Dear Amazon.com

[den]

"Will there ever be an Amazon.com.au in Australia? There are a lot of products I want that will not ship outside the USA. I have the same problem buying from amazon.co.uk"

Thanks for writing to us at Amazon.com.

Please accept my sincere apologies for any inconvenience you may have experienced and I do understand your concern. We're always glad to learn of new opportunities to grow our business internationally. As you may know, we now have websites throughout the world. You can see a full list at: http://www.amazon.com/international At this time, however, we have not determined a marketing direction in "Australia".

I wonder if they thought I made up the country's name. And their list of international sites doesn't help; I already knew that and it doesn't answer my question at all.

Comments

[hedgegoth.livejournal.com]

dood, everyone knows Australia is just a myth.

[kreggan.livejournal.com]

Just a conspiracy of cartographers, you mean?

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

Is that the right collective noun?

I need a dead of laughter icon.

[jenny_evergreen]

No, seriously, the quotes kill me. *wordlessness*

[the-starshadow.livejournal.com]

I think the term "wanker" comes to mind.
I just made that up.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I shakes me head at them.

[sanderling.livejournal.com]

I run into the same problem, sort of. There is in fact an Amazon.ca, but it only (for the most part) carries multimedia. Amazon.com is like a department store, while Amazon.ca is more like a big-box book store. So non-media merchandise that Amazon.com carries is not sold on the Canadian site. However, even though we're right next door, for customs/duty reasons they don't sell/ship a lot of their stuff to Canada. I've contemplated having it shipped to an American friend and then having them send it across the border as a "gift", but then you're paying shipping twice over, and whatever cost savings there was to buying it off Amazon.com versus finding it (or having it ordered in) locally in a store is lost. I'm not sure what you'd been looking at on Amazon.com, but I hope that if Amazon does ever set up an Australian branch, they make it their department store style, not just the book store.

[freetrav.livejournal.com]

With apologies:

Please, PLEASE change the tags bracketing the Amazon response; it is failing to wrap, and as a result, stretching all the way across the equivalent of about six or seven screens for me.

That said, don't you know that they speak German in Australia (whose capital is Vienna), and you're supposed to use the Amazon.de site?

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

changed the font.

Of course! amazon.de! But the closest I've even been to Vienna was an Ultravox album.

[torakiyoshi.livejournal.com]

Of course they do! It's listed right there, the first one on the page; says they sell books in German and English...

...

What?

-=TK

[fenris-lorsrai.livejournal.com]

Try Biblio.com (http://www.biblio.com) for books you're having trouble getting ahold of. International site, though the majority of the dealers are in the US. They have a special program set up for US dealers to bundle Australian order to trim the shipping cost down to something reasonable.

And here's an output of the Australian book dealers on Biblio (http://www.biblio.com/bookseller_search.php?country=7). A lot them are extreme specialists and don't have a physical store, so you may not have seen them before.

Not going to be much help if you wanted Amazon's other offerings. To deal with those, you might want to try Etsy Shop local (http://www.etsy.com/shop_local.php) which will show you local artisan's. You can input country, town, province, and it'll show you the 100 most recently updated store. (so you know they're still live). Good for all kinds of handmade stuff. No good for an ipod, but you can get a custom case for it.

Can't help you with straight up patented consumer goods and electronics if that's what you were looking for.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

It's the electronics and goods that are the problem, Books, CDs and DVDs are obtainable.

[amazingadrian.livejournal.com]

What is it you are looking for? As a US Citizen, maybe I can help you get it and just ship it to you, if you're willing to pay for it.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

Generally anything that is not a book, CD or DVD. Standard overseas shipping rates are prohibitive and usually almost as much as the item's value.

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

I assume you know this, but presumably they have a form letter where they hit the 'somebody wants amazon in their country' button and then fill in the country name. Unfortunately, looks like somebody forgot to remove the quotes around the country name...

They aren't going to answer your question (or anyone who asks this type of question ever) because presumably they haven't announced an Australian site - that means they either don't have any plans (in which case who knows when or if they will ever have one) or else they do have plans which they haven't announced yet so they wouldn't reveal them.

Sucks, but for a company that big, it's probably not likely that emails from interested people would influence them. If you're lucky, the same program that does the form letters also keeps a count of how often people from "Australia" have requested the service and flags that up if it hits some kind of threshold, but I doubt they even bothered with that to be honest.

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

By the way, you could try writing to complain that they answered your question with a form letter instead of considering it. This will probably elicit a form-letter response :)

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

I live for machine generated responses.

[dewhitton.livejournal.com]

Enter type of query: Country
Enter country: Australia
Send Y/N: Y

I bet they have software that scans emails, looking for text combinations.

(nonexistent Amazon url) + (country name) + (text "When will amazon")

[quen-elf.livejournal.com]

They probably do - we (in the general sense, it's nothing I'd have anything to do with) have that kind of software at work, though as far as I know it is only used to direct email (i.e. you can send an email to the general address and it will supposedly work out what kind of query it is and route it to a slightly more specific one).

Actually it occurs to me, we probably have a form letter for the exact same question, i.e. 'why can't I study at your university from "another country"'. Hopefully our form letter doesn't use the quotes.

[tara-lb.livejournal.com]

Dude, at least they so ship SOME stuff to you. Johannesburg International Airport (or whatever they are calling it these days....) has been blacklisted due to all the baggage & parcel theft that goes on there. So even if I can buy somethign off Amazone, they won't send it to me. *sulks*