Dwindling friendship

I've been calling Amazon.ca as my friend for the last two years or so, but I think this friendship is slowly degrading...

Amazon.ca is usually pretty good with pre-order prices when the item first get posted on the website. As the release date gradually approaches, the price goes up little by little as well. Then, once it's released, the price will never come down again.

My other friends, Amazon.com and RightStuf, are the opposite. Amazon.com's pre-order prices are usually just slightly higher than that of Amazon.ca's, but it often has sales of 30~40%, or even up to 80% off for the item months after release. RightStuf, on the other hand, has good price for the pre-order item the week it's announced and posted on the website, then go back to the regular price until the item is put on special again, which is random but relatively often enough.

Another pet peeve I have with Amazon.ca is the status with pre-order items. It'll often put up an item on the website, but sometimes not be able to acquire the item, or fail to update the release dates (these get changed rather often by the licensed distributors). I was forced to order quite a few items from Amazon.com or RightStuf because Amazon.ca couldn't get them and cancelled my orders. Usually Amazon.ca would eventually have the item, but by then the price would not too high to be worth it.

I will not abandon Amazon.ca just yet, though, as it offers free shipping. RightStuf's threshold for free shipping to Canada is $150. While that's not hard to meet, because of the randomness of its sales, I may not get the best price for the items I want. And RS is the only place if I want Aniplex USA products, when I deem the particular series is worth the 3x price tag of other series.

For Amazon.com orders, I usually just ship it to Neko-tan's house and pick up when I go to AX. There used to be no tax shipping to Neko-tan, but not anymore. So I'll be saving just 3% in tax. As a result, unless the Amazon.com price is really good and I don't have enough items to reach $150, I may just ditch Amazon.com and go with RS.

So what spurred this whole thing was the order I made yesterday with RS, after waiting for Amazon.ca to put up certain items and finding the price to be way higher than that on RS. As I was throwing stuff into my shopping cart, I checked the price for a few pre-order items I had with Amazon.ca. I ended up cancelling two orders with Amazon.ca and went with RS for those. Today, I added another item to the RS order (it went on sale today) and cancelled the same item on Amazon.ca.

You get my drift.

Right now the only orders I have left with Amazon.ca are all Bleach pre-orders and one pre-order for Inuyasha Final Act part 1, which I have yet to see available anywhere. Of course, this means there's a good chance that it actually won't be available when it says it will. As luck will have it, Amazon.ca might just tell me that they can't acquire the item and cancel my order...