Amazon flows into Canada

[Jason Dunn]

<a href="http://news.com.com/2100-1017-939055.html">http://news.com.com/2100-1017-939055.html</a><br /><br />Good news for Canadians! Amazon.com is now also known as Amazon.ca! They don't have an electronics category yet, but I'm hopeful they'll add one. I also hope they give their head a price-check shake! I was looking through the categories like music, and an album I want is $22.99 CND on their site and only $17.99 on the Futureshop.ca site. So why would I order from Amazon.ca? <img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/images/smiles/icon_rolleyes.gif" /> At any rate, good news for Canadian consumers if Amazon can bring their price advantage up here.<br /><br />"The new site, which was live on Tuesday, is selling Amazon's core products: books, music and video. The site is available in both English and French. In April, sources told CNET News.com of Amazon's plans to move into Canada. Sources said that Amazon had partnered with Canada Post, the Canadian equivalent to the U.S. Postal Service, to handle much of the distribution and fulfillment for the new site. The move into Canada will allow Amazon to save money on shipping costs." Source: Peter West

[butch]

French version is very :( ...... most menus are in english.
And they don't even tell if DVD have French audio track. They don't mention audio format at all...
Hope the site will evolve a lot...

[CoffeeKid]

Good news, I agree, but they will have to do some serious looking at the price points.

I wouldn't shop at Future Shop, but here in BC we have AB Sound (I think they may be in Calgary as well, Jason), and even FS can't compete with AB's pricing.

I probably won't buy anything until they get closer to the US versions' offering, including electronics, houshold goods and appliances, etc. And also, their book selection kinda sucks. We have a new staff member who wants to learn Dreamweaver; we just upgraded the office to Dreamweaver MX, and I went to Amazon.ca to see what books were up. 10 listed (and none from Friends of ED, the best Macromedia book publishers), and ALL of them were preorder status, not in stock. Sigh.

[butch]

CoffeKid:
Check http://www.camelot.ca/ i've not ordered form them for a long time, but they used to have a lot of choice.

[OTHHC]

Not that I'd be biased or anything... but they will have a hard time making an online business effective in Canada using Canada Post. We tried using them for almost 6 months because of the lower rates but the customer dissatisfaction and time wasted tracking lost packages and the fact that the service took days longer than estimated just made it a money-loser for us.

We've switched everything to UPS and while there are occassional exceptions, overall they have done a great job for a fair price. We are still able to offer free shipping on orders over $100. Even Future Shop doesn't offer that using their lower cost Canada Post service.

It will be interesting to see if Amazon is serious about making a footprint in Canada. I don't think Future Shop (now owned by Best Buy) is making money in their online business although their retail seems to be doing well.

Similar to your comments on mainstream press vs. community sites, I think there is a future in specialty online merchants who can out-knowledge and out-service the big guys.

[iPAUL]

There seems to be a gerneral void when it comes to Canadian online retailers. It certainly is good to see that the void is slowly being filled by sites merchant sites like HandheldCanada.com and Amazon.ca.

Although from the looks of it, Amazon may have to increase content to attract business - and I agree they need to price competitively.

[CoffeeKid]

There are lots of reasons for the general void in online stores in Canada (quality ones)

- confusing taxation (for American companies setting up here, not to mention us)
- until recently and probably still today, a complete lack of respect or desire by Canadian banks to offer internet merchant accounts without massive deposits
- Cdn regulations means that banks can only carry one type of CC - visa, or mastercard. So to get a merch account, you actually have to go to two banks = 2x the lack of respect and hefty deposits
- Market size. Really puny
- "The Players". Here's an example - Carsons used to be the exclusive importer of Olympus cameras into Canada. They purposely jacked up the prices (retail, wholesale) by a large amount and worked out a deal with Oly so that any camera bought from another country (incl. the US) would be void of warranty. They were impossible to deal with from a vendor's standpoint, and even worse from a customer's standpoint, because CS was non-existant. They had an exclusive deal, and this is common in Canada because of the market size. (Carson's no longer has the exclusive - Oly set up a Cdn office).

There are other reasons of course, but everything from the government(s) to the banks, to the market conditions is a negative. And to top it all off, most startup wanna bes expect their new "web store" should only cost them $5K or less to get built :roll: