My online bookseller of choice is “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/ rather than Amazon; unlike its larger competitor, it’s union friendly. But sometimes they don’t stock something and Amazon does. Here’s my beef: when Amazon claims that something is “usually available in 24 hours,” my experience is that three times out of four it isn’t. On average, I’d guesstimate that it takes 2-3 days for Amazon to ship something that is supposed to be available immediately. Is this just persistent bad luck on my part? Or do others have similar experiences?
{ 37 comments }
PanJack 02.09.06 at 8:45 pm
And when they say something has “shipped” most of the time it doesn’t seem to actually go anywhere for 2 more days.
Tyrone Slothrop 02.09.06 at 8:50 pm
I’m way to cheap to pay for Amazon to ship things to me rapidly, so I just expect to wait.
Greg 02.09.06 at 8:53 pm
My impression is that Amazon got substantially worse after they gave that offer of 70 something dollars a year, for which you in return get one day shipping on all items. This is of course nothing but a mere correlation….
Randy Paul 02.09.06 at 8:58 pm
You might want to try Barnes and Noble.com They’re really relaible.
rd 02.09.06 at 9:01 pm
I’d say the “usually 24 hours” turns into a couple of days about 1/3 of the time for me. Generally its the more obscure academic monographs, so if you’re only shopping there for things Powell’s doesn’t have you’re probably ordering a disproportinate amount of their “trouble” items.
John Emerson 02.09.06 at 9:14 pm
Amazon lists stuff that isn’t even in print yet, or which is not in stock anywhere. I waited 3 months for something once before I figured that out.
jen r 02.09.06 at 9:28 pm
john,
Yes, I had to do a double-take recently when ordering a gift. During checkout, I noticed that the item “usually ships in 2 to 3 months”.
vivian 02.09.06 at 9:50 pm
Most orders, no trouble, though occasionally (5-10% of the time maybe?) I get something backordered. If something is in stock at my favorite local bookstore (Harvard Bookstore, which also has a web store) then I get it there. Amazon’s been great for books, household stuff, my laptop arrived ahead of schedule and the spouse has kitted out the basement with shop tools, only one of which was backordered. Commenter 5 is probably right.
johnsu01 02.09.06 at 10:28 pm
It’s not bad luck. IIRC, super saver shipping at one point only referred to the shipping method used. But now it clearly also refers to how long they wait before shipping the item. If you pay more for shipping, the shipping date gets closer. On the other hand, I have had some experiences in the last few months where the item has shipped long before the expected shipping date.
Kathleen 02.09.06 at 11:14 pm
When I was pregnant with my first and only child, I ordered about a dozen books on parenting from Amazon. It took weeks for most of them to arrive. I would get periodic emails from them saying there had been a delay in my shipment. But, those same titles were still being advertised on the Amazon website as usually available in 24 hours.
asg 02.09.06 at 11:36 pm
This is odd; I have been a compulsive Amazon customer for about 10 years now, and I can count on one hand the number of times shipping has been delayed in the way Henry describes.
dr ngo 02.10.06 at 1:01 am
I tried sending my UK relatives Christmas gifts from Amazon.co.uk (whereas I use Amazon.com for my US purchases).
Half of them have still not been sent, having twice been delayed an additional “4-6 weeks” beyond the promised dates. (And yes, I did check those dates originally.) No explanation, no excuse, no offer of refund.
Happy Easter, Family!
(And sc**w you, Amazon.co.uk)
yonray 02.10.06 at 3:23 am
Fancy that – like #11 I use Amazon UK for my family there, and in spite of occasionally straying from Dan Brown and the like have never had problems. #10 and I, then, must be on some secret “whitelist”?
yonray 02.10.06 at 3:25 am
Oh – for 10 read 11 and for 11, 12. It’s the CT queue-jumping phenomenon again
Kenny Easwaran 02.10.06 at 4:10 am
I’ve also generally had no trouble. I ordered Knowledge and its Limits on the free shipping level, and I had it within three days, despite being warned to take longer than that for shipping alone, on top of the wait. Meanwhile, my unfortunate roommate ordered it on some other site and still hasn’t received it a week or so later.
