[ILUG-Social] amazon purchasing

[Caolan McNamara]

On Wed, Jun 26, 2002 at 04:34:30 +0100, Breathnach, Proinnsias (Dublin) wrote:
> Which makes perfect sense, they get to eliminate a large chunk of FX
> Exposure by fulfilling from Germany to Eurozone, and billing directly in
> Euros (for the dollar-equiv or Stg-equiv as necessary)

You should be able to do this yourself to your own benefit, A quick look
gives for the .com .de and .co.uk shipping rates for books to ireland
pretty much...
.com 4 per package + 4each
.de 5 per package + 1each
co.uk 4.425 per package + 1.5 (pounds: 2.95 + 1each)

Course the .com would be even worse if it wasn't for collapse of the
dollar to parity with euro within the last three or so days. The
individual cost of books is a completely different matter, but it looks
on first glance that a policy of browsing in english and buying from
amazon.de is still worth considering. All three sites follow the same
look and feel so its hard to go wrong even without a word of german.
Probably worth running a sample wishlist through all three before
commiting yourself to a purchase :-) 

Its a little interesting that given that its the same company in each
case, perhaps you could view this as a direct comparison of the
competitiveness of the three nations with all their different business
codes and shipping companies and currencies factored in. With some spin
you could make the amazon test into the online equivalent of the
economist mcdonalds burger currency valuation test.

C.
-- 
Caolan McNamara               |  caolan at skynet.ie  
http://www.skynet.ie/~caolan  |  +353 86 8161184
I agree with what you say, but I will kill you if you say it again