231–240 of 495 posts
Mcmaster-carr is fantastic: https://www.mcmaster.com/ Very simple UI with access to technical diagrams. Good pricing. If I order before noon or 2pm or something, here in the bay area I receive the items next day. I wish all web stores could be like this.
The estimates on Amazon right now seem way longer than the reality. I'm getting all my packages in 2-3 days despite Amazon estimating a week or more.
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I'm guessing a lot of this is location dependent, and based on warehouse-proximity.
It's also based on the items you're ordering. Some stuff we've ordered arrives within a few days or less. Other items that I've ordered (tools) has taken about 3 weeks to arrive. Some items keep getting pushed back. I would cancel and buy elsewhere but I'd pay a lot in shipping since these aren't all items I can buy from one place online. I have shopped online for other items though. I bought some insoles for really…
Help requested. My wife, who is in her 50s, is immunocompromised, and she also has a history of fast escalating and difficult to treat respiratory problems. We are and have been (for the past 32 days) treating this bug very carefully. If she catches it, she has a very good chance of not surviving it. Our son and I are at less risk, but we can easily bring this bug home. We've been having more and more trouble getting…
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> we have a fair quantity of emergency supplies. If you won't use them now, when will you? Are we talking days, weeks or months?
When someone in the house gets sick and nobody is supposed to leave because they've been exposed.
I'm pretty much fine with it as long as I think it's reasonable that I won't deplete more than some fraction of it before I can top it off.
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Not me. Amazon is estimating 2-3 weeks on most things now, and so far are sticking by their estimates.
I'm guessing a lot of this is location dependent, and based on warehouse-proximity.
Help requested. My wife, who is in her 50s, is immunocompromised, and she also has a history of fast escalating and difficult to treat respiratory problems. We are and have been (for the past 32 days) treating this bug very carefully. If she catches it, she has a very good chance of not surviving it. Our son and I are at less risk, but we can easily bring this bug home. We've been having more and more trouble getting…
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bnh?
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/ presumably. I've ordered some things from there, and generally had a good experience, with a few notes: - For large purchases at least, they are very scrupulous about sending tax documents to your home state to make sure the sales tax gets paid. This is probably a social good overall, but unusual for internet retailers and may take some folks by surprise. - They follow a Jewish holiday s…
In 2018 in the case South Dakota v. Wayfair the Supreme Court overturned the 1992 case (Quill v. North Dakota) that had ruled that states could not force merchants with no physical presence in the state to collect sales tax on mail order sales to state residents. If a company is doing enough online business with customers in a state, that state can now force the merchant to collect tax.
If you get a B&H store credit card [1] and use it for your B&H orders (which is all you can use it for since it only works at B&H) they give you an instant reward at checkout equal to whatever your sales tax was. In effect then, if you get and use that card there B&H pays your sales tax transparently for you.
• With two exception for the most part online shoppers can ignore the Jewish holiday closings. The website still works so you can still shop. I think you can even still place items in your cart and maybe submit the order. Orders just are not processed until the holiday ends.
Most of the holidays are just a day, so if you hit one of those its not really a big delay.
The two exceptions are Passover and Sukkot. Those are each one week long. Passover is in March or April, and Sukkot is in September or October. That's long enough to be irritating.
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Never had an issue with costco.com where I've made some of my big purchases.
Just this week I had an issue with Costco.com. Ordered an item, their delivery estimate was 3-5 days. 7 days passed and the item hasn't shipped. No updated ETA or any information/communication on how long it might take. Decided to cancel and order from an alternative vendor (who would communicate better, frankly). Was unable to even cancel it online (cancel button was missing, in contradiction to their help docs). Tr…
1. Your order type fell into an edge cast that an incomplete batch system -> system transfer job choked on. Naturally, it silently failed.
2. Inventory count mismatch.
3. Incomplete transportation handshake.
Logistics looks simple from a customer perspective: (1) order, (2) ship, (3) receive. From a vendor perspective it's (1+) bulk source, (2+) distribute, (3) maintain consistent inventory counts, (4) receive order, (5) source order items from stock most efficiently, (6) orchestrate multi-sourced items, (7+) provision & batch transportation, receiving and reshipping at multiple legs, (8+) fulfill last mile.
All while stitching together 30+ year old systems for each of those. And the +'d items are all semi-outside of the company's control. (Ever wonder why there are so many transportation-abstraction companies?)
Which is to say, no excuse for bad service. But it's a bear of a problem.
Incidentally, why most retail has excellent customer support phone centers (usually onshore): they know their systems break a non-zero amount of time, and want the best touch when you need to have things fixed.
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10 years ago I used Newegg a ton, but with third party items now mixed into their store, I find shopping there a bit more of a dice roll.
100 percent this. I dropped NewEgg when they added third party sellers.