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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

I am a prime customer and literally every single time I have contacted Amazon support they have been receptive and refunded me, often times going beyond what I requested.

I am a very skeptical of this story.

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As a counter anecdote, I bought a prime item on a Monday and didn't receive it till the following Monday. When I contacted Amazon they told me that prime just garunteed that shipping would take 2 days, not that they would ship it in 2 days and as they had shipped it on Thursday they would do nothing for me

I had that happen to me once. The Amazon rep told me the item was being transferred to a warehouse near me before being shipped out "2 day shipping". That sounds like 7 day shipping to me.

If there is a guaranteed delivery date, they have to honor it.

This was a couple of years ago - I ordered replacement computer parts to get a failed laptop up and running for a critical timeline. The parts didn’t arrive so I had to search for them and over pay locally. Amazon issued a full refund and told me to keep the parts since they were already in transit.

Not sure if the story would be the same if the items were not sold by Amazon directly, but instead via the marketplace.

In Germany, and in my experience, the "guaranteed" delivery date isn't honored 40% of the time and when you call or email them, they just say that they are sorry and extend your prime membership yet another month. Especially DHL is just a joke in Hesse.

This used to be a policy for US customers as well but I've read that Amazon no longer honors the policy and removed it from the support page it previously appeared on.

>If there is a guaranteed delivery date, they have to honor it.

They don't really have to do anything. I have no power to compel any action from them and I live in the US so it's not like I can expect the government to enforce the rules either unless Amazon starts pissing off other rich people or starts hurting a whole lot of people a whole lot of times.

My only real recourse is to stop purchasing items from Amazon which stops future problems but doesn't do anything to fix what already occurred.

Between actions like this and increasing prevalance of counterfeit items on Amazon an increasing number of people in my social circle are limiting their purchases on Amazon to commodities like toilet paper and buying anything else where quality or timeliness matter in other stores/websites

>commodities like toilet paper

Why don't you just buy this at the store in town? It's cheaper and probably takes less time to just throw that in your cart while at the store anyway. How much time do you save by buying that online?

No vehicle and it's bulky. My shopping is usually limited by volume. Amazon has become a provider to me of large volume goods that dont have a failure mode that can hurt me much or items that are cheap enough that I don't care about them.

If a market shows up in the development near my building then I don't know if I'd even get those commodities from Amazon anymore

That's exactly as advertised though[1]. 2 day delivery, once shipped.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

Advertising your product as "2 day shipping" and then going, oh well that only counts from when we ship it so you will get your item whenever, is the kind of misleading pedantry only politicians and lawyers would engage in.

They may be technically and legally correct, but a reasonable person would not assume that paying extra for 2 day shipping still meant you'd get your items in 7 days and Amazon knows it.

Additionally the Amazon order page told me I would receive my item in 2 days from when I placed the order so it's not like I ordered it when they we're telling me it would be a week.

I've had things fail to ship in the two days multiple times. The only thing they will do is refund the shipping- which, if you have prime, is 0$.

The Prime benefit is free 2 day shipping, not "ships right away and received in 2 days". The 2 day shipping doesn't always pan out but as others have mentioned there is often a resolution by support when contacted.

In my personal anecdotal experience, Amazon is quite good at extending Prime for another month (so basically only a few dollars) or refunding "sane" shipping charges. They are just about incapable of admitting that they messed up, though, and will promise you just about anything only to turn around and say "no, we can't do that" if it is anything that would actually cost them.

When the dollar amount goes up they are less than helpful. I was forced to dispute a $4888 purchase with my credit card at one point because they refused a return. Took over six months with the back and forth, bank being incompetent, etc, but eventually I won.

Have you ever generated a ticket that could cost Amazon $1000 to a supplier though?

I agree, Amazon are usually happy to write off losses of ~$20 as a CODB, but it sounds like this is far beyond that.

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