To me, the key feature of Amazon is the fast delivery with Prime. Do other merchants offer fast delivery often enough?
Regarding credit cards, I started using privacy dot com for virtual, merchant-locked cards. It protects against (rare) card details leaks, but, of course, does not give you any points or cashback.
The local Target and Home Depots all offer same day pickup and delivery. For our house, that's taken 90% of the business away from Amazon.
What's ironic is we still make purchases on Amazon that don't require their fast shipping. We're just conditioned to expect it. I'm thinking TVs, books, project supplies, art, etc.
>What's ironic is we still make purchases on Amazon that don't require their fast shipping. We're just conditioned to expect it. I'm thinking TVs, books, project supplies, art, etc.
Realizing this was what made me quit Prime years ago, and eventually drive down my Amazon purchases to just a handful of times a year. For the most part, there's really not much of a difference if I get a book tomorrow vs. four days from now, or if I get it from Amazon or from the nearby Target. But there's a lot of infrastructure built up to satisfy this admittedly frivolous expectation of fast delivery.
Are there cases when rapid delivery is necessary and valuable? Absolutely. Are those cases the norm? Not in my life, by an overwhelming margin.
I love that I can click "Get it tomorrow" filters, and see the search results visibly change... and not a single one is actually going to be here tomorrow.
The same is true with two-day Prime. Even if you get to the item, all of a sudden, it's gone.
I think their argument is that it's "Prime" shipping (not two-day), so if their eco-get-it-in-a-week-option is available, that's still a variant of Prime.
Do you actually care that much about fast delivery?
My Prime membership ended 3 years ago. These days I just put items in the cart, and place order whenever it reaches $35. If I need an item in a hurry -- which rarely happens -- I go to a store to buy it.
This barely affected me, and I ended up with much fewer impulse purchases.
What's funny though is that the "standard" delivery often takes 5 calendar days. But AliExpress shipments can take as few as 8 calendar days. I ended up spending even less -- well, if the items are manufactured in China, why not just order on AliExpress where you get the same/similar items and pay less.
> well, if the items are manufactured in China, why not just order on AliExpress where you get the same/similar items and pay less.
Yep, I've come to see it as a general rule that, if the item on Amazon is sold under one of those all-caps gibberish brand names, the same exact item is almost always on AliExpress for 30-50% less.
Sometimes I'll even browse Amazon for a product I'm about to buy on AliExpress simply because their reviews are much better than Ali's. Someone wanna write a greasemonkey script to replace the AliExpress reviews with Amazon ones when browsing AliExpress? :)
I really wish there was a non-rush way to order with a guaranteed delivery moment.
Usually I'm not in a huge hurry, and I would happily wait a few days extra if it means workers don't have to pee in a bottle during their night shift. However, a "3-5 days" delivery means there's a pretty decent chance I won't be home and have to go to the other side of town to pick it up - and that's incredibly annoying. So I end up choosing next-day delivery and order it when I know I'll be home the next day.
Why can't I just place an order on Monday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday? Ordering on Friday with a guaranteed delivery on Saturday is already possible, so what's stopping them?
Generally when I order something it's because I need it now and I live at the ass end of nowhere, so it's too inconvenient to find a decent store that sells what I need at a decent price (if that exists at all nearby).
I think the biggest issue is just the uncertainty. I've been ordering at other places lately and it's just ... frustrating that I have no idea if it'll take them a day or three days to process before shipping.
What Prime did for me, which didn't start with but was emphasized by COVID, was that if I needed/wanted many items I could just order them from Amazon with fairly prompt delivery rather than putting them on a shopping list. I'd probably get them quicker than I'd have gotten around to going to the store and probably save at least 30+ minutes into the bargain.
> Do you actually care that much about fast delivery?
I care about knowing when it's going to arrive. I don't necessarily need next day delivery, but if something says 2-3 day delivery that doesn't mean it will arrive in 3 days, it means it will arrive 3 days after it's shipped. Which for some major UK retailers can be 3-5 days. All of a sudden your delivery window is 2-8 days.
