On the other hand, I ordered something from bestbuy with their normal free shipping and it showed up on my doorstep literally the day after.

I have had $10 and $5 credits given to me when this happens and I encourage everyone else to. Amazon needs to support the benefits they grant customers for prime.

What's especially annoying is that you have to pro-actively reach out to them. This isn't customer-obsessed.

Login and grab orders that are shipped. Compare delivery date (x). See if it changes or matches the estimate at time of order(y). If I package is deemed late create a message containing x and y and order number. Open chat support paste message. Might have to throw some additional canned responses but it seems pretty easy.

Paribus contacts customer service to Amazon on your behalf for missed packages. Literally they open a ticket with amazon and complain.[0]

[0]: https://paribus.co/support/topics/purchases-and-claims/274

I'll help test. :)

It's been a long while since they missed a prime delivery date for me, but the couple of times they did, they credited my account automatically without my involvement (other than reading their email notification). Maybe I just got lucky?

Item bought on Monday, with expected -delivery- Wednesday. Late Monday status said "Package has left seller facility and is in transit to carrier".

It's Friday morning now, no package, and status is still "in transit to carrier".

I argued that "Shipped" means the carrier has it. Not that it may or may not be sitting in a corner of a truck for the last week forgotten or unnoticed.

We've been Prime customers for years, but we're getting incredibly frustrated that we're paying for an annual subscription and being promised two day shipping - but consistently missing.

At this point, I'm starting to look back to smaller sites that offer more traditional 4-7 day shipping. They might still be slower than Amazon (which is about a 3.5 day average for us), but at least they're never missing their delivery window.

They started charging my items to other credit cards associated with my account (added in the past to make one-off purchases for relatives or friends.) To prevent this happening again, I deleted every card from my account except my one current personal card.

Despite that, a few weeks later they charged a random subset of my holiday shopping to my mothers credit card. Now, we have an excellent relationship, but you can imagine even the best of relationships has a wtf moment when a thousand dollars of spending randomly appears on their account without so much as a by-your-leave.

I called amazon to complain, and their response was just, “well, you got the items you ordered, didn’t you?”

They were contemptuously baffled as to why this was at all a problem.

I yelled at them until they refunded my prime membership and closed my account.

1. Buyer places order, order goes into pending for anywhere from minutes to days

2. While order is pending, units of inventory are moved to another fulfillment center

3. Once the units arrive, are received and checked-in, the order goes live

4. The customer receives their order two days later

I suspect this happens 1. for items less often purchased which have little historical data to rely on, and 2. items which have been freshly received and haven't yet been distributed across the US.

I am a very small time Amazon 3p seller, so I might be able to answer some questions you have about Amazon or FBA.

IMHO prime is worth it even if I have to spend a few minutes on chat to get it extended by 50%. What is truly frustrating is their "guarantee" that isn't a guarantee.

This lack of transparency and continual missing of their promises erodes my trust in them. Most of the time it's fine - whatever - I don't need those AA batteries on a Sunday....

But the fact that they guaranteed that they would be there, didn't tell me they'd be late, and didn't proactively offer anything to back up their guarantee is super shady. Either don't guarantee a date, or proactively offer recourse when you don't meet your own self-imposed guarantees.

This is a lot less true than it used to be. I had to buy a few things from other sites recently (not carried on Amazon, or the sort of thing that attracts counterfeits or such shenanigans) and was surprised to discover how much other places have caught up in the shipping game.

Even a small-volume niche-market foreign company like B&W shipped me a pair of headphones with free two-day shipping recently.

Avoiding Amazon has actually been easier than I expected and if anything I’ve found purchasing more convenient overall.

It's getting to the point I'm about to cancel - they are late more often than not, and customer service responses are really poor.

It may be worth noting that I spend roughly one order of magnitude more than their average prime customer annually (work equipment).

I have great experiences with USPS, UPS, and Fedex. Amazon Logistics has been terrible, and I suspect it's because of its GPS-driven gig-economy implementation.

Agreed, and specifically it's the yield they expect from their drivers. AMZL expects nearly double the deliveries from its drivers than UPS does. UPS has been doing this for decades across the globe, I would bet they've squeezed just about every last bit of efficiency out of their routes and process... so AMZL's expectations are outrageous, which leads to packages thrown from cars, packages found in ditches, etc. The drivers can't possibly complete their deliveries. The drivers are unhappy, the customers are unhappy and soon Amazon will be unhappy if they don't figure this out.

Yeah, AMZL's awfulness opened my eyes to how uncompetitive Amazon's prices have become. The one-two punch of that broke my Amazon-first shopping habit.

It takes a little more time now, but I do a quick google price search before buying anything on amazon. Sometimes, if it's only a small difference, then it's worth the frictionless experience of buying through amazon, but as I create accounts on more and more sites, the frictional difference is becoming marginal.

It stinks a bit of modern employers desires to ignore the fact that their employees are human beings. I expect any day now to hear of a big company tearing out all the bathrooms in their offices and cancelling lunch hours because it will 'improve efficiency.' If you don't want to deal with the basic truths of human employees, then you don't belong in business, period.

