Some Amazon Fresh customers say the grocery-delivery service is going downhill, and it raises questions about its future

• Amazon Fresh, the e-commerce giant's grocery-delivery program, is slipping in rankings of customer service and getting some poor reviews online.
• Some customers say they've experienced issues like missing items, delayed or canceled deliveries, and damaged produce. They say they believe the service has become unreliable.
• The issues call into question the future of the service, according to at least one analyst.

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Some customers are saying that Amazon Fresh is growing rotten.

The online grocery-delivery service has undergone many changes in the last year, and it's racking up poor customer reviews as its future - and its place within the Amazon Prime ecosystem - is increasingly being questioned.

The service, which is available in roughly 20 cities around the world, allows customers to place fresh grocery orders to be delivered at a predetermined time.

Business Insider spoke with more than a dozen Amazon Fresh customers who say they have experienced issues with the service in places like Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC. These customers complain of poor-quality and even spoiled produce, orders being packed incorrectly or illogically, canceled or late deliveries, and regularly missing items.

The complaints are also visible on social media and even on Amazon's own page for reviews of Fresh, which has a 3.3 rating out of 5 and more than 800 reviews.

Slipping customer satisfaction

Amazon Fresh, which is now in its eleventh year of service in its earliest markets, has fallen dramatically in at least one ranking of customer satisfaction.

In the 2018 Temkin Experience Ratings, a benchmark that gathers customer experiences in industries like grocery and assigns companies a ranking, Amazon Fresh fell 13 points from the previous year to 67%, falling to last place among grocers and landing in the nebulous zone between "good" (70% and above) and "poor" (60% and below).

Now some customers are saying that they've noticed a steep drop in Fresh's quality and reliability over the last year, especially in the first few months of 2018.

"As they've scaled up, they seem to be making the rookie mistakes," Ryan Fritzsche, who has been a Fresh customer since it came to Brooklyn in 2014, said to Business Insider. "You expect them to be improving instead of [deteriorating]."

"Every single time I get groceries delivered from Fresh, something is damaged," said Heather Fishel, a Los Angeles resident who has ordered from Fresh eight times over the last year. "Most of the time, it's all of the order."

Negative reviews are also appearing on the page for Amazon Fresh itself.

"This is not the Fresh I LOVED 2 years ago," one review reads. "It WAS great, now just sort of a necessary evil."

Nearly all of the customers who spoke with Business Insider said they have switched to a competitor or changed their shopping behavior on the platform to account for its issues.

Amazon seems to have instituted a very lenient refund policy for any kind of complaint - from damaged items to missed deliveries - to keep customers happy. Customers say Amazon almost always opts to refund the order, in whole or in part, when an issue arises. Some customers also received promotional credit towards their next order in addition to the refund.

If a problem does occur, however, customers are often still left without usable groceries, which means they must either run to a local grocery store or order again for delivery in a few days.

Inconveniences such as these might negate the utility of Fresh as a service in some customers' eyes.

"I just bought groceries from you because I need groceries," Fritzsche said. "I can't eat a refund."

Fishel expressed a similar sentiment.

"It's incredibly frustrating that their response is always, 'Well, here's a few dollars back,' when I really just wanted the groceries," she said.

The issues described by customers "just [don't] sound like Amazon to me," says Sucharita Kodali, an analyst at Forrester Research and an expert on e-commerce and omnichannel retail.

"I'm actually shocked," Kodali said. "Seems to me ... the only explanation here is that they basically are stretched, and it sounds to me like they have not prioritized these call tickets, so to speak, on the to-do list, and they clearly have not put the A-Team against it."

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the record for this story.

Missing in action

The most troubling issue, according to customers, is the items that are missing from their orders.

Amazon Fresh has a section on its "help" page that addresses the problem of out-of-stock items.

"When possible, we'll try to substitute the unavailable item with a similar product (exceptions are specialty items)," it reads.

"If your item was substituted, you'll see Substituted with on the Delivery or Pickup Confirmation e-mail listing the substituted items. In most cases, you will not be charged for the original item or the substitute. If we're able to substitute the original item with an item that is nearly identical, you'll be charged the lesser of the two prices."

But customers report that Amazon does not always notify them when an item appearing on Fresh's website is actually out of stock. If an ordered item is out of stock at the time of fulfillment, it may just not appear when the order is delivered.

That leaves customers wondering whether the item was out of stock, or whether there was a mistake during fulfillment and the item was forgotten. One customer said that they typically have such large orders, they sometimes didn't even realize they didn't get the item they ordered until they reached for it in the pantry and realized it never arrived.

Some customers have reported entire bags of groceries going missing. Calling Amazon's customer-support line in this context will also net a refund for the missing package, but as far as tracking down the missing groceries, customers say they haven't had any luck. In this case, it is up to the customer to place a new order, rather than Amazon delivering the same order again.

