Nice! I wonder if the vendor gets his money earlier from Amazon if he delivered it faster.
https://www.amazon.com/sp?_encoding=UTF8&asin=&isAmazonFulfi...
No - Amazon pays sellers every other week.
In this case, the only delay is the 7 day holding period after the latest possible delivery date.
For example, if you sell and deliver a product on Jan 1st, you may be able to disburse the funds as soon as the 8th.
However! This example does not hold for the situation described by the GP because no tracking information can be provided to Amazon. In which case, the longest possible delivery period in the shipping method selected will be used.
More importantly, what the seller did as described by GP is big liability, for two reasons:
1. Phone numbers should never, ever, be used to contact the customer directly. They are for the seller to give to the carrier. This is a violation of Amazon's ToS.
2. Sellers should never, ever, deliver directly to buyers. Not only will this hurt their valid tracking rate metric, but it also makes them a very easy target for item not received cases as there is no proof that the item was delivered. The only recourse in a case like this would be through small claims court.
And on a much more minor note, it's unprofessional to visit a buyer in person. Amazon is not eBay.
[0] https://3t122x28ppxb3z3e3u3i0eib-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
They can still use the same tracking mechanisms, I mean when I order from the pizza place, they don't contract it out, so why should I care of my amazon seller does?
This is so they can verify you actually shipped the package, and verify it was delivered within the fulfillment promise date range, ie. if you paid for 2 day shipping or whatever.
There are some sellers that have been approved for self-delivery of packages, which are not trackable. In these cases, they usually forfeit all rights to dispute non-delivery claims and more. So, it's pretty risky for the seller.
Last time Yodel had delivered a parcel of $50 to my door (marking it as delivered), which obviously got stolen. You can’t call Yodel - their line is always busy, and the line is not a free number.
Yodel had done that regularly to me, but I could never contact them or do anything about my delivery, since their customer service is horrendous.
Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
No, unfortunately not. Well, unless you're open to moving outside of Yodel's delivery radius.
eBay has no fulfillment network, so you can reach out to the seller and ask for a different shipping method. You should expect to be asked to cover the cost difference though.
You can also do this on Amazon as well, just make sure that the product you're buying says "ships and sold by XYZ". Send them a message prior to ordering and they'll let you know if they can accommodate.
Amazon support was able to do this for me. They also CC:d me on a really strongly worded email to the delivery company, which I found really surprising.
This was one of the euro amazons with european support staff.
This applies to very few sellers.
Fair enough. I am one of those few sellers and I tend to assume it's more commonplace than it is.
In any case, I don't really understand the desire for instant disbursements. Certainly you eliminate the risk of Amazon carrying a larger balance than necessary, and in rare cash crunch situations it may rescue the day... But beyond that, why is it so desireable?
It might be unusual in the context, its not unprofessional, and in certain contexts associated with a premium service.
It's a very oligopolistic view to say only Amazon and a few big companies are trustworthy logistics providers.
Fortnightly and biennially are 'every other'.
Your parent already provided the counterpoint, Biennially.
Additionally I'm not convinced by your bicycle => 2 => bi annual logic.
You could equally argue it leads to 2 times a year, because it doesn't happen a half every year just like a bike doesn't have half a wheel.
For your bicycle example that I didn't reply to initially - I don't see what it breaks? Unicycles have one and tricycles three wheels. If i give you a wheel triweekly you have three by the end of the week and can build a tricycle.
"Bi- 2a occurring twice in every one or once in every two (biweekly)"
Biannual is only defined as occurring twice a year though.
So, inflammable.
My large Collins dictionary suggests that biannual means twice per year, while semi-annual has more of a hint at 'six-monthly', i.e. evenly space (which makes sense if you think semi-circle, semi-detached, etc.).
> And I’m American, we don’t use the word fortnight unless we’re pretending to be British.
Ah well there's the problem! ;) But well, yes, of course if you remove the word for something from your vocabulary there's going to be ambiguity when a similar one is used. Or just stick to 'every [other] week' and remove biweekly too.
I didn't claim any strong grammatical structure of 'bi', just consistency between biweekly and biannually, and that 'once per two weeks' was the meaning of a different word, as is 'once per two years'.