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.
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.
It's sort of like that bank transaction-ordering scandal from a few years ago, where banks ordered transactions unintuitively to maximize overdraft penalties.
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
And with Amazon's low prices and 5% cashback I'm pretty sure even if they started charging for shipping that it would be still cheaper than anywhere else ...
What amazon says on their main page is very disconnected from reality. What it says on checkout is what matters.
When I buy stuff from Amazon, they have a little checkbox on the side that says "only items that ship to Iceland". Never the less, when I get to the checkout 90% of the stuff they show won't ship to Iceland.
I suspect (because I have a similar challenge in our own ecommerce system) that the model underlying the representation of products has at least one additional layer of specificity, that's not directly revealed to the user. Consider that you're looking at Products, but what they're really manipulating are products as sourced from a particular supplier.
Each of those "supplier-items" has its own price (because with Amazon marketplace, the supplier gets to set their own), as well as its own potential shipping destinations.
When you project that into search results as a list of Products, what you wind up with is a list of "Products for which there's at least one supplier willing to ship to Iceland". And the sorting is something like "order by lowest price offered by all suppliers". When you click on that product to go to Product Details, and then just click "Add to Cart", they've lost the thread of "I need to select a supplier of this product that will ship to Iceland".
There's no doubt that's the case, but it also isn't that big a problem to solve (at least for amazon, your mileage may vary, possibly my commiserations depending on how good/bad your system is to work on).
I know this because of the "Does amazon ship to...?" plugin, which can iterate over every seller instance of a specific item and return it's eligibility for shipping to your country, along with an independent shipping price and item price. It can process two dozen instances in about a second or two via whatever API it uses.
Considering this is possible and frankly not all that difficult, I'm placing the blame for amazon not using a bit of JS-foo to run this form of processing server side (where it will be way faster) and deliver results to my browser asynchronously as they are finished squarely at the feet of amazons marketing department. This has the stink of "if we show it to them anyway, maybe they'll buy it and send it via a shipping service" all over it.
....man I love free shipping on Amazon... and also having a selection of product to choose from :)
I hope they don't up the UK limit as well, that would suck. I buy something from Amazon literally every week.
You're welcome to slowly turn this place into a dustbowl by bitching at people for having conversations if that's what you enjoy doing in a community, don't let me stop you, but let me remind you of this:
You weren't involved in the conversation, and your comment history is nothing but wandering around sticking your nose in robust discussion and whining that people aren't talking to each other via the predefined rules that you like, as if human conversation is based on your two favorite links. You're not contributing here, and there's not a single post in the last several pages of your comments that implies you care about, understand or have an opinion on anything posted here, so please shush and let the rest of us get on with our sharing.
edit: http://joshldavis.com/2014/10/03/heavy-handed-hackernews/
Looks like you've been doing this for at least 16 months, congrats or something?
Please follow the rules from now on. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
100% of the reason I use Amazon is fast and consistent shipping. That is the entire value for me.
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.
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.