Do you also have a love/hate relationship with Amazon?

Ok.. I got lured again by Amazon.. I had to order some Performax casters. Amazon had them 10% off which made them competitive with other websites. They also had $25 off $150.. So, since the casters were $96, I figure I could get about $50 worth of stuff for $25.

Well, of course now since there's so many cross sellers on Amazon, it takes a long time to find stuff that qualifies for free shipping. Ended up getting some work gloves and drill bits. Also got a small level.

I put my order in a couple days ago.. Expected delivery date is Dec

30.. LOL. I know to always expect a snail's pace from them, and I guess I'm ok with not moving the sander for 2 months. At least not bothered enough to cancel the order, but stuff like this definitely doesn't make them my prefered supplier. After waiting 12 weeks to get some Freud router bits from them, I never order anything from them that I need in a hurry.

Yeah, I know, I should've gotten up off my lazy ass and drove to a local store, but that's 45 minutes each way for me and I've been very short on "Free time" lately.

Reply to
bf
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I got a similar date once, but the merchandise actually showed up considerably sooner. Maybe that's luck.

You waited 12 weeks for router bits? That's more patience than I've got. What's your name? Job?

Reply to
George Max

I got my router collet in ~6 days and my router itself in perhaps 10 ... freebie delivery / UPS ground. Not great ... but not a horror story, either.

It took a full month for the cross-seller to get up off dead center and send my table insert. By the time it arrived, I didn't need it any more.

Bill

Reply to
Bill

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Seems like Freud stuff is nearly unobtainium from whoever the supplier(s?) are. I had a set of replacement planer knives on order for over a year, approaching 18 months and they never showed up...Every two weeks a "Sorry, 2-week delay, do you still want them?" e-mail would show up and every two weeks I would reply "Yes", and they would send a new confirmation shipping date two weeks hence. I had decided to see how long it would go on before (or if) anything would ever trigger a human interface to happen, but I was out of town and missed the "reply by" date on one notice and it killed the order. Otherwise, I suppose I would still have an outstanding order nearly three years later now, if not and I had kept up the responses. Last I looked they had the same product still listed at a favorable price with the 2-3 day delivery expected notice. I came to the conclusion that at least a lot of Freud stuff is "loss leader" stuff and not actual merchandise legitimately offered.

I won't order anything through Amazon anymore that isn't direct-from-Amazon and available for immediate shipment(which, of course, means I'm not ordering much from them any longer). About all I even look for there anymore is some bulk items like sander discs and

50-lb pneumatic nailer nails.
Reply to
dpb

It's _all_ available for immediate shipment if you're willing to pay the extortionate prices for "handling" it. Folks in the cheap seats always get the warm beer, you ought to know that.

Reply to
George

Have you ever tried paying the premium shipping and saw that it shipped faster? I'm not doubting you, I just never tried it. I could see them delaying the order 3-5 days if you get free shipping. But 2 months? Doesn't that just invite cancelations?

The router bits that took 12 weeks.. they kept stalling and stalling.. Luckily I was ordering them for a project I hadn't started.. I had a couple other things in the queue ahead of it. Even when they arrived, I wasn't ready to start it yet.

Amazon is ok for stuff you are willing to wait a couple months for, but if I end up going to the local store before they ship, I'm canceling my order before I leave and getting the casters there.

Another thing I noticed is that the big items no longer have free shipping. I almost ordered a Jet Disk sander.. but the $99 shipping surcharge kills it. LOL. I noticed they were adding that $99 to things like dust collectors, etc. It doesn't seem like they want to be in the business of selling "big" items anymore.. After all, Amazon is the walmart of internet shopping. People go there for the price, they sure don't go there for the customer service, IMO.

Reply to
bf

I've had a few instances where the upgraded shipping costs were so small as to be silly to not opt for faster shipping. You might want to select the one or two day shipping and see what the costs come out to - just to see.

A good example is when I was purchasing a Bosch 10" SCMS. I looked it up on Amazon, they had it for about $60 less than the only store in town that had it in stock. When I selected overnight shipping, the cost was $10. Yes, ten dollars. I closed out of the browser, searched for the saw, and tried again and the same shipping price came up again.

