Is The Writing On The Wall?

Kodak is an American, English-speaking company.

When I ordered a remote control for my ZX1 video camera from the Kodak online shop, it was shipped to me all the way from Versmold, Germany.

Increasingly, Amazon products are sent from France or Germany as well.

Now, the German and French postal services are no better than the GPO, probably not as good.

And UPS operates in Britain just as well as in Europe, as does FedEx and CitiLink.

So why are online shops sourced in Germany?

It may be this: the German economy is still massively based on the manufacture of physical items for sale around the world; thus it makes sense that German export infrastructure is first rate.
The Dutch have made a business out of Rotterdam, called 'Europort', which makes Rotterdam(I believe) the biggest sea port in the world.

Meanwhile, in Britain, the export industries largely died in the 60's and 70's, due partly to Union irresponsibility, but mostly due to the absurd monopolistic edicts of the state, the Socialist state of 1945, which made business impossible and destroyed the infrastructure upon which the superbly integrated machinery of the British economy depended. And yes. The unions were put in the position of running the monopolies. both economically and politically.

So Britain no longer has the ability to sustain large-scale bulk (but not necessarily low added value) exports.

Couple this with the building of the Channel Tunnel, which cuts most trans-shipping operations out of the equation, especially for low volume items, and you see that despite the mediocre postal services in Europe, it is better, easier and cheaper to build logistics facilities there.

Also, Germany and Holland use English as a primary business language, leaving an even more appealing option for our American cousins.