The consumer has come to expect guaranteed overnight or 2 day shipping. When they don’t get that, they get really upset.
Amazon doesn’t want its customers to get upset, and it can’t trust its shipping partners because they don’t have the burden of the consumer sentiment. No one blames FedEx for their late package these days, they blame Amazon. Heck, you don’t have to look hard to find product reviews that only gripe with the shipping time or condition.
Amazon is going to vertically integrate shipping, no question. The market demands it, and Amazon will probably eventually ship more packages than any of its competitors. And, Bezos isn’t dumb, so he’ll build and sell this capacity to others.
Amazon is reaching further and further into the economy, and I don’t see much stopping them.
Amazon is going to vertically integrate shipping, no question. The market demands it, and Amazon will probably eventually ship more packages than any of its competitors. And, Bezos isn’t dumb, so he’ll build and sell this capacity to others.
And then.. then. They went out and made an order for 100K Rivian delivery vehicles, ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND. The headlines were all focused on the Tesla factor and how they are electric and nobody bothered to ask.. 'Why?'. That's like the number of trucks UPS Owns, PERIOD. That should have been the headline 'AMAZON ORDERS OWN FLEET TO REPLACE UPS, FEDEX' But nope 'Bezos bets on electric with Rivian order'
It don't think it's a secret. Why do you think it'd be a major story?
> nobody bothered to ask.. 'Why?'
Because they're doing logistics... everyone knows that. Have you never had an Amazon logistics person deliver you parcel?
Plus, you see the Amazon trucks all the time now. At least I do. What’s to report?
As they should. FedEx's customer in this instance is Amazon, not the receiver of the package (who is a customer of Amazon, and Amazon alone). If anyone has the clout these days to hurt FedEx economically if they don't improve, it's Amazon. Amazon should be pushing FedEx (and their other shippers) to be more accountable for late, damaged, and lost packages.
These days both FedEx's and UPS's preferred delivery method seems to be to rake their hands over every single door buzzer to my apartment building, dump the packages outside (insanely unsafe), and run off before anyone has a chance to respond to open the door. They even do this for signature-required packages on occasion, forging the signature. I get that drivers' incentives are completely screwed up regarding how their performance is evaluated, but it's a terrible experience from my perspective.
I would be surprised if Amazon is not using their Ring doorbell cameras to check on deliveries. They will provide evidence of what really happened when customers and delivery dispute it. For example it is clear if the doorbell was rung, or in some cases if the vehicle even went down the street.
I think I ordered socks or something... I couldn't care less. It was jarring, just leave the package in the lobby and send me a delivery notification... geez. Prefer FedEx over that experience.
> In the meantime, I would recommend checking around neighbors and with any other potential members of your household to ensure the package was not incorrectly delivered.
sounds like, they are - by taking a LOT of business from them.
Very similar to the high churn Uber and Lyft experience with drivers. It lasts only as long as you can find people desperate enough to work in these roles.
"Oh, you tried to deliver at 3:13 PM? Well gee, my front door camera sure doesn't seem to show anyone approaching my door at that time!"
But again, you're already dealing with people that will lie to your face, so I can't imagine why video proof would compel them to change their strategy.
2 have been FedEx, 2 USPS. The rest were Delivered by Amazon deliveries.
In turn, that leaves Fedex and UPS absolutely no margin for error. Package shipping errors happen, especially in the weeks before christmas when volume goes through the roof. But Amazon has wasted all the safety margin so if even one error occurs they blow their delivery window.
It's hard to say whether UPS/Fedex have a problem without looking at their metrics, but Amazon sure isn't helping by pushing everything to the bleeding edge. Anecdotally over the last year or so I have noticed an increase to the point where virtually all (let's say at least 75%) of my "2 day delivery" (or even amazon day/no-rush) packages are being shipped like 11 at night on day before delivery and they just beeline it to me same-day.
It's the biggest reason I've stopped shopping at Walmart in recent years. I can't rely on being able to go to the store and expect that everything is in stock.
