An author, some of whose books I enjoy, wants to be helpful and send customers to the ‘right’ Amazon Store, based on geolocation. She’s not the only author to do this. It infuriates me! I use US Amazon not Aus. I end up at the wrong store then have to mess about to fix things. 📚
Odd-Egil “Oddzthrash” Auran Arrrgh! I have a similar situation with Audible, which, after they opened audible.co.uk wants me to go there, instead of .com, where I actually have my subscription.
To make things worse, while I was a bit distracted, I logged into the .co.uk, and got a welcome offer. And now, I always get the message that I’ve been trying to redeem something the wrong way or something… 😩
Miraz Jordan @odd Heh. I emailed the service and the author. The author replied immediately and mentioned she has a similar problem with Audible! Annoying for you though.
Jessica Smith Oh no, I actually really like those "universal link" things! Because I do use the Aus store, when people just link to the US store it's useless to me. The US store page will "link to" the same item on the Aus store, but actually it just does a search of the Aus store for the book title, which unless it's ultra unique means the book I actually wanted usually isn't one of the first results... 🙁 It's really user-hostile. I feel like some of the "universal link" things let end users set their preferred stores, which would be helpful if it's one of those. (I mean, the truly good ones don't just link to Amazon, either 😃)
Miraz Jordan @jayeless I'd be fine with the universal link thing if it let me somehow specify first time through: I prefer X and then always used that, or if it gave me some easily clickable thing when I get to the wrong place to get to the right place.
Jessica Smith Yeah, I agree with that. I think ideally you'd have both: the universal link site should ask for (and remember) your preference the first time you see the site, and Amazon (and other stores) should be able to link you directly to the item page for whatever you're looking at in a different country's store. I'm really not sure why Amazon in particular finds that so hard.