Amazon why dost thou forsake me?

Posted by on 5 Oct, 2010 in My Stream | 1 comment

This is ridiculous. I am an international citizen and regularly use international services in Canada, the US and the UK. But still the likes of Amazon, Audible and Apple thwart me.

I was recently given an amazon.co.uk gift voucher. There’s a book I need for my writing course, available on amazon.ca – but of course it won’t let me use the voucher. OK, fair enough. So then I think, I’ll buy something else with the voucher. But I don’t want to pay international postage.

The solution? Buy some Kindle books on my iPad. Perfect. digital transfer, no postage costs. I know it’s easy because I already bought a bunch from my same Amazon account.
I spend a few minutes picking out some books in the Kindle UK store. I click buy, and I get this unhelpful message:

Kindle

 

Oh I see, my Kindle “account” is marked as Canada. Fair enough, so I go in and change my country to United Kingdom. And try again…
But I still get the same message!Maybe it’s the credit card that’s the problem? So I change that to a UK credit card…
Makes no difference.

Maybe it’s my address? I change the address in the account to my parent’s address in the UK…
Same old message.

Maybe it’s because I’m connecting from Canada. I log in via a UK proxy (which I know works for other sites like BBC iPlayer)…
Still the same result.

So now what? I’ve successfully added the 20GBP credits to my account (which seems to be an international account given it works on amazon.ca and amazon.co.uk – only my amazon.com account is separate). But for some reason the UK Kindle store keeps on showing the same damn message. I am a British citizen with credits in pounds, a UK credit card, a UK address, using a UK proxy. And it still won’t let me.

So I turn to Google (using “The kindle store at amazon.co.uk is for UK customers only” as a search term). This includes the rather unhelpful instructions to use the “Manage Your Kindle” page as I already have tried several times:

Unhelpful

What the hell, I think, I’ll try it one more time. But this “Manage Your Kindle” page takes me to a completely different page, which says “Your Kindle account is registered at amazon.com, would you like to transfer it to amazon.co.uk?”

 

WHAT DO YOU THINK, AMAZON?
Yes. I would. Very much.

 

It’s kind of odd, since it’s at amazon.ca not amazon.com, but ok fair enough.. And now it’s all informative and helpful. Now, after all the crap I tried…

 

Transfer

 

 

Great news indeed Amazon. Now why did you make me waste half an hour on all that? Why didn’t just give me that option up front?!!!

 

This is exactly the kind of stupid situation we have to deal with regularly – especially when your citizenship and residence are in two different countries! One day, the Internet will catch up to the idea that for many people, our lives do not stop at international borders. But I think we have a long wait yet, with too many licensing issues differences and legal differences between countries…

 

Right, end of rant for today. I have some Kindle books to download…

1 Comment

  1. John Platts - 1 November, 2010

    Hi Alex,I spent most of the weekend trying to solve the same problem, but haven’t yet succeeded (I live in Switzerland), although I’ve followed many of the above steps (apart from the UK proxy). What are the key steps to getting it to work

    Reply

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