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This might be a factor but it must be stated that the primary reason why international players had trouble penetrating Swiss markets was due to trade regulation

This might be a factor but it must be stated that the primary reason why international players had trouble penetrating Swiss markets was due to trade regulations which prevent retailers to sell anything duty-free or at a reasonable duty in Swiss markets. This is why Amazon et. al. don't even attempt to sell there; you're simply not competitive if you have to add 8% or something on top of every item. If you open Amazon from Switzerland and search for anything at all, you do get tons of products that seem nice & at a reasonable price, but click on any of them and it will say that the vendor doesn't ship to Switzerland. And this is when you set your location to Switzerland! There's no way to filter for products that ship there, Amazon simply doesn't bother. This is why e commerce stores like Galaxus & Digitec (the tech-products twin of Galaxus) were even capable of getting so large in Switzerland, while in other countries any competition was swept away by Amazon. There are some exceptions to this, e.g. Zalando, a clothes retailer, does deliver into Switzerland... I know that they have large logistics centers in Switzerland and basically send their products b2b, maybe that doesn't pay off for Amazon? I don't know.

ahtihn 4y ago
This sounds a bit surprising. Tons of online clothes retailers ship to Switzerland. 8% doesn't matter that much, you'll see bigger differences than that for the same item between different retailers within Switzerland. A lot of people here don't shop around and aren't that price sensitive.
barrkel 4y ago
That's not quite right. I'd say about 80% of products I find on amazon.de are delivered to Switzerland. If Amazon is handling the logistics, then they normally deliver. They don't need to charge German VAT and Swiss VAT is a lot lower. Duty is more relevant to food products. Meat is the big one. If you like meat, it's very profitable to take your whole family on a trip to a German supermarket across the border, since prices are ridiculous in CH and the meat is low quality - particularly the beef, which is from "dual purpose" cows, where "dual purpose" is like 95% milk cows.

ahtihn 4y ago

This sounds a bit surprising. Tons of online clothes retailers ship to Switzerland. 8% doesn't matter that much, you'll see bigger differences than that for the same item between different retailers within Switzerland. A lot of people here don't shop around and aren't that price sensitive.

barrkel 4y ago

That's not quite right. I'd say about 80% of products I find on amazon.de are delivered to Switzerland. If Amazon is handling the logistics, then they normally deliver. They don't need to charge German VAT and Swiss VAT is a lot lower. Duty is more relevant to food products. Meat is the big one. If you like meat, it's very profitable to take your whole family on a trip to a German supermarket across the border, since prices are ridiculous in CH and the meat is low quality - particularly the beef, which is from "dual purpose" cows, where "dual purpose" is like 95% milk cows.