The U.K. advertising regulator has banned Amazon’s one-day delivery ad for Prime members. The regulator has called the ad, as it is, “misleading” following 280 complaints about the claim.

“Misleading” Ad

According to the U.K. advertising regulator, it had received 280 individual complaints regarding the Amazon one-day shipping ad. The majority of the complaints were from Prime members who said they had not received their packages within one day, said the Advertising Standards Authority.
The regulator called the ad “misleading” as it was. It warned Amazon that the ad “must not appear again in its current form,” and told Amazon it was required to make it evident that “a significant proportion” of Prime items did not qualify for next-day delivery.

Amazon Objects

Amazon defended its ad, saying that the “overwhelming majority” of its one-day orders were received on time. That said, it underscored that the “period of extreme weather” in 2017 caused “a small proportion of orders” to miss their predicted delivery dates.
Prime, the company’s premium member service offers its members next-day delivery for a fee of £7.99 per month or £79 per year. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) examined the advertising for Amazon Prime on the official website as displayed to customers in December 2017.
The Authority determined that the design of the ad led shoppers to believe that the “one-day delivery” would apply to all items on the site with the Prime label. Moreover, it also stated that the ad suggested that the delivery would arrive the day after the shopper placed the order.

The Truth About Amazon One-Day Delivery

Elsewhere on the Amazon website, more information was provided about the one-day delivery service. There, it explains that the one-day service means that the parcel will arrive “one business day after dispatch.” It also pointed out that the total time an order would take to be delivered would be based on the time of day the order was placed as this would decide if it could be dispatched on the same day as the order was made.
According to the ASA, it was unlikely that customers would come across this information before having already subscribed to the Amazon Prime service.
“Because consumers were likely to understand that, so long as they did not order too late or for Sunday delivery, all Prime-labelled items would be available for delivery the next day with the One-Day Delivery option, when a significant proportion of Prime-labelled items were not available for delivery by the subsequent day with One-Day Delivery, we concluded that the ad was misleading,” ruled the ASA.