Comment by rogerbinns | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rogerbinns | Hacker News Reader

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I do wonder what is going on with Amazon shipping. For my orders over the last year, by far the longest time is spent not shipping. The status will say "shipping now" for several days. Once actually in package service it is quick. I use the "free" shipping.

I'd guess that they process Prime members shipping before the free shipping. And I'd suspect some of the waiting is time to ship from the manufacturers to Amazon's warehouses. I also wonder if they transfer long tail items between warehouses to consolidate orders. There is speculation that Amazon intentionally delays free shipping orders to push people towards Prime. Maybe they just have capacity problems?

By comparison with other vendors like Walmart I usually see shipping in less than 24 hours.

Amazon forum complaining about slow shipping, people getting Prime stuff a lot faster, no response from Amazon people:

http://www.amazon.com/Super-Slow-Shipping/forum/Fx4HQD057HT5...

Giving credit to Prime members to accept slower shipping:

http://www.geek.com/news/amazon-prime-customers-receiving-cr...

Another random example complaint:

http://www.pissedconsumer.com/reviews-by-company/amazon/very...

Agreed. Amazon's shipping service is very poor unless you use Prime.

I've bought from Amazon when I had a Prime subscription and when I didn't. With Prime, the goods were always shipped within a day. Without Prime, they let it sit on the shelf for 5 or 6 days before even shipping it.

Compare that to other companies like Best Buy, newegg, walmart, or even no name ebay sellers where products are always promptly shipped without need for any "subscription" nonsense.

Would you rather it ship today and arrive a week from now? Or ship in 3 days and arrive in 4? When you make your purchase, you are given a promised arrival date...the ship date should be irrelevant.

False choice.

With Amazon, it sits on the shelf for 5 days before it ships and then takes another 5 days to arrive.

With something like walmart, it ships immediately and then takes another 5 days to arrive.

Amazon's in-transit time isn't any faster than other merchants. They all use UPS or Fedex, so no difference there. The only difference is that Amazon takes 5 days to ship while other websites take 1.

Except that it is not a false choice at all. Amazon delivers by their promised delivery date. I have ordered items with my prime membership that took two days for it to ship, and yet it still arrived on time (arrived the same day it shipped, via a same day carrier). A super saver shipping promise is 5-7 business days. If it takes 5 business days to ship, then your package is getting a second-day ship method. From the several hundreds of packages I have received from Amazon, both before and after my prime membership, only 1 has ever arrived after it was promised to arrive...and it was the carrier's fault.

> Amazon delivers by their promised delivery date.

Except that there are alternatives to Amazon, hence my use of the word "choice". I'm not saying Amazon doesn't keep its promise. I'm saying when Amazon is compared to its competitors it falls short.

> A super saver shipping promise is 5-7 business days

Actually it's 5-8 business days (http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&...) and usually Amazon milks it to its limit. 8 business days equal 10 to 12 real days.

Compare that to merchants that ship immediately. It usually takes 3-5 days to arrive at my home. That's a lot faster than Amazon's 10-12 days.

Do competitors usually give that shipping for free though? I thought the point of super saver shipping was you don't have to pay for the shipping but the tradeoff is you have to wait however long it takes to get your package. If the competitors are somewhat faster but you still have to pay then the scenarios can't really be compared (I am a prime member so I have paid less than $1 per delivery for guaranteed two day shipping so I have never even considered alternatives).

Pretty much everyone offers some "free" shipping these days, which is just a marketing scheme anyway. Free shippoing or not, the only number that matters is the total, all-inclusive price. It's not uncommon for me to find a lower total price at a seller that charges for shipping than the Amazon's "free" shipping price.

WSJ actually just published an article on how Amazon is frequently underpriced by other sellers: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB2000142412788732342380457902...

There's no one seller that is consistently the lowest price. But Amazon is consistently the slowest in shipping.

> Do competitors usually give that shipping for free though?

