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Please don't cross into rudeness in comments here. It's not cool, and isn't necessary.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


I'm really surprised about India, that's news to me, I knew about the US and Western Europe situation but that doesn't equate to the rest of the whole world, as I was saying. I have to say that I'm a little skeptical about your claim of them dominating SE Asia, as a quick search drove me to this article from September 2018 [1] where it says that they're about to enter the market in Indonesia (which dwarfs Australia in terms of future potential) after Alibaba had done the same thing.

The expected investment also doesn't match Alibaba's, the Chinese have apparently come up with $1.1 billion while Amazon is coming with only half of that value, i.e. $600 million. But maybe they're doing better in Thailand or Vietnam.

[1] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/320410


As an Australian I can confirm that Amazon launching here was a hotly anticipated disappointment. Amazon US is (was) far more popular in Australia than Amazon AU is now, for many reasons including price and breadth of product.

In order to force use of the AU site they blocked sales from the US site to Australian customers, which caused endless irritation and frustration.


Their excuse for the block was the new GST laws but they have removed that now so the US site can be used.

It seems that the relatively quiet launch and slow growth has been intentional. As long as Amazon maintains a decent level of investment here I think they will continue to grow and possibly eventually be dominant.

Only recently have they ramped up advertising and started putting their listings onto Google Shopping.


SEA seems like a terrible place to run an e-commerce marketplace. A bunch of competition that seems pretty content to run at a loss to try and build market share.


Here you go with the source: https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/global-ecommerce-marketpl...

And Amazon is also big in Brazil, Mexico, Japan etc. I think it is suffice to say that my point wrt Amazon dominating global eComm is fairly well laid out. Well, except for "China".


I'm very, very surprised not to see Alibaba/Express/Bao being present in Brazil in their data. And same for the Middle East.

Given that, I greatly doubt the veracity of their research.


Do you have an alternate source? This data is from Shopify who is actually an Amazon competitor.


When I was in Belgium and Holland about 3 years ago Amazon was not available due to some tax dispute with the governments and so it was suggested that I use the German Amazon site instead. The selection was lackluster and Prime was unavailable.

It was quite startling for someone coming from a relatively small city in a sparsely populations part of Western Canada this was quite a surprise.

I had always assumed that given my remote location people that lived in densely populated regions would be better served by Amazon.


> Australia

Absolutely disagree, their service is shockingly slow and the limited range is overpriced. They make up about 0.4% of Australian online sales.

I'm not sure where you got this impression from.


Eventually they will probably have distribution centers in each capital city. Delivery in Melbourne is pretty fast, depending a bit which courier they use. A lot of their orders seem to come via Toll which seems to vary a bit in speed.


> South East Asia ?

Where ? Certainly not in Indonesia, the largest population in south east asia. Nor in singapore, malaysia or philippines.


Not here in the Netherlands. Nobody is using Amazon here.


I am originally from The Netherlands and used Amazon a lot over the last 15 years or so, mainly to buy books. Especially when regarding books, their biggest Dutch competitor (Bol.com) offers much more limited choice.

But I did notice at my last job in The Netherlands that people would often order technical gadgets and the like from Alibaba.


AFAIK amazon only sells (e)books in the Netherlands


Amazon.uk and Amazon.de (and even Amazon.us) will ship orders to the Netherlands, although you pay a fee for transport.




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