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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it. As an incentive to sign up for Prime it makes no sense; Prime needs to offer me things I can't get elsewhere (or at least not for the same price), not return to me things that I can easily get elsewhere. I just spot-checked Amazon US's price for GTA 5, 39.88 [1], and it's the exact same price at Wal-Mart [2], so it's not an exclusive deal or something. (Nor did I spend several minutes hunting for a comparable price; it was the third hit on Google for "Grand Theft Auto 5 PS4" for me. Google being what it is now, YMMV.)

I don't mean "this is a bad idea". I mean "I don't get it". What's the point?

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PlayStation-4/dp/B0...

[2]: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-PS4/41049186

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My guess:

- They cost more than the free shipping threshold, giving shipping away free

- New games are low profit to begin with

- Amazon sells enough of these that they are already in every distribution center

- Every unit Amazon ships probably arrives in a "Prime" amount of time anyway, giving away expedited shipping for free

This is just bringing some video game sales into alignment with what Amazon wanted Prime to do all along.

Amazon makes very good money on a sale that they don't control. If the costs of making that sale (or supporting returns, etc) is too high they benefit significantly by letting marketplace sellers take all the risk.

> Every unit Amazon ships probably arrives in a "Prime" amount of time anyway, giving away expedited shipping for free

Just to add a note that this isn't always true. Sometimes they withhold shipping even though they have the item in stock at the nearby distribution center.

This is definitely true. Back in the pre-Prime days (ie, 5+ years ago) Amazon would send your package as soon as they possibly could, and even with the super saver shipping you'd still often get your order less than the minimum 5 days.

Now I'll order something on Amazon (not a Prime member) and they'll sit on the package for a week and then overnight it to me.

I'm not a fan. Paying more for faster shipping didn't used to mean that cheaper/free shipping always took longer, it just meant that you were guaranteed to get it quickly.

This may be because it's cheaper/better for them to ship other orders instead of yours, since they can only handle a finite amount of orders per center at a time :)

More likely their distribution network has improved so much that it's no longer cheaper for them to ship stuff slowly, and they make money from non-prime next-day shipping.

It's a financial hack. Amazon has low margins so cash flow is king.

They make money off you either way, when they sit on the order for 5 days, they probably book your revenue a month before they need to pay for the product.

Do they charge your before the order actually ships? I don't think they do.

Unless they've changed something recently, they don't. I haven't paid enough attention lately to be sure.

Charging your credit card might not coincide with their definition of revenue recognition.

What if a customer cancel the shipment?

The point is that they don't hold the inventory.

They buy stuff on net-30 terms, and ship stuff to you the day it arrives. WalMart does similar things for many products -- they make vendors carry inventory until it arrives at a DC.

That is one of the two reasons I signed up for prime in the first place, I'd always get super saver and 99.9% of the time it'd arrive in 2 days. All of a sudden it started taking the full time.

I don't remember exactly what the other reason was, but it involved a one time money savings which was > the cost of a year of Prime at the time.

So I can imagine that this was originally a bug. Probably at some point they reached the capacity of things they could physically get out of their warehouse and onto a shipping truck per day, regardless of whether that truck is heading to other trucks or to a plane. So you need to prioritize, every day, the things that must go out overnight to meet the deadline. If you're full and you have things that could be shipped tomorrow, they wait tomorrow. Then tomorrow, or a week later, or whatever, those things are now on the list of stuff that must go out overnight.

Ideally your capacity isn't filled up by the must-be-overnight stuff. But if you're busy for a few days, suddenly a bunch of regular stuff turns into must-be-overnight stuff. And that delays next week's regular stuff, which then turns into must-be-overnight stuff next week. and there's no way to recover from this automatically. You could recover if you manually added more shipping capacity, or if you told customers that ground shipping would take even longer (so you can spend a few days clearing out backlog), or something.

That said given that the current state incentivizes customers to do exactly what you did, I wouldn't want to be the manager who prioritized fixing the bug....

Just do an Uber and surge that price!

Wouldn't that explanation only work if their load is high enough that they frequently hit the limit on how much can be shipped per day, but they rarely hit the limit on how much can be shipped per 5 days?

If the load is lower than this, then deferral of non-Prime orders would rarely be needed. If the load is higher than this, deferral would rarely help.

If their load is in that window where deferral can help with load, the amount of deferral for a given warehouse should vary from order to order all the way from no delay to several days.

My recollection from before I got Prime was that almost all my free shipping 5 day orders shipped the same day, and then over a very short time that changed to them almost all being delayed by an amount that depended on how far the warehouse was from me. I lived in the same city as their biggest warehouse, for instance, and orders served from there were almost always delayed 4 days and then overnighted. That indicates that the deferral was not based on load.

