Amazon.com has a very attractive text along many of it's items : FREE Super Saver Shipping , I was quite happy because I know the shipping costs are high. Finding out that it was a USA only offer. I am very surprised to see Amazon.com making this mistake.
This text was targeted on 48% of their visitors discriminating the other 52%. I am very curious what went into this decision. Amazon.com is starting to look more and more USA centric while most of it's competitors understand the need for globalisation of information, without the creation of domains.
Google Video applies information based on location very effectively and motivating. They present information as popular, video special, movie trailers and Google tips and the top 100 based on data from the specific country. YouTube though doesn't present it this way and ends up with al lot of Chinese videos presented on the most viewed daily top 100, which are pretty unusable.Advertisements have information on location as city or village, this can be pretty scary.
Especially on big websites there is a need for the information architecture to adapt to the different regions or even countries of the world, because its hard to find the nuances between cultures and there behaviour. On Drupal.org which is a open source content management system the vocabulary of a user varies a lot and has a huge impact on their ability to find the issues they need solutions to.
There is allot more information and functions that could be presented upon location, such as top payment methods, contact details of multi-nationals, thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons, color/colour and those endless country selection boxes.
Related Links :
Andy Budd on Select box madness
79.8% of Google and 75.9% of Yahoo! unique visits are from outside US
Discussion
Hello, Bojhan,
I just want to let you know that the comments area seems to be working fine now. Nice going!
April 1, 2007
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