Ok.. I got lured again by Amazon.. I had to order some Performax
casters. Amazon had them 10% off which made them competitive with other
websites. They also had $25 off $150.. So, since the casters were $96,
I figure I could get about $50 worth of stuff for $25.

Well, of course now since there's so many cross sellers on Amazon, it
takes a long time to find stuff that qualifies for free shipping. Ended
up getting some work gloves and drill bits. Also got a small level.

I put my order in a couple days ago.. Expected delivery date is Dec
30.. LOL. I know to always expect a snail's pace from them, and I guess
I'm ok with not moving the sander for 2 months. At least not bothered
enough to cancel the order, but stuff like this definitely doesn't make
them my prefered supplier. After waiting 12 weeks to get some Freud
router bits from them, I never order anything from them that I need in
a hurry.

Yeah, I know, I should've gotten up off my lazy ass and drove to a
local store, but that's 45 minutes each way for me and I've been very
short on "Free time" lately.

On 8 Nov 2006 12:29:51 -0800, "bf" wrote:

Ok.. I got lured again by Amazon.. I had to order some Performax
casters. Amazon had them 10% off which made them competitive with other
websites. They also had $25 off $150.. So, since the casters were $96,
I figure I could get about $50 worth of stuff for $25.

Well, of course now since there's so many cross sellers on Amazon, it
takes a long time to find stuff that qualifies for free shipping. Ended
up getting some work gloves and drill bits. Also got a small level.

I put my order in a couple days ago.. Expected delivery date is Dec
30..

I got a similar date once, but the merchandise actually showed up
considerably sooner. Maybe that's luck.

LOL. I know to always expect a snail's pace from them, and I guess
I'm ok with not moving the sander for 2 months. At least not bothered
enough to cancel the order, but stuff like this definitely doesn't make
them my prefered supplier. After waiting 12 weeks to get some Freud
router bits from them, I never order anything from them that I need in
a hurry.


You waited 12 weeks for router bits? That's more patience than I've
got. What's your name? Job?

On Wed, 08 Nov 2006 12:29:51 -0800, bf wrote:

I put my order in a couple days ago.. Expected delivery date is Dec
30.. LOL. I know to always expect a snail's pace from them, and I guess
I'm ok with not moving the sander for 2 months.

I got my router collet in ~6 days and my router itself in perhaps 10 ...
freebie delivery / UPS ground. Not great ... but not a horror story,
either.

It took a full month for the cross-seller to get up off dead center and
send my table insert. By the time it arrived, I didn't need it any more.

Bill

George Max wrote:
On 8 Nov 2006 12:29:51 -0800, "bf" wrote:
....
.... After waiting 12 weeks to get some Freudrouter bits ...
....

You waited 12 weeks for router bits? ...

Seems like Freud stuff is nearly unobtainium from whoever the
supplier(s?) are. I had a set of replacement planer knives on order
for over a year, approaching 18 months and they never showed up...Every
two weeks a "Sorry, 2-week delay, do you still want them?" e-mail would
show up and every two weeks I would reply "Yes", and they would send a
new confirmation shipping date two weeks hence. I had decided to see
how long it would go on before (or if) anything would ever trigger a
human interface to happen, but I was out of town and missed the "reply
by" date on one notice and it killed the order. Otherwise, I suppose I
would still have an outstanding order nearly three years later now, if
not and I had kept up the responses. Last I looked they had the same
product still listed at a favorable price with the 2-3 day delivery
expected notice. I came to the conclusion that at least a lot of Freud
stuff is "loss leader" stuff and not actual merchandise legitimately
offered.

I won't order anything through Amazon anymore that isn't
direct-from-Amazon and available for immediate shipment(which, of
course, means I'm not ordering much from them any longer). About all I
even look for there anymore is some bulk items like sander discs and
50-lb pneumatic nailer nails.

"dpb" wrote in message
oups.com...

I won't order anything through Amazon anymore that isn't
direct-from-Amazon and available for immediate shipment(which, of
course, means I'm not ordering much from them any longer). About all I
even look for there anymore is some bulk items like sander discs and
50-lb pneumatic nailer nails.


It's _all_ available for immediate shipment if you're willing to pay the
extortionate prices for "handling" it. Folks in the cheap seats always get
the warm beer, you ought to know that.

