Some Amazon customers are frustrated that their packages are arriving late — and it reveals a giant misconception people have about Prime (AMZN)

Amazon

Amazon Prime members are complaining that their shipments are arriving later than they used to.
Many claim that their packages are no longer arriving in two days from the date of order.
Amazon Prime's two-day-shipping policy actually only guarantees customers will get their packages two days from when Amazon ships it — not from the time of order.
The customers' stories show how much confusion there is surrounding Amazon's shipping policies.

Prime is Amazon's crown jewel. But some customers are claiming the company has been failing in its promise of providing free, two-day delivery for members.

Customers who spoke with Business Insider said they noticed in recent months that their Amazon shipments were coming later and later. They claimed that guaranteed delivery times were being missed, orders were being delayed with little explanation, and packages were taking longer to get packed and passed off to carriers.

While it seems unlikely that that's true across the board, the perception that Amazon is slowing even for Prime members could be a real concern, especially considering that the company just raised the price of an annual membership, to $119 from $99, and the monthly membership, to $12.99 from $10.99. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently revealed that more than 100 million people around the world pay for Prime.

The complaints reveal Prime's limitations and how different the two-day-shipping guarantee is from what some customers perceive it to be.

A common response from Amazon's customer-service Twitter account reiterates Prime's guarantee after customer complaints: that two-day shipping ensures only that customers will get it in two days from the time it's handed over to the carrier, not two days from the time of ordering, which is often incorrectly assumed.

"Prime Two-Day Shipping refers to the amount of time it takes for your item to arrive once it's been processed and shipped. Some items have longer processing times than others," the guarantee reads.

Some customers say that they used to get their packages reliably in two days, and now it's taking longer.

"What they've done is set an expectation for Prime ... that people would get the items they ordered very quickly, and certainly within two days typically of order," Brandon Muramatsu, a frequent Amazon customer, told Business Insider. "They're now underdelivering on their promise, whereas they may have been overdelivering before."

Data of Amazon's shipping times also notably shows that the company, in aggregate, is actually getting faster with its shipping times.

Either way, the customer confusion is not great news for Amazon, which is trying to attract even more people to Prime.

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