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Comment by tibiapejagala | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile in my country in Europe I have never heard about anyone buying anything from Amazon. Not the IT people, not the common folk, not teenagers, literally no one. Maybe someone bought a Kindle some time back, but I remember that people were literally reading tutorials how to buy it from amazon. The same people who had been buying things online for years.

Amazon doesn't even have a polish website, as amazon.pl redirects to amazon.de They have multipe logistic centres in my country, employing thousands of people though! I guess it's for Germany so I can buy at amazon.de with international shipping, lol.

We have Uber, McDonald's, iphones, credit cards, the internet, electricity! Come on! Almost everyone buys online here, either native polish e-commerce or directly from China.

Also I think we can't buy any of Google hardware directly. I have given up on them though.

So much for globalization.

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> Amazon doesn't even have a polish website, as amazon.pl redirects to amazon.de They have multipe logistic centres in my country, employing thousands of people though! I guess it's for Germany so I can buy at amazon.de with international shipping, lol.

Amazon.de does have Polish-language interface, though, and free shipping to Poland (and 10 other European countries) for orders over €39.

> Also I think we can't buy any of Google hardware directly. I have given up on them though.

They seem to have given up as well... a few years ago the Finnish Google Store sold various Nexus tablets and phones, nowadays it is just Wifi and Chromecast.

> Amazon.de does have Polish-language interface, though, and free shipping to Poland (and 10 other European countries) for orders over €39.

Well, that's something. Some content seems to be machine-translated and prices are in €, but it indeed works. I wonder why wouldn't they just slap polish domain on it. And why I haven't heard about that.

> They seem to have given up as well... a few years ago the Finnish Google Store sold various Nexus tablets and phones, nowadays it is just Wifi and Chromecast.

"We aren’t in your country yet" I guess I'll get Xiaomi or Samsung again.

>I wonder why wouldn't they just slap polish domain on it.

Customer service? They probably don't have any call center that speaks Polish. They won't slap a .country domain if they can't deliver something up to their standards and not just allow people to buy and then have to speak in English if there's any issue with the product or delivery.

When amazon really commits to a country they put a decent amount of effort into it. In France for example you can quickly get someone over the phone to deal with your issues and they speak French.

>Amazon doesn't even have a polish website, as amazon.pl redirects to amazon.de

Someone at Amazon needs to understand what the single market is. amazon.eu is an institutional site when it should be their only european site. When I want to buy something on amazon I end up looking at all of UK/FR/ES/DE/IT at least. They will all happily ship to me with all sorts of combinations of item price and shipping cost. And then logistically I believe they will ship from wherever it's convenient. So they've artificially segmented the market for no reason, giving me a poorer experience in the process.

> segmented the market for no reason

This probably allows them to maximize profits, e.g. most French people probably won't go look at Amazon Spain to see if the graphics card they want is cheaper there...

You are correct in that Amazon EU has common stock despite the products having different prices on the different regional sites.

Price discrimination would be a reason to do this but then it's strange that they'll ship from every website to me and have a single login. They've even recently allowed changing the language on a few of the websites. But maybe they're just changing the prices per-user in the US and can't do that in the EU so they do it per site? Whatever it is it results in a really bad user experience.

With Amazon in Europe it’s like with a lot of things, the German and British versions have basically become the standard, and everyone uses them now.

Amazon.de ships to half of Europe with the same conditions, and is translated into all those languages as well.

Still, it’s not really proper support.

It's not the same conditions - half the stuff I try to buy on amazon.de doesn't ship to the Netherlands. And stuff that isn't fulfilled by Amazon is always expensive to ship.

You actually want Amazon to march into your country and eat up your local e-commerce market? That is incredibly short sighted. If you could take a step back and realize how important the software revolution is in the modern economy, you'd realize the importance of not having all the profits from the largest software markets eaten up by Silicon Valley companies making obscene profits.

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