But like tyrone slothrop, in 2 above, I generally just go for the cheapest shipping option, and just get pleasantly surprised some day the following week when there’s a book on my doorstop that I forgot that I ordered.
des von bladet 02.10.06 at 7:19 am
I am very used to Amazon’s “usually”s de-usualising themselves spontaneously. “Usually” it comes with a 1984ing of the usuality attributed by the product’s page, but I am a bear of very little patience and wouldn’t have ordered it if it hadn’t promised that my gratification would be negligibly deferred.
William Goodwin 02.10.06 at 8:16 am
There have been a couple of rare exceptions, but my typical Amazon experience is that I order a book or DVD today, and (if it says it ships within 24 hours), the thing is on my doorstep either tomorrow or the day after that. I’m an Amazon Prime customer now, and the “two-day delivery” promise usually means they get it to me in one day. Of course, I live in a major city, which may make a huge difference.
auderey 02.10.06 at 8:48 am
I recently got a “free trial” on Amazon Prime, and my shipping experiences with them changed dramatically – as william in #17, “2-day” usually means I have it the very next day, even when I order in the middle or afternoon of the day. But I’m not willing to fork out the $70 when my trial runs out, either.
otto 02.10.06 at 9:06 am
In rural New England, all my local bookseller will provide is guides to maple syrup and snowshoeing. I have no idea how anyone survived in a small college town before Amazon. I will forgive them their little foibles.
Nat Whilk 02.10.06 at 9:19 am
I spend roughly USD1000 annually at Amazon. For the last couple of years I’ve gone supersaver shipping, and packages almost always arrive earlier than Amazon estimates. Until Henry mentioned it, I had no idea Powell’s was a union shop. Based on friends’ and relatives’ experiences working at union shops, that piece of information is unlikely to convert me to be a Powell’s customer.
Yesterday’s campus newspaper highlighted the fact that they’re adding a student lounge in the middle of the campus bookstore complete with beanbag chairs and Xboxes. This on top of their current catering to deadbeats who consider bookstores to be equivalent to libraries. (Why, yes! I’d love to buy a book previously read cover-to-cover by a Cheetos eater!) Amazon’s prices are great, but it wasn’t cost that caused the campus bookstore to lose my business.
The worst thing about Amazon for me is that it’s taken two-thirds of the fun out of attending out-of-town academic conferences. Who cares what bookstores the host city has when I can get everything I want at Amazon?
Ann 02.10.06 at 9:47 am
I’ve been a compulsive Amazon shopper–10 to 12 items a month–for several years and have never had any problems or delays.
John Emerson 02.10.06 at 10:09 am
My bad experiences with Amazon’s were with hard-to-find books. One rare old book was supposedly being reprinted, and Amazon listed it for well over a year, but the reprinting never happened.
My first choice for book e-commerce is Bookfinder.com. They can find almost anything from any source in English, French, German, or Italian (for various reasons, Spanish has proven difficult). You don’t buy from them; they just find sources.
Within Bookfinder ABE books is my favorite; it leads you mostly to independent booksellers who sell online.
Powell’s union experience was dodgy for awhile, but Powells’ has as good as it is because a lot of very talented people work there for non-monetary reasons.
John Emerson 02.10.06 at 10:11 am
Bookfinder.com
MFA 02.10.06 at 10:32 am
I have had at two or three instances out of perhaps twenty Amazon purchases (not all books) where the ‘usually ships’ information was not just wrong but wildly misleading. Two of those few instances were hard-to-find books with shipping estimates of a couple of days or weeks. In fact, neither book ever shipped (and I cancelled the orders after 90 days).
I certainly appreciate the difficulties involved in providing accurate shipping estimates for products of that nature, however a shipping estimate that read ‘Shipment times for this product vary too widely to provide a reliable estimate’ would have been truthful. The estimates I was given were not.
…
MC 02.10.06 at 11:11 am
The last two times I’ve ordered from Powell’s, it has been for books they claimed were clean copies. When they arrived, both books had marginalia and underlining in ink. I would prefer to support Powell’s but find that unreliability too offensive.
cm 02.10.06 at 11:47 am
My rather spotty experience with Amazon suggests that the 1-day delivery thing is a bunch of baloney. I suspect it is to marginally entice buyers to make the (impulse) purchase by creating the expectation of immediate gratification.