Let's dust off my old binomial probability skills:
Assume Walmart's just-in-time demand model is accurate to the extent that 1% of items in the store were misjudged and are out of stock. Let's say I go in for a shopping trip of 30 items. I'll have a 26% chance of being disappointed that one of the items I needed was out of stock, and I'll have to go somewhere else now.
Those are completely made up numbers, but it demonstrates how a seemingly small error can be a big inconvenience for someone.
If they can't deliver it within their margin, they shouldn't claim they can.
As much as I'm concerned about monopoly and the potential for anti-competitive behavior... I'm impressed by how effectively Amazon operates at the scale that it does. It's not like Comcast or AT&T which operate horribly at scale. I wish they would get disrupted by Starlink or something and go out of business.
Amazon is an incredibly effective business.
They prioritize customer happiness above profit and put any profits made into growth, so they will continue to grow by making more customers happy and opening new categories.
>>The consumer has come to expect guaranteed overnight or 2 day shipping
Amazon created that expectation.
I know I was perfectly happy when packages that I ordered on the weekend arrived in time for the next weekend most of the time, and never paid for expedited shipping. It was only when most of those packages started taking more than a week to arrive that I finally signed up for Prime.
Amazon is an incredibly sticky brand because they created expectations that you almost have to be vertically integrated (or at least one of the largest customers of the post office, the electric company, the computer hardware company, the software vendor, etc) to fulfill.
If using the established players means the buy button says arrives in 2 days and it arrives in 2 days then I would be SIGNIFICANTLY more satisfied with Prime. I haven’t read enough of the other comments yet to know if my experience is the norm but I really think Amazon would be better off abandoning this whole scheme and letting the pros handle it. It wouldn’t kill American consumers to wait another day.
Side rant: I’m absolutely sick of the armada of rented panel vans from Enterprise blasting random circles through my residential neighborhood. Make them take the earbuds out and for the love of god give them some kind of routing that makes sense.
With the build out of Amazon's own transportation network, Transportation By Amazon is poised to become a reality. The biggest part that remains is the pick-up of packages for shipping / reverse logistics. This should not be too hard, especially as Customer Returns is integrated into Amazon's transportation network.
After Customer Returns is done, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get accurate shipment parameters (box size, weight, type of goods being shipped) and then building a website front-end to advertise and slowly ramp up the capability and learn how to handle different types of exceptional conditions.
Amazon already delivers half of its own packages. Currently they're about 85% of the size of FedEx.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/13/21020938/amazon-logistic...
Amazon is trying to to become better, of course.
But it seems they are focusing on things that customers notice, things that are habit forming, while neglecting other areas where, maybe, most customers(maybe not here at HN), don't notice problems.
So fast, effortless delivery(at a price Amazon can afford) is one. And private brands are also another. And TV. And Alexa.
And i think that's where the main focus of their future investments will go, and not as news portrays - towards making themselves more efficient.
I wish this was true but it's obviously not seeing that they haven't fixed the commingling and fake/imposter product issues.
your logic is equivalent to saying, "since the South did not win the Civil War, it’s obvious they did not really care if they were under Union rule or not"
I was thinking of just this (i.e. who is held responsible nowadays by customers of mishandled deliveries) while I was watching, a few days ago, a UPS worker actually throwing boxes out of the back of his truck onto the concrete ground while it was raining.
Hopefully none of those boxes were electronics, which would not have survived such poor handling unscathed.
it's why apple put tilt sensors and shock sensors in their bulk iphone shipments overseas. they can't trust the shipping companies to not do that, unless they know they can be caught.
I feel the elephant in the room is the question of whether Amazon should be allowed to vertically integrate shipping.
Amazon doesn't even offer overnight shipping anymore. This is a big step backward from the days when you were allowed to get one-day shipping as long as you were willing to pay for it. I am totally baffled.
Once the government makes them liable for the actions of their 3rd party delivery services, it will. Until then? I agree, there's not much standing in their way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/05/us/amazon-delivery-driver...