If you use free delivery, they seem do this more often than not lately.

For years free delivery would often be as fast as other methods, sometimes next day, even if ordered late in the day.

Now they will usually sit on the order for a suspiciously consistent 48hrs before it goes to picking status.

I don't mind, it's very rare I really need something next day.

I have an open order right now they've been sitting on for 5 days. It's fine with me. I don't need the instant gratification and don't make enough orders to justify Prime. Just pretend you're living in the era of Sears & Roebuck ca. 1916 and you get your order turned around in the phenomenal time frame of 10 days with doorstep delivery rather than waiting a couple months and having to make the voyage out to the train depot to pick up your stuff.

Granted I don't buy video games with Prime, but my orders with free shipping due to price threshold tend to be significantly slower than Prime, often taking weeks for items of all Prime eligible items. I live in one of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S.

> ...my orders with free shipping due to price threshold tend to be significantly slower than Prime, often taking weeks for items of all Prime eligible items.

I've had the opposite experience (and posted about it here before). Since I joined Prime last year, I've had issues with the guaranteed 2 day shipping taking 3-4 days or sometimes a week. I don't live in the backwoods either; I'm well within the Atlanta metro area (though not quite inside the perimeter). Before I joined Prime, even a non-Prime eligible item would tend to arrive in 1-2 days.

I did call Amazon about the issue several months ago, and they offered me gift card credit equal to the non-Prime shipping cost of all shipments that didn't meet the guaranteed date, and since then I've only had one late shipment. It definitely pays to contact them about it; I know from working for a company that sells on Amazon that the customer is treated like royalty whenever there's an issue, whether it's with Marketplace or Amazon direct sales.

I've had the opposite. Shipments supposed to be delivered on monday delivered on saturday or sunday. And promptly lost because I ship to a business address that is closed on the weekend. Infuriating watching it state delivered on a sunday at 3pm when I know it's going to be lost.

I swear I've had amazon ask me if it was alright to deliver to a new address on weekends. Maybe that's a recent feature?

There is a flag. They sometimes ignore it.

Prime in the UK is next day, and whenever they miss that they give you a free month of prime, which was essentially getting me prime for free. I gave up in the end because the waiting in was getting too expensive

Where do you live? I always get prime deliveries on time, and increasingly I get them same day if order before noon I think.

There were a whole selection of reasons for delay, including repeatedly giving the wrong address to the courier and continuing to use Yodel years after it stopped being funny. You are basically heavily dependent on your location relative to the dispatch warehouse, the courier's depot, whether your driver is overloaded, and whether your driver is a ring-and-run type.

Previous to buying Prime, I ordered things that would be in a "Preparing to Ship" status for a week before actually shipping out. Upon contacting Amazon they informed me that they literally will not ship for a period of time if you got the over $35 free shipping deal. I complained and told them that was bullcrap and I didn't know that and I needed the things the next day and they overnighted them to me but still I was surprised. They basically admitted they'll hold things to make sure that shipping takes longer!

I agree that it's crap, but why would you use the Super Saver Slow Shipping for something you needed the next day?

It sounds like they needed it the next day after they called support, at which point they had already waited some time without it shipping.

Good point. Still sounds like the commenter expected it before the guaranteed date, but maybe Amazon just screwed it up that badly.

The guy above is correct. The order said 5-8 days and I ordered it on Monday and needed it Saturday. 5 days could have possibly allowed it to arrive on time even within the window and I had past experiences where Amazon had just shoved stuff in the mail and it arrived in 2 days. HOWEVER, they waited until Thursday to even start the shipment process because then it would've arrived on/around Tuesday of the next week making it 7ish days which is the longer of the range as well.

This is likely true, but for a less nefarious reasons. It's very unlikely they received your order and were sitting around twirling their thumbs until the last possible moment.

Instead Amazon has algos that know exactly when they need to get an item in the mail to make it before the deadline. Every time an order comes in, the pickers list is updated.

Meaning that every time a customers order comes in with a tighter deadline, their order will be picked prior to yours, until you deadline is sufficiently close (or there is a lack of more pressing orders) for your items to make it to the top of the list.

I'm pretty sure it is for nefarious reasons. For the last year or two (maybe more), Amazon has never failed to deliver my free shipping (non-prime) orders in 1-2 days from when they ship. Since this would be a disincentive to subscribe to Prime if they shipped it within a day or so of receiving the order, they just do nothing for 4 or 5 days so that it arrives in the 5-8 day quoted window.

Its clearly in their best interest to push people to subscribe to Prime to recover their costs, their order fulfillment is so streamlined that a standard free shipment and a prime shipment probably cost the same in 95% of cases.

The low profit part cannot be true. In the US prime members get a 20% discount on new games!

