Amazon has done what many others dream of: I basically forget that I'm paying for Prime every year. And I perceive that it gives me enough value that I don't mind, but I've never actually checked how many orders I place each year vs. the delivery cost for them if I didn't have Prime.
By comparison, Google sends me an e-mail every month reminding me how much I'm paying for Google Play Music. I don't mind it, but I wonder if it affects their retention rates to do that.
I actually quit it, because most of the times I'm perfectly fine waiting extra time, and am ok with holding certain items in my cart until I accumulate $25 to get a free shipping.
They seem to artificially add delays to processing to discourage me, but I don't really order anything that I need immediately.
Not having prime also prevents me from impulse buying.
Also, majority of things that you purchase on regular basis, such as cleaning supplies, vitamins etc are often much cheaper in local store and are less likely to be knock offs.
I'd say just order from jet. Can often find the same things for same price or cheaper - especially with coupons. I'm letting my prime expire this month because I got tired of all the low quality junk spamming the search results and not being able to easily tell whats the real product. The other day was trying to find a ge zwave switch and the same one is listed multiple times with prime shipping at different prices all sold by amazon. So like, which one is the real, most current one? Just spent the extra couple bucks and bought it at home depot instead.
All those other extras they throw in are just junk to me. Apart from The Grand Tour there's nothing on prime video I care about, have never used their music much because the interface is an absolute joke (same with video).
Prime Now is nice but for some reason my area doesn't get restaurants despite being in the Portland Metro.
So just looking at shipping costs, I think I've at best broken even. Rarely get things in two days anyways. Usually takes them 3 days.
Feels like artificial, because they give a week time range and they ship it around the end of that range. The actual shipping then takes about 1-2 days. If they use their own shipping, which they do on Sundays then the product is delivered on the same day they shipped.
Right, but I'm saying the processing (picking and packing process that occurs at the warehouse) before shipping is not first-ordered, first-picked. They've developed a prioritization process for picking which take items ordered _later_ via prime and picks them first. I suppose you could call that "artificial" delays but that's what I think is happening.
I have trouble understanding what you're saying here:
> They've developed a prioritization process for picking which take items ordered _later_ via prime and picks them first.
What I meant to say is that with prime the order is shipped within hours, when without it takes days and it seems to be calculated toward the end of of the time range, but still so it will arrive before the deadline.
Actually any items that are not fulfilled by Amazon are delivered much faster when you don't have prime. When you do it is the reverse, which feels suspicious.
Yes, there's no way for me to completely prove, but statistically without prime items arrive at the later date of the spectrum given, but they also never late than the date given. This could be explained that when deadline approaches they start treating my order as if it was higher priority, but then that would still prove my point.
UPS does weird things with their ground orders. I went to Purdue (West Lafayette, IN). Many packages would ship from Louisville, and for UPS those would go through Indianapolis (about 90 minute drive from West Lafayette). If I shipped UPS ground, my packages would consistently sit in Indianapolis for 2-3 days. While it's possible that their truck was just always full, it was so consistent it felt to me like they were intentionally delaying it.
If you don't mind waiting longer and have Prime, they often offer a "refund" credit. I currently have $5 in digital credits for items I didn't mind waiting a week for on Prime.
Only downside is that the incentive rotates and some of them are simply terrible (prime pantry, women's fashion, and home services for example).
In my experience, that "credit" is really just a promotion for some other service they're pushing. Now all the ones I could get are for prime pantry, which I'm never going to use.
The problem I have with that is that the delivery time often goes past the week mark. If I'm going to wait over a week to receive the item I might as well just order from somewhere like banggood which also has free shipping and is usually a dollar or 2 cheaper. I don't really care about Amazon pantry or free digital downloads so that incentive doesn't provide any value to me.
a lot of incentives are terrible, and you can't use two of them on the same order. If I could delay 2 or 3 orders and then get a free digital movie by stacking the credits, I'd do it a lot more often.
Depending on your life situation and where you live, not having to go to the store for those regular purchases is a huge deal.
I love Amazon subscriptions. Never having to think about buying all those staples, and just having them show up at the right time every month is worth a little extra money, which is at least partially offset by the subscription discounts.
That's actually egregious. I was trialing the Amazon cloud service and it rolled over to a 60$ charge without any notification. And when it renewed a 2nd year, it also didn't send a notification.
The Google method of sending a yearly notification is the idiomatic and proper way of selling a service. The Amazon way is the scumbag way because that's how they charge you without you knowing.
I had felt the same for the past 10 years (wow!). But the past year I have been thinking about unsubscribing because I end up with so much knock off crap that breaks OR the item I order gets delayed for a month before the seller cancels the order (bc the item was likely stuck in China - yet the shipping estimate was originally 2days).
Anyway, have been debating cancelling the last several months and this headline was the impetus I needed.
By comparison, Google sends me an e-mail every month reminding me how much I'm paying for Google Play Music. I don't mind it, but I wonder if it affects their retention rates to do that.