Amazon's Sweden foray off to rocky start; gets country's map wrong, makes lewd translation

E-commerce giant Amazon on Wednesday launched its first Nordic online store in Sweden with the domain name 'Amazon.se' with an aim to expand the business further across the European continent. In Europe, Amazon already has its online stores in the U.K, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and The Netherlands. However, in this case, the launch of Amazon's new online store in Sweden got in trouble when the website showed the wrong flag and mistranslated product descriptions in its catalog. 

The first major error reflected on the newly launched site was the flag. Amazon used the Argentinian flag instead of the Swedish flag in the 'choose your location' section. The other glitches were due to wrong translation in descriptions and listing of some products which include a frying pan as a woman’s item in it's listing, Nintendo Switch games were listed as suitable for the Nintendo Circuit Breaker, while, a collection of second world war-era Russian infantry figurines was translated as 'Russian toddlers'. Moreover, a cat-themed hairbrush or other products featuring cat was described with the Swedish slang word for a body-part on the website.

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Amazon reacts to the errors

Amazon soon issued a statement acknowledging the errors and thanked everyone for highlighting the problem and helping the website to make necessary changes and improve the newly launched site. If anyone spots any issues with product pages, please do use the link on the page to provide feedback and we will make the necessary changes, the statement further said. Amazon has launched Amazon.se with more than 150 million products, it is the only day one for us here in Sweden and we are committed to constantly improving the customer experience, it added.

Meanwhile, Amazon.se has provided local retailers with a new platform through which they can sell their goods and the website is a convenient shopping platform for customers. Sweden is the 17th country where Amazon has set up an online store and it has its stores in the other parts of Europe.

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