Also, much of the stuff I buy off Amazon is the sort of "crap" you make a single trip to the dollar store for - lightbulbs, wood filler, bin liners. They're the sort of things that I kind of need when I need them, or shortly after. My parents are the sort of people who will spend 20 minutes doing a quick round trip to the nearest dollar store/supermarket to get one thing, twice a week. I order it on amazon, and know it'll be there by the weekend for me to do whatever I need to do with it.
This is true. DHL asked me to delay my shipping because of Black Friday chaos and it was a bunch of crap that I didn't really need immediately so I delayed it for a week.
Most of the time, when I order something on Amazon, it's because something broke and I need to fix it, or something is running out, or there's some other time-sensitive need.
I rarely buy big-ticket items, and these can definitely wait.
It's really hard to beat Amazon just because of logistics. Amazon tells me if it'll arrive tomorrow or the day after if I order now and I can be 99% sure that it'll be processed today or tomorrow and it'll arrive as expected.
Anybody else? I have no idea how long it'll take them to process my order, how long it takes for it to be processed by DHL/DPD/GLS and how long the actual delivery will take.
Hm, I have an active order right now. I ordered three things simultaneously on December 15 with a stated delivery date of December 20, also called out by the website as "arrives before Christmas".
One of those things shipped the next day and is currently reported to be arriving tomorrow, which happens to match the stated delivery date.
The other two have yet to ship, but their delivery date has slipped to "December 21 - 24".
Realistically, they look unlikely to arrive before Christmas, and Amazon seems to feel no need to honor their contract.
What's your control group? Would other online retailers fare better or worse than this? Most of the time, other online retailers are worse in my experience.
Amazon is much worse on shipping than pretty much any other online retailer. The norm is that the retailer tells you when the thing will arrive, and it arrives on time. The norm for Amazon is that they advertise a deadline they don't plan to meet, and when they slip that deadline, they alter the shipping speed displayed on your order.
A long time ago I assumed that Amazon removed shipping speed options from their ordering process because, if you itemize shipping separately from the cost of the good, the customer can demand a refund on shipping when you don't provide what you sold.
My current theory is that it's a side effect of deciding they needed to provide shipping in-house instead of buying it from reliable sources. They replaced shipping they could control with shipping they couldn't control, and so they stopped letting you specify the shipping speed you needed. But for some reason they continued advertising shipping speeds they knew they couldn't provide.
It's the complete opposite for me here in Germany based on recent experience ordering from Amazon and other online retailers. It almost always arrives when Amazon says it will. I literally just received a package from an Amazon courier in an Amazon truck, something that I ordered late yesterday.
Update: between my comment above and now, Amazon has marked the other two items shipped, and un-slipped the expected delivery date back to the 20th.
Interestingly, the "shipped" status is matched to a tracking update that says "package left the shipper facility" with no time or location information. All further updates have a location and a timestamp. (Everything is shipped by Amazon.)
It's interesting to me that some people really see fast-delivery as an important feature of e-commerce. In the 20+ years I've been buying stuff online I think maybe less than 5% of the time I have cared about how fast I get something delivered.
Then again I don't have a business that relies on things getting to me fast. I'm just a guy who buys crap online for myself and my family. If I'm getting a book or some electronic doodad it rarely matters to me if I get it tomorrow or in 10 days.
For most Amazon non-business shoppers is getting stuff delivered quickly really an important consideration? I've always assumed that fast shipping, and the importance that Amazon places on it, was at least partly because of their desire for rapid cash flow. That fast shipping was more instituted because of Amazon's accounting needs than because most customers actually needed it. Maybe I'm wrong. It would be nice to hear people's informed opinions on this.
Fast delivery not a daily need for most people, but the dopamine hit is huge, and it makes people buy more stuff. I think an underappreciated factor of amazon's success is how it makes normal people feel like they're the boss, who can slam their fist and get immediate action.
Personally, I feel similarly to you, that most of the time the difference between one day and 1-3 weeks shipping is negligible. However, I think that relies on certain assumptions; I buy most consumable items (food, sponges, soap, etc) in person and almost always have enough to last another month or without buying more. Not everyone does that, some are JITing their daily needs and/or don't have enough free time and energy to make sure everything is always set well in advance (think working single mom, kid needs dress shirt tomorrow for whatever).
