Amazon has two modes for shipping. One is “send me what you can and soon as you can,” resulting in obnoxious shipping charges. The other is “send me my order when everything is available,” resulting in the minimum shipping order.
What makes Amazon really great, and by great, I mean what keeps me coming back to them, is the fact that if one orders enough stuff, you can usually get free shipping pretty easily. Or at least free shipping if you take the cheapest method of delivery option. But more importantly, even with free shipping, and the famous “send me my order when everything is available”, Amazon uses that as a guildline and often ships things in multiple shipments… especially if they are coming from different warehouse locations.
Under these conditions, you get your stuff in a timely fashion, reasonably soon, and often for free. Awesome.
However, there’s a bug in the algorithm. And it’s a bad one. And you need to be aware of it.
If any book in your list has not been published yet, meaning you preordered it, and you select “when everything is ready”, then your order will not ship. It sits in limbo. Even if you have hundreds of dollars worth pending. This is important to know, especially if you need something urgently.
This is really bad, because if you’re also ordered some rare books, or things with limited stock, they can suddenly become unavailable, even though you placed your order on time.
So, making sure you’re with me on this… if you order a preorder item, then you won’t get any of your order, meanwhile the availability of your items slowly disappears while you wait.
What Amazon ought to do is send you an email letting you know this is happening, or ship your partial order like they normally do, or offer to move the item back into your shopping cart for a later order. But they don’t. No explaination is given, no notice appears in your inbox, you just place an order and it sits there… and can sit there for months.
The hack solution from the customer side is simple: order pre-order items separately. Always. Or, if you’re made of money, ship as each item becomes available, though I doubt anyone on a non-corporate budget really wants to do that.
In fact, if you have an order in limbo, you can cancel that item (remember to move it back to your cart), and the moment you apply the changes, your order will instantly be ready to go.
I just finished conducting a test, where a placed a nearly $200 order a month ago, with one well picked pre-order item that was due out the middle of this month. The moment I removed the item, I got an email and things are now moving along again.