12 frogs

A couple of week ago, we placed a book order at Amazon, going over $25 in order to take advantage of free shipping. When I checked on the progress of our order the next day, Amazon said they weren’t going to be shipping the books for two weeks.

Not that the books would arrive in two weeks. No, they were going to start thinking about boxing up our books — that both said they shipped within 24 hours — in two weeks. Since Lisa wanted one of the books for reading on a crazy-long plane trip, we cancelled.

I placed another order on the Monday the 31st, figuring I’d just be patient. For thirty percent off and free shipping, I am prepared to be patient. The same thing happened, and it was still annoying they weren’t going to start the shipping process for a week, but at least I wasn’t surprised.

Turns out I was surprised, happily so, as both books (The Search and Ambient Findability) arrived on Saturday the 4th, about a week before Amazon said they would ship.

Underpromising and overdelivering is one thing, but I think this is really something else. I think Amazon doesn’t want people using their free shipping option, and they are banking on people choosing to upgrade shipping because we all want everything now.

Amazon runs A/B tests all the time [An A/B test in a nutshell involves showing X thousand of users one thing and X thousands of users another thing to determine how well the things work.] I bet they figured out that X percentage of users, when faced with stupidly long ship dates, would upgrade to paid shipping, and this percentage was worth irritating the X percentage of us who will wait, and the X percentage who would say screw it and cancel.