Delivery options, costs and Prime

A listing does not have a delivery date. It offers up to two options, and they differ in cost as well as speed — usually the fast one carries a basket minimum and the slow one does not. Collapsing them into one sentence throws away the trade-off that decides the purchase.

Everything here was measured on amazon.com on 2026-08-19, ship-to ZIP 06268, egressing from the US, against a signed-in Prime account and an anonymous curl side by side.

Read the attributes, not the sentence

Amazon publishes each option as data-csa-c-* attributes on the message span, right beside the English prose. Reading those gets the fee, the date, the basket minimum and the cutoff as separate values, and it does not depend on the storefront rendering English.

Content id	Slot
DEXUnifiedCXPDM	First option — the one the buy box leads with
DEXUnifiedCXSDM	Second option — the "Or …" line

Attribute	Holds
data-csa-c-delivery-price	FREE, a fee like $5.85, or the string fastest
data-csa-c-delivery-time	Tomorrow, August 20, Overnight 4 AM - 8 AM, September 3 - 8
data-csa-c-delivery-condition	on qualifying orders over \$25 — the basket minimum, alone
data-csa-c-delivery-cutoff	Order within 4 hrs 3 mins
data-csa-c-delivery-benefit-program-id	cfs, paid_shipping, SUB_SAME_DAY_OVERNIGHT_PROGRAM, or empty
data-csa-c-mir-sub-type	CONDITIONALLY_FREE when the free claim has strings
data-csa-c-delivery-origin-country, -destination	Cross-border shipments. Empty on every domestic listing measured
data-csa-c-pickup-location, data-csa-c-distance	Pickup-point options rather than delivery

amazon_fetch.py listing returns these as delivery_options; skills/amazon-search/extract-product.js returns them as deliveryOptions.

Four ways this field set will mislead you

1. benefit-program-id: paid_shipping does not mean you pay. It names the programme, not the outcome. Two listings carried paid_shipping together with price: FREE (B002VD5GH6, B00885985C). Read price.
2. price is not always a price. On a second option it is frequently the literal string fastest, matching prose like "Or fastest delivery August 24
   • 26". The fee for that upgrade is not stated on the listing.
3. The block is re-rendered per breakpoint, so the same option appears up to four times. Deduplicate.
4. It is sometimes absent entirely. B002VD5GH6 rendered a primary slot with no DEX span at all. An empty delivery_options is not "no delivery" — fall back to the prose in delivery.

The attributes do not appear on search result cards. Search cards carry prose only; extract-results.js parses that structurally instead.

The anonymous route already has the Prime date

The plugin previously claimed the anonymous route can only see the non-Prime promise. That is true of #deliveryBlockMessage — whose text stops at the first </div>, i.e. the first option — and false of the page.

The Prime date is in the second slot of the anonymous HTML, and on five Amazon-fulfilled ASINs it matched the signed-in session exactly:

	Anonymous	Signed in
First option	FREE · Monday, August 24 · on orders shipped by Amazon over $35 · cfs	FREE · Overnight 4 AM - 8 AM · on qualifying orders over $25 · SUB_SAME_DAY_OVERNIGHT_PROGRAM
Second option	FREE · Tomorrow, August 20	FREE · Tomorrow, August 20

So the free route gets the standard Prime date right. What a signed-in session adds is narrower than "the Prime date", and worth stating precisely:

• the same-day / overnight upgrade, which anonymous never shows;
• the lower basket minimum — $25 signed in against $35 anonymous;
• the order-within cutoff on the leading option;
• coupons and Prime-exclusive pricing, which never render anonymously.

On merchant-fulfilled items the signed-in session added nothing: B0C2H26G6S, B0GSJGFSGZ, B09FHGX71K and B00885985C were identical field for field on both routes. Escalating to a browser for those spends a session for no new fact.

Is Prime actually in force?

Every Prime date assumes a live membership on the delivery date, and nothing on a product page checks that. /gp/primecentral does, and it is readable with a same-origin fetch from a signed-in tab — see amazon-account-import.

The account this was measured on was eight days into a free trial, converting to a paid monthly plan on a date beyond several of the delivery estimates being quoted. A trial that lapses before the parcel arrives silently invalidates the answer. Check the membership state before quoting a Prime promise more than a few days out, and say so when it is a trial.

Amazon renders Prime Central with hashed CSS-module class names that will churn. Anchor on cel_widget_id prefixes instead:

Widget	Carries
[cel_widget_id^="prime-membership-central-profile"]	N days left in your trial, membership state
[cel_widget_id^="plan-change-action-desktop"]	Current plan, price, renewal date, upcoming plan change

Strip <script> and <style> before reading textContent — see verification-traps.md.

Reporting

State, per option: the date, the carriage cost, and the condition attached to it. A date without its condition is not an answer, and neither is "free delivery" on a $9.99 item whose free tier needs a $25 basket.

Where the two options differ in cost, say what the faster one costs — in money if price names a figure, in "unstated, shown only at checkout" if it says fastest.

Related

• fetch-routes.md — which route, and proving it worked
• verification-traps.md — fields that read as authoritative and are not
• amazon-delivery-check — the signed-in workflow
• amazon-account-import — reading Prime state out of the session