So what went so wrong? We can blame the government changes to GST for the Amazon block. The new laws, first proposed last year, get ALLLL up in the face of overseas online businesses, demanding that they register with the ATO. This means that they’ll be forced to add 10 per cent GST to goods purchased on international sites and shipped to Australia.

To that, Amazon said no, no, no.

An email from Amazon to the weeping masses – who sit, banging their keyboards and wailing ‘THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS’ –  apologised to customers for any inconvenience caused. The company is instead directing customers to Amazon Australia.

A new era of Amazon

In the words of the Amazon bigwigs (or whoever writes their emails), “the Amazon Global Store will allow Australian customers to shop on Amazon.com.au for over four million items that were previously only accessible on Amazon.com. This selection is in addition to the more than 60 million products that are already available on Amazon.com.au across 23 categories, including books, fashion, toys, and electronics.”

Doing this allows Amazon to provide customers with continued access to an international selection of products while staying on the right side of the law.

All sounds pretty impressive. But when you consider that Amazon.com has over 500 million products available, well, we can understand the wailing, weeping and threats.

Does this spell the end for all our favourites? While Alibaba, eBay and Etsy have all criticised the changes, Amazon is the first to actually take action and block the Aussie market. We’ll have to keep our (scrolling) fingers crossed that it’s not the beginning of the end.

Shoppers have till 1 July, 2018 to cram their Amazon carts with as much stuff as possible. After that the sanctions come into place and one of our favourite online haunts starts sporting a ‘closed for business’ sign.

Want to check out what’s on offer on Amazon Australia? Check out our run down here.