Complaints as Amazon Raises Cost of Prime | Hacker News Reader

Complaints as Amazon Raises Cost of Prime

nytimes.com

26 pointsuladzislau50 comments

My biggest gripe with Amazon isn't the rising cost of prime, but, it's with the fact that my long-standing amazon account (seriously, I've had this account since 1999) is now being throttled. When I'm using my prime account, and select two day shipping, most items don't leave Amazon's warehouse until two or three days later, meaning I'm getting my "Free Two day shipping" items nearly a week later.

I love Amazon.com -- I use it for a lot of things (to the tune of almost 8K in the last six months), but, watching my account get throttled like this makes me not only want to step away from amazon prime, but, from amazon in general -- if you can't be honest with me that you're going to throttle my account/shipping speeds, please let me know. I'll gladly upgrade to next day shipping, but that doesn't mean shit if you're going to sit on my order at the warehouse side for two or three days.

> When I'm using my prime account, and select two day shipping, most items don't leave Amazon's warehouse until two or three days later, meaning I'm getting my "Free Two day shipping" items nearly a week later.

Exactly. I got Prime mainly for the shipping advantages. I could order things and not worry about accruing an order big enough to qualify for free shipping. But if the actual speed of shipping does not improve, why am I paying for it?

I will probably go back to accumulating orders big enough to qualify for Super Saver shipping.

I've had the opposite experience. I've started to get things faster with the new 7 days a week delivery partnership with USPS. The one downside is that USPS's tracking is terrible compared to UPS's.

With USPS, if I don't get my package delivered between Monday and Friday, I won't get it -- the carrier who delivers on Saturday is afraid of my dogs and just marks my packages as "Business Closed," and Sunday delivery is only for the metro areas -- so, it's effectively Monday-Friday delivery only for me.

Interesting - we non-Prime people assumed that the recent retardation of dispatch was in order to give preference to Prime!

Recently I've had to consistently wait five days for "in-stock" items to move through the "Dispatching Soon" stage. Once Royal Mail have the parcel it's with me in a day or two.

The result is that Amazon has become my seller of last resort if I can't find the item elsewhere, or if they have a stunningly deep discount ( rare these days ).

My family has both Prime and a Netflix subscription. Lately I've been finding that there is a lot of overlap between the two for streaming content. The price increase from Amazon is just the nudge we need to think harder about which subscription services are worth keeping ... and the most likely result is that we'll be cutting Netflix. I wonder how many others will come to the same conclusion.

I doubt many. Netflix has to continue to sign distribution agreements and develop new content like House of Cards in order to stay in business. Video delivery for Amazon is a small sideline to its main business. Hence, I think both short- and long-term, Netflix provides the best content delivery option. (Note: I have both subscriptions too.)

Amazon has started getting into the game of making their own content as well, but I can't comment on its quality. We probably will finish House of Cards before we cancel our Netflix subscription. :)

I wasn't aware anyone actually factored Amazon's streaming service into the valuation of Prime.

It's actually getting good. I'm 50/50 on that and Netflix. Netflix is more like hbo... go for the exclusives.

That was the whole reason I considered it.

Weighing it against Netflix. I beginning to think I'll drop both. :)

Here's a way [0] to lock in another year at $79.

[0] http://slickdeals.net/f/6784580-heads-up-amazon-prime-price-...

Wish they would unbundle the stupid video stuff I don't want. ;/

I've been considering canceling since most things I order come with "free shipping for orders over $25." This makes canceling a no-brainer, unless I'm missing something. Even if my price is grandfathered (not sure if it is, after renewal time) it's still $79 more than free.

Pretty sure it's free after $35. Also, I'm paying the 79 now and was told it goes up at renewal time.

Super Saver Shipping has been $25 in the US for as long as I can remember.

If you're Canadian, you may simply be remembering incorrectly as Amazon.ca used to be $39, but also changed to $25 a few year ago.

It got changed to $35.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=5...

Odd. I could have sworn I checked before I commented. Maybe I was the one mistakenly on Amazon.ca.

I apologize for the error.

Isn't it the difference between 2-day shipping (and sometimes faster) vs. slow shipping (typically 3-5 days for me)?

And $3.99/item 1-day shipping, which I find comes in handy quite often.

I just tried to get something delivered 1-day yesterday and it was $7.99. Bulky item, though, maybe it's higher for that.

The "free shipping if $total > $35" tended to be fast enough for me, and often things arrived sooner than I would have expected given what I take to be Amazon's scheme of "add to the truck if and when there's free space". That is, closer to 3 rather than 5 days.

But since getting Prime I've had things show up the next day. It's sort of freaky. I trialed Prime for the VOD aspect and I bought some product or another, forgetting about the delivery thing. And BAM it was at my house. I got that "I could get used to this" feeling.

In most cases I appreciate having whatever it was I ordered ready for use sooner, but I'd have to give some thought to whether it really makes all that much difference to me, especially since I'm not using the VOD thing as I expected.

You also get other perks such as their instant video catalog and access to their kindle lending library (although if you don't take enough advantage of them, it isn't worth the cost.)

Neither of which are available on Android - very frustrating.

The people quoted in this article are ridiculous. You either buy enough from Amazon to make Prime worth it or you don't.

