Path: ccsf.homeunix.org!ccsf.homeunix.org!news1.wakwak.com!nf1.xephion.ne.jp!onion.ish.org!onodera-news!newsfeed.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp!jpix!newsfeed1.dti.ad.jp!dnews00.dti.ne.jp!newsall.dti.ne.jp.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Graham Bell User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030624 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en, ja MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: fj.life.in-japan Subject: Re: amazon.co.jp References: <91182238.0308260055.3fe49d09@posting.google.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 50 Message-ID: Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 21:36:21 +0900 NNTP-Posting-Host: 210.170.198.59 X-Complaints-To: abuse@dti.ad.jp X-Trace: newsall.dti.ne.jp 1061901463 210.170.198.59 (Tue, 26 Aug 2003 21:37:43 JST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 21:37:43 JST Organization: Dream Train Internet Xref: ccsf.homeunix.org fj.life.in-japan:4823 Ryan Ginstrom wrote: > "Graham Bell" wrote in message > news:qRH2b.17$7B5.1430@newsall.dti.ne.jp... > >>I'm not sure how you found it cheaper and faster to order from >>Amazon.com? > > > Markup, mah man, markup. > > For instance, I just looked up "ATL Internals" on the Japanese and US sites. > > Japanese price: =Y= 5,775 (in USD: $49.19) > US price: $38.47 Well, it isn't always that high, but yeah... > So that is a markup of over $10. Since shipping from the US only costs > ~$5.00, you are still paying an extra 5 bucks in Japan. $5 for shipping on a book? How do you manage that? According to their site, expedited shipping to Japan is $8.99 per shipment plus $6.99 *per book* Unless, of course, you're getting stuff shipped to a US base (APO address). Which is cheating, really. Most of us mere humans can't do that trick. That's the only way I can think of that you could get such cheap shipping.. > Next, shipping. The Japanese site says it usually ships in 8 to 10 days. And > since I live in Okinawa, I know I can add a couple days onto their shipping > date for actual delivery. From my experience, if you order from the US site, > it *arrives* in 8 to 10 days. Aha! So there *is* a downside to living in Okinawa.. > > Wow, you're right! I hadn't noticed. At first they didn't have any software, > and I just assumed it was due to amazon's anti-software-export policy. They > probably found a Japanese supplier for the software, I guess. Thanks for the > heads up! > You're welcome. I was interested that they actually have some English lanuage versions of MS Windows stuff.. and if you're tricky you can even find a fair variety of US release region 1 DVDs on there.. Graham