Pricing at amazon.co.uk

Factual Questions
1

There’s a DVD set I want that’s ONLY available in Region 2, and at Amazon.co.uk. I’ve been wanting it for a while, but since my birthday is coming up I was blatantly nudging my brother towards getting it for me.

The list price for the set is 32.97 GBP. I wanted to see what shipping might be, so I added it to my cart and started the checkout process. When I logged in - with my Amazon.co.uk login, that happens to be exactly the same as my Amazon.com login - it already my address book loaded. The same address book as Amazon.com.

I chose my home address (in America) as the “ship to” and when I got to the next page, the price of the item was changed to 28.06 GBP, with no message as to why. I put in my credit card info (with all my credit card info still stored from amazon.com, by the way) and went to the final confirmation page, and the final price was still 28.06 GBP and shipping was 3.08 GBP. It ends up costing less at the end after shipping than the original price w/o shipping.

I’m not complaining :slight_smile: but I was just curious as to why the markdown. Does it have to do with my location or is a different price on checkout something that usually happens at Amazon?

2

It’s probably because purchasers within the UK have to pay VAT (value-added tax), but you don’t pay that tax when the item is exported from the UK. Prices in the UK normally include VAT, unlike the situation in the US, where sales tax is added on to the quoted price.

3

And to ask the obvious, you do know that Region 2 discs won’t play in a standard US DVD player, right?

4

And just to back Giles up, £28.06 + 17.5% VAT = £32.97
[sub]I don’t think we need to worry about the extra 0.05p involved[/sub]