Hacker News Reader

Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

Did you know that two-day shipping is Amazons' default mode of operation in Germany and Amazon Prime gets you overnight shipping there? Can't buy German Kindle books yet, though.

(I guess this is true for other 'small' countries, too)

View on HN

Why does Amazon Prime exist in Germany, but not Canada? Heh. I knew it existed in the US and not Canada, so I assumed that most of Amazon's "cool stuff" was just US-only.

It's probably a result of the very intimate relationship they have with DHL and the German postal service.

DHL is actually a part of "Deutsche Post"

I think in the US, Amazon is in one special state where taxes are low or something. So they have to ship from there, too. Hence, the mean distances Amazon has to ship to in the US is way longer than in smaller countries.

However, USPS is slow even for short distances. I presume it is optimized for mean shipping time of all US destinations instead of minimum shipping time of individual packages. And population density in the US is slightly smaller than in Germany, so shipping is more bound to be slightly less efficient.

I guess Canada has a considerably lower population density, so shipping gets more expensive. Maybe the Canadian postal service does not offer fast shipping at attractive prices?

Canada's 28 times bigger than Germany. I would expect the cost to ship something across Canada is much higher than the cost to ship something across Germany.

This may be true in some of the rural areas, but to Ottawa, the free shipping takes 1-2 days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com