Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Amazon increased the price of Prime a long time ago.

* Once upon a time, 2-day shipping was free and next-day shipping was $3.99. Then they raised the price if the next day happened to be Saturday. Now, next-day shipping varies depending on the item and is often unavailable. It's never less than $3.99, though. 2-day shipping is rarely shipped via a 2-day shipping service; often they drop it in the mail and hope for the best. (Also, why even bother charging me $4? Just make next-day shipping free and charge $4 more for the thing.)

* Various unreliable courier services end up doing a good chunk of the deliveries. UPS, Fedex, and the USPS are great. I don't know how they do it, but they manage to break into my apartment building every day of the week and drop off packages without me ever knowing the details. Lasership and A1? Yeah right. I love it when they try to deliver packages to my office at 10PM. Are any office mail rooms open at 10PM ever? Ever? Nice try. (Does Amazon even use A1 anymore? I remember finding a bug in A1's website that disclosed the name and address of all their customers. Emailed security@amazon and security@a1. Heard back from Amazon that they fixed it. Never saw another package from A1. Maybe A1 just rebranded as Lasership. I really have no idea.)

* Add-on items. Need I say more?

* Every time you order something from Amazon, you get a stupid interstitial about how you can opt-in to receive email about streaming a bunch of B movies and flopped TV shows at 160i resolution via your Flash player. No thanks, Amazon. You're a physical media store, not Netflix! It's cute that you're trying, though.

Finally, while I'm ranting... it's weird that amazon.co.jp and amazon.com don't share my credit card information and address. Would also appreciate Prime for amazon.co.jp, but I know that's never going to happen.

The worst is when you're promised "guaranteed 2-day delivery" while ordering, but it is actually shipped via...

FedEx SmartPost

What is FedEx SmartPost, you may ask? FedEx gets it close to you, then the USPS dicks around with it and there's no tracking info. You might actually get it in 2 days, or it might be a week.

It's like fiber optic broadband -- except the last mile is your package is carried by a turtle riding a sociopathic sloth whose sense of direction is impaired by a cocktail of psychoactive substances.

At some point Amazon should put me on the "Don't use any shipping that goes through the USPS" list.

The USPS is horrible at my house. The whole point of prime was so that I could get away from having anything shipped through USPS, then Amazon started with this SmartPost thing. So every time I order something through prime, if it comes back that it will go through USPS in anyway I email and complain. Every single time they have canceled and re-shipped the item using a shipping company that can actually do 2 day delivery.

> (Also, why even bother charging me $4? Just make next-day shipping free and charge $4 more for the thing.)

Because people are psychologically manipulable idiots. They'll click on the cheapest search result and go buy from the other site that lists it as $4 less. Also, multiple items let you combine shipping.

> Lasership and A1? Yeah right. I love it when they try to deliver packages to my office at 10PM.

Lasership is actually pretty reliable for me, but that's in midtown NYC, probably their most highly serviced area. I find USPS capable of doing the same scheduling idiocy. USPS tried to deliver one package to my office mail room at 6:30 PM for four consecutive days. A week later I finally went to the PO one morning to pick it up, and inexplicably that day they had actually decided to send it out during normal hours. That day there was a pile of 10 packages at the receptionist so I wasn't the only one.

UPS seems to be the most reliable for actual ground delivery, and certainly the best with tracking status when something does go awry. Fedex is about 90%, but occasionally they will do stupid things like fail a delivery if the named person isn't there to sign, and bury it off at some warehouse 10 miles away with instructions for you to go pick it up.

Oh, and as the sibling comment says, Fedex SmartPost is the most hellishly horrible thing to ever happen to internet commerce. I'm convinced Amazon invented it entirely to dick around and make you wish you'd paid for real shipping instead.

>2-day shipping is rarely shipped via a 2-day shipping service;

One thing I find interesting is that UPS Ground can be a guaranteed 2-day service. They call it "day-definite delivery", and it depends on the distance.

With the exception of hybrid shipping, I am consistently impressed by Amazon's ability to ship using the most appropriate service.

Perhaps it is due to my location in an urban area; when I use Amazon 2-day, it arrives in either 1 or 2 days unless shipped using SmartPost in which case it arrives in 5-7 days.

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