I have been ordering things from Amazon for many years, but within the last year I've noticed a change. I firmly believe that Amazon is intentionally delaying shipment of goods.
As I said I buy a lot of things from Amazon, but I've never had an Amazon Prime account. Honestly I'm too cheap to pay the $100 a year for Prime when there are such easy ways around it. Whenever there is something I want to buy I add it to my Amazon cart. Then when my cart reaches the minimum amount for free shipping (currently $35) I place the order. This works out nicely and it averages out to probably 12 or 15 Amazon orders per year, so I don't have to wait that long for my cart to fill up. But I save on that $100 a year.
But as I said, within the last year something has changed. It used to be items shipped for free arrived to my house in 3 or 4 days. But lately Amazon orders have been arriving in about 12 days. That's a significant change! What's more, after I place an order I don't get the email from Amazon saying it has shipped for about a week.
I think the problem is Amazon's free shipping was too good. If you can get free shipping that will arrive in 3 - 4 days, why would you pay a lot of money for 2-day shipping? So it makes sense that Amazon would want to slow down the free option in an effort to encourage people to spend more for faster shipping.
However; if this is true then Amazon's plan may backfire on them. Now anytime I order something online I check competitors like newegg.com, target.com, bestbuy.com, etc. All of these retailers offer free shipping or free shipping to retail stores. If I find the same item for the same or even slightly higher in price, I won't order from Amazon. Why buy from Amazon when they won't get it to me for 2 weeks what I can order elsewhere for the same price and have it in a few days?
So Amazon, if you listening, you are losing business because you're trying to encourage people to pay for faster shipping and/or buy Amazon Prime.
