ASA Uphold Amazon Prime One-Day Delivery promise complaint

Following an investigation by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), they have ruled that the Amazon Prime One-Day Delivery promise can’t be used in it’s current format again.

The ads Amazon ran in 2017 contained the text “One-Day Delivery for Christmas” and “get unlimited One-Day Delivery with Amazon Prime” but not all items marketed as Prime Eligible could be delivered the next day, even if ordered early morning.

Amazon responded saying that they believed consumers understood from using the website, that individual delivery dates were displayed for each order and that they would have to check each item they were interested in purchasing to find out whether One-Day Delivery was available, and what the delivery date was with One-Day Delivery at that particular time to the address to which they wanted the item delivered.

Amazon says that for a delivery to be recorded as on-time, the delivery needed to have been received by the customer one day after it was dispatched. However despatch dates could vary dependant upon the item type, Amazon location where item was stored and delivery destination, but say that there was not a general trend of dispatch dates being more than one day after the order date.

The ASA noted that the home page featured the claim “get unlimited One-Day Delivery with Amazon Prime” and the claim “Unlimited One-Day Delivery on millions of eligible items” would lead consumers to likely to interpret the claim “One-Day Delivery” to mean that all Prime labelled items were available for delivery by the end of the day after the order was placed. They considered this misleading.

The ASA did however note that Amazon do display forecast delivery dates for every item and that these will be updated if it’s too late in the day to deliver next day, but they considered the claim was likely to cause consumers to make a transactional decision in relation to purchasing their Amazon Prime membership in the first place.

“Because consumers were likely to understand that, so long as they did not order too late or for Sunday delivery, all Prime labelled items would be available for delivery the next day with the One-Day Delivery option, when a significant proportion of Prime labelled items were not available for delivery by the subsequent day with One-Day Delivery, we concluded that the ad was misleading.”
– ASA Ruling

The ASA have told Amazon to make it clear to consumers that some Prime labelled items were not available to be delivered by the next day when advertising the Amazon Prime One-Day Delivery promise.

This could significantly impact some merchants who self-fulfil or whose items are in Amazon FBA but aren’t available to be delivered next day. It may mean that some customers in locations close to the Amazon FBA warehouse where their products are sold will see them as Prime eligible while others further away won’t see them qualifying for the Amazon Prime One-Day Delivery promise.