I've stopped buying from them in light of all the articles detailing the horrendous working conditions and people getting killed because of their contract delivery drivers.
- FedEx is slated to report its latest quarterly results on Tuesday (17 December 2019). http://investors.fedex.com/news-and-events/upcoming-events/d...
- FedEx ended two big contracts with Amazon earlier this year. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/06/amazon-blames-holiday-delive...
Edit: I see many unhappy comments regarding FedEx here. In the UK we have Parcelfarce, which has achieved meme status.
I'm glad Amazon is finally putting a stop to it.
Whenever I don't have a choice, they disappoint me.
Just last week, I had a Fedex shipment that was late. One of the reasons it was late was that it passed through almost two dozen Fedex locations.
Seven in three days.
My package spent three days traveling from Coal City, IL (9:11am 11-Dec) to Swatara Township, PA, (10:59pm 13-Dec) a distance of 741 miles, on an EPIC UNFORGETTABLE 12-day adventure on its route from California to Maryland.
61.75 hours to travel 741 miles is an average speed of 12 mph.
Just a taste of the epic journey: https://i.imgur.com/C0NlH9K.png
Anecdotes are nice but this happens so frequently I've given up on Fedex and will only use them as a last resort.
I live in an area where Amazon Prime delivery is so fast that I swear that sometimes they deliver the damned thing I order before I actually order it.
It was most likely just sitting at their sorting center, which I can see from my back window.
I don't know if there is something especially going wrong in my area, because there was a news story about how bad FedEx has been - people needing medical equipment and stuff that has been sitting for weeks.
Here in Canada we have Purolator - the gov't (Canada Post) subsidiary that is a FedEx competitor. Their systems are ancient, their entire operation is pathetically slow and inefficient.
E.g. a recent undelivered shipment that was to arrive last Friday still had the 'expected delivery date' unchanged two days later. When it finally changed it also noted that the package hadn't even left the distribution hub yet.
The worker was very rude, and refused to let me send it, unless I double-boxed it. Company policy? He offered sell me a box and packing material.
You can expect wildly different experiences shipping SmartPost vs Custom Critical.
I've had them call me on my cellphone and offer to come to me at my office when I wasn't at home for a particularly high-dollar package. This wasn't a FedEx ground shipment though.
Although I'm not sure why you can't pick up your packages at a FedEx location though. I've always been able to do that. Maybe for SmartPost you can't, but that logistically makes sense, as they might not be in possession of the package by the time it gets to your locality.
Further FedEx did a big public hoopla announcing that they were dropping Amazon back in August (not the other way around). Maybe they really don't work for each other. Delivery is a pretty big pie.
In Canada FedEx has never been a part of the delivery options they use, beyond more than a minute percentage.
The only reason I'm ever glad to see one of their trucks on the road is as evidence UPS has at least some sort of competition. But if I see one pull up to my home I cringe, because invariably there will be some problem.
they're just a crap company. if you ship fedex, your best case scenario is receiving it on the last possible day of their window.
To get the real news I need to read comments like yours. Thanks, I think the title should be: "Amazon Changes Policy to Pressure Fedex in Negotiations."
As a customer, I want a delivery time/date and let Amazon figure out how to do it. They're presumably way better at it than I am. If Amazon fails at that, I want to be able to complain without feeling like "oh, it was my fault because I picked Rickshaw Bob as the carrier".
When Amazon would willy-nilly give away a month of Prime when a guaranteed package was late, I would frequently wish I could get a package over to Mail Innovations or SurePost. Both would pretty reliably be late and for most packages, I'd rather have the $10 credit.
> As a customer, I want a delivery time/date and let Amazon figure out how to do it.
The big problem here is that Amazon no longer offers you the ability to pick the delivery date. They'll tell you when your package will arrive, and you'll suck it up.
It's a huge step backwards from the old system, where slow shipping was free, two-day shipping was moderately priced, and one-day shipping was expensive. (Or, with Prime, two-day shipping was free and one-day shipping was $7.99.)
