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Amazon, Thou Hast Forsaken Me (A Little)

So in the latter third of August, I placed a pre-order on Amazon for a certain product which will remain unnamed. Since it was over $25 it qualified for the free super savings shipping which I chose. Didn't think about it again until the last week of August rolled around and I started hearing that the item would most likely be shipping mid to end of the week. After looking up my order, discovered that Amazon was projecting an end of September/early October shipping date. Now I know orders are usually slower to ship if you go with the free shipping but a month difference is a bit absurd. So I changed the order to 2-day shipping which changed my estimated shipping date to the first week of September. What a difference an extra $16 makes apparently.

Unexpectedly, I received an "your order has shipped" email from Amazon on Saturday, Sept. 1 with estimated delivery date of Wednesday, Sept. 5. Given that it was Labor Day weekend, I was pleasantly surprised. Unfortunately as the weekend went on, I discovered that Amazon, for some then-unknown reason, had decided to send my order via UPS Ground. Unless my order was shipping out from somewhere one state over from NJ (which it wasn't, it was coming from Kentucky), there was no way I'd be getting my order in 2 days as I had specified. So I sent customer service an email to see what their logic was. The reply I received had the following two paragraphs of interest:

The One-Day or Two-Day delivery option you choose may not directly correspond with the carrier-branded shipping service used to deliver your package. We use your desire for a specific delivery date along with our knowledge of carrier capabilities (acquired through sending millions of shipments) to select the most appropriate and efficient shipping service available to meet the delivery estimate.
Despite our best efforts, packages are occasionally delivered a day or two after our estimated delivery date.

Now usually I'm a "let by gones be by gones" type of guy but I was irritated by this canned reply. Usually if a person specifies a shipping method that has an exact date range in the name, they want their product in that date range. I've never purchased anything online from any store, paid for two day shipping, and had the store send it via GROUND mail of any sort. If a person chooses two-day shipping, it's usually cause they want it in TWO DAYS. But apparently Amazon is saying, well we'll try to get it to you in two days but sometimes it might take up to four. WTF? Who does that? And apparently their "knowledge of carrier capabilities" even after millions of shipments still ain't that great. Plus I didn't spend $16 on shipping to have it sent Ground. If I knew that would be the case I would have just chosen standard shipping which would have come out to be less than half of the two-day shipping cost and arrived at the same time.

Blah, but anyways, I suppose overall it wasn't that big of an inconvenience since the item was delivered one day after I was realistically expecting it (although they shouldn't send out "your item has shipped" emails on weekends since apparently UPS doesn't pick up from them on weekends so your item wouldn't actually ship until the next weekday) and in the end, they did refund my shipping fee. But still, a bit of a sour experience and I'll think twice before shelling out for expedited shipping again.

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Comments (2)

That sucks. :( Just go with Amazon Prime and forget about this super saver business! Heh.

Ben:

Yeah I'm a cheap bastard and rarely buy stuff new so Amazon Prime would be wasted on me. ;-p

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on September 11, 2007 11:47 AM.

The previous post in this blog was Sony Folly.

The next post in this blog is Carnivore Nation / Prude Nation.

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