Ever had Amazon order shipped from Walmart?

[Farmer's Daughter]

Posted: 9/12/16 at 3:22pm

Was curious. I ordered some new affordable/cheap dining furniture from two different Amazon sellers a couple days ago. No tracking info from Amazon yet, but UPS shipping/tracking alerts told me two packages coming my way from Walmart.  Had me super confused since I knew I had not ordered anything from Walmart. As I (now) understand it, some third party sellers on Amazon don't actually hold any inventory themselves; they just take the order (and money) and have it shipped from Walmart (or whatever), at a profit to them, of course.

I'm cool with that. It's no big deal to me, long as I get what I ordered. It just had me vastly perplexed for a while today. I could see some people being upset, but I don't have the Walmart hate that some people do.

[John Adams]

Posted: 9/13/16 at 11:45am

Coupled with your observations, multitudes of packages are not shipped from the Shipper Address you see on the shipping label, but rather from any number of independent distribution centers across the country. I work for FedEx, and the proxy selling/shipping system that has become commonplace is all fine and good - until there's a snag...

During shipping, barcodes and labels can become damaged, or completely separated from their packages. Another common issue is that bulk shippers (from distribution centers) load our trucks without properly checking that each package has been given a shipping label. That truck then arrives at our station with no label, and no clue where it was shipped from except perhaps a strip of packing tape with the Amazon logo. Even more confounding are packages under the Google Express umbrella - check them out online to see how many stores fall under that umbrella!

Part of my responsibility is to determine where that merchandise should be returned or forwarded to, and what shipper should be charged for its passage. Needless to say, it's a nightmare!

"Oh, Georgie... I long for the old view!"