Amazon one-day delivery claim “misleading” to UK customers

E-commerce giant Amazon has run into trouble with the advertising standards regulator in the UK over its guarantee of free one-day delivery for its “Prime” subscribers. The UK’s advertising standards watchdog ruled this month that Amazon’s promise for its premium subscription members was “misleading” since actually referred to delivery one day after an item is dispatched, not after it is purchased.

And, the Advertising Standard Agency ruled that Amazon cannot claim its service was “guaranteed” since it is not necessarily using guaranteed one-day delivery services.

The ASA said it had looked into complaints about a “significant number” of orders from the Amazon.co.uk website that were not delivered within one day.

In its defense, the Luxembourg-based EU subsidiary of Amazon said that on its website it had stated customers would receive items one business day after dispatch, but that exact delivery times depended on the time of day an order was placed.

Amazon uses multiple courier companies including Royal Mail to carry out its delivery, and said not all of those couriers had tracking capabilities to trade items, but its own data suggested the “vast majority” of orders are delivered by its guaranteed delivery date.

“Misleading”

The ASA ruled that although Amazon’s one-day delivery web page stated that delivery would occur one day after dispatch, Amazon’s Prime web pages said only “one-day delivery”.

The Authority also said in its ruling that by using Royal Mail’s First Class delivery service, Amazon was not using a guaranteed delivery service, and according to Royal Mail’s guidelines the service was a one-to-two day service.

“Because we understood that Amazon used non-guaranteed services such as Royal Mail First Class for these orders, we considered that in describing the service as ‘guaranteed’ was misleading,” said the ASA ruling.

“Because we considered the ‘one-day delivery’ claim was ambiguous, and the claim that the service was ‘guaranteed’ was not adequately qualified or substantiated, we concluded that the website was misleading.”

The ASA said it has now ordered Amazon to fully qualify its ‘one-day delivery’ promise and remove the claim that the service is guaranteed “until this could be substantiated”.