Amazon Blocks Sellers From Using FedEx Ground For Prime Shipments (wsj.com) 48
schwit1 shares a report from The Wall Street Journal: Amazon.com is blocking its third-party sellers from using FedEx's ground delivery network for Prime shipments, citing a decline in performance heading into the final stretch of the holiday shopping season. The ban on using FedEx's Ground and Home services starts this week and will last "until the delivery performance of these ship methods improves," according to an email Amazon sent Sunday to merchants that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Amazon has stopped using FedEx for its own deliveries in the U.S., but third-party merchants had still been able to use FedEx. Such sellers now account for more than half of the merchandise sold on Amazon's website, including many items listed as eligible for Prime.
FedEx said the decision impacts a small number of shippers but "limits the options for those small businesses on some of the highest shipping days in history." The carrier said it still expects to handle a record number of packages this holiday season. "The overall impact to our business is minuscule," a FedEx spokeswoman said. In its email to merchants, Amazon said sellers can use FedEx's speedier and more expensive Express service for Prime orders or FedEx Ground for non-Prime shipments.
FedEx said the decision impacts a small number of shippers but "limits the options for those small businesses on some of the highest shipping days in history." The carrier said it still expects to handle a record number of packages this holiday season. "The overall impact to our business is minuscule," a FedEx spokeswoman said. In its email to merchants, Amazon said sellers can use FedEx's speedier and more expensive Express service for Prime orders or FedEx Ground for non-Prime shipments.
Was it a Prime order? (Score:2)
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What if it is a Prime item but isn't allowed to be transported via air?
Ie, anything with compressed gas, aerosols, flammable, liquids, etc.
Perhaps Amazon needs to decide a better way of making things qualify for Prime shipping?
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Then either it is in the closest warehouse or it doesn't get there on time. FedEx Ground is what you use if you want to save money, i.e. the exact opposite of Prime shipping.
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What if it is a Prime item but isn't allowed to be transported via air?
Then it's UPS or DHL. It was only FedEx ground services getting the ban hammer.
I've had fire extinguishers shipped to me and they had to come by ground shipment. When some of them had to be returned I could not take them to an "express" shipping center like you'd see in a strip mall, I had to go to one of the big shipping centers out of town. Near me I think it's UPS that has one in the middle of a cornfield outside the city limits, and the FedEx center is under the flight approach path at the airport.
Re: Was it a Prime order? (Score:5, Informative)
"FedEx Ground" isn't really "FedEx" (at least, not in the "when it absolutely, positively has to get there overnight" sense of the brand). It's REALLY a separate company (formerly known as RPS) that just does business under the "FedEx (Ground)" name... and has tarnished FedEx's good name for YEARS.
About 15 years ago, I caught them RED HANDED lying about missed deliveries. I got my first IP camera & left it recording after placing an order with buy.com. A week later, it hadn't arrived, then I got a robocall warning me that I'd missed 3 delivery attempts & the item would be sent back at my expense unless I went to their depot within 5 business days to pick it up. I reviewed the camera footage... no truck, no notices on door. It turns out, RPS drivers were semi-independent contractors. If nobody grabbed my package at the depot to try and deliver it, it counted automatically as a 'missed delivery". When I found out what they did to me, I went to their depot & raised holy hell.
It was bad ENOUGH that they didn't even bother to TRY delivering it... but to turn around and THREATEN me with having to pay the full shipping charge both ways after making me wait 3 futile days in the first place was just over the top.
I swore to god I'd never voluntarily use FedEx Ground again, and would do my best forever to spread the word about how shitty they are. I celebrate Amazon's decision to ban their use.
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Those are still "prime free shipping", but don't guarantee 2 days. It gives the guaranteed by date when you select the shipment method, and often prime shipping of batteries and such are listed at as much as a week of shipping.
Amazon Prime delivery (Score:2)
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How long until Amazon starts nationwide door to door delivery, ie: FedEx/UPS/USPS? You know they already contract people to do it, how long til we start seeing Prime blue delivery trucks in the neighborhoods
Now.
I passed two of their vans on the road last Friday in Naples, FL.
