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This is just assuming that they'll even let you order $49 worth of items in one box. I let my Amazon Prime lapse because I was rarely using it. A few weeks ag

• wfunction 11y ago
  This is pretty epic. Did you call them back and demand a refund?
• chx 11y ago
  I believe if you buy Amazon items then, even if they split the shipment, they won't charge you. The above sounds like you were buying from different merchants.
  • ajmurmann 11y ago
    The non-amazon shipped stuff on Amazon honestly had been a pain ever since they introduced it. If you have prime it mostly is just a huge nuisance.
    • stanmancan 11y ago
      I always make sure I check off the "Prime Eligible" checkbox when searching Amazon. It sucks to find an item, go to buy it, and finding out it's going to take 4 weeks and $25 to ship from the UK or something.
      • robryan 11y ago
        A lot of stuff is fine though and you will probably get it in similar time to Amazon standard shipping. It would be hard if they let you search by say < 3 business days, < 5 business days in the same way they let you search prime only.
      • tracker1 11y ago
        I go a step beyond that, and will often also check Amazon as the seller. I've had too many mis-labelled products show up... Sometimes I forget, and that's usually when there is a problem. I'm almost inclined to go prefer local stores again, as Amazon's pricing advantages seem to have slipped, and if they raise the cost of Prime again, I'm definitely out. I've been a pretty loyal customer to Amazon, but honestly, they're slipping a bit. They should probably spend just a little more time on their core products.
        • logfromblammo 11y ago
          I ordered something from Amazon, with Amazon as the seller, and with the Prime filter checked. It was marked as having low remaining inventory. After I purchased, and the item failed to arrive with the rest of my order, I saw that it had been moved to a separate order, from a different seller, with an additional $10 shipping charge and an additional week of delay. Look, Amazon, you have a real problem with sorting and filtering. What I really want is a way to order goods by the final, bottom-line price, including all taxes and shipping costs. If something costs $20 plus $10 in shipping, it should rank after a similar thing that is $25 plus $0 shipping. The Prime filter is the only way I can even approach that problem from my end. It forces the cost of shipping to be included in the price of all items, at the expense of not seeing potentially cheaper items. But even then, Amazon can't even manage to sort correctly by price. Nor does it handle quantities in a package very well.
      • 7952 11y ago
        I was going on a trip and needed some random stuff delivered the next day and was happy to pay delivery for it. It was a nightmare tryng to elimate marketplace sellers with longer delivery times and finding out that Amazon don't actually sell a lot of things I wanted.
    • thirdsun 11y ago
      Same here, unless it's the only option and I really need the product, I'll only buy Prime-enabled products. I really don't want Amazon to turn into eBay or Alibaba, but for many categories it already is if you scroll/paginate far enough.
      • sc90 11y ago
        What do you mean turn into ebay or Alibaba?
        • thirdsun 11y ago
          As the other commenter suggested, I mean offering an endless stream of low quality products, not necessarily knockoffs, but simply bad products. Another commenter mentioned Apple accessoires, which is a good example - I think it would be in Amazon's interest to at least mildly curate these and other categories. Currently Amazon is close to useless when you don't exactly know what you want, which results in me researching elsewhere and buying on Amazon when I made a decision.
        • x0x0 11y ago
          a guess: full of shoddy and/or unsafe knockoffs
        • michaelt 11y ago
          A few months ago I was trying to buy some bright LED bulbs, and I tried Ebay and Aliexpress. I ordered some 7 watt bulbs, but (repeatedly and by different vendors) I was shipped bulbs that were closer to 4 watts. Given that it happened several times with several vendors, I suspect there's a systematic problem due to incentives - higher power bulbs command higher prices, and most buyers don't have the test equipment needed to detect the fraud; and even when someone does detect the fraud you just have to refund them and claim it was an accident. Needless to say, if the conditions of the market mean that fraudsters out-compete honest sellers, all the honest sellers have to quit or resort to fraud, and the market becomes useless to consumers.
          • 11y ago
    • georgemcbay 11y ago
      Agreed. Not that I ever expect them to do it, but if they had a global filter to block anything not being fulfilled by Amazon from ever being see on their site, I would set it and never look back. 100% of the reason I use Amazon is fast and consistent shipping. That is the entire value for me.
