non-Prime users; how long does it usually take you to get an order with free shipping?
i wasn't using Prime enough to pay $100 for a third year of it, so i haven't had it for a few months. until this week, i've only ordered a few things off amazon since then, and they were from 3rd party sellers.
on Monday afternoon I ordered $70 worth of stuff that was being sold by Amazon and not a 3rd party. i selected free shipping. it's now saturday and the status of my order is still 'Preparing for shipment', as it has been for the last 3 days. it's only 7 items, nothing big or hard to ship.
i feel like i'm being punished for not having Prime, and it's certainly not making me want to get Prime. for a company capable of delivering most anything in 2-3 days, it seems crazy for an order to go a week without being shipped.
how long do your non-prime free shipping orders usually take to get to you?
EDIT 10 Nov pm
it shipped!
a few hours under 1 week, and it's finally shipped.
well, it says it shipped. it doesn't even say with which carrier yet. "The carrier may not show a tracking scan until they receive it at a regional hub near the destination.".
if your 7 items came from multiple warehouses, instead of shipping you 3+ packages, they ship it to a central warehouse and ship you a single package.
my delivery hub for any carrier, the place from which trucks leave to come to my house later in the day, is ~150 miles down a single highway from one of the major amazon distro centers. i've very rarely had large orders come in more than one box, and then it was two. and i think that was only with some kind of exotic food stuffs or exceptionally large things.
estimated delivery: thursday, 10 days after the order.
i know not to expect fast shipping with free shipping, and if it had taken 5 days to get here after it shipped, i wouldn't have thought it strange at all. but 7 days between placing the order and it being handed off to the delivery co just seems excessive. it's far longer than with any other order with any other online company i've bought from, or with amazon's free shipping years ago before i had Prime.
i was just a few hours away from being annoyed enough to contact customer service. so... i wasn't too annoyed. but i'm not happy. i really thought amazon would have been capable of tossing stuff in a box faster than that, free shipping or not.
Posted Nov 8, 2014, 8:44 PM UTC · edited
Prime user here with friends who don't have Prime.
Like with most things with Amazon, the answer is "it depends". With Free Super Saver Shipping, the two to three days spent in limbo "preparing for shipment" is pretty normal. When the order is shipped, it's usually whatever the cheapest version of "Ground shipping" is - whether that's UPS, FedEx, Smartpost, USPS, etc. Depending on how close you are to the warehouse, you could get it the next day after the status sets to "shipped," or it could still be four days out.
I've found that the "preparing for shipment" can often include behind the scenes travel - such as from warehouse to warehouse. So if your 7 items came from multiple warehouses, instead of shipping you 3+ packages, they ship it to a central warehouse and ship you a single package. If you're a Prime customer, you'll often note that orders with multiple items ship in separate packages from separate locations because they skip that consolidation step.
Without Prime, living pretty close to a major distribution warehouse (the Mesquite/Dallas one), FSSS took about five to seven business days to reach me.