Fed up with Amazon

[xela]

Ok, Amazon, it's annoying enough that your search results make it hard to tell which items you sell and which you act as middleman for. But this business of not breaking out the shipping cost for third-party vendors is pure horseshit.

(They had one vendor selling an item for $5.25, another for $5.47. Go with the cheaper one, right? Well, I put both in my cart, and proceed to the penultimate page, where all the shipping breakout I get is that my S&H total is $19.43, less supersaver discount for the items I'm actually buying from Amazon of $7.80. Which, since they can't be bothered to provide a subtotal, It's up to me to figure out means the third party shipping is $11.63. So the third party vendors are charging around $5.80 for shipping, on average.

I drop the $5.47 one from my cart, do the arithmetic again, and the third party shipping is now $7.67. Hmm.

Double-check: put the $5.47 one back in my cart; check the arithmetic again; third party shipping is now, again, $11.63.

Remove the $5.25 one from my cart, do the arithmetic again, and behold: third party shipping is now $3.96

So: The third party vendor selling the item for $5.25 charges $7.67 shipping: total $12.92. The vendor selling it for $5.47 charges $3.96: total $9.43. So going with what at first appeared to be the higher-price vendor saves me $3.49.

Fine, I'm okay with that. What I'm not okay with is Amazon hiding that information from me such that I had to go through this rigamarole to ferret it out. What, exactly, would be wrong with doing the obvious thing and itemizing the third-party shipping along with the rest of the itemization?)

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I already mostly bailed on Amazon after amazonfail last year. (I highly recommend Powell's for books. Not being a behemoth, they can't always match Amazon's pricing, but they're an honest-to-god bookstore, run by people whose first love is books.) But Amazon remains too convenient for me to abandon completely. Or at any rate, was until now. I can only hope that Zappos continues to expand its product range, eventually becoming a general merchandise alternative to Amazon. In the mean time, I will continue to cut back on my business with Amazon: Their superficial convenience does not make up for going through this much hassle to find the actual price of an item.

Comments

[coraline]

hate to tell you, amazon owns zappos...

[rax.livejournal.com]

But... they do break out that cost for you, don't they? I go to an item and see "Used from $18.75" and click that, and it gives me a list like this, with shipping broken down: http://autumnfox.akrasiac.org/amazon-shipping.png

Sometimes they have more than one copy of an item and that's certainly lame. And it may be that they don't do this right for all items; but I've never had problems with this before, and I buy stuff on Amazon a lot. Is the problem that they don't show up in the cart? Because that's lame, but the sort of lame that I'd personally hope to fix with a bug report rather than going to a different vendor. I mean, I have no investment in Amazon doing well or anything, that just seems a little extreme if I am understanding you correctly...

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Noooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Mea culpa: I had, in fact, entirely failed to notice that element in the Amazon UI.

I can't imagine why:



I mean, aside from the fact that it's tiny grey type on a blue-grey background right next to big bold red type, in a small corner of a big, cluttered page.

I remain baffled why, especially if they're not trying to hide the information, they don't break it out in the checkout itemization. But thank you, at least in the future I'll know where to look for the info.

[eccentrific.livejournal.com]

If you click on the page for an item that is sold by multiple vendors, they have a sidebar on the right that will tell you who sells it cheapest, factoring in shipping costs.

[eric-the-ted.livejournal.com]

I'm just tired of Amazon continuing to make recommendations based on my last purchases - which were on the order of 10 years ago. Really, I don't need another compilers textbook at this point in my life.

I swear I took myself off their mailing list at least once.

[narya.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, if you go to "Improve my recommendations" you can tell Amazon to not use items for recommendations.

[aerynne.livejournal.com]

Not that this entirely solves your problem, but Amazon does list the shipping price on the product page next to the Add to Cart button.