« Surfing Through Comments | Main | Merry Christmas! »
Thank you, Amazon!
December 17, 2006
No, the title of this post is not from a publisher's perspective. (I wish. Amazon is actually the merchant I do the worse with, affiliate-wise.)
No, this post is from a buyer's perspective.
I always get blasted with a load of offline work in November and December - especially December. And I have a list of friends and relatives in the United States that I mail gifts to. (I live in Canada.)
So every year, I always get in this crunch that sees me standing at the local UPS store, paying exorbitant amounts to ship packages so that they arrive in time for the holidays.
This year, I realized that, for some of the gifts that I would be sending, I could actually buy them online at American sites, and have them shipped directly to the recipients' houses in time for Christmas. Complete with gift messages and in many cases, pretty wrapping.
And I did have a lot of fun picking out gifts, making my list.
Then it came time to buy. And unfortunately, what I discovered was that many merchants were not equipped to accept Canadian credit cards as payment for items that would be shipped within the United States.
It was a huge disappointment, because so many merchants are set up so that you can easily send gifts. You can keep an address book with them. You can add gift messages. You can get things nicely wrapped. But most of their systems simply are not set up to handle using a Canadian credit card to ship items within the U.S.
Out of frustration I even ended up abandoning my shopping cart and calling my order in, thinking perhaps on the phone the customer service rep could actually override the system.
The "there are border/customs issues" explanation really didn't make sense to me, since no merchandise would actually cross the border. Plus, I send flowers to the States all the time through several of the U.S.-based flower delivery sites, and I send books as gifts to my American friends all the time, too, using Amazon.com.
Anyway, that's why I'm so thankful for Amazon.com. Because in the end, by going through Amazon.com, I was actually able to ship three different gifts to three different friends and family members, all residing in the States, from a merchant at whose own site, unfortunately, I wasn't even able to complete my transaction.
Now, if I could only get my Amazon affiliate commissions up there, I'd be really happy with Amazon. :)
Bookmark this: BlinkList | del.icio.us | Digg it | Furl | reddit | Yahoo MyWeb
Posted by BJ at 06:46 PM in Web Publisher's Life | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/69656/7193616
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Thank you, Amazon!:
Comments
Happy New Year Love! 2007 is going to be a GREAT year! Hugs.
Posted by: Chrissie | Jan 1, 2007 11:25:52 PM
