But even their shipping (with Prime too!) is getting slower and slower. Prime's selling point used to be free 2 day shipping. Shipping is still "free" but many items take 4 days (or more now).
Not only that. Try searching while in Incognito Mode and you'll see the same products, sold by Amazon.com, without Prime, for a few bucks cheaper than when you're logged in and seeing them with "free" Prime shipping.
OTOH I still notice the problem that other people have mentioned - that practically everything on Amazon these days is the same repackaged Chinese dropshipped garbage. Which is one reason I shop on Amazon far less than I used to.
Of course I'm sure things are different if you live on Mull or Fair Isle, but for the vast majority of us it seems reliable
The quality of what you get from amazon is of course somewhat different.
Then every once in a while you get something that takes a month to deliver, comes in a package covered with customs stamps, and is roughly the size and shape of what was ordered but wrong. I ordered a titanium tube one time - think the dimensions of a reusable drinking straw - and after a month got a solid titanium rod. "Mail it back and we'll give you a refund." There's a bit of unfair asymmetry there, friend, since you're mailing stuff to the US all day and I wouldn't have the faintest clue how to send something to China, and I'm guessing it's going to cost far more than the thing I'm returning.
But I'm an addict and I don't see myself cancelling Prime any time soon.
I've driven around large parts of the western US and there's a LOT of empty space. I don't know how many shipping centers Amazon has in the UK, but I am about 99.999% sure that there's areas of the US larger than all of the British Isle that are served by a single warehouse and shipping center.
So the variability in the US is going to be very high. Some places that happen to be near a shipping center, or two, will have consistent on-time delivery. Other places that are distant from one, and may have a high mountain pass that's dicey in winter or closed because of wildfires in the summer between them and that single center, are going to have problems.
To give you an idea:
I live just outside Toronto (Ontario, Canada) and if i want to drive east to the next province (Quebec) it will take me 4 hours to cover the 450 KM. If i want to go to the next province to the west (Manitoba) It will take me 20 hours to cover the 2,000 KM. So to cut across Ontario you are looking at something like 2,450 KM
This is just my province of Ontario. The other provinces are not as large, but the country is vast when looking at Europe.
Using google maps, i can drive from the south (footbridge) to the north (ChargePlace,Scotland) and this ~ 1,200 KM?
In the case of my very simple order, one item is being shipped from 120KM away?
How often do you order something simple and one of the distribution hubs is 120KM away from you? There is a massive 1 million square foot hub a few blocks away but i guess it isnt big enough to hold what i wanted?
I hope this provides some context for you.
25 years ago, I lived in a city of Rijeka. You could start from Croatia; enter & drive through entire country of Slovenia; enter into Italy and go shopping into Trieste, two countries over - in 75km.
Now I'm in the Greater Toronto Area, and my best friend lives about the same distance, officially in the same city or metro.
There's just over two thousand kilometers between the capitals of two neighbouring provinces in Canada (Winnipeg & Toronto). Or you could go through dozen countries, with all of their states and provinces in Europe for same distance (e.g. Geneva to Istanbul or similar).
Distances are vastly different and people's attitude toward them as well - what is daily commute in GTA used to be a yearly vacation pilgrimage in my childhood :)
This is something Europeans also overlook.
I use to commute to Toronto every day. 100KM return trip daily, 500KM a week...
I think Most Europeans would be surprised to know we have a train system which basically travels back and forth from Hamilton to Oshawa all day long.. 127KM one way. Basically the Width of England at the more narrow part and yet we consider this a "greater Toronto area" train system.
People in Toronto dont think about how there are countries which would fit in this distance, Europeans dont think about how a daily passenger train service would cross the country dozens and dozens of times each day.
Your 127km one way train is about the same as the new Reading-Shenfield Cross London service which runs 6 times an hour 18 hours a day (well will do from next year), and less than the 160km Bedford-Brighton Thameslink service. It's pretty much the "Greater London Area", although that term is of course steeped in politics. The Paris RER D line is 190km and runs 466 trains a day, and is a "greater Paris area" train system
The Greater Toronto Area has broadly the same population as the Frankfurt Rhine-Main area, but is only half the area.
