amazon webstore redirect by continent/country

Question

I recently helped build an amazon webstore. I need to only display this store to the United States and redirect visitors from foreign countries as the pricing structure is completely different due to taxes, shipping, ect.

My initial thought was to create an .htaccess file

GeoIPEnable On
GeoIPDBFile /path/to/GeoIP.dat

# Start Redirecting countries

# Canada
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^US$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://destination-site.com$1 [L]

and than upload this to the amazon hosting account. In testing I cannot get the above example to work: what I expect to happen here is that since I am from the United States accessing this page I should be redirected to "destination-site.com" This however does not happen and I get a 500 error.

I am having an increasingly difficult time as Amazon documentation is often out dated, incomplete, or just extremely confusing and convoluted. Google search are not yielding much help either. If someone knows if this is possible to redirect an amazon webstore if the visitor is not from the United States this would really help.

Thanks

Answer 1

You should consider instead signing up for the various amazon associates countries accounts. Then, you should detect your visitors, and append the correct associates tag for the country they are derived from, via javascript. Since this is a bit confusing to explain, let me make a flowchart explaining.

Answer 2

Try changing your Rewrite code to this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{ENV:GEOIP_COUNTRY_CODE} ^US$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://destination-site.com%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R]

If you still get 500 error then look into your error.log to see that the error log is for this request.