I’ve had this happen a number of times now - when shopping, Amazon will tell you “order in the next 3 hrs and 23 minutes and this will arrive by Thursday”…then you get the email confirmation “Your item has shipped and it now says it will be delivered on Friday or even worse Saturday”.
I finally had it and used their customer service to call me at my house and I spoke with a rep who was all apologetic and said he would look into it and it would only take a few minutes.
25 minutes later I hung up. There is only so much waiting I can do.
So I had their support call me again and I immediately asked for a manager. Who then professed that he needed my account information - name, email and asked for my mailing address! I asked him how he needs all this SINCE I HAD AMAZON CALL ME WHILE LOGGED INTO MY ACCOUNT.
I am so pissed off at them right now. I have a feeling there really is no good customer support answer to this predicament, but I’m pissed off at this bait & switch on delivery dates I’ve caught it at now.
The bait & switch? Yes. Wondering why it didn’t arrive on day x and having customer service tell me it was my fault as the confirnation email clearly said x+1… Yes.
I’m just more wary now when I see that green text claiming ‘order in the next seconds…’
Never had anything but fantastic experiences with Amazon’s customer service. In my last 20-25 orders, the one where I didn’t get my item on the delivery day promised when I put it in my cart, I called and the rep overnighted it.
I have sort of have had that problem. When I order, it will say order now and get it by Wednesday. I order it, and then tracking (usually USPS nowadays) shows the item delivering Thursday or doesn’t have an expected date. The item still always shows up on the Wednesday Amazon said it would, sometimes even a day early if its at the Amazon warehouse close by.
I just don’t worry about it. 99% of the time items are on time with what Amazon says, usually when they are late its because the carrier did something funny (saying I wasn’t home to deliver when I was home all day).
And that said, Amazon has never let me down when I called them. Always go above and beyond to make sure I am happy.
That’s always been my experience too. Things arrive when stated 99% of the time. And the very few times I’ve had to speak to Amazon support, they seemed trained to really try and make sure you are happy and will do everything they can to achieve it.
I know someone who does Amazon support and he says that that is exactly the case: you are graded on customer satisfaction (whether or not the customer is at all reasonable). In particular, when they ask “did this help? y/n”, if you say “n”, it reflects badly on the support agent even if there was nothing they could reasonably have done about it. So these days, I click “y” (unless it really was a bad agent) and put any further issue I had in comments. Often they’ll follow up on that!
Looks like 100 orders for me in the past year and I think I had one item come late. It was something I ordered next day shipping, and for some reason it just sat in processing for a few days. I called up CS, and they waived my original next day shipping charges and extended my prime account by two months.
Mostly I’ve been flabbergasted that I can sometimes order something at like 9 PM via regular Prime shipping and have it show up the next day. That’s some serious time-and-space chicanery.
All that said, I do sorta’ feel like their “Order soon. Only 3 left” is maybe not being entirely truthful.
Yes, I just don’t worry about it. There has been a long standing discrepancy between when amazon.com says something will show up and when their emails & tracking say it will come. However I almost, like 95%+ of the time, get the package when the web site first says I will.
I think they are just taking advantage of knowing when the shipping companies will deliver better than they do, probably exploiting rates and such. So it makes sense that for some people and areas it will just screw up. If I lived in one of those areas… I probably wouldn’t have prime.
Yes, I have had that happen on occasion. A few times I’ve bothered with customer support to get a shipping refund. But they usually make you jump through hoops and tell you that the green text doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed.
OTOH I’ve noticed Amazon shipping getting faster & faster in general. With Prime we often see it a day before they expect.
So overal no complaints. Guessing if you don’t have Prime the experience will be less optimal though.
What impresses me about Amazon’s customer service is the amount of trust they place in their reps. I know that a lot of them work from their own homes through some kind of centralized software platform that Amazon runs. Yet despite that sort of lack of centralized supervision, the reps seem to be given a great deal of empowerment, with the central goal making the customer happy.
For a company that has carved out as huge a market niche as Amazon has, that focus on customer service is pretty amazing.