Another factor is that, while I travel less than I used to, I do like the schedule deliveries around being at home. Although package theft is not really a factor where I live, I also don't want my mailbox getting overstuffed or a package potentially sitting out in the elements for a week. As a result, I don't lke to order things with an indeterminate delivery if I might have travel coming up. (Which used to be a LOT.)
I think it's less fast shipping, and more reliable shipping.
I ordered a pair of shoes from a major UK high street store earlier this year who advertised 3 day shipping. Fine, I'm going away next weekend. Except, it turns out their guarantee is from dispatch, which is 3-5 days. It was listed in the small print on the order page, but even the order page still had the "Free 3 day shipping" banner on it. Unsurprisingly, they took 5 days to dispatch, and 3 days to deliver. I actually ended up going into the store to buy them, and returning them when I got home.
Amazon, for all it's faults, if they say next day, it's almost certainly going to arrive next day.
> To me, the key feature of Amazon is the fast delivery with Prime
Most websites won't even give you a realistic shipping time (major brands might but the long-tail of online merchants don't). They might say "2-3 day shipping" but that's how long it takes after they ship it, sometimes it can take up a week before they actually ship it. It means than if I buy from anyone but a massive retailer I am rolling the dice on if I'll get something in 2 days or 2+ weeks. Some things can wait 2 weeks but when I'm moving between my house and my parent's house (I visit often) it's really hard to remember "2 weeks before I move locations I need to start directing packages at the other location". The two locations are 3hrs+ apart so I can't just pop over and pick up something sent to the other place.
I was just looking at buying “The Great American Mail Race”, which is sold directly by USPS. They charge $16.45 for the shipping and don’t even provide the shipping speed! It could be anything from next day to next month- it’s not mentioned. And that’s from USPS’s own website! How does the USPS not think to consider sharing the shipment priority with the customer during checkout? Insanity.
Prime is almost always next day, occasionally same day delivery for me, FWIW. B&Q (home depot equivalent in the UK) can occasionally be the same as ordering off of aliexpress.
In the UK, the only place that I've found beats Amazon for delivery is Argos. For some utterly insane reason, they do their own delivery logistics from my nearest store and it can only be a fleet of vans sitting waiting for an online order to come in. I've _regularly_ had orders delivered in about 15 minutes from them (which is about how long it takes to drive to the nearest store).
I don't dislike typing in my credit card numbers because I'm worried about the number leaking (This is the US, I hand my card to strangers a half dozen times per week), I dislike it because I have to go find my wallet and fill out a long form. Apple Pay is nice because I can slap one button on the top right of my keyboard.
Except basically none of them store the CVV and so even if I use them, I still have to go get my wallet. And many cannot fill out the varying expiration date fields correctly.
1Password fills out CVV. I sometimes have problems with zip code and state drop downs, or with weird validation that prevents filling. I just copy and paste CVV from 1Password. Better than typing out the number.
There is on browser thought. It doesn’t work on mobile so I usually wait until at computer which is better anyway.
The speed is nice, but for me it's more about the reliability. For example, a few years ago when my router broke I decided to try something else (Newegg I think) and after several weeks it just never arrived and I got a refund. Found the exact same model on Amazon and it arrived two or three days later, without Prime and without issues.
I just don't ever have the problems with Amazon that people complain about online.
For the most part these days, Amazon seems like a fast way to ship goods from Alibaba in the one to two day time frame.
For a lot of other stuff, it feels like they've lost their edge on price and shipping.
Often my main reason for using Amazon is that it reduces the friction associated with buying for more retailers. For example worrying about data breaches, being put on spam email lists, etc.
For me, the fast shipping is at a point where more reliability would be better than the current speed of delivery. If it's on time, I'd prefer to get a package in two days than have it delivered at 10pm in one. If it's behind the deadline, I'd prefer a more realistic deadline than emails about slipping on the schedule.
Regarding credit cards, I started using privacy dot com for virtual, merchant-locked cards. It protects against (rare) card details leaks, but, of course, does not give you any points or cashback.