I ordered several photobooks, calendars and prints from Shutterfly. I took the slow/cheap shipping options and everything came in faster than advertised. I was impressed and that goes a long way toward repeat business.

Two items from amazon shipped standard - one arrived one day early, the other arrived two days early.

Shutterfly order took less than a week with the cheap shipping.

My REI ship-to-store order said it would take one day longer than standard shipping. It's supposed to arrive today, the one week mark. But ship-to-store is free.

I think that in the first half of December, USPS, etc really rush their orders to have some kind of padding for the end of month rush.

I ordered 90% of our gifts online. Amazon is coming through really great -- so far everything is here earlier than promised. Yes, and free. I have received 6 boxes and 3 boxes are still on the way, set to arrive this week. The Apple products that I ordered are a mixed bag -- one arrived only ONE day after my order, the other is still in Hong Kong, so I will have to head to the Apple Store 30 miles away, I'm afraid.

My purchases from sites that offer UPS tracking are great. Other sites offer USPS tracking, and they do not update them, so I don't know if they are coming or not.

Someone mentioned ordering calendars -- I had great success ordering a calendar via iPhoto (2 weeks - cool gift box they send it in!!), as well as a huge poster from Walgreen's (came in less than a week, very affordable.)

I have used Best Buy three times this month for the "in store" pickup option, and I am a huge fan. No lines, no wait. No complaints from me.

I'm saving gas....getting lots accomplished at home...staying warm...no lines....I'm sold on online shopping!
Merry Christmas!

I agree about Amazon.com's free super-saver shipping. I almost always receive my shipment before the initially specified date. I have never had a late shipment on an in-stock item.

(Most of my Amazon.com shipments come by USPS.)

Amazon's Free Super Saver shipping is a hit-and-miss proposition. Yes, this time of year, it's at its best, but midyear it seems like they refuse to allow anything to arrive before the predicted date. You can tell by watching the online tracking. I live in Southern Maryland, about 30 minutes from the Beltway, and see that the Amazon packages are dispatched into USPS from Capitol Heights. I've seen deliveries take five days to get from Capitol Heights to me. And then, there's the USPS delivery, where the mail carrier won't get out of her car, but will leave large packages sitting precariously on top of the Washington Post newstube. (The driveway is only three car lengths, so no excuse for not coming to the door). I have come to absolutely hate when any part of a shipment gets handed to the USPS!

With Apple, we ordered two iPods on Black Friday and they shipped direct froom Shanghai and arrived the following Tuesday via FedEx! Apple's "local" warehouse is in Jonestown, PA (near Harrisburg) and I've had items arrive on my doorstep in less than 24 hours from the order being placed.

Amazon claims that it will get your gifts to you by Dec 24 if you choose super saver shipping through Dec 17. To me, that seems like pushing it, and at this stage if I had anything left to order, I would upgrade the shipping.

I've been using amazon prime for the last few years. For $79/year you get free 2nd day shipping or an overnight option for a flat $3.99 fee. Up until black Friday the free shipping option would usually be delivered next day. But during this busy time of year, it has become 2nd day for most items. If you do alot of online shopping, I cant recommend amazon prime enough.

I ordered a non-gift from LLBean on the 3rd that arrived today via the US Postal service. Shipping was free and because it was over $50, they have given me $10 (in the form of a card) towards a future purchase. The card arrived yesterday in the mail.

I use Amazon Prime a lot. Most of the time, it's been great. But you can't specify the shipper at Amazon, and in my area, DHL (with the office that serves me still staffed by the bozos who were Airborne) has been unreliable until the past few months. The year before last, I had to fight with DHL big-time to get an Amazon package that was shipped on Dec. 20 for delivery on Dec. 22, and was at DHL's depot on the 21st or 22nd, but unaccountably still had not arrived at my house by Dec. 24. And DHL wase closed on the 25th and 26th, so I was looking at delivery on the 27th, a week after it was shipped, not the two days I paid for. By standing firm with the DHL national office and the local office, I was able to get the local guys to grudgingly deliver the package on the 24th (no, DHL guys, I'm not going to drive to the depot and pick it up myself--you're going to deliver it like you were paid to do), but it was a huge hassle. This was at the time only the latest of many snafus with DHL, and I nearly canceled Amazon Prime when I had problems with the next couple of deliveries as well. Before this, Amazon had been sending via FedEx wiht nary a hitch. I called Amazon, pleaded for a way to specify "NO DHL ON MY PACKAGES," but it's not possible. I was told that they basically auction the packages to the different delivery services, and at Christmas, there were so many that I drew the short straw.

Having said that, DHL service in my area has improved to the point that I get my packages on time, and they deliver them to my house, not to some stranger two streets away with an entirely different house number.

The folks at DHL told me, during the Christmas Eve mess, that they don't guarantee delivery on any particular day during the Christmas rush season. And no, they had no explanation for why my package was on the truck for delivery on the 23rd but came back to the depot with the truck. Grrr.

Anyway, the point that's getting lost in my rant is to be careful about timing. If some carriers don't guarantee overnight or 2-day delivery during the Christmas season and if your merchant (such as Amazon) doesn't specify which carrier they use, you might be taking a chance. Amazon might be willing to make things good (I've had them do that with other DHL snafus), but that will all happen after Christmas, so if you want something there in time, order ahead.

