To help my personal fitness program I drink some sport drink mixes pre- and post-workout. These come as powders that have to be measured out and mixed with water, which is a bit of a hassle (but that gripe's probably best for another post). Anyway, the ones I like are hard to find locally, and when I can find them they're sold at full retail plus sales tax (plus the cost of gas to get to the store!), which makes the already spendy stuff even more so.
So of course I turn to "teh Internets" for better pricing and convenience. Supplements being what they are, there are lots of companies out there selling them and many of these companies don't have the best customer service reputations. Of the companies I've tried, far and away my favorite has been AllStarHealth.com, but they're located here in California so I get to pay the tax man and the UPS man when shopping with them. The biggest disappointment is that they don't carry one of my new favorite mixes, even though I've emailed them and they've said they plan on stocking it soon.
Being in need of more mix RSN, I started looking for another store that stocks both mixes. Imagine my surprise when a Froogle search showed that Amazon.com is now selling both of my favorite mixes. This isn't via their Marketplace service that lets other companies list products at Amazon; Amazon itself is selling the products directly.
Even better, they're available via a service called "Subscribe & Save" that I hadn't heard of before. It looks like it launched late last year as part of their beta Grocery service, and it lets you schedule regular shipments of your items. OK, so that's not that new of a feature—even my old favorite (AllStarHealth.com) offers a subscription service as well. What makes it exceptional is that Amazon gives you a 15% discount on their regular price for buying via subscription, and they also waive the fees for standard shipping. That's a huge discount and makes the all-in price significantly lower than anyone else I've been able to find. And, because it's Amazon, the payment process is quick, painless, well-communicated, and they also provide obvious control over my subscription with a nice dashboard.
As I write this my first order is slowly making its way to me via USPS. The two downsides I've observed so far are 1) A limited scheduler (1-, 2-, 3- or 6-month increments only), and 2) Long shipping times with USPS. The long ship times can be easily accommodated by order a little more in advance, but the scheduler could be a pain if you consistently use up a product at an odd interval. It's pretty easy to skip a shipment so it's not like you can't manually tweak the shipping schedule as needed, but it'd also be nice if there was an "Advanced..." button to let control freaks define a custom interval, too.
UPDATE May07: It seems that the USPS doesn't really know when they're going to deliver packages. Their online package tracking told me that I'd receive both shipments on May08, but one arrived on May05 and the other arrived on May06. Note to Amazon.com: Y'all really need to optimize your shipping engine. When multiple products are scheduled to ship on the same day you'd save a bunch of money if you consolidated them into a single box.
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