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During the 2016 holiday season, Amazon handled 8 percent of its final-mile shipments - that number increased to 20 percent in 2017 and to 30 percent in 2018. This year, in March and April - an off-peak time of the year - Amazon is carrying as much as 45 percent of its own shipments. In just a few years, the largest online retailer has methodically shifted its share of volume from final-mile carriers like USPS to its in-house delivery service.
Re:Amazon Prime delivery (Score:5, Informative)
I passed two of their vans on the road last Friday in Naples, FL.
I bet they were parked on the side of the road with a driver in reflective green or yellow hazard gear trying to sort/find packages from the back of the van? And when they do find and deliver your package it is to some random spot on the property.
I have had Amazon leave packages beside the mailbox (mailbox is down the road as it is a dead end gravel road), on the mailbox, on top of one of my stone light posts at the end of the driveway, on the steps of my sidewalk (three whole steps, I guess they were tired), finally at the garage door, and if lucky on the porch (where the package is safe and completely hidden from view from the street).
Fedex ALWAYS brings it to my porch unless it weighs 100lbs, then it is left at the garage door. UPS is either porch or garage unless holidays then it can wind up beside mailbox. USPS, If it doesn't fit in the mailbox, always brings it to my porch.
Amazon is in a race to the bottom, I am glad Fedex is not joining the race.
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I am sure mileage varies for the quality of the deliveries. I know when Amazon delivers to my house they take a picture and ask for a review of every delivery. That did not happen on day one, and is something they added shortly afterwards (probably due to issues like you have experienced).
On the flip side, I have had Fedex hold my package hostage before, and they had given me a 5 minute window at the end of the day, on the other side of town, to pick it up. Each service has their pro's and con's, and lik
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Amazon has been doing its own delivery in the Pacific Northwest for several years now. The trucks are generally brown, though - except when the delivery drivers are using their own vehicles.
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Re:Amazon Prime delivery (Score:5, Informative)
Never. FedEx and UPS don't even do that now, they just cover the cities and larger towns. Almost all rural deliveries and small towns that aren't near a big city are done by handing it off to USPS.
They're both on the record as they couldn't provide the service they do without USPS being able to cover the last mile for a lot of Americans.
Re:Amazon Prime delivery (Score:4, Informative)
That's not actually true. My parents had a UPS pickup in a brown truck at their house in my home town of ~10,000 people just last week, and I've fairly recently had FedEx SmartPost and UPS SurePost items delivered to me by the USPS in my current city of over 150,000 people. It has nothing to do with rural areas or small towns.
SurePost/SmartPost are a different class of service that is cheaper because the postal service does the last bit of delivery. FedEx and UPS couldn't do it at that discounted price in small towns without that, but unless I'm missing something, they still provide normal service in even the smallest towns, just like they always have.
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Not the smallest, sure, but it's almost three hours from the nearest real airports, an hour from the nearest actual city (~66k people), and some of my childhood friends measured the distance to their nearest neighbors in miles, so I'm pretty sure that qualifies as "rural" and a "small town that isn't near a big city". :-)
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They are already doing this.
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how long til we start seeing Prime blue delivery trucks in the neighborhoods
They're already out there. I see them all the time going in and out of my neighborhood. They aren't blue, but they're Amazon-branded vehicles.
Amazon internal delivery sucks (Score:2)
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Many of the drivers are incompetent and struggle on my property
Maybe they'd do better if you removed the land mines and snake pits.
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Sure, but what's the fun in that?
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Agreed. Literally every single time I've been given an "amazon tracking number" instead of fedex, ups, usps, or other, the package has shown up late by at least a day.
Wait. I take that back. They delivered something nearly a week early last week. (Just checked to make sure, and nope. It was shipped by USPS)
just wait for an 1099 driver to get into an bad cr (Score:1)
just wait for an 1099 driver to get into an bad crash that says hit's an school bus the lawsuit will likey force amazon to go back to UPS / fedex or to make them W2 workers with full commercial drivers insurance
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Re:Amazon internal delivery sucks (Score:4, Insightful)
My favorite is when they labeled a package as delivered, "Handed to customer" . Little detail is that the package never actually arrived, and was of course never handed directly to me. I called Amazon, and tried to explain no one handed me anything so either your driver 1.) lied 2.) handed a package to a stranger that happened to be outside my house? The CSR had no interest in any details, just the refund. And I'm not into berating customer service folks, so that was the end of that. But yeah, Amazon shipping is not much of an improvement.
