Amazon's much-talked-about "soft launch" of its Australian retail offering — set to go live at 2pm on Thursday — has proved to be a bit of an anti-climax for most hopeful shoppers, with the local website shortly after that time looking more or less as it has for the past several years.

While Amazon.com.au has long been a hub for Kindles and ebooks, the new version of the site expected to launch in full on Friday will look more like the US and UK versions, filled with everything from electronics to breakfast cereal, and from baby toys to motorhomes.

It's believed that the soft launch, or "internal testing phase" is limited to a small number of select customers, who will be able to order from the Australian site from Thursday afternoon. But for the bulk of Australians that functionality remains invisible, with no clear way to become one of the special early few.

Amazon didn't publicly announce its plans for a soft launch on Thursday followed by the full thing on Friday. The details of the soft launch were leaked in an email to sellers that warned them to have their Australian offerings good to go by "2pm AEST Thursday" (note that this is actually 3pm for most of Australia during daylight savings, but it's been taken to mean 2pm).