Australian retailers make just 3% of sales online The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released new and more detailed data on the nation’s use of information technology that shows e-commerce accounts for 7.5% of Australian business revenue, but retailers are only scoring 3% of their take online. The new Selected Characteristics of Australian Business, 2010-11, …
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Business here are making progress though. Any day now they will have caught up to the end of the nineties and who knows, they may be at year 2000 levels before 2020.
Compared to three years ago, MSY's website now looks cutting edge - it used to be more or less a single, massive plain text page, with various text colours making it almost unreadable, along with a couple of links to pdf price lists.
But their range, reputation, and prices are legendary. A really good example of how far other retailers such as Harvey Norman are wide of the mark - MSY make an absolute killing, because for the complete lack of glitz and glamour, they're known as a great place to shop (just make sure you know what you want before you walk into the shopfront - if you hold up the 20-30 people in the queue behind you, you *will* have dozens of pairs of glasses staring angrily at you and clearing their throats and tutting but not actually saying anything).
Yes, I buy stuff at MSY, because, as you say, they are cheap. Even better is that they have a store literally around the corner from where I work.
But just as often I buy stuff at Scorptec even though they are slightly more expensive and I have to actually drive to get there because, you know, often I just really dont want to wade through that godawful shitfight of a pdf price list that MSY use.
Sometimes it is worth paying $4 more just so I don't have to navigate that crap PDF
Your point about knowing what you want is also pertinent. Too often I have been at MSY (and Scorptec) waiting in the queue behind some cheaparse punter without a clue to bless himself who really ought to be buying his crap from Harvey Norman.
Yeah, I've got a "backup" too - megaware computers in Sydney - same deal, an extra couple of dollars for an easier method of doing things, and a pickup point around the corner from work.
It still amazes me that places like Harvey Norman haven't even *tried* a website-based approach and simply turn one of their horrifically poorly laid out stores into a warehouse.
The PDF price list used to piss me off but you can now just use the shop online section to look things up. Info isn't always that great - speeds for USB3 drives listed as 5Gb/s etc
The secret to most Aussie companies doing so poor online is because they were about 15 years late to the party - Harvey Norman, Myers etc were still using online PDFs as recently as 2010 and for multi-billion dollar companies that is pathetic. The next reason is because, unlike MSY, most offer prices the same as their bricks and mortar stores but with an added delivery fee - smell the innovation.
It's pretty easy to pick the ones that are going to stay in business and the ones that are going out of business.
You have to know your product, you have to be to the point and you have to be prompt in the delivery.
The clueless have no idea, they bullshit on and on and the calls usually take ages to go nowhere.
Simple.
Oz retailers charge whatever they think the market will bear. My local woolworths supermarket is charging 10c/litre more than the bp station a couple of hundred yards away on the other side of the road and aud 2 more for a bathroom scales battery than the corner shop/pharmacy at the top of my road. Tomatos are almost AUD12/kg
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