If you've ever done any online shopping, you're probably already familiar with Amazon's Prime shipping service. For $99/year (previously $79 until mid-March 2014), most of your Amazon orders are delivered within two days for free. You also get some other benefits with your membership, such as access to a lot of free TV shows and movies through their Amazon Instant Video streaming service.
Amazon Prime is a great service. While you're shopping, Amazon lets you know how much longer you have to place your order in order to make that day's cutoff time ("place your order in the next 53 minutes to get this order by Thursday"). On the final page of the ordering process, Amazon tells you exactly when the order will be delivered.
Shipping occurs Monday-Saturday; Sunday and holidays don't see deliveries. Even so, if you place an order on Sunday, it usually counts as a shipping day, so that you still receive your package on Tuesday.
In my experience with Prime, I've only had a couple of packages take three days (excluding Sundays and holidays). My best order was of a package of specialty pens that only local art stores and Staples carry. It was 11pm on a Friday night; the local stores were closed and the first wouldn't open until 9am the next morning. I placed my order and at 8:30am the next morning, a courier dropped off the package from Amazon. Not only did they get me my 2 day order within 10 hours, but they actually got me my order faster than I could have picked it up from a local store.
ShopRunner positions itself as an Amazon Prime type service for the rest of the web. The pricing is similar ($79/year) and it enables you to get free two day shipping from nearly 100 online stores. In principle, it should be just as awesome as Prime; in practice, not so much.
The first problem with ShopRunner is the poor integration between it and the partner stores. You have no indication from the store when your order needs to be placed, nor do you get a delivery estimate when you place your order.
You also don't get two day shipping. You get delivery within two days. The distinction is important. If the store determines that UPS 3 Day Select is likely to be delivered within two days, then they can use that service. However, UPS only guarantees that the order will be delivered within three days, so I've had many of my ShopRunner orders delayed.
But the biggest problem is ShopRunner's definition of "2-Day shipping". First, the order must be placed by that store's "cut-off time" in order to ship the same day. All of the times are different and the earliest ones are 7am PST. ShopRunner also doesn't consider Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays to be shipping days.
Consider the following example: you order a new USB flash drive from NewEgg.com at 10am on Friday (NewEgg's cutoff is 9am PST). The order won't ship on Saturday or Sunday. If Monday is a holiday, then it won't ship then either. On Tuesday, NewEgg actually ships your order using UPS 3 Day Select. You finally receive your order on Friday afternoon, more than a week after you ordered it. This example actually happened to me. Had I ordered from Amazon, there is a good chance I would have received my package the next day.
Another problem is that the stores aren't even aware that they offer this service. I ordered a pizza from Dominos; ShopRunner waives the delivery charge ($2.50 in my area). I had signed in with ShopRunner, but for some reason it was not applied to my order. So I called the store. The person who answered had no clue what I was talking about, so she got the store manager. The manager also had never heard about ShopRunner. Even worse, the manager was acting like I was trying to scam her into free delivery; she wouldn't even check their own website to verify what I was saying. I ended up canceling my order and went out for lunch instead.
On the plus side, if you have an American Express card, you get a complementary subscription to ShopRunner. And if you have Amazon Prime, ShopRunner will give you a one-year free subscription.
You can find out more about both services here:
Amazon Prime
ShopRunner
Just make sure you understand the benefits and limitations of each before you sign up.
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