In recent years, my Amazon orders have been much more likely to be delayed. But in the past few months, I've experienced a worse pattern. Items become "Delayed", then very delayed, then Amazon offers and eventually begs me to cancel the order. I've let this ride for a while and found that the package will just never show up. It will be "delayed" indefinitely, with no progress for weeks. Yet I can cancel the order and immediately reorder the item, and it'll show up the next day.<p>It feels like I'm "rebooting the router" on a logistics flow. I'm interested if anyone has worked to close to Amazon to explain what is going on with stuff getting stuck this way.
For my order just cancelled two days overdue with no update after 'out for delivery' after two fumbles logged earlier in the process, it was doomed from the start by the carrier being Hermes/Evri. I would never willingly use them to send anything, and would have refused to have my order sent via them if I had had a choice. The entire ownership of the firm sets them up to fail IMHO, even though all carriers can have bad depots/drivers/days. I suspect some new bean-counter is optimising for cost with a rather short-term view of cost...<p>When getting my refund I said "please please do not use Hermes/Evri." Let's see if someone runs the stats properly...
My assumption has been they do that when the shipment is damaged or lost. And that they haven't implemented any sort of automatic refund or reship because some percentage of people don't notice, and that reduces Amazon's losses.
I've been ordering stuff from Amazon for almost two decades now, and the regular failure in deliveries started about 2 years ago. Recently there's a 20% chance of the package getting lost, and 50% them not knowing whether the package was actually delivered when it was. How did they get to that shameful state? And the final cherry is them now shadowbanning my account from deliveries that are medium to large sized, I can only order small things. What?
In my area the problem is over reliance on the postal service. Prime delivery routinely takes 3-5 days. Lost or damaged packages are far more common on USPS than on UPS, Amazon subcontractors, or Amazon corporate drivers. Our postal carrier actually told us to get a bigger mailbox if we didn’t like the damage because he wasn’t getting out of his truck.
I have a lot of packages delivered to an Amazon locker. Item delivery is inconsistent if the locker is often full. Sometimes items are marked refused delivery, sometimes locker full and sometimes lost. They should have cameras inside the locker boxes to show what was actually delivered and picked up.
I've had 13 Amazon orders this year and I got them all within a few days of ordering them. Just mentioning since threads like this get dominated by people experiencing problems and want to point out it isn't always like that.
There were some news articles a couple years back about theft being one cause of such failures. Entire containers being swiped off a train, for example.