After my first blog, I thought it would be interesting to select a number of products from Amazon’s vast catalogue and compare the prices across three of their European stores: UK, Germany, and Spain. The reason behind this is just to see if we in Ireland are getting a better deal then our euro priced Amazon counterparts, or if we are getting charged a higher price.
First of all I will explain the method: five random products were chosen when browsing the UK website. When purchasing an item, Amazon allow you to convert the British pound price to Euros with the Amazon Currency Converter at the very last step of purchasing. Their conversion rate (£1 = €1.215434960) was higher then two other sites checked: Google’s own currency converter (£1 = €1.17), and XE (£1 = €1.16). Their price was noted (excluding delivery), and then the German and Spanish Amazon websites were searched for the same product, and again their prices were noted (excluding delivery). The comparison is presented in the table below.
Product | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon ES |
Programming the Raspberry Pi | €10.28 | €11.20 | €11.41 |
Django Unchained (Bluray) | €18.23 | €16.90 | €15.98 |
Bioshock Infinite (Xbox 360) | €38.89 | €34.99 | €49.95 |
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 inch Tablet | €397.98 | €416.00 | €431.91 |
Sony Bravia KDL-46HX755BAE2 | €1489.43 | €999.00 | €1531.69 |
So are we getting ripped off, or fairing better when being forced to shop at Amazon UK? Well Germany is the cheaper of the three stores for most of the products, and the Spanish appear to be getting the harshest treatment. As an Irish customer, I know I would obviously prefer to be getting the Euro prices of the German site. I would also like if the UK site used one of the more live (and therefore accurate) exchange rates of XE. This would provide us with a better price again. From the figures “Ripped Off” would not be the right wording, but we could get a better price.
And finally something I find particularly interesting here is that seeing these prices in Euro would encourage me (and others too) to purchase from Amazon rather then there counterparts. The reason behind this is you often feel like you may be getting ripped off by sites when they are dealing with a different currency.