Amazon simplifies cross-border online shopping

Thursday, April 19, 2018 - 10:19 by Graham Miller

The international e-commerce market is growing by the month, with consumers from all parts of the world looking to bag bargains via safe shopping online with retailers that are based in other countries.

Now market leading outlet, Amazon, is making it even easier for customers to buy from different regions thanks to a number of updates to its mobile app, according to The Verge.

It has rolled out support for more languages, so everything from English to Simplified Chinese is available as the default option on smartphones. Prices for products can also be shown in 25 currencies, which means that there will be less confusion surrounding whether or not a product is affordable.

Of course, there are a number of restrictions which can exist on certain items depending on where in the world a customer is based. So a number of new filters have been included in the app to make sure that users only see products which are eligible for shipping to their location.

The main beneficiaries of this update will be people in nations that have yet to get a domestic version of Amazon’s site for safe shopping online. But Brits will also be able to take advantage of the app’s fresh capabilities, especially if they want to streamline the process of buying from Amazon’s other international outlets without the usual hassle involved.

Both Android and iPhone versions of the Amazon app have been augmented with these new features this week. The main downside is that, for the time being, these abilities are not offered to desktop shoppers, which means a lot of manual tweaking is still required to view items in the correct languages and currencies.

Amazon is a global retailer and so it is perhaps surprising that it has taken it this long to make changes that improve the international shopping experience for users.