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> The merchant alleges he could offer the same products on Amazon at lower prices and with faster, more reliable delivery if he could handle logistics himself w

by whack 7y ago

> The merchant alleges he could offer the same products on Amazon at lower prices and with faster, more reliable delivery if he could handle logistics himself without being penalized for late deliveries. Merchants using Amazon’s logistics services don’t face penalties for delivery mishaps, which is why many choose to use it even when better options are available, the letter states. It would be great if someone had numbers on how often Amazon logistics are late, as compared to third party services. If their logistics are indeed much more reliable, then I can understand where their policy is coming from. If a merchant wants to use a 3rd party service that is cheaper/faster but less reliable, that does seem like something the merchant should be penalized for. It all depends on their relative rates of reliability though. Either way, the optics certainly don't seem to favor Amazon here. They may have to restructure their pricing and penalties, to avoid the perception of bias.

ikeboy 7y ago
There's numbers for Amazon logistics in the article. More to the point, Amazon themselves use UPS/Fedex under the hood in addition to their own system. But they hold sellers responsible for using UPS/Fedex if it's late only when not using FBA.
- wUabkSG6L5Bfa5 7y ago
  Considering that it takes Amazon-level resources to get UPS/FedEx to track down errant shipments and honor claims, this seems like a fine idea at first glance.
  - amluto 7y ago
    In my personal experience, “Amazon-level logistics” is just about the least reliable way to get anything to show up on time.
    - colejohnson66 7y ago
      In my experience, it’s the opposite. I’ve had hundreds of packages delivered by AMZL, and only one was late.
      - Semaphor 7y ago
        Here in Germany they are late about 30% of the time for me but at least that means I get yet another month of free prime.
- whack 7y ago
  > fewer than 25% arrived within two days; more than half arrived in about three days and more than 15% arrived in four days Those numbers are for delivery speed. Not percentage of deliveries that are late relative to the date promised to customers when they made the purchase
- gnopgnip 7y ago
  If a delivery is late it is often because of how it is packaged, and not purely on the delivery service
themagician 7y ago
It's much more likely that Amazon will just start to sunset the Amazon marketplace all together. In some ways they already have. VendorExpress was an initiative designed to get rid of 3P sellers and create a direct relationship with manufacturers. It sort of worked. The 3P sellers started pretending that they were manufacturers though. They recently sunset/sunsat/sunsetted that program. The new program, OneVendor, will give Amazon a lot more control of who sells what and how. And their new Transparency program will eliminate a lot of the middle men playing the arbitrage game all together. It's worth noting that most of the complaints against Amazon are from middlemen, scammers and arbitrageurs who make a living as leeches. When Amazon destroys their "business", they sue. While it's true that prices on Amazon are going up that's not necessarily a bad thing. You often have a situation where a manufacturer's items are leaking out into the Amazon ecosystem through arbitrageurs. When they finally take control of their own product listings they want to raise prices to parity with the rest of retail. The arbitrageurs lose. Amazon wins. The manufacturer wins. Traditional retail wins because Amazon is no longer undercutting them so deeply. And while the customer does lose, in a sense by paying more, the customer service is greatly increased.
- Y_Y 7y ago
  I think the past tense form of "sunset" here should be "sunsat".
  - hollerith 7y ago
    Or "sunsetted".
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - ummonk 7y ago
    No cause the sun doesn’t sit, it sets. Ergo past tense is sunset, not sunsat. I’m assuming you aren’t being sarcastic.
- ikeboy 7y ago
toasterlovin 7y ago
> They may have to restructure their pricing and penalties, to avoid the perception of bias. They don't need to avoid the perception of bias because they're free to run their marketplace however they want. They have absolutely no obligation to look out for anybody's interest except for their own. But, FWIW, it totally makes sense for them to have different rules when the third party merchant fulfills orders. Amazon and merchants selling on their platform have different incentives. Amazon cares a lot about their customer experience and has an extremely long-term perspective on customer satisfaction. Many third party sellers are either 1) incompetent, or 2) actively malicious. As a result, Amazon has to structure incentives accordingly whenever they let a third party seller handle part of the customer interaction.
- danaris 7y ago
  > they're free to run their marketplace however they want. That's only true if they don't wield monopoly power. Personally, I think there's a very strong argument that they do. It would be interesting to see to what extent courts agree.
  - hcurtiss 7y ago
    In my view, there has never been a more diverse and vibrant marketplace than online shopping. Amazon offers decent services, but whether it's shoes, or TVs, or food, there are many, many, very viable alternatives. It's very interesting to me that some folks are able to define "monopoly" in their head in a manner that captures Amazon.
    - papln 7y ago
