Innate/Scary Knowledge of Amazon.com?

Mugenmidget

This topic is for you!

If an order is grouped by "as few shipments as possible" and has some pre-order items in it, this means the order will be delayed until all unavailable items become available.

I'll assume that some sort of "price guarantee" protects me from price hikes/discounts in this time period, but what about product availability for things that were in-stock at time of ordering and then become unavailable? Does anyone know if the items available now are set aside to be shipped later or do they continue to sell them as product?

yurnamehere

I would imagine the "as possible" part covers separating preorders from other items that are available. Whenever I've ordered a mix of preordered and available items at once, they've sent out the available items ASAP and later the preorders as they become available.

Mugenmidget

yurnamehere wrote: »

I would imagine the "as possible" part covers separating preorders from other items that are available. Whenever I've ordered a mix of preordered and available items at once, they've sent out the available items ASAP and later the preorders as they become available.

I think it's an option at ordering time that I could probably still take advantage of if I cancelled and re-ordered, but I have lacked this same foresight in the past and have done something this stupid where the available stuff came around the same time as the pre-ordered items (many months later).

If I cancel my order and put it through again, will free shipping apply if I specifically request for multiple shipments? I don't think I took advantage of any other special deals so I shouldn't lose out on anything else.

Also, to be quite frank, I can deal with a delayed shipment since I'm somewhat in the middle of tons of school and work right now, and this would come around Winter Break time if the delivery estimate is correct (no need to challenge my willpower). I'm more concerned with whether or not one of the items I already have will go "out of stock" before then and not be shipped.

blanknogo

hm... when I put in an order at Amazon.ca over $39, I qualified for shipping even though one of the items was pre-order. The ones available shipped first and then the pre-order came later... I didn't even play with the options.

Doc

In one order, I've pre-ordered two things that came out at different times, and received them as two shipments. If something is unavailable or unreleased, I'm 99% certain that they just send what they have, then send the rest later.

blincoln

My experience has been that if you place a single order than contains both in-stock and pre-order items, the in-stock items will ship immediately and the pre-order items later. However, when I pre-ordered two items that were separated in release date by two months awhile ago, Amazon was going to hold both items until the second was released according to the checkout page. Maybe that was inaccurate, but I wasn't willing to take the chance and switched to the other option to explicitly split the order.

LavaKnight

blincoln wrote: »

My experience has been that if you place a single order than contains both in-stock and pre-order items, the in-stock items will ship immediately and the pre-order items later. However, when I pre-ordered two items that were separated in release date by two months awhile ago, Amazon was going to hold both items until the second was released according to the checkout page. Maybe that was inaccurate, but I wasn't willing to take the chance and switched to the other option to explicitly split the order.

I think this is the case normally, however if the order qualifies for the free shipping, at least in one case that happened to me, Amazon holds the order until the pre-order item is available.

It could have been a separate circumstance that caused it to happen, but I'm pretty sure it was caused by the super saver shipping option.

Mugenmidget

Yep, you figured it out exactly, LavaKnight. They sent back an e-mail to me which was a huge rant about how "Super Saver Shipping" passes on the savings to me (wowwee!) and that part of the reason they can do that is because of how they group shipments.

That's fine as long as they don't sell out of what I ordered before it's shipment time, but does anyone know if they keep the item set aside? I'll try asking that next.

Dalboz

In my experience, I can't figure out a rhyme or reason to how they group shipments. Sometimes they will wait on preorder items to be available, and sometimes they ship SOME of the available items right away, but not necessarily all of them. They do have an order/preorder price guarantee where between the time the item is ordered and it ships, you will receive the lowest price that the item is sold for during that time. So if the price of the item goes up, you don't have to pay more, and if the price of the item goes down, your order price goes down. That's how I got my Halo 3 Legendary Edition for $99, since they accepted orders at that price when it was merely a speculated price. Then the real price came out at $129, but since I already ordered it for the lower price, I got a nice discount.

Doc

Now that I think about it, I was using Amazon Prime, their 2-day shipping service.