Book Shop Hacking for Amazon Readers

I came across some of these little factoids just recently, and some of them I’ve known for a while, but they all add up to an interesting insight about shopping for books.

  1. It doesn’t matter where you live on the ball, you can still browse through Amazon.com.
  2. Depending on where you’re located on the globe, you may not be able to buy books from Amazon.com

Plus:

  1. If you put a review on, say, Amazon UK or Amazon DE, that review stays there.
  2. On the other hand, if you put a review on Amazon.com, it will filter down to all the other Amazon stores (UK, CA, AU, DE, etc.)
  3. Not all the international stores have a “look inside” feature, where you can read an excerpt and see the front bit of the book.
  4. If you are browsing on Amazon.com and click the “buy” button, it will redirect you to that book’s page on your country’s site.  (This one, I could not confirm directly, because my country site is CA, and I can buy from Amazon.com.  Perhaps one of you dedicated Amazon readers could confirm this for me.)

In summary:

The main Amazon site provides:

  • All the books
  • The majority of the reviews
  • A peek inside
  • and will redirect you when you’re ready to buy.

It seems to me that you would be far, far better off doing all your browsing and window shopping on Amazon.com and using your country site only when forced to buy there.

Food for thought….

Tracy Cooper-Posey
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5 thoughts on “Book Shop Hacking for Amazon Readers”

  1. I just learned last week of the filtering down to all sites. That was terrific as it saves me a substantial amount of time not having to go to the other Amazon sites, pulling up book, copying and pasting. When I found out, I said A ALRIGHT; makes my day go so much faster.

  2. on the Uk site the Uk reviews come first and if there aren’t any it will say no reviews at the top by the title, even though scrolling down then shows Com reviews. So I add to UK and Com sites.

    Re purchasing, what happens if your in UK is that the com site has a “go to UK site” button – you can’t actually click buy on the com site. Frustrating when – as this morning – you get email about a free book you’d like and its free on com only, go to UK and its not free 🙁 That happens a lot…..
    This is the text box UK readers get on the Com site

    Kindle titles are available for UK customers on Amazon.co.uk.
    Continue shopping on the Kindle Store at Amazon.co.uk.

    Have you moved recently?
    You may change your country on the Manage Your Content and Devices page

    1. Hi Jeannie:

      Thanks for the feedback. I have a lot of UK readers who will appreciate the information. The text box about countries seemed to be the same everywhere else, too.

      Re, free books: This is something that some authors are not aware of, but permafree books (those that aren’t made free via Kindle Unlimited for five days) are only made permafree on the .com site, unless the author or readers on the international sites report free pricing on those sites as well. Plus, it’s a moving target: If the author uploads a new version of the book, the free price resets to .99 cents or whatever the price is set at on their dashboard, and they have to go through the whole price matching exercise again…on all the sites. I spend a LOT of time monitoring my free books on all the Amazon sites to make sure they stay free, and often they don’t and I have to start negotiating with Amazon again.

      It’s frustrating to get to the UK or AU site and find out the book isn’t free there (it happens to me, too), but this is an Amazon thing, not an author thing.

      Cheers,

      t.

  3. Well back to individually adding to the other Amazon sites I guess. Nice while it lasted

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