http://www.watoday.com.au/business/a...417-1x5k5.html

Might be a good idea to make delivery quicker, but what about GST?

Aussie retailers must be very afraid of stories like this.

Items bought from Amazon.com this week:
$45 delivered each
$130 local price

Edit:
Can a mod please correct my crap spelling in the title.

Yes, I read it as whorehouse.

Me too, a whorehouse full of Amazons, can you imagine that?

Death by Snoo Snoo!

The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy and bruised.

Good news for Aus Post.

Best edit back my signature.

Being serious a second, its not necessarily a good thing for consumers.

Take books for example. If Amazon set up warehousing in Oz, would they be forced into the silly overpricing of Australian books? Or if it were electricals, would Panasonic say "oh you are selling in Australia, well here is our Oz price list"?

Basically its only good if Amazon can bring global prices 'inside the fence' and force down local overcharging and couple with local customer service. Otherwise you could find that suddenly you can't order from the overseas site - getting redirected to the special 'Australia' pricing.

Saying that, I don't think Bezos is stupid. This is flying a kite and the only way he'd set up in Australia rather than, say, Indonesia, is if he had some pretty cast iron guarantees that the prices would be competitive.

With Amazon's reintroduction of postage charges they are again no cheaper than some of the local pricing.

http://www.fishpond.com.au guarantees to have better prices than Amazon and have just now bought a book from them for 30% less (including postage).

Amazon's postage pricing structures do not reward purchasers of multiple items. There was one book I really wanted but after a good shop I ended up putting seven items into the basket. The price with postage doubled at the checkout so I whittled it down until only the book that I really wanted remained - which still seemed too expensive postage-wise. So I performed a quick price compare on the isbn and found half a dozen local vendors whose prices worked out cheaper. Result!

For books maybe, but for other stuff they are way lower on cost and delivery charges. Last order was for 4 items, mainly electronics - $130-odd plus under $10 delivery. One of the items was $45 delivered - $130 locally. I'm buying more e-books now anyway and only buy hard copies when it is something really specialised.

With non book/DVD items I am yet to get Amazon to accept an order. You're quoting $ so maybe it's the US site you're using? I have a .co.uk accound site and usually get told to redirect to .co.uk whenever I try to log in to the .com. I've also switched to kindle after being sent one for a Christmas present by a kind and generous BE-er () but sometimes the book has a disk included or it isn't available on Kindle yet.

I heard the division responsible for Amazon Web Services (Cloud) was the one scouting so we may get a local AWS data centre to provide australian based cloud services so we don't have to go through Singapore/US.

That would make a lot more sense.

Amazon.co.uk is uber-shite - .com and .de are the best.

If you have an Amazon.co.uk account, you can automatically use any nation's Amazon - common password, keeps all of your order history, addresses etc.

I have tried to buy a few bargain books from Amazon but after filling in all the details I get a message to the effect that cannot deliver to Australia. This doesn't happen to all books, just a few of them.

I have no sympathy for Australian retailers, have bought things for 25% of the local price and that often includes postage, did get caught with a laptop battery but the other 95% of what I've bought have been real good value and seem to be identical to what the local retailers sell. I wouldn't mind paying the local retailers a bit more but most do not add any value or provide any service, some have even said "we don't accept responsibility for that", makes me want to punch them real hard on the nose as I say "I don't accept responsibility for that".

It's a bit buggy. Close the Amazon session, log back in again and it usually works a second time round.

Yes but when it comes to ordering a popup often notifies .co.uk users that that they have to make the purchase on .co.uk