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Amazon got 100 million people to become Prime users by guaranteeing frictionless service, but now that it’s gotten a sizable chunk of the market hooked on quick, free shipping, it may be trying to cut delivery costs by scaling back on the very thing that got customers interested in the first place. Wilson’s complaints about Prime suggest a bait-and-switch strategy. They force you to buy a minimum number of items to get the best deal, adding back the very psychic burden Prime had eliminated from the equation of online shopping in the first place. … It doesn’t help that we’ve seen a slow dilution of Prime itself over time, with the rise of Prime Pantry and Add-on Items. In this sense, Prime was constructed to be great for the consumer (so efficient) and great for businesses (mindless impulse shopping!). It’s that it’s so reliable, you never have to think for more than a second about buying something. It’s not just the free, two-day shipping.
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This cuts through the greatest promise of Prime.
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“Now it feels like a ruse that lulls shoppers into a false sense of security, until they go to checkout and see a shipping arrival date far later than anticipated.” “That little Prime logo used to mean something,” he wrote. In December, Fast Company’s Mark Wilson wrote about how Amazon Prime is “getting worse,” claiming the company had all but abandoned its promise of two-day shipping for most products.
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Delivering packages to a single location instead of hundreds of individual homes cuts costs, and requiring customers to meet a delivery minimum for small orders helps Amazon consolidate deliveries, as does the Amazon Day program.īut the response to these new initiatives has been mixed at best. Most recently, Amazon rolled out Amazon Day, a new delivery option that lets customers choose a specific day for all their orders to arrive.Īll of this makes sense from a financial perspective. Instead, customers have to purchase $25 worth of goods before Amazon will send out the box with those items the point, according to the company, is to give customers access to “low-cost items that would be cost-prohibitive to ship on their own.” Since 2011, Amazon has given users the option to have packages delivered to “lockers,” which are basically branded PO boxes, instead of to their homes or offices. Two-day Prime shipping isn’t necessarily a thing of the past, but it’s undeniable that Amazon delivery isn’t as seamless as it used to be.Īmazon doesn’t deliver some small items, like razors or hair ties, individually. They aren’t always happy about Amazon’s cost-cutting efforts. Prime customers pay for - and expect - quick, free shipping. All of this makes sense from a financial perspective, but that may not be enough to win customers over. The result? Prime orders don’t necessarily arrive in two days anymore, nor are they always delivered to customers’ homes. But even as Amazon has reemphasized ensuring speedy delivery, it has begun looking for ways to rein in customers’ desire for instant gratification, a phenomenon it arguably helped create, in an attempt to cut costs and streamline its supply chain. (It expanded to other major cities in 2015.) Amazon often makes headlines for the grueling work expected of its delivery fleet - or, more accurately, the network of contractors that deliver packages to Prime users across the country - a sign that it continues to take its shipping promise seriously, often at workers’ expense. In 2014, the company launched Prime Now, a service designed to deliver products in an hour or less, for some New York City users. That’s not to say Amazon is totally changing course. But as Amazon has expanded, the promise of free two-day shipping, the main draw of Prime, has begun to come with a lot of caveats. Today, Prime is about much more than package delivery: Users can order everything from groceries to a house cleaner through Amazon. Memberships were cheap - $79 a year in 2005 and $119 today - and users had the option of paying a small fee to get their orders delivered in just one day. In the beginning, free two-day shipping was Prime’s biggest draw. In some cases, that means weaning Prime users off the near-instantaneous shipping they’ve come to expect. There’s just one problem: Amazon, which has focused on obtaining customers at all costs for decades, seems to be looking for ways to cut down on shipping costs. Before Prime launched in 2005, two-day shipping was virtually unheard of - now more than 100 million people use the service, and they expect the things they order online to arrive at their doorsteps in 48 hours or less. In less than two decades, Amazon single-handedly transformed the way we think about online shopping.