Amazon and the case of the missing globalization
Being an American guy married to an Italian woman and living in Austria, I don't really have a problem with "globalization". Actually, I'm something of a fan, which is one reason I'm disappointed in the globalization of Amazon's services.
If you order a book from Amazon.com in the US, it will be shipped to you from the nearest shipment center. If you go to a large site like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, it's quite likely that they provide services in your language.
Amazon, however, appears to be completely split up along country lines. Your amazon.com account is completely seperate from your amazon.co.uk account, and amazon.de isn't even available in English! This completely violates the sensible reasoning behind the two features outlined above. If you're somewhere like Italy or Denmark or Eastern Europe, you should be able to log in to amazon.com, in your language, order a book, and have it shipped from the nearest shipping center. Instead, you have to log in to each site (they don't share account info), which is only available in one language. So, for instance, an English speaking guy in Austria wanting to order books from the nearest country with an Amazon site goes to amazon.de and finds that there is no option to get the site in English. If I want to order from amazon.co.uk I have to enter all my login information from amazon.com again, and don't get the same recommendations and other features that come from Amazon knowing about my purchasing history.
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about 2 hours later:
Book markets are fairly fragmented and in particular the German-speaking ones have specialties (fixed prices etc.).
about 3 hours later:
And you will be paying extra taxes for shipment from, say, the US. Apart from that I'm glad that German privacy laws forbid such data exchanges. (Unless it's under Safe Harbour, but I think amazon.de is run by a German subsidary of Amazon.)
about 6 hours later:
It is that way for tax reasons probably.
You get to keep the same username/password for all sites though, and that is something, at least.
about 7 hours later:
I have an account on amazon.co.uk and I can happily login to amazon.com and order from the US store.
about 9 hours later:
Some products may only be stocked in one country - and then they wouldn't be able to offer consistent shipping rates across products in the same site...
about 19 hours later:
Problems like taxes, shipping rates and the like certainly exist, but come on, this is Amazon we're talking about. Those kinds of things aren't insurmountable. It would be easy to display some text on the page explaining shipping rates for the user's default location - you can even take a guess at that from IP addresses. The data storage problem (Europe has different laws than the US) is a bit trickier, but still manageable: if the user does business in Europe, store their data in Europe, if it's a US-only customer, keep their data in the US.