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by AnssiH 2078 days ago
Is there a reason your "Buy" links for amazon.de include "&language=de_DE" in the URL?

It changes my account language to German and causes Amazon to send me a "your account language was changed" email, so it kind of makes me avoid your direct links...

A lot of people, including me, are using amazon.de in English, as they have free shipping to quite a few European countries (and e.g. http://www.amazon.fi/ redirects there).

4 comments

Seems poor of Amazon to do all that for following a GET request! Thought the most they'd do would be drop a cookie for that session.
I think Amazon is adding the language parameter. We do not force a language on outgoing links. Worth stripping on our end, though.

Thanks for the feedback.

Do you find that Amazon.de has better offers than others in Europe? I usually shop on my own country TLD and didnt't think before of checking if .de or any other has better offers and free shipping
Amazon doesn't have a TLD for every country. It's super weird what they support...

Amazon.lu (luxemberg) but no amazon.be (Belgium). Amazon.at (austria) but no amazon.ch (Switzerland). No Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, but they do have Lichtenstein, Poland, Denmark. No Slovakia (sk) but they do have Czech (cz).

And some of the existing ones are not separate services either (amazon.pl is autotranslated amazon.de)
There is no Amazon for my country, and delivery is faster from Germany, than most other. But my German in not that good, and prefer English.

Not having local amazon blows. You can buy prime but shipping isn't free or next day (best case 3 days usual around 5), a lot of the shows wont show etc. Also random thing will decide that they wont ship from one amazon, but will ships from some other. Also returns are expensive.

Generally, no, it feels pretty random to me.

For small purchases I don't care that much (and .de has cheaper shipping to me), but for larger purchases I usually price-compare between .de, .co.uk, .fr, .it, .es, .com as the price difference may be significant (i.e. save me hundreds of euros), and all of those sites have had the cheapest price on occasion.

For some reason, websites just use the IP to make a language decision for the customer.