I recently ordered a couple of books from Amazon.

When reaching the check out screen I, obviously, selected to group my shipments to as few as possible. I then looked and saw that it was grouped into two shipments, one book should be shipped the next day and the other 4 should ship only on the 20th of March – almost two months afterwards!

This was a bit strange considering the fact that Amazon showed that all books were in stock.

I figured there is probably a book or two causing the delay of the whole shipment, so I switched to the “ship as soon as the books are available” option and saw that one book (one book alone) caused the delay of the whole shipment.

I removed it (with great sorrow – it will wait for the next batch of Amazon books from my wish list), set the “group to as few shipments as possible” and everything was in one big happy shipment.

I wonder what other customers who are a bit less proficient in computers would have done. I’m guessing one of 3 options:

  1. Order and not notice that it will take two months for the shipment to come
  2. Select the option to send things as soon as they are available and pay a bit more
  3. Cancel the shipment and go elsewhere

Why didn’t Amazon add a check to see if the shipment will take more time than it should alert the user and tell him/her which item is the one causing the delay? It shouldn’t be that hard to check something along the lines of

if (scheduledShipmentDate > DateTime.Now.AddMonths(1)) {

AlertUser();

}

Sometimes it’s the little things that tick me off. I’m a great fan of Amazon and it’s really the only place I can get almost any book I can think of, but sometimes a man’s got to post on his blog when a man’s got to post on his blog.