WTF Amazon?

[andrewducker]

I got an email telling me my order for Flex Mentallo was cancelled.

So I did a search and discovered that they have exactly the same book - only it's £1.50 less. So I've ordered that instead.

I wonder what on earth is going on with their systems that these two items aren't the same...

Comments

[birguslatro]

It's obvious they're not the same. One is "Currently unavailable" while the other "has not yet been released"...

[ajr.livejournal.com]

Check the publisher field. One will be DC (or something like that) and the other will be Titan.

The former being the American edition, the latter being the UK one.

Once upon a time, Amazon seemed to not care about this sort of stuff - you could order the US edition and get it earlier, and cheaper than the UK edition. The other upside to this was that the UK edition is, literally, the US edition with a sticker over the barcode, so you'd get exactly the same book only without an ugly sticker on it.

A few years ago, though, a whole bunch of my pre-orders 'vanished', and when looking to pre-order newer books, the US editions didn't appear to be listed any more - or, to be more precise, Amazon would list the edition, but they'd never be in stock.

It seems to me that someone - probably Titan - got arsey about Amazon about Amazon doing this and got them to stop. I mean, you would, wouldn't you, if you paid DC for the rights to sell their books in the UK and Amazon blithely sold the US DC books in the UK anyway. So it's frustrating, but understandable. And presumably that Flex Mentallo was ever listed was simply down to the fact that Amazon made a mistake, which they corrected.

Related: I ended up with two copies of Starman Deluxe Edition volume 5 because I ordered the US edition, then Amazon listed it as out of print so I ordered the UK edition, only I forgot to cancel the US edition order and ended up getting both, a few months apart. Whoops.

[andrewducker]

I hadn't considered the Titan/DC split, that would definitely make sense.

It would be nice if they said "We cancelled this book, but another book with the same title and authors exists. Click here to check/re-order."