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Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

videogamer.com

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Re: Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

#131

Post by rodgerd »

throwanem wrote: post #39
zzleeper wrote: post #28

Is there a reason for non-console players to even buy in DVD form anymore, instead of Steam or similar markets? I mean, I get that if you live in Canada or Australia your bandwidth sucks and you have caps, but for most cases download speeds are way faster than DVD shipping speeds.

I've heard a few people express concerns around whether they actually own Steam games, and whether those games might suddenly be pulled or otherwise made unavailable without the courtesy of a purchase price refund. I'm not entirely unsympathetic, but on the other hand, to the best of my knowledge that's never actually happened, so...

> whether those games might suddenly be pulled or otherwise made unavailable without the courtesy of a purchase price refund.

A legit concern, but so many physical games seem to be tied to shit like uplay I'm not sure avoiding Steam gets you anything.

Re: Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

#132

Post by jldugger »

MichaelGG wrote: post #120
Spooky23 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a financial hack. Amazon has low margins so cash flow is king. They make money off you either way, when they sit on the order for 5 days, they probably book your revenue a month before they need to pay for the product.

Do they charge your before the order actually ships? I don't think they do.

Charging your credit card might not coincide with their definition of revenue recognition.

Re: Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

#133

Post by dmxt »

jldugger wrote: post #132
MichaelGG wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they charge your before the order actually ships? I don't think they do.

Charging your credit card might not coincide with their definition of revenue recognition.

What if a customer cancel the shipment?

Re: Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

#134

Post by wl »

foone wrote: post #103
post_break wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the opposite. Shipments supposed to be delivered on monday delivered on saturday or sunday. And promptly lost because I ship to a business address that is closed on the weekend. Infuriating watching it state delivered on a sunday at 3pm when I know it's going to be lost.

I swear I've had amazon ask me if it was alright to deliver to a new address on weekends. Maybe that's a recent feature?

There is a flag. They sometimes ignore it.

Re: Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

#135

Post by tzs »

geofft wrote: post #113
jghn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is one of the two reasons I signed up for prime in the first place, I'd always get super saver and 99.9% of the time it'd arrive in 2 days. All of a sudden it started taking the full time. I don't remember exactly what the other reason was, but it involved a one time money savings which was > the cost of a year of Prime at the time.

So I can imagine that this was originally a bug. Probably at some point they reached the capacity of things they could physically get out of their warehouse and onto a shipping truck per day, regardless of whether that truck is heading to other trucks or to a plane. So you need to prioritize, every day, the things that must go out overnight to meet the deadline. If you're full and you have things that could be shippe…

Wouldn't that explanation only work if their load is high enough that they frequently hit the limit on how much can be shipped per day, but they rarely hit the limit on how much can be shipped per 5 days?

If the load is lower than this, then deferral of non-Prime orders would rarely be needed. If the load is higher than this, deferral would rarely help.

If their load is in that window where deferral can help with load, the amount of deferral for a given warehouse should vary from order to order all the way from no delay to several days.

My recollection from before I got Prime was that almost all my free shipping 5 day orders shipped the same day, and then over a very short time that changed to them almost all being delayed by an amount that depended on how far the warehouse was from me. I lived in the same city as their biggest warehouse, for instance, and orders served from there were almost always delayed 4 days and then overnighted. That indicates that the deferral was not based on load.

Re: Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

#136

Post by takno »

vidarh wrote: post #128
takno wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prime in the UK is next day, and whenever they miss that they give you a free month of prime, which was essentially getting me prime for free. I gave up in the end because the waiting in was getting too expensive

Where do you live? I always get prime deliveries on time, and increasingly I get them same day if order before noon I think.

There were a whole selection of reasons for delay, including repeatedly giving the wrong address to the courier and continuing to use Yodel years after it stopped being funny. You are basically heavily dependent on your location relative to the dispatch warehouse, the courier's depot, whether your driver is overloaded, and whether your driver is a ring-and-run type.

Re: Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

#137

Post by sokoloff »

goldenkey wrote: post #109
sokoloff wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that Amazon is "swindling" third-party sellers. How much do Home Depot, Walmart, Sears, Costco, and others charge the (zero) third party sellers that they allow onto their platform?

Most of the "oldbiz" buy the goods and sell them from their own corporation -- this is because they have actual retail stores. Amazon does not. I do not know how much their rake is for 3rd party online goods though -- I see "Sold by Pharmapacks", etc.. often on Walmart and the price is usually not competitive at all compared to "Sold by Walmart.com" items. Mostly has to do with the shipping price.

That's because Walmart doesn't offer third-party fulfillment (to my knowledge). They allow select third-parties onto the selling part of the platform (but again, not open like Amazon), but fulfillment remains the 3rd party's problem to handle, which is why the shipping price is still an issue there.

Amazon is providing far more of the value chain than other e-commerce sites, and it's no surprise to me that they're charging for that. If that doesn't work for a given seller, they shouldn't use Amazon. If enough people don't use Amazon, Amazon will have to adjust. I see no evidence that the latter is occurring in great numbers.

Re: Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

#138

Post by Spooky23 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #120
Spooky23 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a financial hack. Amazon has low margins so cash flow is king. They make money off you either way, when they sit on the order for 5 days, they probably book your revenue a month before they need to pay for the product.

Do they charge your before the order actually ships? I don't think they do.

The point is that they don't hold the inventory.

They buy stuff on net-30 terms, and ship stuff to you the day it arrives. WalMart does similar things for many products -- they make vendors carry inventory until it arrives at a DC.

Re: Amazon blocks non-Prime members from buying certain video games

#139

Post by surrealvortex »

mindslight wrote: post #123
surrealvortex wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe the transportation resource Amazon had to use to ship later in the day had some cancelations? It's impossible to build a distributed system that has fully consistent results. That is usually the reason for inconsistencies between the detail page and checkout page promises.

I guess you've indirectly answered my question - Amazon has its own reality distortion field. Are you really not aware that every other merchant and shipper has specific cutoff times? It's based on truck schedule rather than link capacity - the essential measure is weight , which primarily necessitates more fuel. The only "distributed system" in question is Amazon's own computer system. In which case no, it does not…

Um, if someone else cancels, they free up the resource (volume or weight or number of packages). This allows some other package to use the resource. This essentially makes it non-static, since it depends on the number of shipments that will consume that specific resource.

Your reply seems to suggest that you can get a truck to carry infinite capacity just by using more fuel. Not sure if you meant something else.

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