It appears that after years of speculation that Amazon has finally acknowledged their thinly veiled expansion plans for Australia, announcing they will be launching here, but as to when that will be isn’t clear.
The confirmation comes on the back of a number of different leaks regarding Amazon have come forth including Amazon shopping for physical locations for their massive warehouses here in Australia, which SMH reported on last year. SMH also recently reported on an interview with former global logistics senior manager for Amazon Brittain Ladd who reported Amazon was looking to launch here with a full range of services in 2018.
The quote given to Gizmodo Australia from Amazon Australia confirming their plans to launch here reads:
Amazon Web Services launched an Australian region in 2012, we launched a Kindle Store on Amazon.com.au in 2013, and we now have almost 1,000 employees in the country,” the statement reads.
The next step is to bring a retail offering to Australia, and we are making those plans now. We are excited to bring thousands of new jobs to Australia, millions of dollars in additional investment, and to empower small Australian businesses through Amazon Marketplace.
We are optimistic that by focusing on the things we believe customers value most – low prices, vast selection, and fast delivery – over time we’ll earn the business of Australian customers.
So, there’s no dates, but it appears there’s a lot more meat behind the rumours of Amazon launching here in Australia. Amazon has begun advertising for staff in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane amongst other jobs in Australia – although these all appear to be related to services already launched here in Australia like Amazon Web Services.
Amazon has slowly been launching more and more services here in Australia, they launched Android Apps through their web store officially back in 2013, and last year launched their Amazon Prime Video service here as well.
How Amazon will deal with the ‘Australia Tax’ we often see with goods available in Australia will be interesting, we’re going to have stay tuned for more on this one.
Hope someone asks Gerry Harvey for comment.
Alexa. Launch in Australia.
I thought they had already confirmed that they were coming late last year and had planned to be up and running by Christmas this year? This is at least the way the current affairs shows presented it anyway. There was even talk of potentially setting up their supermarket business here possibly even this year.
While I do feel for local retailers than will suffer more once they do arrive it should I would hope remove the ‘Australia Tax’ on many imported good I would think and certainly make a lot more brands more readily available here.
If they were smart they would launch the full set of Amazon devices here now – not only Kindle, but the Fire TV units, and critically the Echo and Echo Dot; before Google get around to launching the Home here.
And since they will already ship to Australia from the US & UK for certain goods, there’s no reason they couldn’t populate at least some level of store right now via imports.
The TV stuff seems tricky as they need to get local apps made for FireOS.
but does Alexa work well with Australian English
No idea, but I’d guess that it’ll work well enough and could be refined.
Not Amazon, but Google’s speech recognition API seems to handle native chinese trying to speak english and can still manage to transcribe accurately enough. The deep learning approach seems common across most services and people that have played with Echos here (eg Gizmodo) say it’s OK.
You could give it a try with the Reverb app for Android (which is basically Alexa).