It isn't free - the cost of the shipping is baked in the product prices. Walmart's threshold is $45 for no additional charge, shipping to one of their stores is no additional charge, and below the threshold shipping is usually 97c.

In any event this isn't about "can you pay more for faster shipping" which is the case virtually everywhere, but that it seems like Amazon is holding back on their lowest tier before the actual shipping which none of their competitors seem to do.

There is an obvious benefit to them in Prime upsells. Actual logistical reasons seem at odds with the story about huge spending on warehouses.

Wow. I've had cheap items with free shipping from Hong Kong to the UK take less time than that to turn up. That really is amazingly slow shipping.

I've had two orders in the last few months where one of the items was snail mailed from Hong Kong. In both cases it beat the Amazon warehouse shipping by a few days. (West Coast of US.)

It's irritating because it feels like they're deliberately shipping it slower to get you to buy the expensive shipping. With newegg if you choose "up to 7 days" you get it in 3-7 depending on when it arrives for them. With amazon it seems like if they get it early they'll deliberately hold it so that it always takes 7 days.

I really doubt that they're deliberately doing that just to push you to upgrade, though. Basically, you're paying less in exchange for allowing their workers to focus on the higher priority packages that are paying more. Supersaver is probably like remnant advertising inventory - they probably get to those when things are slow to fill in the gaps. Put another way, the Prime and normal shipping speed people are subsidizing your savings.

Newegg offers a different, more proactive approach that might sit better - you can pay $2.99 for rush processing to get them to get stuff out to you quickly, otherwise it might take a day to ship.

We don't know what Amazon's order flow is, but if it is reasonably uniform then it doesn't make sense. Stalling super saver orders for several days doesn't save you any work or priorities. It still has to be shipped and new orders still come in.

If the higher priority orders are very lumpy then it does make far more sense to process them first and have variability in the response time for the super saver orders.

Without some sort of crowdsourcing effort we can't tell what everyone's actual experience is. The anecdotal data so far is delays in Amazon's lowest tier happen that don't exist at their competitors. The story is about them spending more on warehouses, so something doesn't add up.

Yeah, I considered that, but order volume is almost certainly not uniform over the course of the week. Any web company could tell you that load varies quite a bit over the course of the week, and I'm sure shopping is the same.

From everything I've heard, they're an aggressively frugal company, so I would guess that they don't have the packing capacity to handle their peak days of the week, but they do have enough to handle the total week's load. Their competitors are probably overprovisioned to improve their consistency, but that leads to higher prices.

Does that match your ordering experience? Because for me Amazon have been more consistent - super saver items are consistently delivered at the end of the delivery window. Other retailers seem to have a wider distribution like you describe.

Hm, that is interesting. It's been a couple of years since I last used Super Saver shipping, so they might have changed, but I remember it being pretty variable, between slow and super slow.

It's probably sitting in a big truck somewhere that only leaves once it's full, to minimize cost. If shipping speed is important to you, perhaps you should pony up.

You've missed the point. The experience with other retailers seems to be quick dispatch of items to the shipping service.

The article is claiming massive warehouse investments by Amazon, yet that is somewhat at odds with shipping non-Prime items slowly. It would seem somewhat strange to deliberately ship slowly to push Prime upsells since that hands things to competitors, and is only doable if you are close to a monopoly.

It is possible that trailers (not trucks) are sitting around until full but that takes up space. They also generate the tracking id before it goes into a trailer, and you usually see less than 24 hours before it arrives somewhere outside the warehouse. I doubt there is any benefit to letting trailers fill up over several days. The shippers also use regional distribution centers so there isn't a need to have a full trailer, although full pallets would make sense. However Amazon should be able to fill those in a few hours.

Here is an article from 2008 about a Newegg distribution centre. Note that several trailers a day were filled.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2531/7

And another from last year explaining how the warehouse is almost empty moving stuff as quickly as possible.

http://www.stores.org/STORES%20Magazine%20May%202012/newegg-...

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