Amazon Will No Longer Ship to Australia

The Australian government gave notice to online retailers that they must collect tax on behalf of the Australian Tax Office and submit the tax collected to the ATO for purchases made by Australians overseas. Surprisingly, online retailers objected to this and at the time threatened to block Australian shoppers. Now Amazon has taken the step of preventing Australians from purchasing from their site and sending parcels to Australia. Amazon have stated that Australians can now purchase products from the Australian Amazon site, which while true comes with a significant markup of in some cases of 160 per cent or more over the price of the product in the US Amazon site. This does not prevent Australians from working around this technicality by engaging with a shipping company in America to bounce products through their warehouse and having the parcels forwarded on to an Australia address. In the mean time, from July 1st 2018 Amazon will no longer ship products to an Australian address.