: No shit, Amazon

Published at
Thursday 28th February, 2008
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Every so often on the Amazon US site there's a nifty link that takes you to the same product on the Amazon UK site (maybe just because I'm based in the UK - who knows?). However it doesn't always work; fortunately what does work almost always these days is just changing the hostname from amazon.com to amazon.co.uk. I haven't quite got round to writing a bookmarklet for it, because it honestly is so easy to do anyway.

So it came as a bit of a surprise when changing this US link into this UK link didn't work (even though there is a product page for the item in question - it just has a different ASIN, probably because it's slightly different in a way that only Ubisoft really cares about). However that's not the big problem: not only did it not work, but it came up with a fairly unhelpful page.

Thumbnail screenshot of Amazon UK page saying that the Web address entered is not a functioning page on their site

Branding, but no chrome: this isn't really part of the Amazon UK site at all. In fact, all we'd need to make this into a helpful page would be a search box. Type in something useful and on you go. But no, as Amazon helpfully point out themselves: the Web address you entered is not a functioning page on our site.

Well, duh.

This is an example of what I'm beginning to think of as Apple trouble; when something simply works almost all of the time, you get disproportionately annoyed when it doesn't.