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Comment by saosebastiao | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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).

> 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.

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.

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.)

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