Things I'd like to be able to do #6552: Post-date Amazon purchases

[andrewducker]

"Oh, it's Nick's birthday in five weeks, and I've found the perfect present. I'll tell them to despatch it three days beforehand."

"I want to buy this parcel, but I'm on holiday for the next four days. I'll set up the pre-order for the day before I get back."

Trivially easy to do, I'd have though, as they already take money for pre-orders on books that aren't released yet.

Comments

[teresafloyd]

Now I wonder why they don't do that. It is a brilliant idea that a lot of people would use - would even encourage their upsells like gift wrap. Probably has to do with warehouse space.

I'd even be happy to pay for the item at time of purchase and just have them hold it for a couple of weeks until I want it delivered.

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

That's actually a pretty big ask. Amazon do just-in-time fulfilment. It's their big thing, in fact. If they were to delay fulfilment, they wouldn't be able to guarantee stocks. Someone would have to warehouse stock somewhere, and that costs money.

Pre-orders for books etc. are easy: they take the money now, the stock will come when it comes.

[andrewducker]

They don't take the money now - they take the money on despatch.

I guess that if they wanted to keep the costs down then they could say "We don't guarantee stock on that date."

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

They do Subscribe and Save on grocery items - I get stuff sent out from them on a monthly basis so I agree they should be able to cope with the order for timed despatch - they never write to me to tell me they won't be able to fulfill my order - I get an email three days before despatch, reminding me of my monthly subscription and giving me an option to cancel/ delay the despatch. So they do have a whole order/delay system built in, why they can't roll that out for everything is a mystery to me.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

There's some weird FTC law that makes it impossible to do that. I only know this because some of the clients I do ad copy for have tried to set up things where people could order stuff in advance and it's always fallen flat on their faces.

What happens is that a certain amount of people who pre order stuff decide before the order is fulfilled that they have changed their mind.

(I.e. people pre-order stuff when they are drunk and then when they sober up are like "WTF?")

This results in a "charge back" situation with the merchant banks that handle processing and after a certain number of charge backs the merchant bank freezes your account(making it impossible for you to process credit card orders) and reports you to the FTC who then investigate and it's up to you to prove that it's the idiots who pre-ordered who are at fault and not your company.

Amazon is so huge that their cancellation numbers would quickly hit the hundreds of thousands thus almost certainly triggering all this bullshit.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

The law is different for subscription services than it is for pre-ordered services.

[skreidle.livejournal.com]

Failing that (for the reasons stated in other comments), I'll set a Google calendar reminder for myself. :)

(That'd work for Nick's birthday, but not so much for the holiday trip.)

[naath.livejournal.com]

Amazon only take your money when they ship the book if you order a book they don't have yet, I guess because of this kind of thing, so they could do that.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Cool, I'm getting a present!