Users in Israel reported Monday that Amazon has temporarily stopped shipping many products to the country, with items sold directly by the company and most third-party sellers no longer available for delivery on its U.S. site during the Mastercard Day discount event.
For years, Amazon has offered free shipping to Israel on thousands of products for purchases above $49. Other items are shipped for a fee, while some products are not delivered to Israel at all and must be ordered through freight forwarding companies that provide a U.S. address and charge for the service.
The company has previously suspended shipments to Israel during some periods of fighting over the past two years because of airspace closures. Those suspensions were always temporary. A check found that some third-party sellers are still shipping to Israel, but they are offering very distant delivery dates. One product listed an estimated arrival between April 5 and April 30.
In contrast, AliExpress continues to ship regularly to Israel, as do other Chinese e-commerce sites. iHerb briefly halted shipments to Israel but later resumed deliveries through DHL, which is routing packages through Cyprus. Next informed customers that delivery times have been extended to 21 days due to disruptions in flights. Previously, those shipments typically arrived in Israel within a few days.
Over the past weekend, nearly 200,000 packages ordered before February 28 arrived in Israel. “Amazon will come back,” Benny Buhnik, manager of the shopping group “Kaze Ani Rotzeh – INeeditIL,” told ynet. “In previous wars they left shipping suspended for about a week and probably accumulated orders. I assume that next week, even before the war ends, once the skies open a bit more, they will restore shipping to Israel. Right now the sites still working with Israel are those using cargo flights. Anyone relying on passenger flights currently has a problem.”