Splitting Book Orders to Get Free Shipping

This is a guest post by my wife who is going back to school and trying to save money on her textbooks.

Hoping to avoid long line ups at the campus bookstore and hoping to save some money, I did some comparison shopping on both amazon.ca and chapters.ca. I was happy to find a savings of 12.5% compared to the campus store. The textbook prices at both online book sellers were identical before applying Chapter's iRewards savings and since I don't have an iRewards card anymore and since the savings were only half of the cost of a new card, I decided to order my 5 books from Amazon.

All five of the books individually qualified for "Super Saver Shipping" (over $39 of merchandise) so my money wasn’t going to be eaten up by Canada Post. Three of the books were in stock and the other 2 would be shipped in 1-2 weeks. I still had time before classes started so there was time to complete the order.

The first option Amazon presented me with was to choose a shipping speed: FREE Super Saver Shipping: (averages 2-3 business days) or Express (averages 2 business days for $13.70) or Priority (averages 1 business day for $20.94). I decided to go with FREE. I like FREE.

The second option was to A: group the books and ship them all together or B: ship the books as they became available. If I selected B, it would cost me extra to ship the two books that weren't in stock.

What happened to the free shipping that was advertised for each of the books?

What Amazon was encouraging me to do was split up my one order for 5 books into 3 separate orders: one for the three books which were in stock and one for each of the 2 books which had a 1-2 week delivery time. Then the shipping would be free for all the books.

Not willing to risk getting the books late for classes, I changed my Amazon order to include only the 3 in-stock books (they arrived 2 days later) and ordered the other 2 books from Chapters. One of those books arrived 3 days later and the other will be shipped, without extra charge, when it is available.

In the end I saved over $70 by buying online instead of on campus, but perhaps my first lesson of the new school year is to make sure that FREE shipping means FREE, not FREE plus an extra charge.

Comments

  1. PotatoSeptember 8, 2009 at 3:15 AM

    I've had pretty good luck with Amazon splitting up orders even when I elected to "ship when available" to keep the shipping free. But with textbooks I can understand you don't want to mess around with one out of stock book holding up the whole batch!

    Did you look at getting used books at all?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousSeptember 8, 2009 at 9:31 AM

    Whenever I order from amazon.ca I always choose the free shipping option and what happens is that they immediately send the books in stock and the delayed ones are sent later for free. They do this without extra charge. Also, if you collect airmiles, go to airmilesshops.ca and then click on amazon.ca from there and you can collect airmiles on the purchase. If you collect aeroplan miles, there is a corresponding e-store - aeroplan shops or something from which you can select amazon.ca and then get aeroplan miles for the purchase.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The WifeSeptember 8, 2009 at 4:37 PM

    Potato: I was able to get 2 of my books previously enjoyed which was nice. Three of the courses came with codes needed to access an online site which is used in conjunction with the in class presentations. I could have still bought this separately if I had been able to find used books for those classes but I suspect the cost might have eaten most of my savings in getting the books used.

    Anonymous: What you describe is what my experience with Chapters has always been. The Amazon site said that they would charge me extra if they had to ship multiple times. Perhaps given that each of the books did qualify for free shipping, their software would have gotten it right when it actually came time to send the books out. I wasn't willing to take that chance.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Grand Homme CajunSeptember 8, 2009 at 9:09 PM

    You can't fool me, there is no way your wife wrote that posting!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Michael JamesSeptember 8, 2009 at 10:03 PM

    Big Cajun Man: I wasn't sure she would write it either, but she did a nice job.

    ReplyDelete
  6. NeilSeptember 11, 2009 at 11:35 AM

    I get annoyed at Amazon for this, too. Last Christmas I ordered a bunch of items, and one was not in stock (I hadn't noticed...I'm pretty convinced it was in stock when I added it to my cart). That threw out the guaranteed delivery by Christmas, which added a ton of stress. This year, more careful.

    I believe that they only charge additional money for splitting the order if an individual package is worth less than $39, but it's not entirely clear from the website.

    Anyway - not exactly a savings tip, but this year's textbooks netted me a good chunk of air miles by buying via amazon using airmilesshops. Since I like to go places, I've found using offers like that to be a frugal way to get around the country.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Short Takes: InvestorLine’s HISAs, 24-Hour Trading, and more

I recently moved some cash into BMO InvestorLine’s high-interest savings accounts (HISAs) that are structured as mutual funds.  Their designations are BMT104, BMT109, and BMT114, and they purportedly pay 4.35% annual interest (which they can change whenever they like).  However, the way they report the monthly interest payments is so baffling that I wasn’t able to sort it out in my first 15 minutes of trying.  A further complication is the following text in the HISA description: “The Bank may pay, monthly or quarterly, compensation to your Dealer at an annual rate of up to 0.25% of the daily closing balance in the BMO HISA.”  I couldn’t find any evidence of such a charge, but I haven’t been invested for a full quarter, and I can’t yet say that such a charge isn’t buried somehow in the confusing reporting.  I have more digging to do before I can recommend these HISAs. Here are some short takes and some weekend reading: Preet Banerjee explains the dangers of Robi...
Read more

My Asset Allocation

I’ve resisted discussing my asset allocation for some time, but now is finally the time to describe it and the reasons behind it. I’m not holding it out as a model portfolio; I believe it’s suitable for me and not necessarily anyone else. With that warning, enjoy the discussion and feel free to ask questions or take some pot-shots. The main reason why I haven’t discussed my asset allocation in detail before now is that I don’t want readers to treat it like a model portfolio and follow it blindly. Everyone’s situation is different. The need for variation in asset allocation from one investor to the next usually isn’t huge, but there is no one-size-fits-all portfolio. A secondary reason for keeping my asset allocation to myself is that I can’t be sure I’ll never change it. For example, I recently made the minor change of switching from an ETF of small-cap stocks to an ETF of small-cap value stocks . I don’t have any plans to change my current allocation, but I may think differe...
Read more

What to Do About Crazy Stock Valuations

Image
The last time I had to put a lot of effort into thinking about my finances was back when I retired in mid-2017.  I had ideas of how to manage my money after retirement, but it wasn’t until a couple of years had gone by that I felt confident that my long-term plans would work for me.  I had my portfolio on autopilot, and my investing spreadsheet would email me if I needed to take some action. I was fortunate that I happened to retire into a huge bull market.  I got the upside of sequence-of-returns risk.  The downside risk is that stocks will plummet during your early retirement years, and your regular spending will dig deep into your portfolio.  Happily for me, I got the opposite result.  My family’s spending barely made a dent in the relentless rise of the stock market. However, stock prices have become crazy, particularly in the U.S.  One measure of stock priciness is Robert Shiller’s Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings (CAPE) ratio .  In the U.S...
Read more

Archive

Show more