I thought I was so clever– instead of buying all the parts for our books scanners from industrial vendors then assembling&testing&reshipping from Richmond California, we could send many parts to where they were needed and assemble in our scanning centers. We wanted to buy all the parts through amazon.com, all on one amazon business account, which would make it easy to track. We thought we could try this for a scanning center in Hong Kong.
Well, here are the problems we encountered:
1) the prices for cameras and lenses were 30% more than if we bought from selected stores we could bargain with,
2) some amazon.com vendors would not ship internationally,
3) most electronics vendors had limits on how many you could buy, like 2 or 4 or 5. What a pain. Even “amazon basics” were limited,
4) a couple of the vendors only had a couple in stock,
5) shipping to Hong Kong means deliveries take at least 9-10 days because they come from the US,
6) shipping to Hong Kong is expensive because there is no Prime or free shipping or local delivery.
All in all it took hours after we had figured out which ones we wanted. (thank you Salem!)
So we ended up making many sub-accounts for our business account to get around some limits, have to wait for restocking from others, and shifting around vendors. On the positive side, we could use our business credit card to get a kickback in miles, and we also used smile.amazon.com to try to get a kickback to Internet Archive. We should have used the affiliate code, which would might have given us a bit more of a kickback.
Oh, well. Amazon.com is meant for individual consumers– and for that it works well. For this application, not so much.
-brewster