dragonlady7

( BLEED ALREADY ahem probably TMI )

Also I realized just after I pushed the button to order my phone that in comparing two listings, I had noticed that one specified "unlocked" and the other did not specify, and in the reviews of the products, the unspecified one had complaints from people who both did and did not want the unlocked version, so I got the feeling it varies. I sent a message to the company right away, but I know, as an Amazon seller, that you get those messages Monday morning, that's just how it happens. The phone shipped already. It said "Prime", which used to mean it was in Amazon's warehouse, but now, well...

Some of y'all might not know this even as well as I do, but I don't fully understand it either. So you know, when you're shopping on Amazon, right, that Amazon itself is a marketplace, right? The company itself offers a lot of things for sale, but it offers far more things that it does not own. You can see this in a listing, when you look over near the price of the item, or near the "buy" button. (The page can vary.) It'll say, "$Price", and then next to it, "Prime" with the little checkmark. And under that, it'll say In Stock, and something like "ships from and sold by Amazon". That means Amazon owns the item and is selling it directly to you.

But a different item-- I just searched for something I know my company sells, and when I clicked through directly to a listing I just knew was ours, instead it says "$Price" and then in black text "& FREE Shipping" and then a delivery date estimate. "Only 2 left in stock- order soon", and then "ships from and sold by "OurName".
See that's because we own that thing, and it's shipping directly from our store. Amazon's delivery estimate on there is based entirely on their prior data about how long something that weight should take to get from our address to your account address and the fact that they yell at us if we don't ship within 24 hours of ordering, and has no guarantees really, because they don't know how long it will take me to get the warehouse idiot guy to put that in a box for you, and we're going to ship it via the cheapest method we can, so who knows. (I mean, the cheapest is USPS First Class which is actually pretty reasonable, but. It also varies widely. Ostensibly Amazon knows that you're in California looking at a store in, well, it thinks we're in Pennsylvania when some of us are in New York but whatever; I have no idea how accurate their shipping estimates are but we do get a fair number of customer complaints but that's also because we very often take longer than 24 hours to put it in a box. [listen our warehouse guy is very dumb but he's ours and we're very loyal and actually he's been on sick leave since Black Friday so our CEO is packing orders so this season has gone flawlessly but let's not dwell on that])

There's a third category that's existed for a few years now. Periodically, we take a bunch of stuff from store inventory, pack it into a giant box, and send it in to Amazon warehouses (mostly, a close one, but sometimes they ask us to ship things further). They then ship it directly to customers when orders come in, and pay us after they've shipped it. It's called Fulfillment By Amazon. It means Amazon's selling it for someone else, and Amazon's packaging and shipping it, but Amazon doesn't own it. It also means they can use their Prime shipping, which isn't actually expedited shipping exactly-- it's that they distribute things into warehouses based on their belief (based on lots of data) about where it's likely to sell, and when a customer orders a thing, they ship it from the closest warehouse so it gets there faster. You can identify this because it'll say Prime, and then it'll say, under the stock notification "Sold by [SELLER], Fulfillment By Amazon."

And they just introduced a fourth category. Seller-Filled Prime. That means that the seller owns the item, the seller stocks the item, and when a sale comes in, Amazon doles it out to the seller nearest the customer, and what's more the seller is absolutely required to ship same-day anything they get by 2pm, using the method Amazon dictates. It's integrated into our shipping software; regardless of cost, it only gives us shipping options that will get the package there on time. (We pay for the shipping, but at special rates negotiated by Amazon.)

I have no idea, as a customer, how you tell what's Seller-Filled Prime and what's not. I have a suspicion the phone might have been, because I ordered a bunch of stuff that's all arriving today, but the phone, while listed as Prime, was also predicted not to arrive until this coming Friday. Yes-- Prime means free 2-day shipping, but in this case it somehow actually meant free 5-day shipping. Because there's a holiday in there, I'm sure, is why it was such a difference-- you can't require a seller to be open on weekends, so Seller-Filled Prime only counts business days and if you order on a Saturday night, it's going to get filled on Monday, which means it's going to get hung up in New Year's closures. (But what's weird is that it told me it had shipped within an hour. I don't think it actually had, it just got downloaded or whatever, but. Meanwhile the things that were actually shipping from Amazon warehouses, mostly FBA I bet, were actually pulled and packed because Amazon staffs its warehouses on the weekends.)

Anyhow. I don't know if my phone is SFP or FBA or what. If SFP, my message might not have been useless. (I'm caffeinating right this moment to get to work early to sort through the downloaded orders, and I'll check the incoming messages too in case anything's cancelled or the customer had a question so I think they might not want the thing after all.) If FBA, then the seller has no control over what actual item Amazon's warehouse staff fills, and in many cases, the sale is assigned at random and has nothing to do with the inventory. (We had trouble with this; we sent in legit things and then got returns of gray-market counterfeits that customers had bought from the general pool of inventory and Amazon had assigned to "us". Sometimes it wasn't even that they were counterfeit, but that the serial numbers didn't match the range we'd been initially sold so the manufacturer wouldn't credit us for the defective items etc. So now we have to re-label every single serial-numbered item we send in so that our inventory doesn't get pooled-- it was the counterfeits that really annoyed us, that Amazon would send fake shit to customers in our name and there was nothing we could do about it. (And how are they gonna know the difference? They don't, that's not their job. That's the thing you've got to think about when you're buying on a marketplace site, right?)

So that turned into more of a rant than I meant to, and might actually contain relevant information so I should snip out the part at the beginning that was the whole purpose of the rant initially, but oh well, c'est la vie, now I must dash to go download the orders actually