A couple of weeks ago we announced Amazon Pantry and then I placed my first order. Yesterday I went to place a second order and discovered all is not great at Amazon Pantry.
My whole experience when placing my first order was great, sure they had no Stella, but prices were very competitive compared to supermarkets, delivery was a day earlier than expected and the service was flawless as we’ve come to expect from Amazon.
I was pretty much prepared to place a repeat order (the cat is fast getting through the Whiskers!), only to discover that of the 11 products I purchased two weeks ago half of them were out of stock.
Restricted Range
There’s a big difference in buying from Amazon Pantry and a Supermarket. The range is very restrictive and you might have to switch from your favourite brand to alternatives. You might not be able to purchase products in the same range of sizes as you can choose from at your preferred supermarket. None of that particularly bothered me with the exception of Stella.
Out of Stock products
What does irk me is that having placed an order two weeks ago, I can’t today purchase the same products a second time. They still have Whiskers, but only the 1+ variety. I don’t have a kitten and I want to reorder the 7+ variety I had last time. They are out of stock of Walkers Prawn Cocktail crisps and dont have any Prawn Cocktail Flavour Pringles either. They’ve run out of Beef flavour Dreamies cat treats. It’s just not good enough.
If I go to Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Asda, or even Tesco, I know that by and large I’ll be able to purchase the same brands each and every time I visit. Amazon need to be the same if consumers are going to buy their heavy and bulky items on a regular basis.
Amazon Need Consistency of Stock
Supermarkets allow you to save your favourite products to make repurchase simple. Amazon need to do the same. It’s simply uneconomic in commercial terms to spend marketing to get consumers to start shopping with you just to let them down and leave them disappointed when they return to make a repeat purchase.
However Amazon have redeemed themselves, they do now have Stella in stock. The question is will it still be in stock next time I use Amazon Pantry?
8 Responses
I’m not sure this is entirely on amazon – a lot of supermarkets are struggling to hold their stock levels moreso than I’ve seen in previous years.
Indeed you can get Whiskas in any supermarket week in week out, but that’s not the comparison you’re making with Amazon. Can you get the specific whiskas you got before each time? Personally from my experience it’s no, and often our cats mix & match different weeks as long as we avoid the brands they refuse to eat (ironically whiskas is the most notable!)
Bit unfair really; its a new venture for Amazon and the demand will be high for Xmas. Doubtless it will improve over time.
Amazon Pantry is not the only site that needs to ‘make improvements’.
Late Sunday evening I went to Argos website to buy something ‘Fast Track’ At Argos Fast Track can now mean one of 2 services.
It can be either Collect in Store or Delivery to an Address.
They very quickly need to distinguish between ‘Fast Track Collect’ and ‘Fast Track Delivery’.
As a returning customer to repeat a previous order I logged into my account. Was very surprised to find that I had nowhere to ‘view previous orders’ (to make finding the item more speedy). Seems that you can’t do this for Fast Track (collected) orders.
Never mind, I found the item/store, ordered and paid for collection (Argos Fast Track gives you 7 days to collect). No emails received therefore it appears that my purchase failed even though the money has been authorised/earmarked at my bank. The complete absence of a view order facility makes this a nightmare!
Three days on the money is still earmarked in my bank account but not taken.
The product has since been acquired by other means.
So Argos as well as Amazon has some way to go.
Maybe it’s Amazon’s way of getting the Great British public to eat healthier? Seems like they’re running out of stock on all this awful junk food.
I’ve used pantry 3 times recently. First was a shipment of 1 full box of booze for xmas. It never arrived and upon checking tracking it said that yodel received it damaged and had returned it to sender. I contacted amazon who said they couldn’t resend a duplicate order as one of the items was out of stock so they refunded me. This meant I had to re-order everything and create a new order. This second order arrived on time andeverything was present as it should be. So I’ve ordered another full box from pantry which is my 3rd order. This was meant to arrive and didn’t. Guess what…. it was damaged according to yodel yet again. So 2 out of 3 orders were damaged in transit and never arrived. This was my 3rd and my final order with Pantry.
I really do expect more from amazon. The way the glass bottles of lager, ale and wine etc are packaged into one huge box is completely inadequate and i can see why shipments would get damaged so easily with yodel.
I WILL NOT BE USING PANTRY EVER AGAIN!
This is tarnishing the amazon/prime brand and the entire pantry situation is clearly a complete lash-up.