    • CydeWeys 11y ago
      A lot of it is such JUNK, too. Amazon has no qualms whatsoever about selling stuff that, frankly, belongs in the garbage. I've cooled off on Amazon a lot since earlier years because shopping on there is an experience fraught with angst thanks to trying to find the best trade-off between price and utility. Oftentimes the cheapest items for any given category (e.g. snorkel masks and touchscreen gloves, two recent things I purchased) are pure junk that aren't fit for their stated purpose. Whereas if I'm in a brick-and-mortar store, I can at least evaluate the quality of something hands-on, and then have a better idea of if the cheapest is good enough. This is exacerbated by item descriptions that are frequently inaccurate, even showing the wrong photos. The third party sellers especially don't seem to be held accountable for much, and processing returns through them is often a disaster. I fear that Amazon is creating damage to their brand by not establishing some minimum floor for product quality. Right now they rank somewhere between a dollar store and a Walmart in my mind.
      • brbsix 11y ago
        There are a lot of (POS) counterfeit goods as well. It is very difficult to be certain you're purchasing the genuine article. At least this has been my experience purchasing electronics from merchants on Amazon in recent years.
      • coco1989 11y ago
        I know - its like revenge of the show room.. I look for reviews on Amazon and then get it somewhere else..
  • Pxtl 11y ago
    I think everybody's been burned by that once. We keep using Amazon, of course, so it's obviously sitll working out for them. Then again, my in-laws got burned by Amazon's various dark patterns enough times that they've given up on it. Can't say I blame them.
    • Silhouette 11y ago
      We keep using Amazon, of course, so it's obviously sitll working out for them. For now. The thing about reputations in business is that they can deteriorate slowly over time and up to a point it won't matter because customers will favour convenience and the brands they know. Sometimes that point can be much further from where you started than most people would expect. However, if you ever pass that point and lose a critical mass of customers, you're in real trouble. If Play/Rakuten/whoever they are these days had a decent web site and content management, they could make a fortune out of my household given our increasing frustration with Amazon cluttering up their own site. Unfortunately, they're actually much worse and not really a useful alternative at all.
      • Pxtl 11y ago
        Amazon's inventory supply chain is so many light-years ahead of the competition, especially here in Canada, I think they'll be able to screw up the UI for a decade or two.
        • prewett 11y ago
          It may be light-years ahead of the competition, but if advantage doesn't produce a cost savings for the customer, it doesn't matter. I generally need about $20 of something from Amazon. At $35 I can generally find something else I will use. But if I have to buy $50 worth of stuff to get the cost advantage of free shipping, I'm much more likely to just go down to the store and buy it.
          • hga 11y ago
            Back before my father and I decided to share a Prime subscription (I buy the stuff with my account and charge it to his credit card), I solved this by keeping in my deferred cart various items I wanted sometime in the coming months that I wasn't in a hurry to get. If you can take a long very about enough things it worked out pretty well, especially since your metric is to, over a year, pay less than a Prime subscription.
  • deftnerd 11y ago
    All the items were eligible for free shipping, according to Amazon. Some of the items were from individual merchants, but all of those were FBA (so they were warehoused at an Amazon facility). It's possible that even though they were eligible for free shipping, they weren't all in the same facility. If that was the case, I would understand why they were put into separate boxes. What doesn't make sense is removing one item in a box by itself causing the shopping cart to reshuffle so a different item was placed in a box by itself. I was irked enough that I want to find alternatives.
    • jfoster 11y ago
      Even if they weren't in the same facility, why would that make it understandable? How are you, as a customer, supposed to be concerned with which Amazon facility has what stock? (information you don't even have)
      • blowski 11y ago
        Agreed. Feels like Amazon outsourcing part of its shipping algorithm to customers.
        • cwilkes 11y ago
          +1 I've had the same experience trying to get $35 of "qualifying goods" into my cart to only see that they weren't really telling the truth and having to pay for shipping with Prime for next day. Oh and through some weird ability to rename time "next day" now means 2 days and "2 day" means 3 day delivery. Same day usually does mean same day -- which used to have a lot of items available for that but recently has seemed to have gone down. Still impressed that it can be done.
        • fweespeech 11y ago
          They already outsource fixing the errors made by their algorithms to customers and the businesses that ship for Amazon. Lol. "Hey, lets merge these two colors, what could possibly go wrong?" is an algorithmic decision made by Amazon that happens far too frequently after I've gone home or to bed. :p
  • hacknat 11y ago
    I agree. I literally just did this and got free shipping, even though the items were spread out.
• jbkkd 11y ago
  I have a business that purchases multiple items in a single order on a daily basis, and have never encountered this. We always get free shipping for orders, even if boxes are split. I'm curious about your use case, were they non amazon fullfiled items?
  • deftnerd 11y ago
    Answered in detail above, but to sum it up, all the items were either Amazon supplied or FBA, so they would ship directly from an Amazon warehouse.
