Amazon to block Australian shoppers from its US website

Re:Amazon to block Australian shoppers from its US website by thisrod on Thursday May 31, 2018 @02:38AM (#17194397)

This sounds like a publicity stunt. I mean, really, how hard is

    if (shipping_address[end-9:end] == "Australia")
    then
        pay_gst()
    else
        evade_sales_tax()
    end

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Re:Amazon to block Australian shoppers from its US website by harry8 on Thursday May 31, 2018 @05:46AM (#17195126)

They provided direct access to australians while destroying the local bookseller industry. Now they don't have to compete I think you'll find it is:

    if (shipping_address[end-9:end] == "Australia")
    then
        charge_australia_tax()
    end

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Tax

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon to block Australian shoppers from its US website by akhatri_aus on Thursday May 31, 2018 @06:47AM (#17195350)

The reasoning I suspect is more to do with price differentiation. It is easy to charge more to Australian consumers and I bet this is a business/commercial decision on Amazon's part more than it is to do with the technicalities of their back end.

By blocking the other Amazon websites its easier to force Australians to pay more for their shopping on Amazon for the same products on their US Store (even with GST + Shipping).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon to block Australian shoppers from its US website by consciouskernel on Thursday May 31, 2018 @01:06PM (#17198026)

1. Where should this if statement live?

2. Your solution assumes the full shipping address is known to where you think this code should live.

3. No edge cases are being handled here.

4. What's the additional server burden for your solution? Do we need to provision additional capacity? What about DB capacity?

5. What does pay_gst actually do? Is it handling only charging an additional price? What about accounting, tax, and reporting?

6. Why are we evading sales tax in the else? We might still need to collect other sales taxes. Amazon.com is also the primary portal for NA, so it still needs to collect local/state taxes.

7. How should we handle updating the DB tables? What about the derived tables?

I could easily go on.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Amazon to block Australian shoppers from its US website by 2muchcoffeeman on Thursday May 31, 2018 @03:14AM (#17194542)

Even if the implementation is easy, the accounting will be a pain.

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