A reply I posted this morning on the excellent One Degree website (www.onedegree.ca) in response to a post announcing that Amazon.com has finally posted a redirect to the Amazon.ca site for Canadian customers:
" Nothing really new here, when Amazon launched the .ca site there was a redirect from .com for almost a year. So it's not a new thing at all.
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My personal, random stream of conciousness ramblings on marketing, consumer research, the business world, marketing and market research in Toronto and elsewhere, and other stuff of probably little interest to anyone in the real world, but that I'm sticking here just because I wrote it and I feel like saving it in public.
The issue here is being lost - it's purely an issue of classical marketing fundamentals, primarily centered on the product itself.
The US site simply has far better selection, and a whopping better chance of the desired items being in stock. The Canadian site loses the advantage of quicker local shipping by not having stock.
The decline of the US dollar has made the US site's pricing much more competitive - in fact, in many cases, even factoring in higher shipping, it's on par or cheaper.
Last, the Marketplace concept really took off in the US but the Canadian site understandably has yet to offer a strong Marketplace, so customers buying a part Marketplace and a part from the main site will gravitate towards the US site.
Also, little discussed is the fact that Canada Post cut a deal with Amazon to allow them to drop ship from the US to Canada and generally those shipments aren't getting nailed with duties & taxes, savvy Amazon buyers know this, eliminating another reason to stick with the .ca site.
So - better selction, more items available now to ship, better or at least even price, no duties & taxes - well, no wonder people go to the US site. I do.
A redirect will do little to solve the underlying deficiencies in the fundamentals."
Subsequent to that post, another writer mentioned that one other issue with Amazon.ca is that they do not take advantage of their international channel links - such as offering an import befre the domestic version is released, and sources Canadian product from US distributors, making domestic product into "imports". Again - lousy fundamentals - not using the channels to best advantage, in fact, using them to create a disadvantage.
It's simple. When all is said and done, the product itself is where the marketing takes place - so if the product sucks, there's no amount of spin, or advertising, or promotion that can overcome it.