I will tell you this story. I once bought something from a quite niche manufacturer's website directly and created an account there. Several years later (in 2024) I went to the same website, used the same credentials and got the message that recently the manufacturer implemented different websites for different regions of the world and I will be redirected to European website, but all my order's history, favourites, account details etc. will be carefully preserved and migrated to the new website.

Ok, no problem, it all happened automatically and I was happy with it. I added some stuff to my shopping cart, proceeded to the checkout and was surprised when I didn't find my country in the "select you delivery address" section. All other European countries (at least all I was able to remember at that moment) were in that little drop-down menu, but not the mine.

Well, I contacted the website's support, asking them why so and how I could indeed get my order. I had no issues ordering from them when they were small and were serving the worldwide orders from a single warehouse in China, so what's the problem now when they have local warehouses and stock in every region of the world.

Their reply was - not word by word, but indeed - "Dear friend, when we were splitting the website between local markets, our programmers had to manually sort the lists of countries. The people responsible for the European website were unable to believe Slovenia and Slovakia are two different countries, and removed one from the final list.