Jeff R. 02.10.06 at 1:08 pm
I signed up for Prime when my wife needed a bunch of books for a class quickly, and worked out to be cheaper. It’s always been within two days and sometimes just one. I’ve noticed from the UPS tracking it usually ships from Horsham, PA, (I live in eastern Mass.), while super saver seemed to come from all over. I also noticed with super saver, it would take several days for the carrier to pick up. Maybe they spread the work around their distribution sites depending on which ones have slack time.
gideons 02.10.06 at 1:11 pm
Powell’s is great. I love going there and ordering from there is decent. They are a union shop. However, the management does engage in constant low level union busting activity. I still think it’s worth supporting them. But Michael Powell and the rest of management took it as something of a personal insult when the employees decided to unionize.
matt 02.10.06 at 5:15 pm
Hey, if you’re gonna buy from amazon, go through alonovo.com — it’s a front-end to amazon that adds corporate responsibility ratings and sends some of the proceeds to charity..
fyreflye 02.10.06 at 10:34 pm
I started out as a Powell’s customer but Amazon’s super saver shipping and overall reliability converted me. One advantage not mentioned here is that you can often get O/P books from Amazon’s Marketplace sellers while Powell’s has no such resource beyond its own used book stock. Amazon is also an increasingly useful source for O/P and used classical CD’s. ABE is reliable but slow and you always have to pay for shipping.
If you’re not a rich college prof and price is an issue try http://www.fetchbook.info/
Stephen Frug 02.10.06 at 10:48 pm
For those for whom price is an option, it’s worth noting that there are a bunch of sites that will check multiple sites all at once (amazon, powells, b&n, alibris, abe, etc) and report the various prices. I should say that these are not 100% reliable — sometimes a book is listed as in that, once you click through, isn’t; sometimes they miss a book that a site actually has; sometimes they simply fail to find some editions. Nevertheless, they’ve lead me to some good bargins. The two I use are:
http://www.anybook4less.com
http://www.allbookstores.com
There are others, too, but those are the ones I’ve used. Give ’em a try.
SF
Stephen Frug 02.10.06 at 10:49 pm
For “price is an option” read “price is an issue”.
Oops.
lalala 02.10.06 at 11:20 pm
About a year ago, I noticed and upon checking found that several of my friends also noticed, that Amazon shipping had gotten considerably less reliable, mostly because of them taking a long time to ship out things that had been claimed for shipping within 24 hours. It’s not like they’re always that way, but enough that I noticed it as a trend.
Also, recently Amazon shipped me entirely the wrong order of books (someone was having a book group reading diet books, clearly) and between that and slow shipping times on the original set of books and on the replacements, it all ended up taking several weeks longer than the books I’d ordered at the same time from the local bookstore where I grew up (which had to order them, then ship them to me, which is why I’d ordered the ones I wanted quickly from f’ing Amazon).
Daragh McDowell 02.11.06 at 10:05 am
Henry, this discussion of bookshipping is fascinating, but as your cousin I must warn you that I never want to hear you use the word ‘guesstimate’ ever again.
redfox 02.11.06 at 9:30 pm
I’ve had entirely the opposite experience — Amazon is so faithful about mailing things promptly that it has spoiled me for all other mail-order purchasing. I get so terribly confused when I pay for two-day shipping, say, and don’t get my object for a week. What? You mean it takes time to find the thing, pack it up, and send it off? This cannot be!
I am, however, an Amazon Prime subscriber, so perhaps that’s it.
Tyrone Slothrop 02.12.06 at 8:26 pm
Kevin Drum posts about Amazon S&H charges:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_02/008210.php
tom 02.14.06 at 6:10 am
I use http://www.newsfromnowhere.org.uk/ for preference, an independent, not-for-profit radical & community bookshop, run by a workers’ co-operative, based in Liverpool, UK. They can do you any UK-published book, not just lefty nonsense
Obviously not so useful for those outside the UK, but great if you are in the UK and that’s your bag…
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