Several customers reported missed deliveries - either that their delivery just never showed up, or that it was delayed past the delivery window.

Kodali called missing or out-of-stock items "one of the biggest frustrations" in online grocery shopping, but that Amazon, since it nailed online shopping years ago, should be better equipped to handle it.

"How is something so basic, that they've solved so long ago [on Amazon.com], still a problem on Amazon Fresh?" Kodali said. "Unless they just didn't really care."

"It's baffling," she added.

Damaged goods

Damaged items were another issue for customers, some of whom said the damage their orders sustained in transit was beyond what could be considered acceptable as the risk of ordering groceries online.

Most of it, these customers said, seemed like it could be blamed on poor packing on Amazon's part, even taking into account the fact that orders often shift in transit.

Customers complained about frozen items being packed next to fresh herbs and produce, freezing or crushing them in transit and rendering them no longer usable, and cartons of milk getting crushed by heavy items like 12 packs of canned seltzers being packed on top of them.

Jennifer Silva, another customer from Los Angeles, said that she once ordered food as well as cleaning product with bleach in one order. The items were all packed in one bag, with the bleach product on top. In transit, it ended up leaking all over the food, rendering the entire delivery unsafe for consumption.

Amazon has a policy of adding a plastic bag for products like cleaners and detergents, in order to separate them from food items. But as a rule, it only separates items in different bags by temperature.

When Fishel called to complain about the way her items were being packed, an Amazon customer-service representative suggested that she change her ordering behavior, she said. Instead of including an entire grocery order all at once, the representative suggested ordering fragile items in one batch and heavy items in another.

Receiving damaged goods once in a while can be the cost of delivery, according to Kodali.

"We hear this all the time," she said. "Some guy comes to deliver you stuff, and your burrito's upside down. Jostling food, you're not going to get things in the right order. That's just one of the costs."

Kodali speculated that since there's a "this-way-up" policy for food delivery packages - basically, packages shouldn't be left on their side or upside down - the issues customers are reporting could be exacerbated by inexperienced delivery people.

"As long as the order is coming from their distribution center and they've packed it, these issues shouldn't [happen]," Kodali said. "I'm surprised that items would get crushed, unless it's just an unskilled worker who wasn't trained properly."

Amazon Fresh keeps changing

Amazon Fresh has evolved a lot over the last year. It introduced Whole Foods items to the platform and stopped service in some suburban areas across the country.

Behind the scenes, the teams behind Fresh and Prime Now, Amazon's two-hour delivery service, are now one. Fresh also kicked third-party vendors off of the platform at the end of May.

Operationally, there have been further changes. The service has recently switched from using ice packs to frozen water bottles in order to keep things cold.

In some markets, Fresh has also switched from delivering orders in its reusable, green cold-storage totes to paper bags - even for cold and frozen items, which are first wrapped in layers of plastic.

'A bad taste in my mouth'

Customers also say the negative experiences with Fresh have colored their perception of Amazon and Amazon Prime, even if they are otherwise happy with the service.

"I feel like Amazon now has two very distinct divisions in my mind," Fishel said. "While I love Amazon Prime and even Prime Now ... I don't know what is going on with Amazon Fresh. But it really leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because there are other companies that do grocery so much better."

Some customers now say the spell has been broken, and they are trusting Amazon less for other kinds of purchases.

"The troubles we've had over the last few months have loosened the grip Amazon had on me," Gillian Fritzsche, a customer in Brooklyn, New York, said.

Cost is also a consideration: an Amazon Fresh membership costs $15 a month, and it's only available for Amazon Prime members, who also pay $120 a year or $13 a month for that subscription.

Amazon Fresh's struggles put the future of the service into question

Kodali said that none of the issues described are "unfixable," but the fact that Amazon has not fixed them yet may point to the possibility that Amazon is preparing to sunset the service in its current iteration.

"Why even bother having Fresh at all if this is the way you're going to treat it?" Kodali said. "It does not speak highly to its prospects."

Fresh is a service that has struggled to find its footing, and there are indications that it hasn't reached the profitability targets Amazon has set out, she said.

"Maybe what this is is the pains of constantly trying to pivot the business model to try and find a better [one], tinkering with a business model that never really worked in the first place," she said. "What they're discovering is that it's a business model that may never work."

Fresh grocery is still a focus point for Amazon, though its approach to grocery has changed massively since Fresh began. Whole Foods' integration and brand has been a major point for growth of both Prime Now and Fresh, leading to increased sales on the platforms.

But now that Amazon is working on integrating Whole Foods with its Prime Now two-hour delivery service in cities across the country, delivering from stores instead of dedicated fulfillment centers, Fresh may soon find itself obsolete in Amazon's new grocery paradigm.