And then once you find the book and get it shipped to you it gets destroyed in shipping because they put it in a padded envelope or a box with zero padding. Every book that I've ordered from them has been damaged. I quit ordering books once it happened the fourth time.
zrobotics|3 years ago
Having worked on it, I get that sizing packaging is a tremendously complex optimization problem that even other experienced programmers underestimate the complexity. The options for different package size grow factorially with different product selections, and it isn't possible to have every size box available in a packing station. However, it isn't an unsolvable problem to pack better. Optimizing split shipments to increase effeciency is tremendously complex, but calculating the box size needed for an order is actually pretty trivial (ignoring packing density, which is oddly often a reasonable assumption for shipping goods to the consumer). Amazon can certainly improve here, just by using routing packages to a packing station with a closer box size and having differing box sizes in each station.
I have always assumed that, given their scale, Amazon doesn't necessarily face the same price hit that a normal shopper faces when sending an oversize package. I have gotten multiple shipments from Amazon that were so oversize that, at my company's shipping pricing, would likely result in a net loss due to shipping cost. However, I suspect that Amazon has negotiated rates that insulate them from this, and the shipping companies take a loss on individual packages to gain the volume.