Amazon is super weird if you don't live in a country where they have an official site. Half to two-thirds of the products can't be shipped to where I live, for Reasons, but I can't filter out those unshippable items. It's to the point where I have given up using it for anything but books.

It's the same in Ireland (inexplicably, Amazon employs tons of people here). The solution is that several businesses have popped up to reship things from the UK. There's no legal reason you couldn't. One nice thing is that when I buy from Amazon I can compare all the EU Amazon sites for price and get the cheapest.

Refusing to ship EU-wide is a common UK e-commerce anti-pattern that bizarrely applies even to Amazon. Even before Brexit was a thing. It's really annoying.

Well, more money to German merchants (and amazon.de). Many German merchants even provide English UI for Nordic customers these days. (Amazon.de provides hit-and-miss machine translation to English.)

Yep, Amazon has a massive warehouse in Poland, but doesn't have a Polish website at all. The best you can do is purchase stuff off Amazon.de, but not everything ships to Poland, despite being dispatched from a warehouse in Wroclaw.

In (at least) European Amazons, you can avoid looking at unshippable products by:

- searching for something

- selecting the most applicable category on the left, next to the results

- selecting Amazon.(de|fr|it|es|co.uk) on the bottom left (under Seller)

What is sold by Amazon generally gets shipped anywhere (within Europe?).

As a company, before Amazon Business, this also made sure you'd be able to shop without VAT.

A lot of the products from German Amazon cannot be shipped to Switzerland. Not sure why.

Because it is not in EU.

But it is in the EEA. I would imagine the barrier here isn’t legal policy or trade customs but simply currency difference. Since the price-cap charade a few years ago, the Franc has probably lost trust with quite a few businesses.

Switzerland is not part of the EEA. It has a bunch of EEA-like bespoke deals with the EU.

The most obvious gap for a traveler is that the EEA mobile roaming price regulation doesn't apply if you are on an EEA operator and roam to Switzerland.

It's not that hard to ship a parcel across a border. Maybe having to pay tariffs would destroy the "Amazon experience" or something?

Apparently it isn't worth the effort.

Could be that Swiss customs takes ages to clear parcels. Could be that tax or import duties are complicated or simply just so high that it's not worth it. I knew a lot of people in Switzerland near the German border used to go shopping in Germany because was significantly cheaper, probably still the case today.

Not so much the case today that it is significantly cheaper because the Swiss Franc weak-end 7-8% in the last year to the Euro. Also, the German food is not comparable to Swiss food in quality. Example: Swiss meat is more expensive but then again it is from Switzerland and not form Poland (which can happen in Germany but not in Switzerland because of the tariffs on foreign meat).

Unlikely to be about Amazon experience. They currently offer Fire TV Basic to EU countries that don't have Amazon presence but they don't do so from within the EU from e.g. amazon.de but from amazon.com going through customs.

Amazon is doing a lot of this now, for example into India. They take a prepayment for duties, clear it for you and refund if it ended up costing less to clear.

Not really. Amazon charges you the import duty when you place the order. The only difference is that it takes a bit longer to get delivered.

It's also true for The Netherlands.

It's true for many countries. The biggest reason is because they are not in the EU. The logistics of getting stuck at some border control is something most sellers don't want to deal with.

Last time I checked the Netherlands we're in the EU and there was no Nexit. Switzerland is different, though. They are indeed outside the customs union. (Which is always interesting to watch, when travelling across the border in trains and passengers are confused by the radom customs control, since they are part of Schengen, where people, not goods, can travel freely)

Well, I don't understand what's there to check, I never said Netherlands wasn't in EU.

The most probable reason why you can't get packages from EU Amazon to Switzerland is because they are not in EU.

The same reason applies to why you can't get packages to EU if you're trying to get them from US.

Yes, some big sellers don't mind but small ones do, and EU Amazon does have a huge variety of sellers.

For example, I've lived in Croatia before and after EU membership. The Amazon situation changed completely and now I can get packages from any EU Amazon.

I live in Finland (which is in EU) and Amazon (or their European sellers) is the only major web store inside EU that does not ship most of the products here. German Amazon even regularly pushes ads for products that can not be shipped here.

In contrast, most non-EU stores (except Amazon again) happily ship here, even if the shipping fees may be extremely high and border control is left to buyer's problem.

I meant it's also true that Amazon won't ship many thing to The Netherlands, which is in the EU.

Then it shouldn't be any products and not just some products.

Generally, but there are exceptions.

I usually just search for "Amazon Prime" items, but sometimes those items can't be shipped or aren't even available with Amazon prime! It's a total mess.

You can also punch the ASIN from one amazon site into another. And since the URL already contains the ASIN you can just change .co.uk to .de for example.

That generally gets you FBA though - which is where the worst of the counterfeiting problems are.

Cost savings/shipping costs and Prime?

I was reading today Amazon is going to stop carrying Nest products. It does seem odd to not carry competitors products for a store that sells everything.

Walmart has its own phone cell phone service, yet it still sells other phone brands.

