What’s going on at Amazon?

ussjtrunks

ussjtrunks

Straw Hat Pirate
So lately I’ve started to notice amazon have stock of items if your buying from the U.K. but if you login with a Eu adresss the the items appear as being out of stock, anyone know what’s up with this. For example black clover season 2 and sword art online aliceization s2 even when both first seasons are orderable?
 
ussjtrunks said:
So lately I’ve started to notice amazon have stock of items if your buying from the U.K. but if you login with a Eu adresss the the items appear as being out of stock, anyone know what’s up with this. For example black clover season 2 and sword art online aliceization s2 even when both first seasons are orderable?
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The sooner the newly announced Irish fulfillment centre is online the better, hopefully it will also come with a .ie version of the site instead of redirecting to the UK one.
 
I think we can only speculate what's going on. But I believe Amazon simply does this to push people to use other Amazon sites instead. Now why they might want to do this in this case is beyond me, but in some way money is probably the answer.

Similar things have happened with Amazon.de for me. Amazon has launched a Dutch front (Amazon.nl) and really tries to get Dutch customers to switch from amazon.de to amazon.nl (along with their Prime membership). Besides getting spammed a lot, certain product also ended up not findable through the search. Some products even stopped listing Amazon as a seller, but if you knew Amazon's seller id (or had it in your "save for later" list before that point), you could still access it. At one point, these products could also no longer be "delivered" to the Netherlands once you were at the checkout phase.

Mind you, it didn't report them as "out of stock", but the end result was practically the same. It seemed like a lot of products were no longer on Amazon.de, but they were on Amazon.nl. The real kicker was that the things that I did order through Amazon.nl, still ended up coming from Amazon.de's warehouse after all. 😐

I'm not saying that this is the case here, but I'm also not surprised by these practices. Whatever the reason, pretending an item is out of stock or simply not sold by Amazon likely results in less confusion/backlash than having a text stating "this item can't be shipped to your country X".
 
One should note, that both Amazon and some parcel services have Brexit related problems. This resulted in Amazon cancelling pre-orders that should arrive after Brexit, with a value above vat-free treshold.
A friend still has a pending (not cancelled!) pre-order of Code Geass M4 that hasn't even shipped yet!

Amazon US also stated "fake OOS" for many items, when international deliveries were paused during the first Covid wave.
 
Funny enough (well no it’s no funny situation at all) you can order the US versions without a problem. Guess it will take a while before the Brexit dust settles down, and it’s bad for customers but even worse for the distributors I guess.
 
It doesn’t seem to make sense though unless it’s something wrong with some distro center, for aliceization part 1 is orderable but not part 2
 
Even though it has a site, I don't believe Amazon has any warehouse for fulfilment in NL yet, so DE is the Amazon node that supplies a large portion of Europe. It seems dumb that something would be available on Amazon DE but not NL as a result. Perhaps their localisation robots haven't yet got around to their bad machine translations of the listings into Dutch?

The UK-EU issue is easier to explain. Amazon has completely partitioned off UK stock from EU stock now post-Brexit (it used to be a shared pool) so I guess they have arbitrarily flagged some categories/products as unsuitable for export, the same way they do when you try to order certain products from Amazon US to the UK and they're not available unless you enter a shipping address in the US (or if you try to preorder from Amazon JP without being a domestic customer). I hope they get all of this sorted out soon because not being able to preorder or reliably find stuff is just making me buy things elsewhere.

R
 
Yeah maybe it’s possible they only ship Eu stock from Eu warehouses so it lists oos if you try to order from EU, it seems to only effect items that luancher after a certain date I think November as anything before that is fine
 
@Rui , think you're correct here. Amazon also has a hub in Lauwin-Planque which is near the Belgium border, so sometimes when I ordered something in the past it was actually shipped from that hub.
 
I haven't noticed any consistency but Amazon have made ordering internationally much more difficult since the onset of the Covid pandemic. Pre-orders are definitely out of bounds and it seems to be down to luck whether an item is available for international shipping. Most items I'm interested in on Amazon US show as out of stock when my location is set to the UK.
 
Yami said:
I haven't noticed any consistency but Amazon have made ordering internationally much more difficult since the onset of the Covid pandemic. Pre-orders are definitely out of bounds and it seems to be down to luck whether an item is available for international shipping. Most items I'm interested in on Amazon US show as out of stock when my location is set to the UK.
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If the Amazon US titles you're after are available (and not pre-orders), try finding those listings on Amazon UK as you may be able to get them.
 
NormanicGrav said:
If the Amazon US titles you're after are available (and not pre-orders), try finding those listings on Amazon UK as you may be able to get them.
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Yep, unfortunately they seem to hike the price up above just a currency conversion. Seems like the good days are well and truly over.
 
Yami said:
Yep, unfortunately they seem to hike the price up above just a currency conversion. Seems like the good days are well and truly over.
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I guess. When I ordered Kandagawa Jet Girls (the XSEED Racing Hearts LE), on the US side it was '$39.99 + VAT + Shipping', but on the UK side it was '£36 (with VAT included in its price) + Free Shipping' which is decent enough imo.
 
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