I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
Amazon just released an ‘International Service‘.
Often US companies are criticised for not seeing outside their borders, but Amazon looks to have done the work with local customs officials so that …
For your convenience, when we use Priority International Shipping … Amazon Export Sales will estimate and collect an Import Fees Deposit … to pay the Import Fees on behalf of you … to the appropriate authorities of the destination country … If applicable, you authorize us to designate a carrier to act as your agent to clear the merchandise with the relevant customs and tax authorities in the destination country …
I.e. they work out duty and customs clearance so your stuff can come straight to your door.
Amazon is doing some big and smart things. S3 & EC2 are cool extension of services. They went deeper in the stack. Amazon have now built a value added international distribution channel which will mop up other suppliers. They just broadened their value chain.
It also reduces the value of local distributors for global products. (Wonder what a landed MacBook costs?)
The world just got a lot smaller.
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Unfortunately, Amazon imposes lots of restrictions, presumably based on conditions enforced by the manufacturers; e.g. Apple not allowing Apple hardware to be sold to any country that already has an official Apple distributor (which NZ does). When I try to check out with a MacBook Pro in my cart, I get:
We’re sorry. This item can’t be shipped to your selected destination. You may either change the shipping address or delete the item from your order by changing its quantity to 0 and clicking the update button below. ( See geographical restrictions.)
Close, but no cigar! This is where the freight forwarders come in handy. They’re pretty expensive though, so the savings wouldn’t be there for casual shopping.