Has that changed in recent years?

To be fair, Amazon is fair at handling Customer Service complaints. I ordered a package with a scheduled 2 hour delivery window ({Fresh, Now}) and it came 2 hours late. The package needed a signature so I was at the delivery site for a total of six hours. My $100-$150 package expense was credited to my account after a short call to customer service.

Isn't the answer obvious? Make the Amazon Logistics team compete on an even footing with UPS, USPS, and FedEx. If the retail team has process for one of its customers to blackball UPS because it had a bad experience with it, then they should have the same process to blackball Amazon Logistics. (I'm 'should' here to mean that would comport with the SOA style business structure, not to make an ultimate judgment on whether it is a good model for a business overall.)

That's what it takes. IIRC, they'll only consider deprioritizing AMZL if you've had 3 misdeliveries (by their reckoning) in the last 6 months. I haven't had the time to basically go to war with them to get them to stop, I just shifted my shopping habits instead.

I'm in Canada, so it may be US only. I do know you can force them to use Canada Post if you enter a PO Box.

Also, amazon's delivery service has been excellent here, chiefly because they don't require signatures. Using any other courier means it often goes to some depot in the suburbs, which is a terrible policy for urban Montreal.

I know, but the other carriers are already good, and I'm not super interested in being the guinea pig to train Amazon's. They're just brain-dead in so many different ways:

1) I'm not a dispatcher, I don't want to give directions to a driver or talk him to my address. That's Amazon's job.

2) I'm not Amazon's cartographer either, and it was super annoying to have to talk a phone rep through dropping a map pin on my place.

3) Every other carrier seems to be able to read the sign with delivery instructions at my door, why not Amazon? They ignore it so often I got tired of calling and complaining about that.

4) They should leave door-notes when there's a problem like every other carrier.

A lot of the stuff they need to improve on is simple stuff they could have easily learned by looking at the customer experience of their competitors, so I'm not really willing to cut them much slack. Especially since they force their carrier on me rather than giving me options.

The more I read the comments the more I realize the complaints about delivery services really hit "corner cases" insanely fast. Like I would be livid if a driver didn't just leave a package at my door/driveway. I got it delivered because I don't want to deal with the hassle - if it gets stolen that's simply a cost of doing business. But I have friends who would be just as livid in the opposite direction.

I never would have considered someone cares about a delivery person walking over their lawn to drop a package off.

I think we're going to see more and more of these pain points as we migrate from "dedicated delivery guy you become friends with who knows all the idiosyncrasies of his customers" to "random dude in a Prius who had a couple hours to spare". And I'm completely convinced the latter is coming to the major delivery companies if they want to stay competitive - Fedex Ground is only a hop skip and a jump away from that already.

I imagine what's old will become new again as we re-invent the wheel for a solved problem of 100's of years. The mailbox. We'll simply see a standardized set of shipping lockers be available for both home install and shared use. I imagine within 15 years delivery services will refuse to deliver to anything but such a device. Much like how we saw the evolution of mail service in the US - went from "bob's farm in Springville, MA" to basic numbers, to streets, to zip codes, to requiring standardized mailboxes if you are to get delivery.

Then I moved to another apartment in another town and I preferred USPS because they had keys to leave the package in basically a PO box in the entryway that was meant for packages. UPS left it at the leasing office which meant I had to walk a few blocks to get it and a few blocks back. FedEx would somehow get into the building and leave it sitting in front of my door, which is super not cool with an iPhone-sized package that says "T-Mobile" on the side.

Now that I have a house and I work from home, I prefer USPS because they come at 9am, whereas FedEx comes around noon and UPS isn't here until after 5pm. Even though USPS "tramples" my lawn, they're going to do that anyway to deliver mail, and I'd rather get my package earlier. Plus UPS and FedEx knock on the door which makes my dogs bark when I might be on a call with a client.

But even then, my postman would sometimes walk through my gate into my backyard and leave packages at the back door (I guess to keep them from being stolen?), which stopped pretty quick when he walked through the closed gate and came face to face with my very surprised and scared dogs. Don't ignore a "beware of dog" sign just because you didn't see the dog before you opened the gate. Luckily he just got cornered and not bitten.

Delivering packages with high customer satisfaction is not as easy as it sounds.

I never would have considered that anyone in the US would fail to recognize the social conventions about the difference between landscaping and walkways and the acceptable uses of each. In places where people have lawns in the first place, they tend to prefer that people not noticeably walk on them (many don't care about the walking so much as any visible sign after the fact.)

But lawns are largely decorative, which is why people with lawns also tend to have more durable (e.g., concrete) walkways connecting the front entrance of the home to the sidewalk (if present) or curb.

Remember, the last mile cost for you is basically the cost from their last hop to you + the carrying your package to all the other stops. If the delivery guy is going to visit several houses on your street that's basically a few hundred feet on average.

That will be a sad day.

If they're wearing boots, or you have xeriscape, they can damage the irrigation system just an inch or two under the surface.