The "Slovenia is only 75km wide" claim is meaningless. Greenwich, CT to Oakland NJ is 75km and crosses the entire state of New York, a state with 10 times the population of Slovenia.
Indeed talking about New Jersey and Slovenia, they're a similar size, but NJ has about 5 times the population of Slovenia.
If something works for Slovenia, why doesn't it work for New Jersey?
So why is Toronto so small compared with Europe?
It's not a Geography problem, the challenges of serving the tiny number of people that like in rural North Dakota are a cruch to hide America's other infrastructure failings.
Is it? What's politicised about this term? "Greater London" and "Greater London area" have pretty clear definitions; I'm not aware of anything that's controversial about it.
The contiguous Greater London Built Up Area [3] extends well beyond the boundary of Greater London (Bracknell, Gravesend, Harlow), yet doesn't include parts of Greater London (New Addington for example)
The London Commuter Belt is somewhat woolly [4], but certainly includes places like Slough and Maidenhead, Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, Harlow and Southend.
Significant numbers of people additionally commute on high frequency (4tph or more) trains from places like Oxford, Milton Keynes, Basingstoke, Ashford into Zone 1 45 minutes or less.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London
[1] https://goo.gl/maps/2Zh9tuQnQoPyrnjC7
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAusbJmRB0c
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_London_Built-up_Area
In the US unless you air freight ($$$) it you cannot rely on getting stock from warehouse A (say in NY) to warehouse K (say near LA) overnight. This then means you have to keep a lot more "duplicate" inventory sitting around various places as you cannot just in time move it, which is also extremely expensive.
I imagine the reports of shipping delays in the US are caused by Amazon intentionally trying to reduce the amount of inventory on hand and/or using less air freight.
Maybe it's down to competition - for lots of products I'd go elsewhere if they didn't offer at least next day delivery.
But some things do take longer. I guess it depends on stock levels.
As i posted i ordered a few items on tuesday and delivery will be friday.
One of the items tracking details shows me that it is being shipped from a city ~ 120KM away yet there is a massive 1,000,000 square foot hub within waking distance from me??
Tracking hasn't updated to show me where the rest of the stuff is being shipped from so i can speak to the entire order.
This gets to the CORE issue with amazon. Because i no longer have prime my stuff is almost intentionally held back to encourage me to get prime?
It will not surprise me at all to see that when shipping is finally updated the other items on my list come from the local hub.
Not all hubs hold all items and because of this your shipping times can fluctuate.
I've had the opposite experience. Everything comes within 1 day. Some items even come within 12 hours (overnight shipping delivering at 7am)
Walmart also provides all-paper packaging (they seem to have worked hard on developing it) - so you can burn / recycle packaging without say peeling off stuck plastic tape first.
Amazon's delivery date is friday? Want to guess where amazon's distribution warehouse is? A few blocks away from me.
The point you are attempting to make is unclear. If the distribution hub is within walking distance from me, why does it take days to ship?
Also — if you’re in the US, today is a holiday and nothing will move. So today and yesterday had/has limited movement between distribution centers. And as we get closer to Christmas, the entire network will start to approach saturation.
There are many reasons why things don’t always ship as fast as you’d like them to.
1) I am not assuming the products are from different warehouses. I know this for a fact. Look at my other post and i stated one item is being shipped from a warehouse ~120 KM away. I will guess the rest is from the local warehouse? Once amazon updates the shipping details (probably friday AM) it will show me where it came from..
2) I'm in Canada and it is not a holiday here so it is unclear why "today and yesterday had/has limited movement between distribution centers."
3) Amazon Canada rarely uses other carriers anymore. I cant tell you when the last time anyone i know received something that didnt use their own in-house shipping service so you cant really blame "UPS/Fedex"
And it doesn’t even ship (UPS) until a few days before the delivery date. And they still don’t do a good job combining orders.