Thursday, July 12, 2018

Shopping with Amazon Australia

In short: Depending on what product you're after, it's not all bad.

I've compared a couple of items (ok, just 6), and even within that tiny sample, the results range from "that's ok" to "are you fucking kidding me":

Description Amazon USA Amazon Australia Harvey
Norman
USD AUD AUD inc GST AUD Diff AUD Diff %
Seagate Backup Plus 4TB
Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.0
USD 100 AUD 136 AUD 150 AUD 149 - AUD 1 - 0.67 % % AUD 219
AmazonBasics External Hard Disk case USD 7 AUD 9 AUD 10 AUD 12 + AUD 2 + 20.00 % % AUD 14 1
Sanddisk UltraFit USB drive 16 GB USD 8 AUD 11 AUD 13 AUD 9 - AUD 4 - 30.77 % AUD 12 1
Mpow Car phone mount USD 16 AUD 22 AUD 25 AUD 57 + AUD 32 + 128.00 % AUD 24 1
Filter B&W Neutral density
3.0 MRC 110M 77mm
USD 100 AUD 136 AUD 150 AUD 323 + AUD 173 + 115.33 %
Buyee media player USD 35 AUD 46 AUD 53 AUD 43 - AUD 10 - 18.87 %

1 Comparable product

Note 1: For convenience, all prices have been rounded: Amazon US up to the next full dollar, Amazon AUS down to the full dollar.

Note 2: I've ignored shipping; for low-price items that are only slightly cheaper in the US, this might reverse the result.

Also, Amazon Australia still only features approx 60 million products, compared to 570 million items on Amazon US; so it's still a matter of luck to even find what you're after on the local site.

So there you have it. It's not as bad as I expected, but there are still a few instances of blatant rip-offs for Australian buyers; especially now that Amazon US is no longer available to us.

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

The Grey Headed Flying Fox

The internet tells me the Grey Headed Flying Fox is one of the largest bats in Australia (Wikipeida, that old beacon of accuracy, even claims it's the biggest).

And as it turns out, there's a rather large colony at Parramatta Park. So, here are a couple of pictures:

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