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Comment by carlmr | Hacker News Reader

My biggest Amazon annoyance. I'm often looking for some product, reading Reddit and other reviews. They usually link to amazon.com.

Then it asks me to switch my profile to American/$. But then in order to order I need to switch back to Germany/€.

It's just super cumbersome. Just let me view stuff from any region without switching profiles. If I order from that region you can tell me to switch profiles. But not just for viewing it.

In the same vein. Why is there no, I want this thing, but from a German seller.

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Reminds me of when someone links to a product on some (non-Amazon) website, I go there, it says "this is the US site, you should go to the [your country] site!", I click OK, and it takes me to the homepage.

I get this from the Nothing (phone) emails, the direct links in them go to the UK site, but if I let it redirect me to the US site, it's just the homepage. Extremely annoying.

With Amazon it's even worse, if you click on an US Amazon product link on an Android device:

My app is set to use Amazon in Germany. I click a link on a page and this opens the app. The app says it needs to switch to US. If I do that, I'm signed out of my German account and end up in an empty US account. I also think that I didn't even land on the product page afterwards. So I had to sign out of that US account and re-sign in into the German account to use the app normally.

So I basically just can't see the link unless I long-press and select open in new tab.

This is also infuriating for all those sites that take to their homepage when you log in instead of taking you back to the page you were viewing.

It doesn't work that way. A link is to an ASIN (unique product in Amazon). The same product might have a different ASIN in a different region. The product description, title etc might vary.

Clearly there exists some higher-level product concept with a mapping of country->ASIN for that product. How hard is it to lookup the correct ASIN?

Maybe you end up on the home page when there is no ASIN for your country? There should be a nicer message telling you that’s what happened. But if it always dumps to the home page, that’s just dumb — Amazon could easily do the lookup.

There's no such mapping, you could do a text search and if the item name matches then maybe US ASIN 2785334 should correspond to UK ASIN 3894948, or maybe some third party just named something ambiguously. They're essentially GUIDs and essentially separate businesses.

We all recognize this as an anti-pattern that has directly led to a poor customer experience, right?

Sorry this is just not true. ASINs can be the same cross marketplace. There are lower level identifiers available if needed

To be precise, sometimes there are matching ASINs and other identifiers cross-marketplace, but often they are unique.

https://www.amazon.de/dp/1408855658 And https://www.amazon.com/dp/1408855658 Are both the same item. Same with https://www.amazon.de/dp/B086WQWSNT/ And https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086WQWSNT/

Seems like changes .com to .de works with every item i can find. Some just won’t be deliverable in a different geo.

> The same product might have a different ASIN in a different region

But why?

> In the same vein. Why is there no, I want this thing, but from a German seller.

eBay used to let you filter results by region, but apparently that ruined some kind of metric and the option is gone. When buying games or books or what have you I only want sellers in the EU. I don’t care that it’s available in the US or UK, shipping and duties are going to be 4x what the product is worth.

This https://i.imgur.com/fTRrVnP.png is not gone, look it's right there.

It was gone for years, it's useful that they've recently restored the option.

It’s gone for me, and there are a lot of frustrated support threads from other Europeans so I’m not alone.

I managed to find the option on the advanced search on ebay.ie, but I still get page after page of American items as the result…

It doesn't work in all cases, but I can often replace the .com with .ca. It doesn't guarantee availability, but can at least check if the same listing is available on the Canadian store.

If it works in some cases it's a simple lookup if the same item exists then show that. And if not you can show similar products in your region.

its a pain, and the option to switch it back is hidden inside the accounts section, which is hard to find and even take 3-4 clicks.

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