Amazon: Prime for success?
When I read about Amazon’s all you can eat, free 2-day shipping plan, the first thing was I added up all charges I’d paid towards shipping in the past year (and I bought about 30-40 items - books, toys, etc).
2004 total in shipping fees: $0.00
Compare that to the $79 I would pay for a year worth of free shipping, it is still a increase of 7900% over last year (figuratively speaking, as you really can’t multiply zero with anything). So, at first glance, it seemed like a no-brainer: Prime wasn’t for me.
So, can people like me, who buy 10-20 casual gift items a year for friends and family through Amazon, be tempted into signing up for Prime? Chances are slim to none.
Will it push people who paid anywhere from $0.00 to $50.00 into signing up? Not necessarily, it seems.
However, the plan did tempt me into thinking about buying all gifts that I buy during a year, through Amazon.com. Hey, I get free shipping after all, so why not make full use of it? I would never have to stand in line at KB Toys or ToysRus ever again! Hooray!
But my joy was to be shortlived. Before I could roll over and hand them my $79, I happened to buy a Sony Walman/Recorder at Amazon for my father-in-law.
It was then that I noticed that in order to be eligible for Prime, you had to buy it directly from Amazon (and not its merchant partners) - that is, the walkman that Amazon sells itself directly, and not one that OfficeDepot sells through Amazon.com.
Now, Amazon’s version was selling it for $79.99.
However, if you purchased it through OfficeDepot (still through Amazon.com, the web site), you paid only $63.95. Even after $7.54 in shipping charges, the total through OfficeDepot would still be only $71.49 (plus tax, of course).
No points for guessing who I bought it from. After paying shipping charges to Office Depot rather than the free shipping I would’ve gotten had I signed up for Prime, I was still up by $8.50 (compared to the $79.99 + free shipping deal I would’ve gotten had I purchased through Amazon.com).
However, I was still not sure if I might have been eligible for Prime even if I had purchased through OfficeDepot. So, I wrote to Amazon.com asking if my purchase through OfficeDepot would’ve been eligible for Prime free shipping. And here’s the very personal email I got back from them.
< snip >
Hello from Amazon.com.
Products sold by third parties, or through third-party areas such as
Marketplace, Auctions and/or zShops,OfficeDepot and ToysRus are NOT
eligible.
Products eligible for Amazon Prime will be designated on the product
page, in the order pipeline, or at check-out. The program is limited
to products sold by Amazon.com.
< / snip >
Amazon’s free shipping offer comes with a lot of ifs and buts. So, read that fine print - turn up the font size in your browser if you can’t - before you pull out that credit card.
Amazon is a company that was always well ahead of it’s time. While everyone said that having a book store online, that too lowest cost pricing, along with free shipping even, was a sure recipe for disaster. Well, they’ve proven all the “pundits” wrong - and while most of those other “surefire winners” are long gone, they are still here, and even churning out a profit!
Forget me, forget the pundits, forget the critics.
Let’s just wait for the people’s verdict - I hear it is never wrong.
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Amazon is stupid!!!
First, my mother ordered gift certificates through Amazon for my wife and I for Christmas, yet we never received them (still haven’t). She ordered paper copies instead of e-mail versions because she was afraid of the order getting messed up. Yet it seems to have been messed up anyway. She checked her order queue and found they have no record of her order, yet her credit card company charged her for them. She tried to work out the issue with them, but they keep giving her the run around. What idiots!
Secondly, why the heck doesn’t Amazon have a big logout button so that you can logout of your account? What a stupid thing not to have. It seems to me that they are trying to use a sneaky way to prevent people from leaving so they will continue shopping. What a bunch of dirt bags. How are we supposed to keep our accounts safe from others if we can’t logout preventing others from getting our information? At least as a precautionary measure like most major bank sites have. PUT A BIG LOGOUT BUTTON ON THE MAIN PAGE SO WE DON’T HAVE TO DIG ALL OVER YOUR STUPID SITE TO LOGOUT, AMAZON!!!!!! I’m getting fed up with Amazon.
I figured out how to logout of Amazon, just click on the link that says “If you are not (INSERT NAME HERE) click here.” And that will log you out; sneaky Amazon!