ASA takes on Amazon over one-day delivery adverts

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has told Amazon that its 'one-day delivery' advert cannot appear in its current form and must make it clear to customers that not all Prime-labelled items are available on next-day delivery.  

Earlier this week it was revealed that the ASA had discovered that a ''significant proportion" of orders did not arrive as promised during a six-month investigation which began after 280 complaints were made about Amazon's Prime service in December 2017.

Amazon argued: “The vast majority of the complaints were received following widespread media coverage of an initial handful of complaints about the issue.” 

In the ASA publication, Amazon said:

- Consumers were likely to understand from the ad that they would not have to pay to use the One-Day Delivery option, and that it was available on a selection of items.

- The ads did not promise a particular speed of delivery of a particular product

- They believed consumers understood from using the website, that individual delivery dates were displayed for each order and that they would have to check each item they were interested in purchasing to find out whether One-Day Delivery was available, and what the delivery date was with One-Day Delivery at that particular time to the address to which they wanted the item delivered.

- Speed of delivery of a future order could not form part of consumers’ decision about whether to sign up to Prime.

- A customer’s later disappointment about the speed of a One-Day Delivery order should not render its marketing misleading

The ASA ruled that customers would be unlikely to research delivery information on individual Prime products before signing up to the yearly membership fee.

Read the full publication here.  

Source : Insight DIY Team

Image : Kay Roxby - shutterstock - 361433204 

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