Comments on: Don’t Hose the Canadians! (Our Dollars Are Equal Now.)

By: greenchloe

greenchloe — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:28:47 +0000

my rant is about how, like me, many people watch television online. what is with specific entertainment companies only allowing people with a US server to watch the shows. most of the time they are filmed in Canada, my country, with Canadian crew, often mostly Canadian cast, yet a final 90% Canadian product is not allowed to be viewed by Canadians? what’s up with that?

By: Kelly Rusk

Kelly Rusk — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:06:33 +0000

Or better still they could recognize up front he was Canadian and then serve a message guiding him to the International booking place…

Sadly I’ve had a lot of bad experiences being a Canadian online shopper(don’t get me wrong–lots of good too)

The worst was Banana Republic, one of my favourite retailers, I shopped the site a while and picked out a few items I liked, went to buy, and I didn’t realize until I couldn’t enter a “Province” that they don’t ship to Canada. Disappointed, I shoot customer service an email letting them know I was unhappy that it wasn’t apparent enough (have to dig in small print to find out) and also to ask if they had plans to open up shipping to Canada. The response was :

“Sorry, we don’t ship to Canada, if you’d like to find a store near you in the US use our store locator tool, or email us again to find a store in Canada”

Didn’t answer my question, didn’t make me feel better AND peeves me a little more because I can’t even locate a store near me from the web!

By: nethy

nethy — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 23:45:38 +0000

I am always just blown away whenever I realise the sheer size of the ‘american’(US) market.
You read things like: “Amazon (isn’t she stateless?) cannot afford to ignore the ‘international’ market which accounts for almost 1/3 of its sales.” Huh! For Americans there is the US (the important market) and the ‘world’ (a good place to look for an extra few sales).

In contrast, Australia (where I am) there is local (small but safe) and the ‘world’ (where you wtake a business when it grows up). What a difference in the way you look at things.

Interestingly, if all the predictions of the end of ’scale’, fragmented markets, & micro marketing came true maybe all this won’t matter any more.

The US is important because of size (quantity). If size of markets starts mattering less in favour(do canadians spell with ‘ou’?) of other qualities the game may change.
(French are willing to spend more on food; Germans are willing to spend on quality; Canadians like to make fun of Americans)

By: S.Hamel

S.Hamel — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:23:49 +0000

Interestingly, I was doing the analysis of a B2C site that has a US and Canadian version. Both are identical, except when you reach the billing address you are left out with either States (if you ended up on the US site) or Provinces (if you ended up on the Canadian one). Guess what? 38% abandonment on that field! Ouch! and double-ouch! User’s went all that way to be left out in the cloud at this step… If you switch site you have to start all over again. I guess we’ll be spending some time fixing that!