Now this is what I call fast shipping.
- Thread starter RJM62
- Start date
I'd call that fast processing.
Fast shipping is when you click "order" at 5:37 pm on a Thursday and the UPS (Ground) guy hands you your package at 9:05 am Friday. And it was free! (Crutchfield, if you are curious)
Fast shipping is when you click "order" at 5:37 pm on a Thursday and the UPS (Ground) guy hands you your package at 9:05 am Friday. And it was free! (Crutchfield, if you are curious)
I ordered a book from Amazon once in the middle of a 4PM meeting. My wife tripped over it on her way out the door at 8:30 the next morning. I don't know when it arrived.
It has a USPS tracking number, so it's in the system. I suppose it'll go out with the next batch to the post office.
Crutchfield is great, as is Amazon. The one that amazes me most, however, is iherb.com. They're based in California, but I get their orders in two days at most, via ordinary Priority Mail (basically the parcel equivalent of First Class); and a few times they've arrived in one day. I don't know how they do it.
-Rich
poadeleted21
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Eudora still exists?
When I lived in Memphis on more than one occasion I ordered something before work and would arrive home the same evening to have it on my doorstep.
When I lived in Memphis on more than one occasion I ordered something before work and would arrive home the same evening to have it on my doorstep.
Eudora OSE (Open-Source Edition). Built on Thunderbird. Not horrible, but I do miss the old Eudora...
-Rich
Archammer
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Oh ya, we use USPS for all our shipping now, because everything we ship arrives to our customers in 2 days flat.
Good stuff!
Good stuff!
DaleB
Final Approach
I've been shipping USPS for years now. Fast delivery and their tracking has improved immensely over the past couple of years. The only packages that get lost are overseas shipments (after they leave the US) and maybe one domestic every couple of years. That's out of a couple of thousand a year, not too shabby.
RussR
Final Approach
Amazon is testing (or possibly now has implemented, not sure) same-day delivery for orders in some major markets. Obviously to do this they have to the have the items warehoused nearby. And I'm sure there's an additional cost. But that's quick!
Yep, one of Amazon's fulfillment centers is about five miles north of IAD. They must have used some local courier to get it to me overnight.
A lot of people are basing their operations at either Louisville (UPS) or Memphis (FEDEX) to cut down on the delivery times.
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
Same experience here. Also had very good luck with Adorama.
Clark1961
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I still use Eudora...the old version from Qualcomm not the really old version. It works just fine...
comanchepilot
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Amazon not as good as it once was . . . . taking about a week and sometimes 10 days to ship their free shipping orders - yes - within guideline - but much much longer than it used to be . .
We have a peculiar system here in that a lot of UPS and FedEx orders wind up at the post office, as does all of our mail. (There's no carrier route mail service. Everyone has a P.O. Box.)
That creates a minor hassle because my legal and mailing address is a PO Box -- it's even on my driver's license and FAA certificates -- but private carriers' systems vomit on PO boxes because technically, they're not allowed to deliver to PO boxes. It also can be a problem when they use AVS or when the credit card issuer rejects the physical address because the billing address is a PO box.
I say "technically" because in my little sparrow-fart town, there's about a 50/50 chance that your UPS or FedEx package will wind up at the post office. Big, bulky stuff like the four tires I just ordered go to the house. But everything else is hit-or-miss.
Even more strangely, if UPS or FedEx attempt to deliver something medium-sized that requires a signature to a house, but no one's around to sign for it, it almost certainly will wind up at the post office. The postmaster signs for it, and they either bring it inside the post office or leave it on the dock.
I have no idea whether any of this is legal. I suspect it's more of a courtesy thing. With fewer than 600 full-time residents, it's a small enough place that no one up the ladder cares very much what goes on here as long as no one complains. And of course, no one does. The cooperation makes everyone's life easier.
-Rich
That creates a minor hassle because my legal and mailing address is a PO Box -- it's even on my driver's license and FAA certificates -- but private carriers' systems vomit on PO boxes because technically, they're not allowed to deliver to PO boxes. It also can be a problem when they use AVS or when the credit card issuer rejects the physical address because the billing address is a PO box.
I say "technically" because in my little sparrow-fart town, there's about a 50/50 chance that your UPS or FedEx package will wind up at the post office. Big, bulky stuff like the four tires I just ordered go to the house. But everything else is hit-or-miss.
