Amazon.com Needs To Stop Hurting Its Bottom Line With Incentives

Submitted 7 years ago

Right now (although the company has also offered $5.95 for Amazon Pantry purchases under the same terms) Amazon.com credits customers with $1 toward ebooks and such for being a Prime customer but accepting 4 to 5 day standard delivery. This is a very bad approach because it causes me to make lost of little orders that I would otherwise consolidate in a single order. That way I get more dollars in ebook credits, but it also means Amazon.com almost certainly loses money on most of those because of the minimum delivery charge it incurs. That is true even if it just pays by truck weight because packaging materials are not free and neither are address labels. Instead Amazon.com should base the credit for digital materials downloaded to a set percentage of the order total.

The other problem is some products that would be delivered in two days as a Prime customers sometimes don't take 4 to 5 days but around 6 weeks coming directly from Asia. Most of the time if I had known that would be the case, I would have picked a different vendor and paid a little more if necessary as that also assures affordable return shipping.