Use MS BookShipper 1.1!

http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

Last year I ordered something from cooking.com with their lowest cost shipping. It shipped DHL to the local USPS delivery warehouse. It shipped fast from a warehouse only 50 miles away, so I expected it to arrive quickly. DHL delivered it to the USPS warehouse only a couple of miles away in a day and then it just disappeared. Cooking.com was apologetic and quickly shipped not via USPS a replacement item but unfortunately after the initial delay it arrived after x-mas.

Ordered a couple of 1GB RAM chips from Crucial.com last Friday afternoon (the 7th), paid a $2.99 three-day delivery fee and by 10 a.m on the 10th it was on the doorstep via FedEx. I don't know who gets the credit for the success, but it was:

Priceless.

On December 11, I ordered two items from Amazon. The delivery estimate said that they would arrive after Christmas.

I was inclined to gamble on the free shipping, because mostly my Amazon orders have been coming much earlier than the estimate. Then I noticed that the items would not be in stock till the 19th. That seemed to be pushing it a bit, so I upgraded to two-day shipping.

Both items were shipped on December 11th! They weren't even supposed to be in stock for a week! I really can't figure this one out.

I've been using Amazon for years, and almost always use the free/cheap shipping option. More often than not, book orders arrive within a day or two. There are a couple of things to take note of, though:

-- Amazon has a book distribution center somewhere pretty close (Delaware, I think). Items other than books sometimes come from farther away (one electronics order, for example), and will take a bit longer.

-- There is some merchandise that you can order via Amazon's Web site that is not actually sold directly by Amazon. In that case, the results also depend on the third-party supplier. For example, I ordered a pair of running shoes from Nordstrom via Amazon. They, too, came in a couple of days, but of course that may vary with different firms.

I've also used Best Buy's store pick-up option (at the Reston store), and it's been quick and fairly hassle-free.

Amazon has been pretty good overall, though I removed a bunch of items from my shopping because I had items that had different delivery dates, and couldn't group them to be shipped at different times - I had enough items to use free shipping and get delivered for Xmas, but they wouldn't let me ungroup a couple of not in stock items, and the free shipping was for the entire order at once or not available.

So I removed the offending items, got free shipping, but never seem to have time to reorder the removed items.

It would have been nice, and profitable for Amazon, to be able to group items in shipments, and use different methods as applicable - I don't need all the items I ordered for myself right away, for example, but some are gifts that have to be on hand.

It killed the spontaneous purchases, which were mostly things that I wanted for myself that are hard to find locally.

Shipping has been generally good and on-time thus far. I too wish that for Amazon and other sites that you could choose the vendor to deliver your purchase. I live in a small apartment building with no on-site rental office, therefore, there is no one to sign for a package. I'd just prefer that items be sent slower through USPS so that I didn't have to make arrangments with a vendor to drive to their closest location to pick up the packages. That certainly defeats the purpose for wanting packages to be delivered.

Late to the party, but .... Amazon *really* let me down. I placed an order on 12/10, it supposedly shipped on 12/11, from Capital Heights, MD to Richmond, VA. No package yet. These were items I needed to wrap and send to family members in another state, so yesterday was pretty much the cutoff, unless I want to pay for Express Mail.

I complained to Amazon last night and they first offered to credit me the shipping charge, which is nice, but doesn't put presents in my hand. Then this morning I got an email saying they'd resubmitted the original order with one-day shipping, but gave a scheduled delivery date of 12/20. That's one really long day, and of course still doesn't resolve the issue.

I am scrambling now to find replacements for the missing items, crossing my fingers that the packages I send today by FedEx Ground will arrive in time, and probably will never use Amazon again.

To add insult to injury, the Amazon email I received today said something like 'We know you want to get your items by "Christmas" . . .' Why the quote marks around Christmas? Oh yeah, it's a form letter sent from a facility in India somewhere ....

Yee-haw! Going at it again with Amazon, DHL, and DHL's inexplicable failure to deliver items on the day they are said to be "out for delivery." With a package temporarily lost in their system this year for good measure.

At least this year, I have a few days leeway, so if 2-day shipments turn into 6-day, I'm hoping I'll still have all the stuff on Christmas Eve.

And it's FINALLY done with DHL today. Items that were ordered on 12/17 for delivery on 12/20 are all here as of about 3:00 today, 12/22, but only after prolonged and repeated and insistent pressure on DHL, multiple phone calls (sometimes having their automated system hang up on me over and over because their call volume was too great, sometimes being put on hold for 15 minutes--first time I have ever felt grateful to be told I would be on hold for at least 15 minutes--because the alternative was having their system hang up on me again), several promises from DHL not kept, and no explanation or accountability for why packages were getting sent out for delivery day after day and being brought back to the warehouse that night, and again the next night (same packages!). I will never ever buy from Amazon.com around Christmas time again because they will not let me specify the shipper, and the local DHL office is poorly run. Who needs the stress of having to force people to do what they've been paid to do?

Meanwhile, I also had a problem with UPS for a purchase from another vendor, first due to my error, then due to UPS's error--and lo and behold, they were happy to do all they could to fix it, even called me back without my having to ask.