All other things being equal, if 2hr delivery happened to me I'd at least be tossing referrals around if not being a return customer [maybe they sell only TVs and I only needed the one].
They probably were able to save money by delivering it directly, instead of taking it to a postal office to ship it which probably would have been more work anyway.
This is not necessarily true. Some sellers can request disbursement at any time. For a breakdown of when Amazon pays sellers, see [0].
In this case, the only delay is the 7 day holding period after the latest possible delivery date.
For example, if you sell and deliver a product on Jan 1st, you may be able to disburse the funds as soon as the 8th.
However! This example does not hold for the situation described by the GP because no tracking information can be provided to Amazon. In which case, the longest possible delivery period in the shipping method selected will be used.
More importantly, what the seller did as described by GP is big liability, for two reasons:
1. Phone numbers should never, ever, be used to contact the customer directly. They are for the seller to give to the carrier. This is a violation of Amazon's ToS.
2. Sellers should never, ever, deliver directly to buyers. Not only will this hurt their valid tracking rate metric, but it also makes them a very easy target for item not received cases as there is no proof that the item was delivered. The only recourse in a case like this would be through small claims court.
And on a much more minor note, it's unprofessional to visit a buyer in person. Amazon is not eBay.
Admittedly I did not think about the proof of delivery aspect. Definitely would cause issues. Although I imagine it could be mitigated by forcing the person to click "I accept delivery" on their Amazon account when you meet up, that way the retailer knows it is actually the person in question.
A lot of assumptions there. Why is delivery from the he vendor unprofessional and unreliable, compared to Amazon who hires anyone off the street as independent contractors to handle deliveries?
It's a very oligopolistic view to say only Amazon and a few big companies are trustworthy logistics providers.
They can still use the same tracking mechanisms, I mean when I order from the pizza place, they don't contract it out, so why should I care of my amazon seller does?
For orders over 10 USD, Amazon requires a verifiable tracking number from one of the major carrier services. (It's possible to "ship" an order without a tracking number, but the seller takes a hit to their account metrics, and Amazon will eventually freeze their account for review).
This is so they can verify you actually shipped the package, and verify it was delivered within the fulfillment promise date range, ie. if you paid for 2 day shipping or whatever.
There are some sellers that have been approved for self-delivery of packages, which are not trackable. In these cases, they usually forfeit all rights to dispute non-delivery claims and more. So, it's pretty risky for the seller.
Speaking of which: Amazon (and ebay, too) had recently started using a UK-based service called Yodel.
Last time Yodel had delivered a parcel of $50 to my door (marking it as delivered), which obviously got stolen. You can’t call Yodel - their line is always busy, and the line is not a free number.
Yodel had done that regularly to me, but I could never contact them or do anything about my delivery, since their customer service is horrendous.
Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
>Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
Amazon support was able to do this for me. They also CC:d me on a really strongly worded email to the delivery company, which I found really surprising.
This was one of the euro amazons with european support staff.
Did it actually work? Did they actually stop using that delivery company for your packages (and is the company common enough for this to not be random chance)?
> Is there any way to set it up in Amazon (or ebay, too) so that their fulfillment never uses a certain delivery brand?
No, unfortunately not. Well, unless you're open to moving outside of Yodel's delivery radius.
eBay has no fulfillment network, so you can reach out to the seller and ask for a different shipping method. You should expect to be asked to cover the cost difference though.
You can also do this on Amazon as well, just make sure that the product you're buying says "ships and sold by XYZ". Send them a message prior to ordering and they'll let you know if they can accommodate.
The risk here is that the customer commits fraud by saying they did not receive the TV. Amazon may side with the customer and refund the money; but the merchant should still be able to file a small claims lawsuit or maybe even a police report.
Fair enough. I am one of those few sellers and I tend to assume it's more commonplace than it is.
In any case, I don't really understand the desire for instant disbursements. Certainly you eliminate the risk of Amazon carrying a larger balance than necessary, and in rare cash crunch situations it may rescue the day... But beyond that, why is it so desireable?
For most businesses at scale, cash flow is a gating factor for growth and profitability. This is why businesses always try to get cash on delivery, but pay their vendors Net 60.
not every order will show up on the next payment though; to my knowledge, they can be delayed until some amount of time after the order is placed or after it's arrived
Amazon seller here. Amazon doesn't make funds available for disbursement until 7 days after delivery. At that point funds are available for disbursement, but they aren't necessarily disbursed. Seller accounts created before 2011 have what are called daily disbursements: the seller has a button they can click once every 24 hours that will disburse all available funds. Most sellers accounts opened since then have bi-weekly disbursements, though, so all available funds get disbursed every 14 days.
God I hate the word bi-weekly; if you hadn't specified 14 days I would've thought it was twice a week. "bi-weekly" is never the right word to use because you always have to add additional information that makes it redundant.
For some reason the bi-weekly vs. semi-weekly thing doesn't confuse me, but I take your point and the dictionary seems to agree that it can mean either every two weeks or twice a week.
It confuses me because I regularly hear "bi-weekly" to mean "twice per week". I don't think I've ever heard someone say semi-weekly. Usually you can make a good guess of the intended meaning from context, but the two time intervals are similar enough that it's frequently ambiguous.
I guess I’m just generalizing semi-weekly from semi-annual. Do people actual my use the term bi-weekly to mean twice a week? I understand confusing bi-annual to mean twice a year because years can be evenly split in two and bi-annual would thus mean every six months. But weeks, being 7 days long, don’t naturally get cut in half. If you heard someone use the phrase bi-weekly and the context implied twice a week, what would that even mean to you? It seems to me that someone would always say the exact days of the week they meant.
Interesting... in my area (NYC) I only hear people say it to mean 14 days. I suppose the rationale is to think of "bi" as "two" (precisely as you'd do for bicycle, bisexual, binomial, etc.) rather than as "twice" and then the ambiguity disappears. Counterexample supporting ambiguity: the word bisect, which means two sections, but can quite easily also be thought of as halving!
A lot of people dictionary words incorrectly and the dictionary unfortunately adapts and decays the language into incomprehensibility. That doesn't make correct usage wrong.
A bicycle is not half a wheel, it is two wheels. If bi-annual is twice a year, then why does the word semi-annual exist? And I’m American, we don’t use the word fortnight unless we’re pretending to be British.
My large Collins dictionary suggests that biannual means twice per year, while semi-annual has more of a hint at 'six-monthly', i.e. evenly space (which makes sense if you think semi-circle, semi-detached, etc.).
> And I’m American, we don’t use the word fortnight unless we’re pretending to be British.
Ah well there's the problem! ;) But well, yes, of course if you remove the word for something from your vocabulary there's going to be ambiguity when a similar one is used. Or just stick to 'every [other] week' and remove biweekly too.
Mostly I'm just arguing that it's ambiguous. I don't have a strong opinion, but the person I was responding to did and it seems like a silly thing to be so adamant about.
I'm 'so adamant' about what they mean only in the same sense that I am about any other word I know the meaning of, I only meant to be helpful.
For your bicycle example that I didn't reply to initially - I don't see what it breaks? Unicycles have one and tricycles three wheels. If i give you a wheel triweekly you have three by the end of the week and can build a tricycle.
FWIW, regarding correct usage: the dictionary on my computer (Oxford American English) lists both meanings of biweekly and does not put either meaning forward as more correct. It even has a whole entry on the ambiguity of the 'bi' prefix.
Yes, 14 days (nights), which is - as I phrased it - every other week.
I didn't claim any strong grammatical structure of 'bi', just consistency between biweekly and biannually, and that 'once per two weeks' was the meaning of a different word, as is 'once per two years'.
