15 ms·

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.

by chx 11y ago

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.

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.

by 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.