Ask HN: Why do Amazon deliveries fail?

[LVB]

In recent years, my Amazon orders have been much more likely to be delayed. But in the past few months, I've experienced a worse pattern. Items become "Delayed", then very delayed, then Amazon offers and eventually begs me to cancel the order. I've let this ride for a while and found that the package will just never show up. It will be "delayed" indefinitely, with no progress for weeks. Yet I can cancel the order and immediately reorder the item, and it'll show up the next day.

It feels like I'm "rebooting the router" on a logistics flow. I'm interested if anyone has worked to close to Amazon to explain what is going on with stuff getting stuck this way.

[DamonHD]

For my order just cancelled two days overdue with no update after 'out for delivery' after two fumbles logged earlier in the process, it was doomed from the start by the carrier being Hermes/Evri. I would never willingly use them to send anything, and would have refused to have my order sent via them if I had had a choice. The entire ownership of the firm sets them up to fail IMHO, even though all carriers can have bad depots/drivers/days. I suspect some new bean-counter is optimising for cost with a rather short-term view of cost...

When getting my refund I said "please please do not use Hermes/Evri." Let's see if someone runs the stats properly...

[mattl → DamonHD]

I had a similar thing years ago and asked them to not use FedEx and since then packages were always delivered by UPS until Amazon's own delivery took over most of the area.

[SaberTail]

My assumption has been they do that when the shipment is damaged or lost. And that they haven't implemented any sort of automatic refund or reship because some percentage of people don't notice, and that reduces Amazon's losses.

[WheelsAtLarge → SaberTail]

I've had at least one order when the order was damaged and it was automatically reordered by the system. I live in a big city with many nearby warehouses so it may be the exception. I suspect that it's better for delivery people to just ignore a damaged order than to report it and have it be a point against them. But I'm just guessing.

[giantg2 → SaberTail]

I agree. I assume damage when it gets indefinitely delayed since it's usually something fragile or liquid when it happens to me.

[ffhhj]

I've been ordering stuff from Amazon for almost two decades now, and the regular failure in deliveries started about 2 years ago. Recently there's a 20% chance of the package getting lost, and 50% them not knowing whether the package was actually delivered when it was. How did they get to that shameful state? And the final cherry is them now shadowbanning my account from deliveries that are medium to large sized, I can only order small things. What?

[Blackstrat]

In my area the problem is over reliance on the postal service. Prime delivery routinely takes 3-5 days. Lost or damaged packages are far more common on USPS than on UPS, Amazon subcontractors, or Amazon corporate drivers. Our postal carrier actually told us to get a bigger mailbox if we didn’t like the damage because he wasn’t getting out of his truck.

[Hatrix]

I have a lot of packages delivered to an Amazon locker. Item delivery is inconsistent if the locker is often full. Sometimes items are marked refused delivery, sometimes locker full and sometimes lost. They should have cameras inside the locker boxes to show what was actually delivered and picked up.

[jaredsohn]

I've had 13 Amazon orders this year and I got them all within a few days of ordering them. Just mentioning since threads like this get dominated by people experiencing problems and want to point out it isn't always like that.

[jjice → jaredsohn]

Also throwing in my data point: Very consistent for me as of late. I've had issues in the past, but most of those were nearing a decade ago. Amazon is probably the best delivery service I use on a day to day basis, with FedEx being the worst in the last few years for me, anecdotally.

[codingdave]

There were some news articles a couple years back about theft being one cause of such failures. Entire containers being swiped off a train, for example.