Let's say you're shopping for Christmas gifts online. You see something that would be a perfect gift for someone - we shall call this 'Product A'. You put it in your 'shopping basket' and go to the checkout at which point you discover that shipping is going to cost £5.

At this point you can either abandon your attempt to buy anything, or seek to amortise the shipping costs across more products. You choose this latter option and think of a couple more things that would make nice gifts, and add products B and C to your basket.

The next day you receive an email from the online shop to say that, sadly, product A is out of stock, but they have shipped products B and C (and charged you the £5 shipping).

To avoid this, online shops should have 'criticality' options so that you can say that if they can't deliver product A, scrap the whole order, or if they can't deliver all the products (A, B and C) then scrap the whole order.
-- hippo, Nov 21 2016

Good luck getting them to stop playing games with shipping prices
-- Voice, Nov 21 2016


//... I've considered that in the near future there'll be a shift back to actual shopping in real shops. At the moment, things like amazon work because there are no jobs so we're all in all the time anyway, but as the economy will thrive as robots recede due to brexit, making people become happy, nobody will be in, they'll be out.//

At that point, Ian, I will unveil my massive network of old dears scheme. They'll always be in, and they'll get a small fee and someone to talk to, so it's win-win. And they'll get a free secure porch extension so their house will be warmer.
-- Loris, Nov 21 2016


I stopped using Amazon the moment they started charging to NOT deliberately delay shipments.
-- Voice, Nov 21 2016



random, halfbakery