So, it might be worth it to check what the shipping charges are when you go to place an order - you may luck out.

Reply to
Mike

Maybe. I ordered a Delta AP-100 air cleaner (fairly large) from Amazon about 5 weeks ago and used the free shipping. It made it to my house in under a week. It shipped from a city in Ohio, I don't remember which one. That worked o.k.

Reply to
George Max

Well, that may be what the site says, experience says otherwise. At least for me, an unfulfilled order after a wait of over a year doesn't qualify as "immediate".... :)

As for shipping costs/delivery schedules, w/ Amazon that never seemed to come into play in my experience under the original Amazon umbrella. I've ordered a lot of stuff through them over the years and always taken the ground/cheapest or "free" shipping and invariably products were shipped in a timely manner until the rise of the associated vendors. Being in an area where nearest air freight terminals are still at least two delivery days away by ground by the time they're handled, it simply never made sense to order stuff w/ expedited shipping here.

What really killed my use of Amazon was the revamping of the site so you never know with whom you are dealing until at checkout the products you ordered might be supplied from a bunch of different vendors and all have different delivery rules/rates/returns, etc. If I wanted to deal w/ another vendor, I'd look for another vendor. :(

It had been some time, a look shows these particular knives listed now as "In Stock" from another vendor I don't recognize. I suppose the previous "supplier" went belly-up.

Reply to
dpb

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Up until a year or so ago, I never saw any appreciable delays in shipping times w/ free ("Free" shipping isn't free, of course, it's simply included in the overhead pricing structure rather than explicit. Some of the expense may be underwritten as marketing or early on as a way to build customer loyalty/preference, of course.) shipping and normal ground delivery. Virtually every instance the product would ship within a coupld of days at most and often would go out the same day and be here on or before the "expected ship date".

I believe the difference primarily is the shift to all the other suppliers fulfilling orders and that many of them don't have the facilities to handle significant volume and that others simply are fronts for folks trying to drop ship or re-ship merchandise rather than being suppliers in the traditional sense. I suspect that for small volume items some of these folks don't have a supplier arranged for (like the planer knives I attempted to order).

I suspect the expedited ordering system for those orders which are placed for it simply means they go in the queue first and the non-expedited orders are handled as they come up to the top; the delay quoted is only there as a CYA policy so you can't complain if they don't make it the next day kind of thing. It would be far more expensive to try to place a hold on them than to simply process them as time allows.

Reply to
dpb

On the item page there used to be a "this product usually ships within" and it would say 24 hrs, 2-3 days, 1 week, 1 month etc. That seems to have gone away recently. You used to be able to tell without putting in the order though.

I have in the past gotten an email saying it was delayed, then the item shows up at my door on the day it was supposed to, and then a day or two later I get an email saying it shipped. So yeah, Amazon is often interesting in the shipping department.

-Leuf

Reply to
Leuf

Well, I ended up canceling the order.. I wish they had a "reason" field so you could let them know that as a customer, I'm not too crazy about waiting 7 weeks for them to ship my order.. Got it locally.

Reply to
bf

I won't buy anything that's not sold by Amazon itself. Luckily, Tool Crib is only a few hours up the Road in Fargo, and it appears that the larger stuff ships from there. For years I bought most all of my tools from Amazon, always free shipping, and nothing ever took more than about a week to arrive. Since they started Amazon Prime (the $70/year upgraded shipping deal) I've been offered free trials three times, each time for 2-3 months at a shot. During those period I get everything shipping two day for free, as long as it comes from amazon, with no minimum. This past week the UPS guy stopped four out of five days with packages from amazon. It's crazy.

So I really have no hate for Amazon at all. I've probably made well over 100 purchases from them since they opened shop, and bought many large tools from them (jointer, planer, sander, etc.) with no troubles at all. The few things I've had to return over the years were never any trouble at all. In fact, the only order I recall EVER taking more than two weeks was when I ordered 10 copies of a book published by the Catholic church that I couldn't find available in print anywhere...after six months I finally canceled the order and printed of a pdf copy instead.

Amazon has gone way downhill in terms of prices and selection in tools over the past few years but it's still my first choice for most items they stock. Always good (usually best) prices and I have no complaints about the service at all.

-kiwanda

Reply to
Kiwanda

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