Amazon.com’s Message to the Irish
Amazon.com
I was talking to a client this morning about mobile phones and he directed me to the amazon.com website to check out some prices. I’m not usually a visitor to their site. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever bought from them in the past. The first thing that jumped off the screen at me was an Irish flag and a message: “Shopping from Ireland? Visit Amazon.co.uk”. I really found this strange from such a large organisation. They have amazon.ie, they have it redirecting to the .co.uk store, why not just put amazon.ie in the message?
Ok, it’s probably a branding thing and they don’t have a .ie store, but it still looks strange to me from such a big company. A lot of smaller companies trading in Ireland and the UK try to secure both .ie and .co.uk domains (or get a .com to cover both) and target their sites towards each country. This has just got me thinking about how perception might effect the purchasing decision of a customer in country A, buying from a website with a domain extension from country B. The .com seems to cover all countries but should you have the different country extensions for your online business when you are targetting them in particular? This probably doesn’t effect Amazon due to their size but smaller online businesses, are they losing revenue on a global scale if they only advertise through their .ie (for example) website?
Anyway, food for thought. I didn’t buy anything in the end.