I order a lot from Amazon, and in the last year or so, late deliveries have become increasingly common - probably 10-15% of my orders. I usually don’t bother to complain, since most of the time, I didn’t actually need it to come on time, but I wonder if my failure to be a pain in the ass is somehow making it worse.
Order from there almost constantly. Deliveries are often early. Maybe twice I’ve had something come in late, including one time a situation like the OP described. I advise double checking the confirmation info to see if the expected arrival has changed, if something is important. You can always cancel immediately and find a different seller.
What’s even more impressive is their Prime Now. I can order something and have it arrive as early as 2-3 hours later. You can even track the drivers location. Of course, you pay for it, but the tip is optional (I always pay it).
I wonder if you live in a place that’s difficult to deliver to? I’ve placed three hundred or so orders with Amazon at this point and I can’t recall ever getting a package late. About a quarter of the time (est.) I get the package the next day, even though Prime only guarantees two-day delivery.
Admittedly, I live in California and we have distribution centers out the yin-yang, so most stuff doesn’t have that far to come. But even when they have to ship it all the way from KY, I don’t think I’ve ever had to wait.
I agree with the folks citing location as the possible issue. Maybe the OP lives in an area not easily serviced by an Amazon distribution center? We have an Amazon warehouse not too far outside of town (I live in Cincinnati, Ohio), and 100% of the time things I order that are “fulfilled/shipped by Amazon” end up coming exactly on time (2-day Prime) or even a day early (no rush shipping). I can even choose to pick up the item the same day from the Amazon Store at University of Cincinnati (I never have, but it’s cool that I can!). Stuff I order from third-party vendors using Amazon as a platform has been a mixed bag. Most of it arrives when they say it will, sometimes a day or two late, but that’s totally not Amazon’s problem in my opinion.
When I have had to use Amazon customer service to resolve an issue (I can count on one hand the number of issues I’ve had in over a decade), they have been exemplary.
As many have stated here, I don’t keep a running tab on how often this occurs as time is usually not important. I’m left wondering if I have to screenshot every time I buy something and compare it to the shipment details, which seems like overkill, to understand how often this is occurring.
What I can say is that for the times I needed an item quickly - and was counting on it, I’ve been disappointed several times in the past few months. I live in the burbs of Portland, OR, so I’m not out in the boonies.
And I’ve had good experience with Amazon customer support in the past - and decided to push it this time because of the frequency, and was totally flabbergasted by the poor support not only initially but by the supervisor when I tried to escalate.
This has happened to me four times in the past couple of months. Each time it involved a larger item that neither UPS/Ontrac nor I wanted to have sitting unguarded out on my front porch. In every case, I selected shipping options to minimize the risks, but delays would occur and there’d then be discrepancies between what the Order Status said and what the tracking info said. In two cases, items were marked as delivered when, in fact, they were just delayed somehow.
Each time, Amazon gave me token credits and apologized after I complained, but this didn’t do much to compensate for missed work time or the stress of not knowing where the hell my item actually was or when it would actually arrive. Today, this just wasn’t enough. A TV that’s supposed to arrive tomorrow – for which I paid $20 extra in shipping – may actually arrive on Saturday, or on Sunday, or on Monday. I can call UPS up and ask them to just leave it on my porch (they don’t like to do that unless specifically asked), but that means risking leaving it there for a time while I try to scramble and head home to get the package off the porch.
I complained bitterly and Amazon is going to refund me 20% of the order cost, plus (I assume) the shipping fee if the TV is in fact late. I thanked the rep, and said this was a good start, but that they need to fix their shit (not in those words).
Has anyone done anything more about issues like this? I’m not willing to stop buying from Amazon, but I want to do a little more to ensure they hear my feedback, this time. Probably going to fill out a feedback form at some point, for what it’s worth. I’m assuming it’s because they can’t really control sellers who don’t meet their commitments and fail to kick off the shipment on time.
Odds are good it’s out of their hands. Unless there’s a delay in handing over the item to the shipping company, everything past that point is the shipping company’s fuckup. And from the literally hundreds of problems I’ve had with UPS especially, for which UPS has seen literally zero consequence because I can’t choose to work with a different carrier, I would lay good money on it being their fault.
There’s a reason Amazon is starting to do more of their own delivery.