Even more strangely, if UPS or FedEx attempt to deliver something medium-sized that requires a signature to a house, but no one's around to sign for it, it almost certainly will wind up at the post office. The postmaster signs for it, and they either bring it inside the post office or leave it on the dock.
I have no idea whether any of this is legal. I suspect it's more of a courtesy thing. With fewer than 600 full-time residents, it's a small enough place that no one up the ladder cares very much what goes on here as long as no one complains. And of course, no one does. The cooperation makes everyone's life easier.
-Rich
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Actually, I have had no problems with Amazon. First you have to realize that Amazon is an e-commerce front for:
1. Amazon itself.
2. Other vendors who let Amazon warehouse and ship their stuff.
3. Venders who just use Amazon to take the orders/payments.
The latter has the possibility for a decent amount of variability. But even with that everything I've ordered has beat or meets the 3 day "free" limits if it was listed in stock at the time of ordering.
AVS deals with billing addresses which is a mailing address and works fine with PO BOXES. I've had more problems with AMEX declining to accept things where the shipping address doesn't match the billing address or some other "known" address for me.
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The PO box verifies just fine. The problem is that the USPS AVS system corrects the physical address (which technically is not a "street address," but rather a "911 address") to the PO Box, which makes sense for USPS because that's where the mail or parcel should go. It's also fine for credit card issuers and the like, who will accept a PO box if USPS says it's okay.
The problem arises when the shipper uses the USPS AVS system for packages being shipped via non-USPS carriers, which they're not supposed to do, but a lot of them do nonetheless. The physical address gets converted to the PO Box, and then when the UPS or FedEX system tries to print the shipping label, it pukes on the PO box.
Amazon gives you the option of overriding the result and just shipping to whatever address you specify, even if their system believes that its incorrect. Most other companies will do this with a phone call to customer service. A very few, such as NewEgg, can't (or won't) ever override it. As a result, I can't order anything from NewEgg. No big deal. MicroCenter is better, anyway -- and they'll ship to a tree house if you ask them to.
Just to complicate the issue a little bit more, even though no mail can be delivered to it, the physical address has its own ZIP suffix -- and it's different from the PO Box suffix (which is simply the PO box number preceded by a zero). This only rarely causes problems, and only with government agencies (like FAA) that require the physical address, even if the mail is going elsewhere.
What happens here, as best as I can understand, is that the ZIP suffix of a physical address can be used to pinpoint the location of a residence with great precision. But when the AVS conversion of the physical address happens, USPS correctly assigns the suffix as the PO box preceded by a zero. That's what it should be for mailing purposes, but systems that want the physical address for security reasons barf on it.
It took me several days and five hours of phone calls to change the address on my driver's license -- and they still got it wrong. I finally gave up and visited the county clerk (who also does the DMV stuff), who was able to override it in seconds. The FAA system also puked when I tried to change my address online. I forget how I got it fixed. I think I had to mail it in with a check and a letter from the postmaster.
All this PO box stuff really annoyed me at first because I'd say that one-half to three-quarters of the online shopping I did required a phone call to customer service to override the AVS system. Correcting the address to the PO box solves the problem with banks and such wanting a physical address, but it created new ones for non-USPS shipments.
Since then, however, it seems that more companies are allowing the customers to override the AVS results themselves. The tire company I ordered from yesterday initially barfed on the address, but did let me override it. I suppose shippers got a lot of complaints from annoyed customers and got tired of wasting their CSRs' time doing manual overrides. Most people do know their own addresses, after all.
-Rich
denverpilot
Tied Down
They're using the logistics services of the shippers and warehousing somewhere near you.
Popular stuff on Amazon can be ordered here in Denver in the afternoon and will arrive at your doorstep via free shipping the following morning.
First thing I did when we moved to the boonies was fire up Amazon Prime. It was marginal at best in the city but out here, it has already paid for itself in fuel.
It's rare to see anything take more than two days to arrive unless it's an Amazon partner that drop ships from the manufacturer who has chosen to participate in Prime.
I stack up stuff to order in the cart or wish list and click the buy button the weekend before my every other week on-call/work from home week. Monday and Tuesday the locally stocked stuff arrives and by Friday at the latest the East Coast stuff arrives. Pretty amazing really.
denverpilot
Tied Down
P.S. Eudora. Wow. 