George wrote:

It's _all_ available for immediate shipment if you're willing to pay the
extortionate prices for "handling" it. Folks in the cheap seats always get
the warm beer, you ought to know that.

Have you ever tried paying the premium shipping and saw that it shipped
faster? I'm not doubting you, I just never tried it.
I could see them delaying the order 3-5 days if you get free shipping.
But 2 months?
Doesn't that just invite cancelations?

The router bits that took 12 weeks.. they kept stalling and stalling..
Luckily I was ordering them for a project I hadn't started.. I had a
couple other things in the queue ahead of it. Even when they arrived, I
wasn't ready to start it yet.

Amazon is ok for stuff you are willing to wait a couple months for, but
if I end up going to the local store before they ship, I'm canceling my
order before I leave and getting the casters there.

Another thing I noticed is that the big items no longer have free
shipping. I almost ordered a Jet Disk sander.. but the $99 shipping
surcharge kills it. LOL. I noticed they were adding that $99 to things
like dust collectors, etc. It doesn't seem like they want to be in the
business of selling "big" items anymore.. After all, Amazon is the
walmart of internet shopping. People go there for the price, they sure
don't go there for the customer service, IMO.

bf wrote:
I put my order in a couple days ago.. Expected delivery date is Dec
30.. LOL. I know to always expect a snail's pace from them, and I guess
I'm ok with not moving the sander for 2 months. At least not bothered
enough to cancel the order, but stuff like this definitely doesn't make
them my prefered supplier. After waiting 12 weeks to get some Freud
router bits from them, I never order anything from them that I need in
a hurry.


I've had a few instances where the upgraded shipping costs were so
small as to be silly to not opt for faster shipping. You might want to
select the one or two day shipping and see what the costs come out to -
just to see.

A good example is when I was purchasing a Bosch 10" SCMS. I looked it
up on Amazon, they had it for about $60 less than the only store in
town that had it in stock. When I selected overnight shipping, the cost
was $10. Yes, ten dollars. I closed out of the browser, searched for
the saw, and tried again and the same shipping price came up again.

So, it might be worth it to check what the shipping charges are when
you go to place an order - you may luck out.

On 9 Nov 2006 06:05:16 -0800, "bf" wrote:

Amazon is ok for stuff you are willing to wait a couple months for

I noticed that the big items no longer have free
shipping. I noticed they were adding that $99 to things
like dust collectors, etc. It seems like they don't want to be in the
business of selling "big" items anymore.. After all, Amazon is the
walmart of internet shopping. People go there for the price, they sure
don't go there for the customer service, IMO.

Maybe. I ordered a Delta AP-100 air cleaner (fairly large) from
Amazon about 5 weeks ago and used the free shipping. It made it to my
house in under a week. It shipped from a city in Ohio, I don't
remember which one. That worked o.k.

George wrote:
"dpb" wrote in message
oups.com...

I won't order anything through Amazon anymore that isn't
direct-from-Amazon and available for immediate shipment(which, of
course, means I'm not ordering much from them any longer). About all I
even look for there anymore is some bulk items like sander discs and
50-lb pneumatic nailer nails.


It's _all_ available for immediate shipment if you're willing to pay the
extortionate prices for "handling" it. Folks in the cheap seats always get
the warm beer, you ought to know that.

Well, that may be what the site says, experience says otherwise. At
least for me, an unfulfilled order after a wait of over a year doesn't
qualify as "immediate"....

As for shipping costs/delivery schedules, w/ Amazon that never seemed
to come into play in my experience under the original Amazon umbrella.
I've ordered a lot of stuff through them over the years and always
taken the ground/cheapest or "free" shipping and invariably products
were shipped in a timely manner until the rise of the associated
vendors. Being in an area where nearest air freight terminals are
still at least two delivery days away by ground by the time they're
handled, it simply never made sense to order stuff w/ expedited
shipping here.

What really killed my use of Amazon was the revamping of the site so
you never know with whom you are dealing until at checkout the products
you ordered might be supplied from a bunch of different vendors and all
have different delivery rules/rates/returns, etc. If I wanted to deal
w/ another vendor, I'd look for another vendor.

