Buy a Nintendo Wii! From the Foreigns.
UK citizens what like to play games and what are are interested in playing on a nice new Nintendo Wii might have noticed that stock on The Island is a little bit on the scarce side. You basically have 2 options:
Option the first: No Wii for you until next year;
Option the two: Pay way over the odds unless you are very very lucky!
Oh but I lied! You have a third option too! The continent is drowning in Wiis! Buy one from abroad!
Amazon.co.uk is fresh out of new Wiis, and using the marketplace you’re looking at £300 and up. That’s crazy talk. But a little birdie (thanks Alex) pointed me in the direction of Amazon.de and Amazon.fr – the German and French versions of Amazon. Here are some interesting facts you might like to know about these 2 sites:
- Both sites (used to) ship to the UK happily;
- Your existing Amazon account works on both sites so no bothering to fill in info again;
- Both sites are selling the Wii at just shy of EUR 250 – considerably cheaper than you’d expect to pay here
Don’t just take my word for it though. BBC News commentors have also picked up on this fact.
However, one slight stumbling block is that they may have now stopped shipping to the UK. A recent experiment by myself (and again, Alex) showed that Amazon.fr would only ship PS3s and Xbox 360s, and Amazon.de would only ship a PS3. Why they’ve changed their policy all of a sudden I do not know. Maybe they don’t like business. Whatever. What you could do though is plan a cheap day trip over to France and pop into a nice high street games store and see what happens. I reckon success will happen.
You can thank me later. Merry Tophmas.
John Robinson - designer, developer, coder... John’s not quite sure exactly how he should be labelled. Why not check out his blog and make a decision for yourself. He mostly talks about CSS, jQuery and the crazy world of the Interwebs, with a little bit of personal life thrown in for good measure.