      https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-commerce-market-is-now-49-or-5-of-all-retail-spend/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-... https://www.theinformation.com/articles/whats-amazons-share-of-retail-depends-who-you-ask https://www.theinformation.com/articles/whats-amazons-share-... login-wall alternative: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/emarketer-cuts-estimate-of-amazon-s-u-s-online-market-share https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/emarketer...
linuxftw 7y ago
Amazon's logistics are fraudulent. They'll say "Can't access the building" when they never event attempt to deliver. They're gaming the metrics. Sometimes they'll just outright lie, say the package is delivered, and it will show up in the next 48 hours.
- __jal 7y ago
  Back when I still used them, this was why I only had things delivered to my office. If I tried to have things delivered to my home, one of two things nearly invariably happened: I'd either waste my time waiting on a delivery only to have it marked "no answer" or "can't access", or they'd leave it on the sidewalk outside my door. (I live in downtown San Francisco. You can guess how well that worked.) But I dropped Prime a while back and stopped using them, and am still happy with that choice.
  - Rapzid 7y ago
    Anecdotally I've had both "delivered-not-delivered" and "office-closed-not-closed" happen at work while I'm setting in plain view of the parking lot and office. Haven't had that issue working from home but now everything seems to come UPS or USPS; I haven't had deliveries from Amazon drivers. Not sure why.
- brycesbeard 7y ago
  My building has a large posted notice stating (to the amazon logistics people) that this area is monitored by and reported to Amazon’s quality dept. seems to have helped w delivery issues they were having.
duahncjak 7y ago
In my experience, Amazon drivers will mark packages as delivered when they haven’t gotten around to delivering yet. When I call Amazon to complain, they tell me to just wait and the package will show up later. I suspect the drivers are given an impossible number of packages to deliver, and there’s a misalignment of incentives where everyone is better off pretending they delivered the package on time. It’s not hard to imagine how this situation would arise when the delivery company is also the merchant, and there’s a command from on high for everyone to get one-day delivery. If the package is marked as delivered, everyone up the chain makes their numbers. @bezos, are you paying attention?
- NCWV 7y ago
  Or they mark it as an attempted delivery for up to 2 days. Next day shipping is a lie.
- michelpp 7y ago
  It seems like something they could easily verify: they know the exact location of the truck when the package is marked delivered. If it doesn't correlate with the delivery address then something is up. Another clue would be a bunch of packages marked delivered at the same time that don't have tightly clustered delivery locations. I agree with you about performance metrics being gamed, wouldn't surprise me.
  - HankB99 7y ago
    I get pictures of the delivery on my front porch. I wonder if that is to prove to me that the package was delivered or to prove to Amazon that the delivery person delivered. If the photos are taken with a cell phone app/camera they will be tagged with location and time which would be pretty difficult to falsify. I don't always get these pictures so I suspect it is Amazon spot checking their delivery people.
    - irrational 7y ago
      I was getting these for awhile on every single delivery, then they stopped. I wonder why?
antjanus 7y ago
Personal experience has been that Amazon delivery estimates and deliveries are extremely unreliable. A one-day shipping ordeal could turn into a week. A two-day shipping will arrive past its "guaranteed" day for a solid 10-20% of all packages I get. And usually that guaranteed date will suddenly change on the day of. So you're expecting, and nothing gets there. Basically, if you want to have a guaranteed delivery time on a package, do not use Amazon.
- interlocutor 7y ago
  My experience has been the opposite. Also, Amazon's deliveries have become extremely fast. I ordered an item at 6pm yesterday. Amazon's guaranteed delivery time was 8am this morning... and it was actually delivered at around 6am. I was blown away. The item arrived in around 12 hours, and the delivery was free since I am a Prime member. This is miles ahead of competitors!
- ryan_j_naughton 7y ago
  I think this must be a consequence of where you live. I live in Santa Monica, and literally 100% of my Amazon packages have arrived on the day Amazon originally said they would. I order probably 1 item from Amazon a week on average and have lived in Santa Monica for 4 years. Thus around 200 items and I literally can't think of a time when the package arrived later than advertised at checkout except one Christmas.
hinkley 7y ago
> The merchant alleges he could offer the same products on Amazon at lower prices and with faster, more reliable delivery if he could handle logistics himself without being penalized for late deliveries. I feel like this is not unexpected. If on-time delivery is non-negotiable for Amazon then that will be built into the price. Anyone who builds anything is trying to get permission to relax one constraint in order to facilitate another.
axaxs 7y ago
People have come to equate Amazon with fast delivery. It's literally the only reason I use them. Often, looking at reviews, delivery time and condition are the biggest factor in bad reviews. To their credit, they usually strike these and put a note that they are responsible for logistics. That said, I don't blame them one bit for enforcing logistics onto sellers...