It had been some time, a look shows these particular knives listed now
as "In Stock" from another vendor I don't recognize. I suppose the
previous "supplier" went belly-up.

bf wrote:
George wrote:

It's _all_ available for immediate shipment if you're willing to pay the
extortionate prices for "handling" it. ...

Have you ever tried paying the premium shipping and saw that it shipped
faster? I'm not doubting you, I just never tried it.
I could see them delaying the order 3-5 days if you get free shipping.
But 2 months?
Doesn't that just invite cancelations?
....

Up until a year or so ago, I never saw any appreciable delays in
shipping times w/ free ("Free" shipping isn't free, of course, it's
simply included in the overhead pricing structure rather than explicit.
Some of the expense may be underwritten as marketing or early on as a
way to build customer loyalty/preference, of course.) shipping and
normal ground delivery. Virtually every instance the product would
ship within a coupld of days at most and often would go out the same
day and be here on or before the "expected ship date".

I believe the difference primarily is the shift to all the other
suppliers fulfilling orders and that many of them don't have the
facilities to handle significant volume and that others simply are
fronts for folks trying to drop ship or re-ship merchandise rather than
being suppliers in the traditional sense. I suspect that for small
volume items some of these folks don't have a supplier arranged for
(like the planer knives I attempted to order).

I suspect the expedited ordering system for those orders which are
placed for it simply means they go in the queue first and the
non-expedited orders are handled as they come up to the top; the delay
quoted is only there as a CYA policy so you can't complain if they
don't make it the next day kind of thing. It would be far more
expensive to try to place a hold on them than to simply process them as
time allows.

On 8 Nov 2006 12:29:51 -0800, "bf" wrote:

Ok.. I got lured again by Amazon.. I had to order some Performax
casters. Amazon had them 10% off which made them competitive with other
websites. They also had $25 off $150.. So, since the casters were $96,
I figure I could get about $50 worth of stuff for $25.

Well, of course now since there's so many cross sellers on Amazon, it
takes a long time to find stuff that qualifies for free shipping. Ended
up getting some work gloves and drill bits. Also got a small level.

I put my order in a couple days ago.. Expected delivery date is Dec
30.. LOL. I know to always expect a snail's pace from them, and I guess
I'm ok with not moving the sander for 2 months. At least not bothered
enough to cancel the order, but stuff like this definitely doesn't make
them my prefered supplier. After waiting 12 weeks to get some Freud
router bits from them, I never order anything from them that I need in
a hurry.

On the item page there used to be a "this product usually ships
within" and it would say 24 hrs, 2-3 days, 1 week, 1 month etc. That
seems to have gone away recently. You used to be able to tell without
putting in the order though.

I have in the past gotten an email saying it was delayed, then the
item shows up at my door on the day it was supposed to, and then a day
or two later I get an email saying it shipped. So yeah, Amazon is
often interesting in the shipping department.


-Leuf

Well, of course now since there's so many cross sellers on Amazon, it
takes a long time to find stuff that qualifies for free shipping.

I won't buy anything that's not sold by Amazon itself. Luckily, Tool
Crib is only a few hours up the Road in Fargo, and it appears that the
larger stuff ships from there. For years I bought most all of my tools
from Amazon, always free shipping, and nothing ever took more than
about a week to arrive. Since they started Amazon Prime (the $70/year
upgraded shipping deal) I've been offered free trials three times, each
time for 2-3 months at a shot. During those period I get everything
shipping two day for free, as long as it comes from amazon, with no
minimum. This past week the UPS guy stopped four out of five days with
packages from amazon. It's crazy.

So I really have no hate for Amazon at all. I've probably made well
over 100 purchases from them since they opened shop, and bought many
large tools from them (jointer, planer, sander, etc.) with no troubles
at all. The few things I've had to return over the years were never any
trouble at all. In fact, the only order I recall EVER taking more than
two weeks was when I ordered 10 copies of a book published by the
Catholic church that I couldn't find available in print
anywhere...after six months I finally canceled the order and printed of
a pdf copy instead.

Amazon has gone way downhill in terms of prices and selection in tools
over the past few years but it's still my first choice for most items
they stock. Always good (usually best) prices and I have no complaints
about the service at all.

-kiwanda