Amazon Prime UK versus Amazon Prime USA
Amazon Prime has been a regular feature on my Twitter feed for a while now, but its reasons for appearing are markedly different depending on the location of the commenter. If you’re in the USA, it seems you’re continually bowled over by Amazon Prime; it is, in short, so great that it’s being used as a service to subsidise the Kindle Fire tablet. In the UK… well, things aren’t so good.
Americans are often quite surprised when I complain about Prime on Twitter, while Brits are often shocked when Americans bang on about how great it is. Here’s a comparison of what you get:
Amazon.com (cost: $79—about £49—per year)
- Two-day shipping on millions of eligible items
- Unlimited streaming of a ton of movies/TV shows through Prime instant videos
- A free Kindle book to borrow each month
Amazon.co.uk (cost: £49)
- One-day shipping on millions of eligible items
Even the UK’s sole advantage (faster shipping) is purely down to geography, given that the country is significantly smaller than the US. Additionally, I found Amazon Prime’s reliability and value went out of the window. I’d been a Prime subscriber for some time, but in 2009 the service was extremely creaky around Christmas. In 2010, it was beyond a joke. Amazon had to deal with a harsh British winter, to be fair; but that doesn’t excuse the company’s shift from trackable services to just flinging items out using Royal Mail’s standard first-class service. I therefore had the absurdity of receiving a small book and DVD by next-day courier, and two Kindles rattling around in the system and, by some large measure of luck, finally arriving well over a week late on the last Royal Mail delivery day before Christmas.
Amazon’s response was also pretty telling: it pretty much told me “tough”. Goods are sent by whatever service Amazon chooses to use, and the value of the items is largely irrelevant. Into the new year, things were no better. Pretty much everything now came via Royal Mail’s first-class service, and so my £49 per year was losing value fast, and, worse, Prime goods were eventually taking longer to arrive than those shipped for free from rivals like Play.com. For my winter’s troubles, Amazon made a big fuss about extending my Prime subscription by a whole month, but it lapsed in April and I’ve no desire to start it up again. (I also note that Amazon’s dispatch times for ‘free shipping’ changed from fast to sluggish over the past couple of years, presumably to push people into upgrading shipping. Cynical.)
I know other in the UK have had similar experiences, while some have found Prime totally robust. But it makes me question whether those burned would ever return to the service even if it started offering the extras Americans get. But while Prime UK is merely ‘possibly faster shipping, if you’re lucky’, it’s not hugely attractive and is another case of an international company providing some of its users with a banquet while the rest have to do with a sandwich.
I always pick free shipping from Amazon and stuff almost always comes well before the “3 to 5 days” that Amazon threatens. About half the time it’s next day anyway.
@Stephen: I find free shipping slower than it used to be, purely because the dispatch times have gone from same-day (for anything in stock) to ‘whenever we can be bothered’. It’s more of a crapshoot now than it once was. This more or less aligns Amazon with the competition, rather than it being better.
I always use free shipping and items always arrive well before the date supposed to. Most come next day, some take 2 days. I find free shipping quicker than the paid for services.