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Comment by jccalhoun | Hacker News Reader

>I ordered the Switch on October 16th from Nintendo’s UK online store. I wanted to buy direct primarily to support Nintendo

This seems like an odd impulse to me. It isn't like Nintendo is some small mom and pop business or even that they are struggling.

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Yep. And it's a bad decision too, it's just against your best interest as a customer. With Amazon, I know that if there's absolutely ANY issue with my order they will issue a full refund and/or send a replacement within 5 minutes of talking to them over the phone or using the live chat. It will be bumped up to free allocated time delivery or even delivered with Prime Now if available. I work at a games studio so we have few people ordering from Nintendo UK website all the time - and boy, there's loads of horror stories about deliveries and their customer service, I don't know why you'd order anything directly from them instead of Amazon or Argos or even(gasp!) Game.

I'm glad to hear that my experience doesn't seem to be unique, and I'll know for future reference.

I genuinely do think they're a great company, it's just a really unfortunate turn of events that should probably have been avoidable.

Mom and pop business compared to Amazon, and less seedy than GameStop.

Also, the terms of deals for retail placement may be very sweet to Nintendo, because they know it sells like hotcakes. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if stores were getting 0 margin on the switch itself

I wouldn't even be surprised if Nintendo is just outsourcing its "direct retail" operation to a third party retailer who takes a larger commission than the resellers. I mean, Nintendo (clearly) isn't in the retail business so it would make sense to outsource it rather than build that infrastructure from scratch.

There's not much of a reason to believe buying from the Nintendo store has higher margins for Nintendo than buying from a retailer.

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