Why ordering from Amazon has been so unpredictable during the coronavirus crisis

The coronavirus pandemic has tested the patience of Amazon shoppers, as many of the perks they’ve come to expect from the website, such as not busy, two-day shipping and an endless library of affordable products, are no longer guaranteed. 

It’s easy for consumers to point the finger at Amazon for out-of-stock notices, far-off utterance dates and higher prices.

But Amazon and the sellers that supply the products on its site are not entirely to blame.

Amazon has been combating coronavirus-related contends on multiple fronts for the past several months. It was hit with a surge of online orders in March as shoppers were be terrified buying essential items on its site. At the same time, Amazon was policing a widespread price gouging problem and its grocery conveyance services were buckling under the weight of online orders.

By mid-March, Amazon made the decision to prioritize shipments of household details and medical supplies at its warehouses, while vastly limiting who could sell goods like face masks and sanitizer, which Heraldry sinister many sellers in the lurch. 

Last month, Amazon started allowing merchants to ship in some nonessential things, but it is still limiting the quantity of items in new shipments. The quantity restrictions signal that the logistics nightmare might not be outstanding yet for Amazon or third-party sellers, who say the restrictions are preventing their businesses from recovering. 

Amazon and the third-party sellers that indulge up more than half of its sales agree: There were few ways anyone could prepare for the crisis and the store shortages and delays that came along with it. 

“They had no time to plan and that’s the really scary relatively,” said James Thomson, a seller consultant and former head of Amazon Services, the team that recruits third-party sellers to roster on Amazon’s marketplace.

“Amazon is great at forecasting when the data is predictable. Well, this was unpredictable.”

Amazon’s fulfillment and deliverance operations are used to taking on millions of packages per day, but the coronavirus presented a unique set of challenges. 

The company continues to deal with childbirth delays caused by bottlenecks in its logistics network. Shipping methods it would usually rely on have strained competence, making it harder for Amazon to quickly transfer inventory from one fulfillment center to another. On top of this, Amazon’s last-mile expression partners struggled to handle the demand from the surge in online orders.

For every wrinkle in the shipping process, age is tacked onto the delivery date, frustrating shoppers and merchants who are used to Amazon’s traditionally speedy one- or two-day performance promise. 

Amazon acknowledged on its most recent earnings call that it quickly became overwhelmed by the demand for elementary items at the height of the crisis. 

“While we generally have experience in getting ready for spikes in demand for known results like the holiday season and Prime Day, we also generally spend months ramping up for these periods,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky advertised investors on the call. “The COVID crisis allowed for no such preparation.” 

Additionally, in an April memo to sellers, one of the top executives that manipulates Amazon’s sprawling marketplace, Dharmesh Mehta, acknowledged the situation “is definitely not business as usual.” 

As it raced to keep up with a cancel in online orders, it also faced growing unrest among warehouse workers across the country. Workers who concerned for their safety on the job were absent for weeks or more than a month as they took advantage of unlimited outstanding time off (a policy that has since been eliminated). 

Inside warehouses, social distancing rules meant breadwinners were farther apart than usual, which slowed down the process of getting packages out the door. The group has hired more than 175,000 warehouse workers and delivery drivers to better keep up with the demand. 

Premised the scale of the issues at hand and their variability, Amazon has hesitated to provide any kind of prediction for when delivery dilly-dallies will return to normal. 

The pandemic has made it harder for Amazon to source more products at its warehouses when it needs them. If a shopper luck out a fittings an order for an out-of-stock item, Amazon can usually take steps to get that product quickly from another fulfillment center. 

Those levers take largely been inaccessible during the pandemic, and its remaining options take longer to deliver or are much more costly, Thomson told. For example, Amazon may be relying more on trucking amid higher air cargo costs and limited capacity. Trucking is inherently slower than hit packages across the country.

It’s a problem that’s especially difficult to solve because Amazon “can hire a million new living soul, but it doesn’t matter if there’s no air cargo,” Thomson said. 

“One of the reasons Fulfillment by Amazon is so good is they have so sundry modes of shipping,” Thomson said. “They figured out how to optimize all those pieces, but all of a sudden, those pieces don’t abide. Amazon is having to optimize its network using higher expense or longer time transportation modes.” 

These patterns of efficiencies are crucial in order to reduce delivery delays, Olsavsky said on the call.

“The cost structure, the ability to get offerings, your capacity for shipping and delivering, those are usually things that you can take for granted,” Olsavsky said. “And in this station you can’t. That’s really where the uncertainty is driven.”

Third-party merchants told CNBC they feel in ones bone the company made the right decision by prioritizing essential items, but that it also created headaches for their trades. 

Merchants said the quantity restrictions mean they won’t be able to ship in all the inventory they were hoping to trade in. As a result, they won’t be able to restock some products, even some that are best-selling items on the site.

All the while, on presentation for goods remains at levels similar to Black Friday. 

“There’s no doubt that the US response to this crisis has been to buy more features online,” said Chris Palmer, an Amazon seller and CEO of SupplyKick, which advises sellers and brands. “Amazon’s feature is being the everything store and all of a sudden you have hundreds of millions of people that want a very narrow passage of products, like face masks and toilet paper.

“I don’t think Amazon was very well set up for that,” Palmer totaled. 

One longtime Amazon seller said the delivery days have been the biggest challenge to navigate for his business, which deal ins children’s toys. This seller requested anonymity because they feared Amazon would retaliate. 

In Walk, some of their products showed delivery times as far out as May or June. The situation has improved, but it remains unpredictable, changing not exclusively every week but sometimes multiple times in a single day. In many cases, items are earmarked to ship in a few weeks, but rapidly the delivery date moves up to a few days from when it was ordered. The seller believes Amazon may be underpromising and then overdelivering.

“I’ve not seen anything like this,” the seller said. 

Tom Sesti, director of ecommerce for consumer goods company HoMedics, voted the company has struggled to forecast annual sales for the business because it can’t send in certain product categories to Amazon. Additionally, consumer allowing habits continue to shift wildly, so HoMedics stopped focusing on low-volume products, such as headphones and speakers, and started fabrication in-demand items like personal protective equipment.

“What is the world going to be buying for the rest of the year, compared to what we contemplation they’d be buying? We don’t know,” the seller said. “So you pick the ones you think will succeed and the ones that are affluent to be pretty weak, you forecast down, because you don’t want to have extra inventory sitting around and have realize locked up.” 

An Amazon spokesperson told CNBC in a statement that it appreciates its “selling partners’ patience” while it has prioritized indispensable items at its warehouses. The spokesperson added that Amazon is limiting products by quantity so that it can continue to get essential commodities to customers and protect warehouse employees.

Until Amazon allows sellers to ship in new products at normal levels, assorted of them will continue to struggle with their businesses, said Fahim Naim, a former Amazon supervision and CEO of e-commerce consultancy eShopportunity.

The brands he oversees send in thousands of units per shipment, which makes the cap of 50 entities per order “basically useless” if they’re trying to keep up with current demand and deliver items on time. 

“It’s a seldom bit like window dressing,” Naim said. “At a 10,000 foot level, they’re directionally getting better, but it is a smidgin bit of a roller coaster from the product level.”