Amazon Seeks to Ease Ties with UPS

Best Buy will also match Amazon prices. Also they have a really nice buy online, pick up at store system. I actually do like Amazon Prime TV though.

> I dislike when Amazon uses USPS to deliver my packages. Usually the package will arrive in the 2 days like expected but it goes to my local USPS office which will deliver the package the next day.

Before I moved West I lived in Harlem, and the USPS was a total sh*t show. The delivery guy for our block would routinely forge signatures to get out of delivering packages to our building, and I'd have to show up at the local post office to claim my packages. Claiming a package involved convincing the postal employee behind two inches of bullet proof shielding that a United States passport is indeed valid identification for federal purposes...

I've been noticing the same thing with their third party couriers. They get a lot of complaints from people too. I complain every time, I look through the forums and see people complaining. They are essentially these shipping companies that formed purely to undercut UPS and work with Amazon. I wouldn't even be surprised if Amazon had some type of stake in these alt couriers that are coming out of nowhere. They all have horrible reviews and nobody likes them, but apparently Amazon sees this as acceptable because they are the biggest and the best and losing a few customers probably doesn't hurt them.

I had a similarly bad experience with XPO.

I got it the right day, but.... One truck had two deliveries scheduled for the same 3 hour window. One was in San Antonio. I live in north Dallas. That's a ~280 mile drive.

I got the TV 3 hours after the window was supposed to be closed.

Complain to Amazon - if enough of us give negative feedback on companies they choose, they'll find others.

Depending on where you are located, you may have needed to pay taxes all along.

I would for sure pay about $50.00 more a year to only receive packages via UPS. USPS has made some really inconvenient mistakes, and OnTrac has repeatedly left packages in strange locations.

Frankly the only saving grace is that I can have packages delivered to an Amazon locker in most cases. Otherwise Prime has become significantly less convenient than it was when it was UPS/Fedex only.

As an NYC resident I can't say I've noticed the difference (within the past 6 months or so, anyway). Almost all my packages get shipped via USPS but get there by the guaranteed delivery date.

Now I understand why some packages that I shipped to myself at my parent's address didn't get delivered and wound up at the post office pickup window - they don't have a mailbox at the street address.

At least Amazon has been good about refunds and replacements when the delivery service has damaged goods - I've had books shipped in manilla envelopes with no wrapping left in a puddle under the eaves on rainy days, and electronics (also without protection) thrown in the snowbank.

I can't say that I've noticed any decrease in quality lately.

If anything, I continue to be impressed. Monday night, I ordered a bunch of Christmas presents. They were all here by Wednesday, delivered on time to rural Vermont.

I intentionally try to wait until the very last minute for the two day shipping cutoff just so there is more of a chance that they avoid using USPS, but being so close to a shipping hub that doesn't always work.

Despite being a relatively shitty working place, Amazon indeed have so many great opportunities for engineers to explore their interests and skills.

North Austin here - we routinely get packages from USPS intended for other houses. Once they mixed up mailbox keys so we got someone else's packages, and then had to track down whose key they got, then followed the chain to get to our package. UPS and Fedex here have been much much better in comparison.

Amazon just cares about the lowest bid. They still use LaserShip, for example, who has a long-standing and well-earned reputation for being the worst shipping service ever.

I got something sent next-day via Amazon recently and LaserShip made an extremely half-assed first attempt. I had to spend an hour on the phone with a LaserShip rep and pass my phone number along to the driver (who is an independent contractor) to get a second attempt that same day, after they tried to punt it to the next day with no guarantee that a better delivery attempt would be made (I live in a no-doorman apartment building).

The interesting thing is that I wouldn't have even have been able to complain to Amazon until LaserShip noted that they completed delivery -- so I could have spent days or weeks in limbo.

If there were checkboxes on Amazon where I could choose which carriers they couldn't use, I would...even if I had to pay the difference in shipping.

Same here, I've been using Amazon heavily for all my purchases and recently they started using less and less UPS to my great displeasure. Canada Post is awful to deal with, I've been considering if my Prime membership is worth it at all.

Getting delivery is supposed to be a smoother experience than physically shopping. With Canada Post, or Fedex or Purolator or others, it's not. It's just a major PITA when I have to drive to their distribution center to get a package of soap that I wish they would just have dropped at the damn door.

It's weird to me, because Amazon has "Customer Experience" at the core of their values. The customer experience is definitely degrading with the use of non-UPS delivery.

I would imagine UPS's union would give Amazon pause.

A colleague at work and I used to joke that part of OnTrac's shipping pipeline must be a giant machine that blows cigarette smoke on packages and kicks them down stairs. Here's hoping they don't start using them more either.

My Prime deliveries used to arrive in 1-2 days. Ever since they started diversifying their shipping partners, I have been getting my Prime packages in 2-3ish days.

I think the real standout was the time where they jammed the package into my vertical-style mailbox on a rainy day, leaving my auto insurance bill soaked beyond recognition. Thanks, USPS.

Considering the US has 231x the area of the Netherlands (and the infrastructure is far worse), we rely on hacks, kludges, and private industry for stuff to get from one place to another.

Y'know, if you really think about it, the US is just one big growth hack.

Makes me all the more eager to move back to Poland.

My experience is that UPS works a lot better in rural areas. When I lived in a small town off the freeway but otherwise in the middle of nowhere, UPS had a very small service center in town (open an hour a day because it was staffed by the driver) and kept 2-day deliveries on schedule. When the whole town was snowed in, they couldn't get the trucks out, but still showed up at the service center so you could pick things up.

FedEx didn't have a service center within an hour, always missed their delivery estimates, and a couple of times declared addresses undeliverable for no clear reason. When the town was snowed in, they just lost a package forever.