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Comment by patd | Hacker News Reader

I’m in Europe. Earlier this year, I ordered from Amazon Japan, the package arrived quicker than things I had ordered earlier on a European Amazon and it was insanely well packaged.

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Amazon Japan is incredible. I ordered a Japanese book from them and it arrived the next afternoon (to the UK!) Another time I was in Japan and I needed a specific bluetooth keyboard for the tablet I was using, delivered to a convenience store pick-up point in the deep north of the country in the middle of winter, ordered with my UK credit card, and no problem, it was there the next day. I can't imagine the amount of organisation both of these things take.

Delivering in a Hokkaido winter sounds like an epic undertaking considering the amount of snow.

Aomori, but yes it's amazing that everything keeps working in those conditions (in general, not just Amazon).

Amazon Japan used to be in a league of their own, but a mix of their home-rolled delivery service being objectively bad and them allowing their platform to be dominated by scalpers (転売ヤー) means that they've lost a lot of the trust I had in them.

Amazon Japan even in 2013 was amazing. My host family ordered an out of print trail guide to the hiking trail between Osaka and Tokyo after I had failed to find it in every major book shop in Osaka. If memory serves it was delivered in about 6 hours.

I ordered from Amazon Japan for the first time last week and the delivery speed was excellent. I would say the packaging was sub-par compared to other Japanese retailers though. CDJapan is just as fast and ships me books in better condition than any UK store, and proxy shipping from Buyee.jp redefined what packaging means to me. Seriously, it’s almost worth using them just to get some top quality cardboard!

I guess a lot depends on who and how they pay to deliver. I got an internal x260 battery (that can't configure properly in Linux, if anyone knows about it) a few days ago and has been a disaster.

In the case of Spain their customer support is fine, but it falls flat because delivery is a shitshow.

Even more so in the Canaries where we need to pay a lot of handling fees to receive the packages unless you want to do the customs process yourself. On a 200€ headphones I needed to pay 44€ of taxes and handling fees that was shipped from Valencia.

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