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November 23, 2005
Dumping the shopping cart
Granted I live in France and want to read books in English, which makes me unusual. But I just dumped out my shopping cart at Amazon.com. The cost of the books was about $49, but the cost of shipping -- to receive things in 36 days -- was $23. It just seemed like too much.
Amazon.co.uk may be a better choice, though they seem to have an expensive shipping scheme for Western Europe. And banks are starting to award themselves commissions for currency trading done on your bank card.
For some reason the books I was looking at could be had in English at Amazon.fr... except that you pay double. Maybe it'll all be good to Amazon shareholders, since they'll eventually make money in shipping and handling. Doesn't make me want to buy their stock, at a P/E of about 40, nor buy anything from their stores.
Posted by Mark at November 23, 2005 09:55 PM
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Comments
Well, there are downsides to living in the paradisical hinterlands of American culture. Remember, unusual is not profitable, all the long tail stuff is for digital media. Shipping is physical and it takes oil which is expensive nowadays.
The way I see it, you could pay double and get your books quickly from amazon.fr and support the French book pricing politics, pay the $23 and think of it as cheap, or get somebody stateside (mainland) to receive and resend the books. Here in Hawaii, we sometimes ask relatives to do that for online retailers who don't bother to ship to Hawaii.
It could be worse, the rest of the world has to go through commercial reshippers who forward things to places Amazon won't deliver (eg Kuwait) and charge for it of course.
Posted by: Andy at November 24, 2005 01:30 AM
Shipping maybe costs that much. Why do they need to ship it from somewhere further away from the UK? That's probably closer than where they'd ship it if I lived in the US.
You're right, it could be worse. But it could be a lot better. In that respect, what's irking me is probably not Amazon.com, but watching us do that sort of thing at work, then seeing that repeated elsewhere.
Posted by: Mark at November 24, 2005 09:51 PM