Packages from Amazon’s discounted store, Haul, have started arriving for early adopters.
Derek Lossing, founder and senior industry advisor at Cirrus Global, told Retail Brew that his first Amazon Haul package arrived at his Seattle home on Nov. 25, 11 days after he placed the order. The brown paper package came from China and was delivered via USPS.
In a LinkedIn post, Lossing shared that the order took 36 hours to fulfill in China, and was done in partnership with Amazon’s long-time freight forwarder ECMS Express. The Haul package took roughly two days to depart from China via Guangzhou in Southern China.
Lossing’s package—which was carrying men’s joggers, a pair of shorts, a $4 wallet, and kitchen hooks—arrived at the Los Angeles airport on Nov. 19. Lossing ordered four items to hit the $25 free shipping mark.
“Section 321 [also known as the de minimus trade provision] clearance happened in flight,” Lossing wrote in the post. “There was 2 days of dwell here, which is an opportunity. I suspect the package was relabeled with USPS label here,” he added.
To be sure, Lossing doesn’t exactly qualify as a traditional shopper, because he said he placed this Haul order “solely” for research purposes—his firm Cirrus Global handles cross border e-commerce, shipping, and logistics.
Lossing said his checkout experience was smooth overall, but pointed out that Haul orders were placed within a different shopping cart, not the same one as Amazon’s Prime fast-shipping orders.
“The one callout I will make is that it has a separate shopping cart, and that’s similar for how Amazon has managed grocery in the past as well, too…And, so, that was a slightly different experience, but, there wasn’t any challenges understanding that, in my opinion,” Lossing added.
Still, Lossing is among a growing list of shoppers who will use Amazon Haul to buy inexpensive goods online. With Haul, Amazon is saying that online shopping for slightly unusual, low-cost products sourced from China is here to stay.
Initial response: Amazon’s VP of Fashion and Fitness Jenny Freshwater told Modern Retail that so far, the response to Amazon Haul has been “positive.”
Juozas Kaziukėnas, founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse, told Retail Brew that it’s early days for Haul. Amazon has not marketed the service so far—a sign that it’s still in its test and learn phase.
“We’ve not seen ads on Facebook or Google, and we’ve also not seen ads inside of Amazon itself,” Kaziukėnas said.
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“It’s a soft launch for Amazon, and I think that people that have discovered it have found it accidentally in the Haul tab, at the top of their app, or perhaps many of them also kind of saw it in the news,” he added.
But Kaziukėnas was quick to add that people are indeed buying items on Haul because they have begun to show up on Amazon’s bestsellers list for random and niche items like bestsellers in sewing rickrack, or in women’s novelty head wraps, or in machine tools lamps, to cite a few examples.
“We’ve been tracking Amazon bestsellers for a very long time, and Amazon Haul products are now slowly starting to appear amongst the best sellers on Amazon…They’re [showing up] in the niche, small categories, but they are starting to appear there,” Kaziukėnas said.
Amazon’s Senior PR and Communications Leader Nicole Pampe said Amazon introduced the Haul shopping experience on mobile, because the tech giant thinks most customers looking for products at low price points would shop on their phones.
“We’ll continue to listen to customer feedback as we expand the shopping experience,” Pampe wrote in an email.
Amazon did not respond to Retail Brew’s query about when Haul products will become available across all devices.
Sledging rivals: Last week, Amazon ramped up its discount rates on Haul with a temporary sitewide discount of 50%. Kaziukėnas said this was a “welcome move” by Amazon, because it shows the company’s commitment to Haul.
More recently, rival Temu has been in expansion mode, opening its platform to local US sellers without an invitation. Previously, merchants needed an invitation code to join Temu.
Temu has also been quietly building Amazon-like local warehouses. The Chinese-linked e-commerce platform now offers some Temu sellers the ability to ship merchandise directly from local US warehouses, with delivery times as fast as one business day.
Ultimately, Kaziukėnas said he doesn’t expect Haul to leave a significant mark during holiday shopping this year.
“It launched quite late in the year,” he said. “Its catalog is actually quite limited. If you’ve ever used Shein or Temu or AliExpress, they have so many more products…It’s too early for Amazon Haul; it doesn’t deserve a seat at the table yet.”