> New games are low profit to begin with

AFAIK, they aren't. There's apparently enough margin that Best Buy and Amazon both have membership clubs that yield 20 percent off preorders.

Amazon believes it has enough brand stickiness that enough people don't even consider non-Amazon options that this will be an effective way to incentivize upgrades compared.to the cost in shoppers that do consider non-Amazon options. If there marginsnon the items are low enough this isn't that unlikely to be true, even if a large percentage of customers do consider other options.

I guess they try to hit people like me. I have only one online shopping account connected to my real name. It's on Amazon. Back then I got it to buy books in english. It worked pretty well for some time with other products too.

However. Seeing this, I would rather pirate the game then allow them to force me into Prime.

Thanks to the messed up DHL delivery guys here I already started to discover shops in my area again. Especially for electronics and other fragile products.

This has the be the weakest justification I have ever seen for piracy and believe me, I've seen a few.

It wasn't supposed to be one. I assumed the sentence following this would outline my usual way to acquire products besides amazon.

I wanted to show that even if I had no choice, I wouldn't buy into this.

Is it likely that these products would sell out if available to everyone? I think probably not, but it would make sense if that were the case. Amazon should ensure availability for Prime customers to prevent poor experiences. Imagine paying for a Prime subscription and then seeing that the popular product you want to buy from them is out of stock. You might think "well, what am I paying them for?"

Because amazon wants subscription revenue because subscription revenue is valued by analysts. So they do whatever they can to get people on prime.

Calm down. Probably some engineer made a mistake that caused a bunch of items to be incorrectly labeled as prime-only. A bunch of vidya nerds couldn't buy they favorite shooter anymore, made a post about it, and Amazon rolled back.

As others have pointed out in this thread, this makes no sense as a deliberate move.

Completely deliberate. As others pointed out, they've already been doing it, on less popular products that caused no backlash. It's there in the article up top, pre roll-back:

UPDATE: Amazon has provided VideoGamer.com with the following statement in response to this story:

"One of the many benefits of Amazon Prime is access to exclusive selection on a number of great products. Customers who are not Prime members can sign-up for a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, or they can purchase those items from a Marketplace seller."

For a company that calls itself "The Everything Store", becoming the "Everything except if we think we can squeeze you for more money" is going to push people into the waiting arms of Walmart and Jet and Google Shopping intermediary.

Costco charges everyone $50/year. If Amazon wants to do that, just drop the non-Prime offering entirely, give everyone a 1 year free trial, and stop the nonsense games.

You still can buy from 3rd party though, but no free delivery from Amazon.

Amazon charges vendors up to 40 percent rake just to be fulfilled by Amazon. They are swindling the living crap out of 3rd party sellers while also maintaining their position as lowest price on most products within their own sham site. Very often these days Walmart or another online vendor will have cheaper prices than Amazon. The way Amazon treats its employees and the underhanded business tactics toward customers are going to be the end of them. They became a meme - just Amazon it Bob!! But Myspace was a meme too. Fuck up a phone, make your employees miserable, and foster a culture of dark doing customers.. and Amazon will fall just like Myspace. A name recognition can only take you so far. (fyi I recently worked as a dev for them in Seattle and left due to a hostile work environment so I do have bias but also a unique perspective.)

Interesting that Amazon is "swindling" third-party sellers.

How much do Home Depot, Walmart, Sears, Costco, and others charge the (zero) third party sellers that they allow onto their platform?

Most of the "oldbiz" buy the goods and sell them from their own corporation -- this is because they have actual retail stores. Amazon does not. I do not know how much their rake is for 3rd party online goods though -- I see "Sold by Pharmapacks", etc.. often on Walmart and the price is usually not competitive at all compared to "Sold by Walmart.com" items. Mostly has to do with the shipping price.

That's because Walmart doesn't offer third-party fulfillment (to my knowledge). They allow select third-parties onto the selling part of the platform (but again, not open like Amazon), but fulfillment remains the 3rd party's problem to handle, which is why the shipping price is still an issue there.

Amazon is providing far more of the value chain than other e-commerce sites, and it's no surprise to me that they're charging for that. If that doesn't work for a given seller, they shouldn't use Amazon. If enough people don't use Amazon, Amazon will have to adjust. I see no evidence that the latter is occurring in great numbers.

"Calm down."

An attempt to claim the higher ground by casting someone as hysterical. Why do you feel the need reach for such a pointlessly large rhetorical stick for such a little discussion?

(Yes, I'm doing a bit of a higher ground play myself. I don't deny it. You earned it.)

I don't think many people here particularly give a crap about the video games. It's the entire notion of "prime-only" items that's problematic. So your assurance that marking these particular items as prime-only was a mistake doesn't really help.

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