by whack 7y ago

ikeboy 7y ago

There's numbers for Amazon logistics in the article. More to the point, Amazon themselves use UPS/Fedex under the hood in addition to their own system. But they hold sellers responsible for using UPS/Fedex if it's late only when not using FBA.

wUabkSG6L5Bfa5 7y ago
Considering that it takes Amazon-level resources to get UPS/FedEx to track down errant shipments and honor claims, this seems like a fine idea at first glance.
- amluto 7y ago
  In my personal experience, “Amazon-level logistics” is just about the least reliable way to get anything to show up on time.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    In my experience, it’s the opposite. I’ve had hundreds of packages delivered by AMZL, and only one was late.
    - Semaphor 7y ago
      Here in Germany they are late about 30% of the time for me but at least that means I get yet another month of free prime.
whack 7y ago
> fewer than 25% arrived within two days; more than half arrived in about three days and more than 15% arrived in four days Those numbers are for delivery speed. Not percentage of deliveries that are late relative to the date promised to customers when they made the purchase
gnopgnip 7y ago
If a delivery is late it is often because of how it is packaged, and not purely on the delivery service

themagician 7y ago

It's much more likely that Amazon will just start to sunset the Amazon marketplace all together. In some ways they already have. VendorExpress was an initiative designed to get rid of 3P sellers and create a direct relationship with manufacturers. It sort of worked. The 3P sellers started pretending that they were manufacturers though. They recently sunset/sunsat/sunsetted that program. The new program, OneVendor, will give Amazon a lot more control of who sells what and how. And their new Transparency program will eliminate a lot of the middle men playing the arbitrage game all together. It's worth noting that most of the complaints against Amazon are from middlemen, scammers and arbitrageurs who make a living as leeches. When Amazon destroys their "business", they sue. While it's true that prices on Amazon are going up that's not necessarily a bad thing. You often have a situation where a manufacturer's items are leaking out into the Amazon ecosystem through arbitrageurs. When they finally take control of their own product listings they want to raise prices to parity with the rest of retail. The arbitrageurs lose. Amazon wins. The manufacturer wins. Traditional retail wins because Amazon is no longer undercutting them so deeply. And while the customer does lose, in a sense by paying more, the customer service is greatly increased.

Y_Y 7y ago
I think the past tense form of "sunset" here should be "sunsat".
- hollerith 7y ago
  Or "sunsetted".
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ummonk 7y ago
  No cause the sun doesn’t sit, it sets. Ergo past tense is sunset, not sunsat. I’m assuming you aren’t being sarcastic.
ikeboy 7y ago

toasterlovin 7y ago

> They may have to restructure their pricing and penalties, to avoid the perception of bias. They don't need to avoid the perception of bias because they're free to run their marketplace however they want. They have absolutely no obligation to look out for anybody's interest except for their own. But, FWIW, it totally makes sense for them to have different rules when the third party merchant fulfills orders. Amazon and merchants selling on their platform have different incentives. Amazon cares a lot about their customer experience and has an extremely long-term perspective on customer satisfaction. Many third party sellers are either 1) incompetent, or 2) actively malicious. As a result, Amazon has to structure incentives accordingly whenever they let a third party seller handle part of the customer interaction.

danaris 7y ago
> they're free to run their marketplace however they want. That's only true if they don't wield monopoly power. Personally, I think there's a very strong argument that they do. It would be interesting to see to what extent courts agree.
- hcurtiss 7y ago
  In my view, there has never been a more diverse and vibrant marketplace than online shopping. Amazon offers decent services, but whether it's shoes, or TVs, or food, there are many, many, very viable alternatives. It's very interesting to me that some folks are able to define "monopoly" in their head in a manner that captures Amazon.
  - papln 7y ago
    https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-commerce-market-is-now-49-or-5-of-all-retail-spend/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/13/amazons-share-of-the-us-e-... https://www.theinformation.com/articles/whats-amazons-share-of-retail-depends-who-you-ask https://www.theinformation.com/articles/whats-amazons-share-... login-wall alternative: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/emarketer-cuts-estimate-of-amazon-s-u-s-online-market-share https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-13/emarketer...

linuxftw 7y ago

Amazon's logistics are fraudulent. They'll say "Can't access the building" when they never event attempt to deliver. They're gaming the metrics. Sometimes they'll just outright lie, say the package is delivered, and it will show up in the next 48 hours.