    • tdeck 11y ago
      The paranoid engineer in me thinks this "box shuffling" is a feature flagged behavior and you ended up in an unlucky bucket.
      • jlgaddis 11y ago
        I can't recall exactly where the option is but I do remember seeing an option that offered a choice between "ship my items as fast as possible, even if it means multiple, separate shipments" versus "put everything into the same shipment, even if it means it might take a little longer".
• choppaface 11y ago
  Customer service is way all over the place. I had a shaver that I wanted to return. It was a gift bought from a Prime-connected account. After 3-4 emails of getting nowhere, one rep finally told me that shavers can't be returned due to health hazards and they refunded the buyer the full cost of the shaver. Since then I've also had them unexpectedly give me 2-3 full refunds for things I threatened to return. I think they're trying very hard to retain prime members.
  • robryan 11y ago
    If something can't be resold they save money by not having to deal with the return you make. That kind of situation is a tough call, in theory they could simply not offer you anything, in practise they don't want to lose customers.
• BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Interesting. I've never had an experience with Amazon customer service that hasn't been outstanding. I'm assuming you were able to contact them and they gave you a full refund on the shipping costs? I would be shocked if they did anything less. Shitty experience yeah but I would expect them to fix it too.
  • Silhouette 11y ago
    The customer service people you speak to on the phone or on-line generally seem to be reasonable, and certainly better than a lot of on-line stores. Still, this kind of thing happening in the first place is also poor customer service. Other dumb stuff is also far too common at Amazon in my experience. They frequently seem to ship fragile items in nothing but a standard cardboard box with negligible padding so they're smashed to pieces by the time they arrive. Recently I've seen several "new" and yet obviously not new items like books with bent spines or DVDs with fingerprints all over them. They sometimes give wildy optimistic estimates of delivery dates particularly around holiday seasons when everyone is buying presents. Worse, they seem to have multi-week standard processes for deciding when something has really gone missing before they will try shipping another one, which is no use at all if say you're ordering Christmas presents in December. Even if they are happy for a customer to return something for a refund, it's still a hassle for that customer to ship it back or arrange the collection every time something goes wrong. Even if they'll refund an order they found they couldn't ship when they said, the customer has still potentially lost several days in the process and might be too late to order it from somewhere else instead. I suspect in some ways Amazon have been victims of their own success. I wonder whether anyone has ever tried to implement such personalised logistics at the scale Amazon does before, and given how often ordering from them does lead to a better experience than we used to have with bricks and mortar stores, I hesitate to criticise too much over things going wrong. There is definitely plenty of room for improvement in the customer service department, though, and at least part of it appears to be due to deliberate policies and perhaps cutting a few corners too many to try to shave off every last penny in running costs.
• agumonkey 11y ago
  ..Priceless story.
• hga 11y ago
  This happened when you selected "ship in as few packages as possible" option? That worked for me in the $35 minimum days before I and my father got a Prime subscription. A related patience game to decrease the costs of your Prime subscription is to allow them to ship is slowly and give you a limited time, but several month, digital $1 credit, or if you to the pantry thing, I've seen discounts for it.
• ufukbay 11y ago
  This is really not meant in a mocking way and it could be different on Amazon Germany but are you sure you didn't check this box by accident which tells them to send your stuff as soon as possible? Before I had Amazon Prime I always made sure to check free shipping even if it meant that I had to wait longer until all items were available so they could be shipped in a single box.
• archemike_ 11y ago
  what's going on is an item that's FBA(fulfilled by amazon sitting at an amazon facility) is at a facility that's not near you, so it's physically further and although it says prime they won't expedite in a day since it's maybe east coast placed and you're in California so they don't do same day because of this unless the item standalone is over 35. This is sort of against the spend 35 and get free shipping but seems to be the apparent modus operandi as of somewhat recent. e.g. 25 dollar item and 15 dollar item might both be two days and would have to pay for one or same day even though total is 40 since one is FBA'd from a further location, so the same day can be misleading happens to be sitting at a facility that the seller shipped to, what happens after shipping into fba and how they disperse inventory if at all for lower latency in shipping I don't know but I am seeing more and more where they split orders to not pay same day even if total is over the same day rate. Hope this sheds a bit of light.
• deleted 11y ago
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• Shivetya 11y ago
  The only issue I have found with Amazon Prime is more items I have bought have moved to the Marketplace and most of those items no longer qualify for prime. So while it is great for many items if Amazon keeps offloading items to others it becomes less useful to me. As for the shopping cart games, I have never had that issue as I usually check ship it all together.
• msellout 11y ago
  Weird. I have never experienced anything like that with Amazon. The boxing appears totally irrelevant to me (as per what I pay Amazon).