Agreed, Amazon's regional stuff is really, really weird.

Base item prices seem to vary wildly between sites, and there are some real head-scratchers related to postage: amazon.es does not have free "supersaver" delivery, but amazon.co.uk will post to Spain for free for orders above £25.

Plus of course the permanent confusion about VAT: you can't get any of the websites to show VAT for a specific delivery country, it will only do so at checkout and show the VAT-inclusive price for that site's "main" country for the rest of the site. For some types of item, (mostly food and books) VAT can vary wildly between countries (e.g. 0% in UK, 10% in Austria), but there are at least small differences for all items between most countries. So bizarrely, it's cheaper for me to get non-book items sent to Spain from the .co.uk site, but for books I'm best off buying them when I'm actually in the UK. Electronics are usually cheapest on amazon.de, so I tend to get those while in Austria.

As 'bencoder says, the warehouse it actually gets delivered from mainly depends on the destination, not the website you ordered it from, despite huge price differences. Although items e.g. only available from the .co.uk site do usually get sent from a UK warehouse (so there's at least some method to the madness).

And as the article says, they IP-geolocate digital downloads, although I'm assuming those aren't necessarily Amazon's fault, but rather demanded by the contracts with the copyright managers/holders. Though they really should handle this better for Kindle books where they have a direct relationship with the author or publisher for all countries. (I can only assume it gets insanely messy with music and the draconian licensing schemes)

You have to cut Amazon some slack there. They have to deal with all kinds of stupid regulations that demand different compensations to copyright collectives whether e.g. Amazon.de sends a memory card to a visitor from Germany or Austria (or elsewhere) and the fact that they have merchants listed in their marketplaces from other countries than the marketplace itself (so the greedy copyright collectives from that other country demand their share) further complicates things.

As if the VAT regulations and translations for all products (and reviews and sometimes product info entered by users) and (former) price fixing on books for some countries weren't complicated enough already ...

I'm not saying it's easy. In fact, they seem to handle the complexity admirably: you can buy most items from anywhere in Europe from any of the sites and they charge all the appropriate fees. Which makes it all the more odd that the individual sites are so different and disjoint, when they're clearly all the same at the back-end.

VAT and sales tax is something that kills businesses. It is a tax specifically designed to be punitive and it is a major stumbling block in growing a business.

[citation needed]

I dislike paying taxes as much as the next person, but where exactly are you getting these supposed facts from? Particularly in retail, the fact that VAT is an indirect tax doesn't really matter much as late payment basically doesn't happen. (whereas I'll accept that it can sink your company if you invoice your customer some huge amount and they don't pay and you still owe the VAT on revenue that never materialised)

VAT exists only because greedy, inefficient governments could tax everyone (esp. lower incomes) easily with it. It seems most unfair to online retailers, because they usually only earn a fraction of the government's cut per sale (around here: typically 1/4th for electronics, i.e. 20% VAT, 5% merchants' margin).

When I order from amazon.co.uk to Finland, often items get delivered from their German warehouse, so it seems that something like this does happen, at least in Europe.

But I agree it would be nice when I'm linked to amazon.com to easily be able to see that the same item is available from one of the european sites. As it is I have to manually check.

The lack of region/language differentiation is something that bothers me a lot from a lot of websites. As an English speaker currently living in Finland, I often change the language to English on a particular site, only to be redirected to the UK regional site which has different information that is not useful to me.

At my previous job I was responsible for the i18n of our globally-used web app. The problem came down to a choice: follow the HTTP standard and pay attention to the request header the browser sends that specifies its language setting, or ignore the browser and maintain a user configuration setting in our app. We chose the latter, which worked much better: users could choose a language from a dropdown at any time, and we remembered that choice across sessions. (They had to log in to the webapp so we knew who they were, but we also set a cookie so most of the time the login page was the right language too.)

I guess the other choice we made was to support any language through the same codebase, rather than a separate codebase/deployment per language. A lot of websites do the latter, which means that if you go to a country-specific site you're stuck with the language used for that site. Bad design; I think there are few places left in the world where a region only has one language in common use anymore... at least among people who use the internet.