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.
" doc_version: "1" last_updated: "2017-06-02" date: 2007-01-18 tags: [Amazon, amazon-books, books, checkout, Rant, shipments] canonical: "https://eran.sandler.co.il/2007/01/18/amazon-checkout-interface-group-to-as-few-shipments-as-possible/" --- ## Sitemap - [Home](https://eran.sandler.co.il/) 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][1]), 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. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/registry.html?ie=UTF8&id=100VDU9G4XALK