in persuading customers to look to them first and not shop around.
But still, not much room for profit. And from my experience, a lot of big box sellers will just put it in a huge box and pay a much higher rate than necessary for shipping.
To the parent point, even with 2-day delivery, most of the things I order aren't stuff I need right now. And the reality is that, normally, they'd have gone on a list where they'd have rattled around before I got around to going to the store with a shopping list. But, now, generally minimizing or at least reducing store trips, has reinforced the notion that a lot of in-person errands are pretty unnecessary given online options.
In these cases, I’m willing to backorder from other retailers (or the manufacturer) and wait for their slower shipping.
I’m able to just drop off the item without packaging or label or really anything except my name and other info like the order number. Couldn’t be much easier (if you have a Kohl’s close).
I’m sure for areas that don’t have Kohl’s, they’re working on figuring out how to make returns as easy as possible (relative to the b&m experience).
(Allegedly you can also return to an Amazon Locker. Never tried that)
It's usually between 3-8 days. I used it for years and have friends who still do.
The first couple months of COVID a lot of stuff was taking 2-3 weeks but that was often true even if you had Prime. Then they hired tons more people and it stopped. Maybe that's what you're talking about?
For example, a search for "snow pants" turns up products by Arctix and Outdoor Ventures. Outdoor Ventures is presumably a knockoff of Outdoor Research, a reputable cold-weather clothing brand. Outdoor Ventures seller page says their actual company name is "FUJIANSHENG SHANGFEI ZHIYI YOUXIANGONGSI". And Arctix is presumably a knockoff of Arcteryx, and seems to be owned by a very small financial services company in NY.
I rarely feel like I'm being presented with accurate or meaningful information when I look for things on amazon.
https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/amazon-counterfeit-f...
If it was that easy to beat them with just pricing then other retailers would've done it already. The only other company that gets close is Target which has vastly improved its online and digital experience.
I buy locally what I can, but retail offerings are so anemic (even for, say, granola bars) that online options massively eclipse what stores carry.
I don't want to order from Amazon, but I don't want to get by with the meager brick-and-mortar offerings.
Another example: Recently I went to Best Buy to grab an HDMI-DisplayPort cable. They had it priced at $38. Amazon had it for $12. I'd have paid up to $20 for the retail stock surcharge, but that overage was obscene.
edit I've heard they make more selling you a USB cable than selling you a printer.
But earlier this month, I ordered something from them and it took 4 days to hand it off to some shipping company, 3 days for that company to deliver it to USPS, and another 2 days to get to my door.
For me, I found this not to be true. I've been ordering gifts for people fleeing the company I work due to a merger and the changes, so there has been a lot. Literally everything I found on niche sites I found on Amazon for cheaper and at a faster delivery rate aswell.
Lately also more and more books are dented or damaged when they arrive so they get send back too. If I want a book that looks like second hand copies I would buy one of those.