It’s too late for Jared, who won’t get his copy of Mass Effect 3 until Friday, the poor thing. (Other people who placed pre-orders got theirs yesterday.) But he wants everyone else to learn from his mistake. If you pre-order an item from Amazon, but change your method of payment for the order before it ships, you’ll lose your spot in line and your release-day shipping. Sure, this usually doesn’t matter all that much, but we’re talking about a game here.

He wrote in last week:

I had a pre-order for a physical copy of the Mass Effect 3 Collector’s Edition with Amazon.com since July 26th. When I placed the pre-order I had opted for Amazon’s release date shipping option. Unfortunately, last month my debit card that was used as payment for the pre-order got canceled because of a security breach at another merchant.

Today I remember to check the pre-order since Mass Effect 3 releases on the 6th and I see my old debit card is still on the order. I update my payment method with my new card. But wait… what’s this? Delivery date of March 9th?

Turns out if you change your payment method on a sold-out pre-order you lose your release date shipping. Not even Amazon customer service can bring it back. At the very least they waived the $3.99 I would have otherwise had to pay for overnight shipping (Prime member). I can’t place the pre-order with another merchant as everybody’s sold out of this edition of the game.

At this point I’m thoroughly annoyed, had I known this would happen I would have placed my pre-order with a brick and mortar Gamestop where you can change the payment method when you go pick the game up.

Someone prefers Gamestop over Amazon for something? Wait, am I still logged in to Consumerist’s e-mail account? Yep, I am.

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