A lot of our relatives express our disbelief when we launch kindlemalaysia.com; they couldn’t understand why we would want to enter a low margin hardware business.
I explained to them that the main purpose is not to make money, but to provide a service to kindle fans in Malaysia, so that they can get their hands on the latest gadgets from Amazon. Not just gadgets actually, but also the services– what good is the gadgets if you can’t buy books, rent/buy/watch legit movies? So we are very different from other sellers from lowyat or ebay. Their purpose is to sell the device, but we are more concerned about letting you own the device, own the Amazon services and the ecosystem, and thus own the total experience of utilizing the device.
As such, one might find that the price for the tablet/gift card services is a bit higher than the ones listed at Amazon. And this is not because we want to make a quick buck, but because we have a lot of incidental costs associated with bring the Amazon devices and services available to Malaysians. For example, what happened if the device breaks during warranty period? Despite that shipping back and forth to US is expensive, kindlemalaysia.com will eat all of the transportation cost so that you don’t have to pay a single cent to get your device replaced. Another example, how do you start buying free and paid digital services such as ebooks and movies from Amazon? For Malaysians, the process is not as straight forward as one might like to imagine, but kindlemalaysia.com will help our customers to do that for free via a BONUS kindle value added services that normally worth RM 100
The same goes to our digital offering such as gift card. Yes, the price is higher than the ones listed on Amazon. But you have to consider the amount of work that goes into it; we often have to ensure that your Amazon account is valid for buying digital contents. In the past we got burned by applying gift card to Amazon accounts that couldn’t used to buy digital products, being there, done that, so we don’t want you to experience the same pain and loss as we did. We have to validate your Amazon account using various tricks.
And all these are on top of the credit card payment gateway charges and delivery fees( if applicable), the standard costs for operating a ecommerce store.
We are committed buying and owning Kindle and Amazon related digital services in Malaysia. Heck, the road to first world country and enjoyment of first world facility can be long, winding and full of false starts. We want to pave the way so that you can travel with ease and peace!