I guess maybe because Amazon is getting more into hardware is maybe why they are dropping certain products. Like I wouldn't expect Apple to sell me a Dell laptop. However I view Apple more of a electronics company than a general electronics store. I view Amazon more like the online version of Walmart.

Does Walmart sell Costco own- brand (Kirkland?). No. It chooses the brands it sells, as does Amazon.

Not sure if store brands is a fair comparison though...

Walmart has their own store brand - Great Value. Costco probably wouldn't sell that either. I'm not a expert on store brands but I suspect they are using a private labeler company that makes products with their logos or minor tweaks.

You can buy Great Value Ultra Strong Toilet Paper or Cottonelle Ultra Comfort Care Toilet Paper at Walmart. Just because Walmart sells their own brand of toilet paper, doesn't mean they can't carry the other brands too. I think of Walmart as a general shop and not a toilet paper only shop. Probably being a "toilet paper company" isn't their main focus either.

If the margin in toilet paper was high enough where they had dedicated toilet paper stores, then at the Cottonelle Stores, then I'd expect only Cottonelle products - sotra like the Apple Store example.

Actually kinda surprised Amazon carries Roku though, but some reason they don't like Chromecast...

FWIW Google are equally petty here. They blocked the YouTube app on my Android device because it's branded with an Amazon owned brand (FireTV).

Presumably if I had more control I could rewrite the UA and Google would not punish me because they're having a tantrum over Amazon.

This is the only way they have of responding to Amazon's petty behavior. Hard to blame them if the other party won't interact in good faith.

Seems smart to me:

https://www.recode.net/2017/10/12/16464132/google-target-ret...

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2975731/software-games/youtu...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16371292/google-youtube-a...

Amazon was first to pull Google products.

History here: https://www.androidpolice.com/2018/03/02/amazon-still-isnt-s...

And Google was the first to modify the Chromecast protocol to prevent Amazon (and open source projects) from using it.

This is why all the pi-cast projects died down, after all. Google constantly eradicating third-party implementations to hurt Amazon.

That’s what started this fight.

If you wish to argue against this, please offer me a way to implement the Chromecast protocol on a raspberry pi, reliably, without it constantly being broken by Google’s updates.

? I still use CastNow https://github.com/xat/castnow

It's core is chromecast-player https://github.com/thibauts/node-castv2-client

V2 suggests there was 1 revision over time...

The FAQ mentioned issues with Chromecast ultra and it seemed to be ipv6. Your reasoning ( Google changes a protocol to block Amazon), seems to be quite extreme.

That's for casting to a chromecast — not receiving a chromecast.

It's protocol isn't opensource also.

Yes, Google does opensource a lot. But that doesn't mean they should open source one of their "few" hardware projects.

No, but Google intentionally obfuscating their protocol when at that time several apps supported casting from the Kindle devices, and people worked on receiving streams, was annoying.

And continuing to repeatedly change the receiving protocol until everyone stopped trying to reverse it was very anticompetitive.

Amazon has spent years to get binary compatibility with almost every Google SDK and API, and Google has responded by continuing to obfuscating these even further, and preventing them entirely.

And that's in addition to Google's illegal threats (EU antitrust case is almost over) to OEMs to prevent them from building Kindle devices.

Amazon cloned an open source operating system, and used it. And attempted to achieve binary compatibility with Google's version. Google did all they could to prevent that from succeeding.

It's a very twisted view to see Amazon as having started that fight.

Personally, I dislike Google's proprietary Android versions as much as Amazon's, but it's been Google that's been fighting third party implementations all along the way here, and not Amazon. It was Google spending lots of effort to destroy open source implementations utterly and entirely.

They didn't tried to fk with open-source, they where avoiding Amazon's "1-up". Amazon also didn't release their binary drivers and they weren't even successfull/popular

They couldn't know that Amazon would fail miserably.. If I look at business tactics, that was a very mean move from Amazon and they earn everything that's coming ( the url's that were posted to "defend" them).

PS. I suppose you have Prime?

> They didn't tried to fk with open-source, they where avoiding Amazon's "1-up".

Trying to prevent competitors from providing compatibility with your products is anticompetitive.

In an ideal market, products are compatible, and you have multiple competitors to choose from. You could buy phones from multiple manufacturers, with different operating systems, that would be able to run the same apps. And you could stream YouTube to FireTV and Chromecast, and your FireTV could receive streams from Kindle and Google Android devices.

Amazon actively works towards providing intercompatibility whenever they can. Amazon added the same APIs to their Android version that Google closed off in Android.

Google, on the other hand, has in the past years every time they had a chance to, actively worked to prevent intercompatibility, kill standards, and limit the usefulness of open source.

I’m not sure there’s any way to see Google’s actions as a positive.

Google was making sure Android wasn't getting taken over by Amazon, I think it's more about business.

Amazon also didn't open-source anything of their changes, something Google did.

Their compatibility was a requirement for getting apps in their Amazon app store ( business decision)

Where is Google killing standards? If it is what I think you mean, they are changing the whole Android system slowly to adjust app/system updates. Balancing between open source and proprietary source is difficult and it's probably a business decision to close it more. If Amazon was successfull in taking over Android, they would have lost a lot.