Verify That Amazon Items Are Shipped To A Selected Country

You may remember that I buy most of my computer games and media at the Amazon UK store and not the store in Germany.

I benefit in two ways here: first, prices are a lot cheaper than they are in Germany most of the time. I sometimes pay 50% less for the same item. Second, I get games and media in the original language, and not the often weak German language synchronization with no option to switch to English or the native language the game was created in.

Sometimes I encounter an item that I want to buy only to find out during checkout that I cannot.

Amazon then displays one-liners like "We are not able to ship this item to your default shipping address", "We're sorry. This item can't be shipped to your selected destination" or "The following items cannot be shipped to the addresses you selected".

Does Amazon Ship To?

The free Firefox and Google Chrome extension "Does Amazon Ship to?" offers a solution. Amazon customers can use it to retrieve information if a specific product on the online shop's website is available for shipping to a selected country.

The browser extension works with all localized Amazon stores, in particular with Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.fr and Amazon.de.

Once installed, the button appears on every Amazon product page. The button is added to the page after the page has been completely loaded. It may even take a second or two before it appears.

When you click on the button you see a country pulldown menu where you have to select the country to check if Amazon ships the item to that country.

Does Amazon Ship To will then retrieve the shipping information and displays it in the program interface. All merchants, including third party merchants selling the item are displayed here with their asking price and, if available, shipping costs.

Basically, if you see a price and merchant you know that the item will be shipped to the selected country. If you do not see a merchant, you know it won't.

So, even if Amazon itself does not ship to Germany, a merchant offering the product on the Amazon marketplace might. You could make the purchase from that merchant then provided that the price is reasonable or you really need the item that is on offer.

Firefox users can download Does Amazon Ship to from the official Firefox add-on repository. Google Chrome users find the extension in the Chrome Web Store instead.

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