Well, on an immediate level.

On a less direct level, I'm not sure the economics of using a heavily subsidized shipping service to the increasing exclusion of local retailers while they get you hooked on the concept and then incrementally raise the price over time are completely legible.

It's still less than $9/month over the course of a year. It's approximately a $2/month increase. Skipping one Starbucks coffee would cover the cost difference for almost two months.

We frequently order from Amazon and use their video service and find lots of value in both. This won't cause us to bat an eyelash. It's not a significant increase relative to the value (assuming you use Amazon's services enough to make it worthwhile).

Now we're into some game theory. Perhaps the best thing is for the group to reject Prime. (assuming your premise of price hikes after putting little guys out of business is Amazon's plan; they could also just push suppliers downward, like the duopoly of supermarkets in Australia currently are)

As an individual, you are likely better off taking Prime until it is no longer the best deal.

What do you mean by "heavily subsidized shipping service"?

The idea being that most Prime members use more than $79/year in shipping costs, that Amazon is subsidizing the difference to gain market share.

Amazon is the new Walmart, just worse because you definitely have no local employees. :)

It's generally more efficient to have a delivery truck bring a range of packages to you vs stocking a local store which you need to dive to. Of course efficiency = fewer jobs which people often object to but from a consumer perspective buying online takes less time and costs less so it's going to keep 'wining'. Now in theory amazon could raise prices but setting up a website with distribution costs far less than setting up a nationwide network of retail stores which should keep them reasonably honest long term.

Local retailers always have the option to sell their products via Fulfillment By Amazon.

Maybe it's not about the shipping. Lots of people are "cutting the cord" of their cable or satellite providers in favor of online video content. Amazon sees the opportunity to get more from those customers with little price push back because $99/year is still cheaper than $99+/month for cable or satellite.

Minor anti-Comcast rant:

I have an important event coming up on April 29th: The Comcast 2 year contract expires. I can't wait till I get to make that phone call and cancel the service. Amazon has such a superior product to anything out there right now. Amazon Prime + Roku and Netflix + Roku/Chromecasts have been a much better experience and cheaper.

I'd be happy to have prime for shipping only. I don't care for any other service. It's not like if prime videos were any good. They're not.

Also here's the problems with prime shipping:

- 2 days shipping is often 4 days (maybe 30% of the time or more)

- price on prime item is HIGHER than the same item non-prime. The main diff is that the non-prime takes generally 6 days + (which means more than a full week since those are business days), but the price is about the same (except you paid $79 - now $99 more for Prime on top)

So basically what i get with prime is slightly faster shipping for approx the same price as normal. I'm not planning on renewing. In fact I already cancelled auto-renew.

Not related to prime but it also often happen that other online shops have lower prices than Amazon, making your prime a little more useless ;-)

> 2 days shipping is often 4 days (maybe 30% of the time or more)

I see a lot of other people making this complaint. For me, Amazon displays a guaranteed arrival date, not a guaranteed shipping duration. What's going on here?

I'm almost $100 ahead on shipping this year already and it's only March.

Can someone explain the final paragraph to me? I don't see how losing $800 million while gaining $150 million is a net positive, which is what the article implies. Similarly, I don't follow how $800M can be (mere) 1% while $150M "would be a lot". In what way did NYT fail math - bad calculation of one of the two, or not being able to subtract in the correct order?

The $800 million would only happen if one quarter of the prime users left, that isn't certain, just an if. It doesn't make sense to add and subtract them. The $150 million is certain due to price increases unless people leave. If you were the business deciding things you'd actually have to multiply the 800 by the probability of it happening to get the expected value, for example, and of course there's the factor that people leaving cut into the effectiveness of the price raise as well. I think they did it simplest just by stating the two numbers separately.

So prime launched in 2005. Adjusted for inflation the original price is $94.62, which makes this closer to a $5 increase in real cost.

Just canceled auto renew and got my brother to do the same. Too many items weren't eligible for two day anyway.

Since submitters won't bloody stop submitting paywalled articles, has anyone yet made a simple, reliable Chrome plugin to bypass the NYT's paywall?

I just typed in my credit card number, and paid for the paid content.

Crazy, I know.

Pretend for a moment the paywall isn't super leaky. You think it's reasonable to submit an article to HN that only 1% of people can read?

I don't think it's unreasonable. Content costs money to write. You can pay for it with your eyeballs, or you can pay for it with your wallet. (In the case of the Times, you have to do both. Sigh.)

That's a strange reply. I didn't mention anything about paying, I asked about submitting to HN. Paying for content is great but I think it's rude to aim for the front page with a source that excludes a vast majority, even if they were preternaturally prone to signing up.

Do you have a cookie whitelist and/or automatically block cookies from all websites?

I also used to get irritated by articles linking to the NYTimes until I discovered that it only redirects to the login screen if you have cookies disabled. If you enable cookies the links take you to the article just fine.

Try using a plugin that allows cookies, and deletes them automatically when you close the tab.

It's not a plugin, but Incognito Mode works perfectly, as do the kinds of cookie management tools that purge non-whitelisted cookies after a configurable interval.

You can usually just google the headline and when google is referrer they let you through.

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