[thelist] Country List needed

Marc Seyon seyon at delime.com
Tue Jan 15 08:49:43 CST 2002


At 1/15/2002 01:21 PM, John Handelaar typed:

> > > http://www.din.de/gremien/nas/nabd/iso3166ma/codlstp1/
> >
> > Thanks Adam, but I have the ISO 3166 list of countries... I need something
> > mapping those to world regions, like Middle East, Africa, Central America,
> > etc.
>
>You might find that a little difficult in practice.
>
>Turkey, anyone?

John,

Turkey  - Europe! They play in the European Champions League... oh, wait... 
so does Russia and we all know they're considered to be in Asia
Maybe it's Asia then... Or probably "Middle East", whatever that means.

Have had lots of physical geography discussions over the years, and they're 
all inconclusive.

However, Paul did say the list is to use with shipping costs. So Paul, I'm 
thinking you can approach this two ways:
1. Try to Be The Classifier - Determine the shipping costs for, say Turkey, 
and based on whether those costs are more similar to Asian/European/Middle 
Eastern costs, put them in that category. Risk - people look in a category 
they associate with someplace, don't see the country they want, think you 
don't ship there
2. Cover Your Bases - USA & Canada. North America. No problem. Mexico - 
North? Central? Put them in both places. Eliminates above risk.

So it seems your best bet would actually be to create that breakdown 
yourself. It isn't difficult. There aren't even 250 countries in the world. 
For anyone with an atlas, or the CIA World Factbook - 
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/indexgeo.html - and a bit of 
common sense and geographical knowledge, it wouldn't even take 15 minutes 
to do.

You've already spent the better part of a day, at least, hoping to find the 
answer online.

The other thing I'm not too sure about. Are you looking for the breakdown, 
to then calculate shipping costs? Or have you already contacted the 
shipping people you will be using and found out their costs to ship to 
country X or country Y?

good luck.
-marc




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