Amazon Pre-Order Question
 

I had pre-ordered Kitchen Confidential last week and my order was split into 2 shipments. So when I was checking up on the part of my order that shipped I noticed that Kitchen Confidential was no longer a link on my order form but rather just text. I pre-ordered it for $20.99. So I searched the website and found that KC was listed twice and one was available for pre-order and one was no longer available. I contacted Customer Service and they were of no help as always. They were the exact same listings from what I could tell beyond the price.

Then I noticed this morning that only the "other one" is listed on amazon, but now at the same price I pre-ordered mine for (it had been $26.99 on wednesday). My order form is still just "text" and no link. So will it still ship when it becomes available? Has anyone had this experience before that can shed some light since CS can't help me?

Amazon Listing Search Page

It will still ship. if you're worried just cancel and reorder.

That may create a problem if you had free shipping since the item is less than $25. I would wait to see what happens. If Amazon cancels the order contact customer service. I would assume under the circumstances they would let you place another order and credit the shipping charges if your current order had free shipping.

Thanks, I guess I will just wait and see what happens. I had thought about re-ordering, but I did go with free shipping and don't want to mess with that.

And right you are about that. A few weeks ago, I ordered a newly released under $25 DVD title from Amazon on its supposed release date, along with another under $25 DVD to put my order over the $25 mark for the free shipping. Well, after a few weeks, my order STILL hasn't shipped, so I checked it only to find out that the new release had suddenly been re-scheduled for release two months in the future, now making it a pre-order.

So I decide to cancel the re-scheduled (and now pre-ordered) title and add some other current titles so I can get the other disk I ordered without having to wait for two months. I put in an order for the two other new titles so I can combine them with the original order to keep the order over $25. Then I go to my original order and cancel the pre-order, hoping to then combine the two orders and get them shipped together. Unfortunately, as soon as I cancelled the pre-ordered half of the first order, it immediately goes to SHIPPING status, won't allow me to combine with my other order, and adds a $3.95 shipping charge.

So count me as having a lesson learned: Amazon's automated order processing is lame, and don't always count on being able to logically combine orders, even if Amazon says you can.

That sucks. Did you try contacting customer service and explain what happened? They may either give you credit or a GC for your trouble.

It would have been better if you could have combined both orders first, and canceled the other item afterward. However I believe Amazon doesn't allow you to combine orders with free shipping anymore. I do remember at one time you could get around it by changing it to paid shipping, and changing it back to free shipping after combining orders. But Amazon caught on to that loophole and fixed it so you could no longer do it. I found in many cases combining orders is a rather useless function, and it's easier to cancel and start over as long as the prices haven't increased.

I did think about calling Amazon's CS to adjust it, but decided it would probably be more hassle to argue with a CSR on the phone than $3.95 was worth.

It did occur to me just a few moments after I went through all of this that the smartest thing probably would have been just to cancel the entire first order altogether and make an entirely new order including the remaining item from my first order. Well, live and learn...

So you are correct, the best process with Amazon is to forget about combining orders altogether and just delete the old order (when possible). And I can't see why Amazon won't just let you directly add new items to an open order, rather than having to go through that whole "Combine Orders" non-sense, which apparently doesn't even work much of the time.

I think the orders with free shipping are not combinable at amazon. I vaguely remember trying to do that and it was no go.

Yes, you cannot combine orders for free shipping at Amazon anymore.