__jal 7y ago
Back when I still used them, this was why I only had things delivered to my office. If I tried to have things delivered to my home, one of two things nearly invariably happened: I'd either waste my time waiting on a delivery only to have it marked "no answer" or "can't access", or they'd leave it on the sidewalk outside my door. (I live in downtown San Francisco. You can guess how well that worked.) But I dropped Prime a while back and stopped using them, and am still happy with that choice.
- Rapzid 7y ago
  Anecdotally I've had both "delivered-not-delivered" and "office-closed-not-closed" happen at work while I'm setting in plain view of the parking lot and office. Haven't had that issue working from home but now everything seems to come UPS or USPS; I haven't had deliveries from Amazon drivers. Not sure why.
brycesbeard 7y ago
My building has a large posted notice stating (to the amazon logistics people) that this area is monitored by and reported to Amazon’s quality dept. seems to have helped w delivery issues they were having.

duahncjak 7y ago

In my experience, Amazon drivers will mark packages as delivered when they haven’t gotten around to delivering yet. When I call Amazon to complain, they tell me to just wait and the package will show up later. I suspect the drivers are given an impossible number of packages to deliver, and there’s a misalignment of incentives where everyone is better off pretending they delivered the package on time. It’s not hard to imagine how this situation would arise when the delivery company is also the merchant, and there’s a command from on high for everyone to get one-day delivery. If the package is marked as delivered, everyone up the chain makes their numbers. @bezos, are you paying attention?

NCWV 7y ago
Or they mark it as an attempted delivery for up to 2 days. Next day shipping is a lie.
michelpp 7y ago
It seems like something they could easily verify: they know the exact location of the truck when the package is marked delivered. If it doesn't correlate with the delivery address then something is up. Another clue would be a bunch of packages marked delivered at the same time that don't have tightly clustered delivery locations. I agree with you about performance metrics being gamed, wouldn't surprise me.
- HankB99 7y ago
  I get pictures of the delivery on my front porch. I wonder if that is to prove to me that the package was delivered or to prove to Amazon that the delivery person delivered. If the photos are taken with a cell phone app/camera they will be tagged with location and time which would be pretty difficult to falsify. I don't always get these pictures so I suspect it is Amazon spot checking their delivery people.
  - irrational 7y ago
    I was getting these for awhile on every single delivery, then they stopped. I wonder why?

antjanus 7y ago

Personal experience has been that Amazon delivery estimates and deliveries are extremely unreliable. A one-day shipping ordeal could turn into a week. A two-day shipping will arrive past its "guaranteed" day for a solid 10-20% of all packages I get. And usually that guaranteed date will suddenly change on the day of. So you're expecting, and nothing gets there. Basically, if you want to have a guaranteed delivery time on a package, do not use Amazon.

interlocutor 7y ago
My experience has been the opposite. Also, Amazon's deliveries have become extremely fast. I ordered an item at 6pm yesterday. Amazon's guaranteed delivery time was 8am this morning... and it was actually delivered at around 6am. I was blown away. The item arrived in around 12 hours, and the delivery was free since I am a Prime member. This is miles ahead of competitors!
ryan_j_naughton 7y ago
I think this must be a consequence of where you live. I live in Santa Monica, and literally 100% of my Amazon packages have arrived on the day Amazon originally said they would. I order probably 1 item from Amazon a week on average and have lived in Santa Monica for 4 years. Thus around 200 items and I literally can't think of a time when the package arrived later than advertised at checkout except one Christmas.

hinkley 7y ago

> The merchant alleges he could offer the same products on Amazon at lower prices and with faster, more reliable delivery if he could handle logistics himself without being penalized for late deliveries. I feel like this is not unexpected. If on-time delivery is non-negotiable for Amazon then that will be built into the price. Anyone who builds anything is trying to get permission to relax one constraint in order to facilitate another.

axaxs 7y ago

People have come to equate Amazon with fast delivery. It's literally the only reason I use them. Often, looking at reviews, delivery time and condition are the biggest factor in bad reviews. To their credit, they usually strike these and put a note that they are responsible for logistics. That said, I don't blame them one bit for enforcing logistics onto sellers...