Tag Archives: Website Design

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.

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.

As a regular shopper online, I find it extremely infuriating when I visit sites that can’t offer me their prices in euros. In Ireland (and most other European countries)  the euro is our currency, and when I visit websites such as Ebay, Play, and The Book Depository, they are obliging enough to offer their prices in euro. It is therefore understandable that I might expect one of the biggest e-commerce websites on the internet to offer a similar service – Amazon.

Rather disappointingly though, they do not deliver this service to us at all. In fact typing in www.amazon.ie rebounds you to the .co.uk site where all the prices are in the British pound – and while often sites provide an option to convert prices to whichever currency you use, Amazon fail to provide one such option. Even more annoyingly, if we look at other countries within the EU, we see that they have both dedicated domain names, and the currency in euros – Amazon Germany, Amazon Spain, and Amazon Italy.

The need to have a currency converter next to you just to shop on Amazon is poor to say the least, especially when we see they provide other European countries with euro prices. This kind of need leads me to shop elsewhere first. And while Ireland may be considered a small market for Amazon, its competitors see us as important enough to off the service, so what I would like to say to them is “I’m Irish, I deal in euros, can you please make this happen?”.