Actually feel bad for delivery guys who have to go to every single adress when its much more efficient to collect stuff at a central point. And how many people are not at home during delivery hours?

Emailing jeff@ tends to get you directly to the best and brightest of Amazons support team, so it's a good option too (albeit a bit slower).

Doesn't work for Amazon Logistics. I tried a couple times a few months ago, and my ticket kept getting denied. Deprioitizing AMZL_US appears to be an entirely different business process than other carriers, as the rep I spoke to didn't know how to do it at first.

They might not deny your request if you claim your home is a prison, but didn't try that route.

Pure genius. I think I could believable get away with saying my house is a 1/2 way house for people getting out of prison. And there are stresses on the delivery driver that should only fall on a full time professional.

IIRC, the three deprioritization justifications the rep had were:

1. Prison, 2. Military Base, 3. Three failed deliveries over the last 6 months.

I assume it's just a prison policy thing. I know no one besides USPS can deliver to AFO/FPO address (which are military I think), so maybe the same's true for prisons.

I bet this is Amazon's issue due to their gig-employment model. If they're employing randos from the internet, it's unlikely that any military base has approved any of them as drivers.

[1]: https://www.recode.net/2016/6/1/11826718/jeff-bezos-amazon-f...

The Amazon delivery guys are way worse. I never know when something is coming, even if it says out for delivery I might not get it for days. Every time I need something for a trip that I buy 3 business days early, with 2 day prime shipping, I don't get it before I have to leave.

I gave up trying to complain, you could review the seller, but not the delivery service. Hopefully they have changed that. I used to only shop on Amazon for pretty much everything. Now I decide if I should get it from a local store instead. When I need something that is time sensitive, I definitely get it from a brick and mortar store.

The worst is that while UPS will leave the packages on my doorstep (and knock on the door), the off-brand Amazon delivery guys tend to leave the package in front of my garage door because it is closer. One of these days I'm going to drive over something expensive by accident.

FedEx, USPS, UPS - they all manage to get into my building and deliver my packages. Sometimes they even go all the way up to my door.

I've asked Amazon to stop trying to send packages via their couriers, because they don't even seem to bother trying to get in before giving up and leaving.

I don't know if it's a laziness thing or if they're under some sort of horrible time crunch to deliver every single one of these packages (not sure if they get a bonus for more packages delivered or something), but Amazon couriers REALLY suck.

Contract workers with unreasonable expectations dictated by management.

But one time, I got a "delivered" notification but couldn't find it, and none of my neighbors brought it in. I finally found it after digging into the "delivered" order information and finding a picture they sent of my package behind a bush, up against the wall of my building, completely hidden. I thought it might just be a one-off thing, but I honestly wish they would always do this, so long as they tell me where it is. I'd rather have to play hide-and-seek than have to be home all day to get a delivery.

That's a thing? I've had tons of large packages delivered via USPS and have never had them hold something for being too big. Are you in an apt complex that doesn't have a package pickup area?

You would assume the weight of the customers monitor would tell any reasonable delivery driver not to drop the package 6 feet, regardless of what the box says.

On the subject of delivery notifications, I had a parcel "delivered to a receptionist" last week, despite it being a residential house (because my sister opened the door).

Amazon so far actually delivers the package... when they don't contract it out to DHL.

My only bugbear is that the I seem to always be one of the last stops for the guy who does our area so deliveries are always around 7 pm.

So it arrives on the day it was originally expected. Difference is, now I'm irritated because I've had to change my plans several times.

I've noticed now, though, it's spread to much more suburban areas where they're way worse. Delivering to an apartment complex in LA with a slightly-hidden package area seems much easier for them than delivering to a bunch of individual suburban houses - packages tossed out the car, photographed laying their on the sidewalk - and I wasn't surprised based on the delivery photos they took when the packages to my parents got stolen. :|

Now I just don't order things from them for my parents. Works for me, ordering to large buildings for work or home, but not to send to addresses I'm not familiar with. So there goes all my gift-buying business.

They're still fast, for me, at least, though. If that goes away...

Another part of my personal mitigation has been that I order less from regular Amazon though, now, and more from Prime Now. Same day in a two hour window for $5 ("suggested tip"), and seems like it's not prone to the same stock intermingling stuff because they don't have third party sellers on Prime Now and they don't have the same inventory.

I’d imagine they are thinking that bad shipping is better than no shipping and try to improve from there.

Bad delivery people are like some kind of spatial plague. Your neighborhood might be so afflicted, or it might have good people, with the occasional hiccup due to a substitute delivery worker.

Sometimes, it's the USPS that has the bozos, but UPS is good. Sometimes, it's also UPS.

This is now changing. Right now amazon has hundreds of MBA Product Managers crunching data to determine how much they can screw up in certain areas with little to no impact on customer happiness or churn (on a macro level.)

This was quite helpful couple of times when the package arrived ahead of time and i was not available to sign the package. and this can be set even after the package is shipped.

I'm sure some of them are, but—for the most part—I think Amazon and their subcontractors have absurd expectations about their drivers' performance, as described in this lawsuit:

https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/12/21/25647480/deliver...