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Comment by BillyMaize | Hacker News Reader

Same here. My girlfriend and I both buy basically all non food items from Amazon because we live in a small town and we are a 20 minute interstate drive away from any stores other than krogers. This has saved us a ton of money on gas and lots of time that easily makes up for the prime cost each year. The one time I have had to return a package was very easy as well. I can't imagine ever going back to spending gas money and my free time driving to a store because they might have what I want, usually at a higher price, without a rating system to see what others who bought the same thing have experienced.

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Ugh, I have Amazon prime in Canada and use it constantly, but amazon.ca has an incredibly smaller selection of items than .com. Amazon seems to be slowly expanding it, but still only 25% of the inventory of it's American counterpart. So jealous.

Border/customs tariffs from American websites ruins any cost savings (like paying $20 in fees for a shipping a $40 item [1]). That is the root problem, given the geographic nearity.

http://www.ups.com/content/ca/en/shipping/cost/zones/customs...

I've been shipping to a US drop location at the border, and crossing by car. Paying duties and taxes that way still makes it worth me while. :-)

(I use Ship Happens, but there are many more)

Try living in Australia. It's a great country but Amazon won't ship many things to me.

This is particularly true for electronics. However, I've noticed that if the fulfiller is Amazon then there's a better chance of shipping an item to Australia. I can't remember what it was now, but I remember one item where storage option A was fulfilled by Amazon and would ship to AU but storage option B was fulfilled by another company who would NOT ship to AU.

There's also an option somewhere to restrict search results to only items that can be shipped to the chosen country. You'll be disappointed by the reduced selection though. In this case, I suggest Amazon UK who has reasonable shipping to Australia.

The other trick I've used is shipping forwarders.

priceusa.com.au places the order for you and is closer to a personal shopper service (at a premium)

shipitto.com seems to be a mail redirector but has silly postal costs.

myus.com is similar to shipitto.com

Just to note it's priceusa.com.au .

Fixed, thanks

Maybe I'm the only person who has this issue but Amazon's categorization of items, broken search filters, and poor administration of 3rd party listings makes it very difficult for me to find items that I would regularly want to buy.

I can search for something like "Vacuum Filter" and receive results from 26 departments including Baby Products. So say I go to Home & Outdoor > Vacuums & Floor Care › Vacuum Accessories › Vacuum Filters › Upright Filters. Now I want to search by brand but there's nothing available for my model when I filter the search, however I can buy a Dyson filter under the "Hoover" sorting. Then half the listings are from 3rd parties who only include a lone 120x120 pixel image, an incorrect product description (or none at all), and with 0 product reviews. Then I give up on logical searching, type in the product code and the only listing was in the Automotive department after all.

Sorry to go on a rant but I find the shopping experience on Amazon to be incredibly frustrating. I usually end up using Google or another site and even when I do find the Amazon listing I'm hesitant to buy because of the sketchiness of the listing.

I have had this problem once before, I was trying to buy a jewelry box for my girlfriend and the picture was way different from the actual item. I think this is mostly because Amazon is willing to put up anything any supplier wants to produce and those suppliers don't know what they are doing. In this situation at least it was easy enough to flag the images as wrong for that item and they were replaced with correct pictures in a few days.

Picking a department is always annoying especially when there are two or more it could easily be in, but overall I like the search options. For example I have wide feed so I always need 4E shoes and Amazon can filter out all of the shoes which don't have 4Es.

It's worth it to compare prices on food items as well. Plus, you might get a better selection than in your local store. For instance, Amazon carries loads of Bob's Red Mill products at great prices.

We buy some food items from Amazon. Specifically boxed cereal. You can get a 3 or 4 pack of cereal for about 150% the price of a single box of cereal in NYC, shipped free with Prime.

>we are a 20 minute interstate drive away from any stores other than krogers

A "20 minute interstate drive" is supposed to be a lot?

People commute for longer everyday just to get to work, and you're talking about shopping...

And I feel sorry for those people as I made sure to live within a 7 minute drive of work. I save thousands of dollars every year this way, as well as don't get nearly as much stress and have a lot more free time.

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