Gerry Harvey, Scoopon, Groupon wow what a week!
Online Retailing Is Coming Of Age
Mark Freidin 9 January 2010
This week past is probably the most historic week for the online retailing industry in Australia. For years now there has been a plethora of “expert” commentary providing reasons why online retailing has failed, both from traditional retailers and from those in the industry or fringe to the industry. The infamous comment by Gerry Harvey that Online Retailing is a waste of time, followed by so called expert opinions that the country is too big, delivery logistics are too hard (anyone heard of Australia Post’s eParcel service, an amazing service that will get a parcel to any address in Australia??), the population is too small and so on, I could bore you with hundreds of pages of commentary from both sides, some true most just hypothesis. At this time in the background a few entrepreneurs were growing their email databases while offering incredible deals on their online stores. Some of the early adopter companies such as dailydeals.com.au, catchoftheday.com.au and Kogan.com.au understood online and the web, its democratisation and liberation for shoppers These companies pursued this segment vigorously to become some of the nations top online retailers.
At the beginning of this week, I chose to sit back and watch the outcome of the Gerry Harvey, Solomon Lew GST debacle relating to online purchases from abroad unravel, and review all the posts and commentary that would come out before I sat down and summarised the events and put my thoughts to keyboard (miss that pen and paper sometimes).
And boy has it been a week for great publicity for Online Retailing in
So, lets have a look at the last week or two. Gerry Harvey and his cohorts make a spectacle of themselves like children who have had their candy taken away from them because retail was so poor this Christmas. Must blame it on something so this blame goes to all the goods imported that are being purchased by shoppers online from overseas retailers with an online presence. So this baffles me! If Online Retailing is a waste of time and Online Retailing makes up 3% of retail sales in
According to an article in the Herald Sun, Gerry Harvey announced he will be taking a lower profile in the retailers’ campaign for GST to be applied to overseas online purchases. He has backed down as there has been a large consumer backlash. The Herald Sun online poll showed that 91.96% of voters (from a sample of 10,592 people) were against any plans to tax online purchases. Facebook comments to boycott Harvey Norman and the topic has dominated Twitter chatter (click here to see the article)
Add to this the much publicised blog post by Andrew Mason, Groupon CEO about why they aren’t in
Finally, there is suddenly no shortage of articles appearing online and in the press about so much relating to online retailing (see some example as at the end of this article)
Well, all this buzz makes me very excited. I have been an advocate of online retailing for almost 8 years now and I always knew that online retailing would find its place in
I am certain the bext few weeks will continue to provide more interesting coverage on the online retailing space
Just to highlight the activity in the space, here are just a handful of articles that have appeared in the press in the last few days:
Online retail is the way of the future
Don’t mess with online retailing
Harvey calls for help in campaign
Trading web is winning big business
Top US site’s name trouble
For even more recent commentary in the press click here to visit the IR blog
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