Under normal circumstances, I don't care which delivery company drops off my package. I might develop a preference if one of them is chronically late, or usually damages the package[1]. But I always care what the delivery date is!
[1] Guess what! Amazon's also stopped shipping individual books in boxes with bubble padding. Now they come in manila envelopes. And they usually take damage in transit from being squeezed by the envelope.
But this isn't true. You can choose which day you want your package delivered. That's the point of setting your "Amazon delivery day". What am I missing?
They can do it off the side, like how you can select an amazon locker to ship to (but still have your default mailing address set to something else). They could easily use the same flow: just add a "pick your shipper" section similar to how some small time retailers too it and have separate pricing for each (if you're not on prime).
That's laughable.
(I oversee Logistics software for another e-commerce player. Our network is vastly simpler than Amazon's and yet I'm quite sure we're better at it than our 99.5th percentile customer.)
If they let customers decide, they'd be a lot more limited in both their reporting and their testing.
It's clear they're buckling under the Christmas load, too. I've had over a dozen items delayed thus far.
I've also had them deliver packages to the wrong apartment numerous times, taking pictures of floor mats that don't even exist within a mile of me.
But boy do their delivery people suck. The number of times they've called me asking where I live... that's their job to figure out, not mine.
Kinda laughed the other day as my amazon delivery person was also delivering postmates at the same time. No wonder they're not hitting their deadlines.
Same exact thing happened to me! Locals have also complained about the haphazard parking jobs and throw-your-package-at-your-door method that amazon's drivers do (to be fair on that last point, I regularly have the same experience with UPS).
"An Amazon delivery driver need help with your order. Reply STOP to stop receiving texts from Amazon delivery drivers.
Hello, my name is [name]. Yor please [sic] in the bin"
"Your order has been delivered"
Getting home late then having to dig through a bin to find your parcel is not fun (and of course they didn't leave a card so other people had added stuff to the bin in the meantime). I've already complained to them about leaving stuff in the garden waste bin in the past (damp grass clippings and cardboard is _not_ a good combo).
Possible process: FBA driver scans box and carelessly tosses box towards front door.
Ring or Amazon app push a notification that the package has been delivered, saving about 20 steps for the driver.
Customer (hopefully) lets the package sit fewer minutes reducing the risk of theft.
Amazon pushes notifications from their app, but I much prefer not having their app on my phone.
They can. Next time they mess up, gather your list of prior order numbers they've messed up and put on your super irate customer voice.
Also Amazon: takes 3 days to deliver.
FedEx ground is a dumpster fire, unless they are doing the smartpost thing where USPS delivers. In my area, they are almost as bad as Laser.
I've already complained once, they sent me something extra, that box got here before the first one did.
Smartpost is garbage, the responsibility is too diffuse. Fedex says it's USPS's fault, USPS says it's Fedex's fault, nobody has any idea where it is or what's going on.
That's been happening around the holidays since well before Amazon started dominating the shipping industry.
That's normal. Although at least here, it's Budget trucks. I must say, it was not very fun driving over 100 trucks from various Budget locations to the UPS depot, with 4 people.
Nearly 100% of the time I get something that's supposed to be delivered by FedEx that needs a signature, I stay home all day until eventually getting a notification that the delivery was attempted and no one was home. The doorbell never rings and there's no slip on the door.
FedEx support tells me the driver scanned the slip so they don't know what happened.
This happens over and over again until I raise enough hell so they force the driver to come back to my house.
My last 3 shipments bounced around Chicago for 6 days, traveling 19 miles total, and were finally delivered late
Ah, remember when monopolists still feared the Sherman Act? Good times, eh?
UPS is only slightly better at delivering packages, but at least they drop off my stuff at a pick-up location a few minutes away.
I would pay extra for an Amazon Prime Actually-Get-Stuff-Delivered service which only uses Canada Post and Amazon's own delivery people.