If delivery performance was really a factor (Score:4, Informative)
Then Amazon would block itself from using AMZN delivery to my house. Seriously, I've taken to keeping photos of all the odd places the Amazon driver has left packages - out in the middle of the lawn, tossed over a fence, shoved into the branches of an apple tree, sitting out in the open on the trunk of my car, etc. Not to mention all the redeliveries of packages that never actually made it to me. Amazon is costing itself a lot of money!
I've also noticed that Amazon has made it pretty much impossible to report any sort of problems to a real person anymore.
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Post a picture with a comment to twitter and include the amazon twitter account of your country.
In my experience they resolved it pretty quickly with a gift voucher to say sorry.
Good (Score:5, Informative)
FedEx is always several days late, always claim they delivered packages I have video footage proving they didn't, the works.
Shitty, awful, terrible company.
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I work for a business where I regularly ship several packages a week via Fedex, to all 50 states, plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Of course, these are all business-to-business deliveries - there's a Fedex truck that stops twice a day at our warehouse, the guys down there know the driver personally, etc. But the majority of them are "Ground". There have been maybe 1 or 2 packages that have had issues delivering, so under 1% failure rate. One of them was a delivery to a storage-unit-type place where
This must be a joke (Score:5, Informative)
This must be a joke. Amazon has the shittiest service of all carriers. They are even worse than DHL, and up until Amazon I found that DHL had the laziest, most careless drivers. The number of shipments shipped by Amazon that are lost, destroyed or left out in the rain is incredible, to the point where my wife & I are cancelling Amazon Prime just before renewal next year, because it's simply not worth it.
FedEx, by comparison, has a great quality service.
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Yeah, seriously, Amazon is horrible at delivery. I am all Amazon and order atleast two items a week. Every month there is a cut, banged, misdelivered, undelivered, etc package. It takes 30 minutes to gets things sorted out with their CS. I can't believe the additional cost to CS is less than the additional for Fedex. Not to mention the customer retention hit from poor service. There are smart people at Amazon, and I guess big data says otherwise. But hopefully they don't have a poor metric because if
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If they run their deliveries like they do their warehouses - all the drivers are probably on the precipice of being unemployed if they take an extra 3 seconds on any given package.
They seem not to grasp that when they have such hairsplitting quotas, people begin making mistakes out of pure nervousness. Yeah, it probably gets the package thrown somewhere near the correct house 3 seconds faster. But rushed work is never good work. And rushed work is not the same as fast work.
I imagine some combination
Are they banning themselves next? (Score:2)
I only have problems with AZL, never an issue with FedEx, UPS, or USPS.
Perk up Pendergast! (Score:1)
It's not just Amazon (Score:1)
Hertz rental trucks (Score:2)
We had a couple Prime deliveries come (on time) in the last week via FedEx employees driving Hertz rental vans. For them to be using a 3rd party rental for vehicles shows they are operating considerably over their capacity. Certainly the use of rentals would have to hurt their profit margin.
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Are you sure they were FedEx? Some of the independent Amazon contractors are leasing vehicles from Hertz and others until Mercedes catches up on its delivery van order.
Walmart or Ebay (Score:2)
Fedex should make nice deals with Walmart and/or Ebay, who are about Amazon's only viable challengers, and eager for Fedex's reach.
Good riddance! (Score:2)
Every Fedex package I've ever had delivered looks like it was hurled onto my front porch from the street.
Is that legal? (Score:2)
Is it legal to restrict who transports your packages for delivery?
After you sell a widget, does the store have the right to tell you how it can be delivered?
I'm guessing Amazon's legal dept signed off on it, but it seems anti-competitive to me.
What a fantastic idea to speed up delivery at Xmas (Score:2)