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> vs. waiting two to four weeks to ship from China.

In UK, the average for my AliExpress orders is now 1 week.

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And the frequent delivery status updates make sure that I am very aware how much time the parcel sits around waiting to clear customs, too.
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Oh indeed, but the one time I ordered at AliExpress and was inundated in emails pretty much turned me off.
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Once upon a time, AliExpress had a really bad reputation for missing packages. I imagine they ramped up the notifications to help repair their reputation.
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Amazon Prime is quite good, tbh. There’s a whole layer of complexity your life loses when you know you can get life essentials within a few hours with no planning.
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You still have same day shipping? I still get two days on basically everything even with prime, at the fastest. I thought their delivery service was getting worse after the pandemic or something
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Yep, and I live in a rural area about 10 miles outside town. Amazon Prime was reliably within 2 days until a couple years ago when they opened a fulfillment center about 20 miles away. Now I often see an item I'm buying as available within hours. I basically use Amazon Prime as a way to avoid having to drive everywhere. Ease of returns, Prime Video, etc., are just icing on the cake.
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It depends on your location.
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Yep still same day. Sometimes they offer 3 hour delivery.
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Prime has gone from guaranteed two days or less to we'll get it to you when we get it to you for a long while. Prime just guarantees you'll be ahead of people who don't pay for prime. It's fine if you can get it for free or through a family plan. But when you don't have it you do not miss it once you remember stores still exist and 99 percent of purchases don't matter if you get it tomorrow or in a week
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Seems to depend on where. I'm in the UK, and same day delivery is more and more common.
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Geographic advantage. It’s a small country so it’s hard to be that far from a distribution center.
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They must still be chasing growth in the UK. It was once like that in the US as well
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>They must still be chasing growth in the UK. It was once like that in the US as well

Where I live (in a large US city) many things are same day delivery, an enormous amount are next day delivery and, weirdly, except for four-serving Strawberry Jell-O (which ships from Texas), almost everything is two-day delivery.

Not sure where you live, but my experience is completely different from yours.

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