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Comment by jclardy | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed that Amazon has been silently bumping shipping estimates for my prime account. Ordered something on Monday morning that said it would arrive Wednesday. I get to Wednesday and didn't notice a shipping notification - I look at my amazon account and my formerly "guaranteed" delivery date now just said expected by February 7-8. Wednesday "or" Thursday.

On the other hand, I ordered something from bestbuy with their normal free shipping and it showed up on my doorstep literally the day after.

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I've started contacting customer service and requesting compensation when this happens. I tell them politely I pay for prime benefit and you are not granting me that benefit, therefore I receive a reduced prime fee.

I have had $10 and $5 credits given to me when this happens and I encourage everyone else to. Amazon needs to support the benefits they grant customers for prime.

Yes. More of this. Amazon is starting to slip. It takes literally 1 minute on support text-chat to do this and it always saves more $ with less hassle than you would have if you went with another site. I've done this 3-4 times and every time I say it's the Nth time I've had to do it and they keep offering more and more.

What's especially annoying is that you have to pro-actively reach out to them. This isn't customer-obsessed.

I think I found a weekend project. Code an Amazon late delivery chat bot. Doesn't seem too hard.

Login and grab orders that are shipped. Compare delivery date (x). See if it changes or matches the estimate at time of order(y). If I package is deemed late create a message containing x and y and order number. Open chat support paste message. Might have to throw some additional canned responses but it seems pretty easy.

I would happily run that.

Email me when it's ready. jim.jones1@gmail.com

I'll help test. :)

Bonus points for using AWS AI services to power this over AWS Lambda.

Yes—and in the process—give Amazon more of your money.

Paribus.co does exactly this

Kinda cool - it does the first part based on what I see. It lets you know that they dropped the ball on delivery, but it's still on you to contact customer-service. Probably not a bad thing but I wish it went just a bit further - perhaps opening the chat for me and pre-populating a chat on the clipbooard or something....

I agree. It doesn't solve the last mile. The 'call to action' is just another email or notification. You still relinquish your inbox. They seem very transparent so I'm not trying to mock. But access to my entire inbox versus just my Amazon? I'll take the later.

What do you mean "it's still on you to contact customer service"?

Paribus contacts customer service to Amazon on your behalf for missed packages. Literally they open a ticket with amazon and complain.[0]

[0]: https://paribus.co/support/topics/purchases-and-claims/274

> you have to pro-actively reach out to them

It's been a long while since they missed a prime delivery date for me, but the couple of times they did, they credited my account automatically without my involvement (other than reading their email notification). Maybe I just got lucky?

Before I just dropped Amazon altogether, something like 75% of my Prime orders were late. At some point it becomes tedious to go to them and ask for some compensation. And they only ever offered me extensions of Prime (and lied about it, too, but that's another story). And I don't even live in some remote area...

I dropped Amazon because of their business practices, but it did not help that I live 30 miles from a fulfillment center and my prime orders we’re consistently late. Walmart is a 5 minute drive, and quiet at night.

Their business and labor practices didn't help either. Of course it didn't help matters that they had flat out lied to me for a week.

I would do it but I do not have the patience to be on the phone for 30 min fighting over $10

I think you can do it over chat.

My success rate over chat is 0%. I just get told over and over that 'Prime guarantees shipping, not delivery. So your package will be shipped within 2 days [or 1 day for 1-day] to the nearest Amazon distribution center. Usually this matches with the delivery date, but not always. The updated delivery date for your order is when you will get it, so we are following our end.'

They tried that on me today (I've had a bad run this month - I usually have about an order a day)...

Item bought on Monday, with expected -delivery- Wednesday. Late Monday status said "Package has left seller facility and is in transit to carrier".

It's Friday morning now, no package, and status is still "in transit to carrier".

I argued that "Shipped" means the carrier has it. Not that it may or may not be sitting in a corner of a truck for the last week forgotten or unnoticed.

Give them a link to the terms of service and say "please direct me to the language in your terms of service to that effect." Follow up with "as a paying prime member, I insist on compensation for Amazons failure to meet their guarantee". This has always worked for me. Some reps have pressed back when I insisted on two instances of compensation for one order with two late packages. I replied "I have no sympathy for a multi-million dollar company that fails to meet its obligations." Have gotten several months of prime and gift cards through chat in this way.

I've only done this via chat, I don't have time to sit on hold or deal with phone.

Takes 5 minutes via chat, I do it while watching tv or checking email.

It used to be better when (presumably) they had more consistent delivery. They used to offer a month of free Prime membership when your package came late, but now they've been instructed to only offer the credits on additional orders.

I've also received a month extension on my prime. I indicated $10 which was approximate value for month extension.

5 of my last 6 orders from Amazon have been bumped.

We've been Prime customers for years, but we're getting incredibly frustrated that we're paying for an annual subscription and being promised two day shipping - but consistently missing.

At this point, I'm starting to look back to smaller sites that offer more traditional 4-7 day shipping. They might still be slower than Amazon (which is about a 3.5 day average for us), but at least they're never missing their delivery window.

