In a bid to make Amazon a global marketplace for its customers, the e-commerce company is adding a new international shipping feature to enable users to reach out to more than 100 countries worldwide. Now customers can easily import goods from an outside market to their home country.
Amazon is available in several countries, but users often cannot purchase products from outside their home markets. The new ‘International Shopping Experience’ feature will allow users to purchase products from other countries with localised pricing and import fee estimates.
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International Shopping Experience: Features & Products
The feature will enable the Amazon mobile app in different countries to buy items from other countries in a hassle-free manner. The feature is now available in the Amazon app on Android as well as iOS.
You can manually switch to the international shipping mode and check out the products which can be shipped to your location. The shipping, handling costs and import fees will be shown for the products which are available to be shipped to your location.
With its international shipping mode, the company will also push its exclusive products into the global markets. Amazon Prime Video is now available in 200 countries and Alexa-powered Echo smart speakers and Prime music service are now available in 28 new countries.
The company is also working on an international version of its Fire TV stick.
Amazon Launches ‘Lite’ Browser For India
To take a dig at its closest rival Google, Amazon has launched a lite web browser app in India. The app has been specifically designed to work on low-end devices with a clean and easily-navigable interface.
The e-commerce giant has termed the app to be “lighter than the competition” and has named it Internet. The app occupies very less space and comes under 2MB in size.
Private User Experience – No Additional Permissions
The app will offer a complete private user experience. The browser comes with added features where users will get total privacy with whatever they are browsing. The app will also not ask for any unnecessary permissions during the installation.
The app does not work with high-end devices. Internet from Amazon can be downloaded via Google Play Store and is compatible with all low-end devices running Android 5.0 Marshmallow and above.
Amazon has claimed that Internet does not collect any type of private data like other browsers do. The Internet app will come with tab previews along with an option to switch to automatic fullscreen mode.
No browsing data is tracked, and no private data is collected. You can also switch to a private tab mode like Chrome’s Incognito Mode. The private tab let users hide all browsing history from their devices.
The Trend Of ‘Lite’ Apps
Amazon isn’t the first internet company to launch a lightweight mobile app. The struggle for good internet connectivity is an old reality and companies have been building lite apps for emerging markets.
Earlier Facebook has built ‘Lite’ versions of their apps like Facebook Lite and Messenger Lite which allow social networking experience in low-end devices. The apps aim to offer a seamless experience even with limited data access. Google has their own suite of Google Go apps which offer similar functionalities to spec-challenged devices.
Google recently launched the Android Go initiative under which the company will deliver a lighter version of the latest Android for devices with low-end specs.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first ‘Lite’ app from Amazon in India. Previously the company launched Amazon Kindle Lite which offers basic e-book reading experience which can work with unstable data connectivity and slower data connections.