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Comment by chupchap | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

But why?

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