I have shared my experience ordering using AmazonGlobal and so far it has been positive. If I may add about one of the main difficulties at the time, it was a bit hard to know whether a product would be eligible or not from the catalog list. It was only until you go to the product page you could finally know. Now Amazon has made things much easier as you can filter the products listed on your search results or category views for ones that are AmazonGlobal eligible to your country.
To do this, just look for International Shipping under Refine by and you should see a checkbox to filter the results. The cool thing is, Amazon seems to be able to detect your country even without an account. Most likely it works through IP detection.
AmazonGlobal is a program offered by the biggest e-commerce company in the world to ship orders directly from their US store/warehouse and have the customs fee estimated upfront.
Actually, that’s not quite enough. The fact that an item is available to shipped to your country doesn’t mean it’s via the AmazonGlobal program (AGP) — it may be a marketplace seller. The reason it matters is that the AGP guarantees the total you will pay, including customs/local VAT, in advance, and for some countries, also uses much more reliable shipping than the postal service. Marketplace sellers almost always charge a lot more than Amazon for int’l shipping.
On some item categories this is significant, and I waste a lot of time just finding out manually which items cna be sent to me.
Conversely, on the European Amazon stores, one can filter on whether the item is AGP-eligible, but that isn’t enough either: While marketplace items will not show up, the fact that something is AGP-eligible doesn’t mean it can be sent to your specific country.
What’s really needed is a way to filter on either or both those conditions independently, and given the amount of international business Amazon does, I don’t know why it hasn’t long since been fixed.
You are right. The filter does not guarantee the items to be eligible for AGP. Too bad that this feature has not grown much in last couple of years. I guess the revenue generated from AGP is considered miniscule compared to one generated within the country itself. We can only hope Amazon would invest more into their AmazonGlobal Program.
It’s not gotten worse… In the last months, even filtering on “cna be shipped to ” yields items that can’t. Many items say “cannot be shipped to ” in the description, but if you ignore and place in the cart anyway, will let you order and they’ll be shipped fine.
The “Estimate your shipping and tax” option on the cart page has become completely worthless. It used to at least save time by not needing to almost-complete the ordering process to get a total cost.
Now sometimes for days every item on Amazon is claims to be unshippable to the country (even things that were just ordered successfully minutes ago), and no matter what it says, it’s frequently wrong (saying something can’t be sent abroad when it can, and vice-versa). The whole thing is a big mess.
Also, I just joined the Prime program trial, and it makes things yet worse… It sometimes ignore the AmazonGlobal program, and gives costs without customs/import fees, but without clearly saying the total cost isn’t guaranteed.
The whole thing is a huge and annoying mess.
Sorry to hear your impression with the AmazonGlobal has got worse. I guess I never actually used it that extensively. Most of the items on my wish list are usually available for AmazonGlobal program. The last item I ordered was last month and it arrived exactly on the last of the estimated delivery date. To me that’s an improvement, considering previous orders had usually delivered past the estimated date.