I can't tell you how weird this sounds to me. When I moved to the US, I paid one year of Prime and then stopped, because that was the year they raised the price from $80 a year to $100. Since then, I have been using the free shipping option (5-8 business day) for the vast majority of my orders and I have consistently received my orders before their initial estimate. The only reason why I paid for Prime that one year was because of Amazon Instant Video, but I got disappointed by lack of Spanish subtitles and the lackluster content selection.

I wonder if this experience is different depending on where you live? I have lived in the DC area for the past five years and I never thought about purchasing Prime because everything I (used to) order on Amazon would arrive within 2-3 days with the regular free shipping option.

I've had the same thing happen to me a couple of times on Amazon. I've actually started taking a screen shot of the original "Guaranteed Delivery Date" and complaining to customer service if it gets changed. The odd error is fine, but when it starts to become a regular thing, something needs changing.

Amen - once in a while is weather or whatever. Happening enough that we notice it's a trend is Amazon being shitty and hoping they don't get caught.

I tried to order something today that's in stock and sold by Amazon and the delivery estimate was next Friday through the following Tuesday. I didn't bother and instead ordered it from Target for the same price and I'll have it Sunday or Monday. I'll probably stop paying for Prime if this sort of thing continues to happen.

I had this happen constantly. It was pissing me off, but not what made me boycott amazon altogether.

They started charging my items to other credit cards associated with my account (added in the past to make one-off purchases for relatives or friends.) To prevent this happening again, I deleted every card from my account except my one current personal card.

Despite that, a few weeks later they charged a random subset of my holiday shopping to my mothers credit card. Now, we have an excellent relationship, but you can imagine even the best of relationships has a wtf moment when a thousand dollars of spending randomly appears on their account without so much as a by-your-leave.

I called amazon to complain, and their response was just, “well, you got the items you ordered, didn’t you?”

They were contemptuously baffled as to why this was at all a problem.

I yelled at them until they refunded my prime membership and closed my account.

Here's how it looks like from my side as a seller.

1. Buyer places order, order goes into pending for anywhere from minutes to days

2. While order is pending, units of inventory are moved to another fulfillment center

3. Once the units arrive, are received and checked-in, the order goes live

4. The customer receives their order two days later

I suspect this happens 1. for items less often purchased which have little historical data to rely on, and 2. items which have been freshly received and haven't yet been distributed across the US.

I am a very small time Amazon 3p seller, so I might be able to answer some questions you have about Amazon or FBA.

Pretty cool stuff. Do you as a seller only ship to one fulfillment center or is it up to you to manage the inventory at each fulfillment center?

You can typically get an extension of prime for a month in this situation if you chat with amazon. I end up paying every 18 months for 1 year of service, basically getting 6 months free. As a frequent user of prime, I have no idea how this isn't losing them money.

Not always true. I’ve tried it every time and they go “it’s weather related” when it’s obviously not.

The last time I tried to do that, they wouldn't do it. They just said "sorry, sometimes we don't get stuff out in time".

It's getting to the point I'm about to cancel - they are late more often than not, and customer service responses are really poor.

People have told me this, but it seems fruitless for me to get free months for a service I am unhappy with. Instead I recently cancelled my subscription.

Your alternative is competitor sites which usually don't even offer 2-day shipping or will charge you expedited shipping costs if they do. And even then they usually defer responsibility for delays to the carriers.

IMHO prime is worth it even if I have to spend a few minutes on chat to get it extended by 50%. What is truly frustrating is their "guarantee" that isn't a guarantee.

This lack of transparency and continual missing of their promises erodes my trust in them. Most of the time it's fine - whatever - I don't need those AA batteries on a Sunday....

But the fact that they guaranteed that they would be there, didn't tell me they'd be late, and didn't proactively offer anything to back up their guarantee is super shady. Either don't guarantee a date, or proactively offer recourse when you don't meet your own self-imposed guarantees.

> Your alternative is competitor sites which usually don't even offer 2-day shipping or will charge you expedited shipping costs if they do.

This is a lot less true than it used to be. I had to buy a few things from other sites recently (not carried on Amazon, or the sort of thing that attracts counterfeits or such shenanigans) and was surprised to discover how much other places have caught up in the shipping game.

Even a small-volume niche-market foreign company like B&W shipped me a pair of headphones with free two-day shipping recently.

Over the past few years I have ordered largely from retailers like Walgreens, CVS, Target, Home Depot, B&H, Microcenter, etc. and in most cases shipping has been free or cheap and just as fast or faster than Amazon ever was (or I’ve purchased things in retail stores).

Avoiding Amazon has actually been easier than I expected and if anything I’ve found purchasing more convenient overall.

One thing I noticed in the UK is that there are items which are "Prime Eligible" and items that are "Delivered at no extra cost for Prime members". The latter will also give a "guaranteed" next-day date, but seem far more prone to slipping and getting a "Now expected" date.

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