Following Apple’s decision to make the Apple Watch available for sale in Best Buy in the U.S. and Canada, it has been making a similar move in other countries. It is already available through select branches of the Australian department store chain MYER, and iPhone Addict reports that it will go on sale through French electronics retailer FNAC as of tomorrow. More chains are likely to follow in other countries.
MYER has an extensive presence across Australia, though currently sells the Apple Watch at only four of the largest ones, in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. FNAC has more than 100 stores throughout France, sales beginning tomorrow with the website and the company’s flagship store on Paris’s famous Champs Elysées, with other stores following at some point next week. The store already sells a range of accessories …
The Apple Watch’s expansion into third-party retailers opens up high street sales to a much larger slice of the population given the relatively limited number of Apple Stores outside the USA. Australia, for example, has just 22 Apple Stores across a massive country, while France has only 18 stores to serve a population of 66 million people.
As with Best Buy, where 16 variants are available, third-party retail chains are likely to sell the most popular combinations of Watch and band. Tim Cook first hinted a month ago that the company would expand its points-of-sale for the Apple Watch ahead of the holiday quarter.
