Amazon one-day shipping claim is misleading, ASA says

Amazon’s one-day shipping guarantee misled customers,
according to the UK’s Advertising Standards
Authority.
Getty/Sean
Gallup

• Amazon
  ran a misleading advertisement on its website in 2017,
  according to a ruling by the UK’s Advertising
  Standards Authority.
• The promotion, which ran on Amazon’s website in
  December, advertised the free one-day shipping that comes with
  Prime membership.
• The ASA said that 280 customers had complained about
  the claims in the ad. Most said that their shipments had not
  arrived in one day, prompting the board to review the ad and
  ultimately determine it was misleading. 
• 
  “The ad must not appear again in its current
  form,” the ASA said in its ruling. 
  
• In a statement to Business Insider, Amazon said that a
  “small proportion of orders” last year missed the delivery
  deadline due to “extreme weather.”

Amazon
has been misleading customers with its promises of one-day
shipping, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority
ruled on Wednesday. 

The ASA said that an advertisement Amazon ran on its website in
December 2017 had claims that were “misleading” to
customers. 

The ad promoted Amazon’s one-day shipping service, which allows
customers to receive eligible items the next day, as long as
there are no unforeseen circumstances. The offending ad’s text
promised “unlimited One-Day Delivery with Amazon Prime” and
“One-Day Delivery for Christmas.”

The group says that 280 people had complained about the ad, most
stating that they did not receive their order the next day as
promised. In response to the complaints, the ASA assessed
the ad and determined that it did not make clear that not all
items were eligible for one-day delivery. 

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

It continued: “The ad must not appear again in its current
form. We told Amazon to make clear that some Prime labelled items
were not available to be delivered by the next day.”

In response to the ruling, Amazon told the ASA that
“
the vast majority of the complaints were received
following widespread media coverage of an initial handful of
complaints about the issue.”

In a statement to Business Insider, an Amazon spokesperson
said that “the overwhelming majority of One-Day Delivery
orders are delivered when promised,” and those that weren’t had
been impacted by “extreme weather.”

Amazon also noted that it provides delivery estimates before,
during, and after orders are placed, and that the company works
“relentlessly to meet this date.”

This isn’t the first time that customers have complained about
Amazon’s shipping speed. In interviews with Business Insider
earlier this year, Amazon customers in the US complained that
two-day Prime shipments
were sometimes arriving late.

The complaints led some customers to
realize they had a misconception of what Amazon explicitly
promises with its shipping speeds. In fact, Amazon Prime’s
shipping policy only promises that customers will get their
packages two days from when Amazon ships it, not from the the
time the customer places an order.