Following the news that Amazon have imposed a minimum order value of £20 in order to qualify for free Super Saver delivery, tech website Gizmodo has posted a solution showing how to get around it.
Basically according to Gizmodo, all you need to do is place your sub £20 order and then simply add an out of stock item. Gizmodo recommend a pre-order item with a delivery date well into the future, such as Halo 5: Guardians for Xbox One which won’t be out until October this year.
Amazon will then happily split your order and ship the in stock items but the best bit is that they’ll only charge your for products on the date they ship them. Once you’ve received your items cancel the pre-ordered item and tell Amazon that you don’t want it any more!
It’s a bit naughty and doubtless Amazon will get wise to the tactic and find a way to stop part shipping orders in sub £20 lumps, but at the moment it works.
5 Responses
Love the irony here. This is exactly what Jeff Bezos used to do in the early days when he was starting Amazon, according to his biography ‘The everything store’.
As sellers we often moan about unethical customers. To go into a transaction with the deliberate intention of defrauding the supplier (which is what this is) is damaging to all sellers, because it helps to standardise a view that defrauding sellers is OK.
It is no different from the flash crash trader and others who put fake trades to force a market into an advantageous position. It is against the law in many countries, and against the stock market’s rules for good reason.
As a seller myself I would never do this to Amazon because I would know I am behaving unethically, and just because they are a huge company doesn’t change the morals of the situation. Remember that what goes around comes around. Do this, and you will never have good basis to moan about your own unethical buyers again.
This does not work, since you cant cancel just part of the order if theres an add on item, you have to cancel the whole order. And if your addon item has already been shipped you cant cancel it, ergo you cannot cancel the pre-ordered item either. Youd have to contact amazon to manually cancel it which doesnt exactly look good on your account. Amazon keep track of naughty buyers you know.