A few months ago Nine West starting blocking visitors with Canadian IP addresses from its US site — rerouting them instead to the.ca site against their will. It is now impossible for Canadians to get to the US.com site. The company claims the reason is that they don't want to continue to frustrate Canadian consumers who shop the US site only to discover the site doesn't deliver to Canada.
This rings false to me. For one thing, they could easily serve a pop up message to Canadian traffic reminding them they are on a US site that doesn't ship to Canada and suggesting the.ca version. For another, we Canadians are accustomed to browsing US sites that don't ship to Canada — it's a novelty when we find US sites that DO ship here. I think this is an attempt by the company to prevent the disaster that J Crew had when they launched their Canadian site — consumers compared prices with the US site and were outraged at how much higher they were on the.ca site. I think Nine West doesn't want Canadian consumers comparing products and prices. But it can never be right when a company takes away a consumer's right to browse whatever site they choose. Does anyone agree with me?
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