back to article Epic e-tail fail down under

Australia’s IT and retail communities are picking up the pieces today, after an epic e-commerce fail that has seen a much-hyped ‘click frenzy’ fail to satisfy most punters. Online retailing is under-developed in in Australia. Few established retailers take it seriously or do it well, while international giants like Amazon have …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    They should have double their server capacity

    by adding another Raspberry Pi.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Rank amateurs

    Mega-Fail-O-Rama

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    No Excuse Really

    Especially after reading this:

    http://ajfisher.me/2012/11/20/a-clickster-fail-of-epic-proportions/

  4. P. Lee

    Clarification> Most welcome its arrival as a tide that will raise all ships.

    Consumers welcome it. Bricks & mortar shops rush to reinforce their wooden sides.

    and other mixed metaphors.

  5. SirAdelaide

    Retail in Australia: C+, could try harder

    Much hyped? I only heard of it this morning after it failed.

    They were on to a good idea though. I've already done my Christmas shopping, online, via US sites. Who wants to wait in line at the shops? Especially now that the big ones are charging for parking.

    1. Urh
      Facepalm

      Re: Retail in Australia: C+, could try harder

      I only heard about it on the evening TV news, but because I live in Western Australia, the frenzy was already under way when the news story ran. You'd think that an online retail sale would want to promote itself rather heavily online, rather than relying on a last-minute blurb on the "old media."

      I was fortunate enough to have a (painfully slow) shufti before the site crashed. It was mostly garbage (as sites like gizmodo had already mentioned), but I did manage to snag a decent deal on a laptop. It was within my price bracket (the overwhelming majority of the "discount" laptops were expensive high-end models), and a significantly better model than I would have gotten otherwise.

      I wonder if anybody is going to use this meltdown as an argument in favour of the NBN....

  6. Winkypop Silver badge

    No jousting sticks

    I got nothing for the pool room at all.

  7. Mark 65

    Amazon

    ...would absolutely clean up if they moved into the market here. Most retailers (with bricks origin) will sell you exactly the same item at exactly the same price with delivery thrown on top. No online discount and postage is often another profit making exercise. I recently bought a particular type of memory stick I was after online and was fortunate to find it with no postage. Some outlets offering a similar sale price wanted $15.95 postage! That's £10 postage for a memory stick! Australia doesn't even seem to have decent distance selling laws forcing the retailer to cover return postage for broken/faulty/not as described items.

    Retailers have zero clue over here and just want the Government to levy taxes on overseas purchases in an effort to shore-up their uncompetitive business model. It would really screw them if Amazon came onshore. What then Mr Harvey?

    1. FutureShock999
      Holmes

      Re: Amazon

      There are 20 million Aussies living in a land almost the size of the US - which has 350+ million. You produce almost nothing natively besides minerals, natural gas, and sheep. And to make it worse, that 20 million is nearly all distributed at the perimeter of the country - making all transport expensive.

      The real failure in Australia, which I suspect Amazon has already dreaded enough to stay away from for all these years, is a lack of reasonably priced internal air delivery. Delivery from Hong Kong to Melbourne is often as cheap as Sydney to Melbs. It is hard to run a centralised distribution model without cheap shipping - and Oz doesn't have the scale and volume that drives down the price of air delivery in the US, nor the small geography that enables land-based delivery here in the UK. I suspect that if Amazon makes it work in Oz, it will be because they use their international shipping leverage and high volumes to score reduced air shipping rates. And again, only an Amazon-sized company could do that...

      1. Mark 65

        Re: Amazon

        Sorry, but they're not located at the perimeter, mainly a couple of spots on the East coast. Almost 50% of the population live in just 3 cities - Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Nearly 11m people in three cities. Postage for items is costly, not because that's what the vendor gets charged, it's because it's another area where the bastards profiteer. How can you justify $15.95 for postage on a USB stick? It's not lack of reasonably priced internal air delivery it's that the business model of most companies here is "rip-off" and it got that way through protectionism and lack of competition/monopolies. We need an Amazon to break this cycle. Amazon is widely credited with bringing about the boom in online shopping in the UK - the need for a reliable, well priced service that people could trust. Here, we still have companies offering the same crap as their bricks and mortar stores for no discount which, considering the goods will come from the central distribution point, is taking the piss. Even Dixons offers web pricing.

  8. JamesB12

    Business model?

    The most galling thing was the (as predicted) justifications in the morning - "We was so successful it falled over! OMG! Come back next year!!".

    It was also never clear why users had to go through the portal apart from as a money spinner (I had assumed referral percentages, but perhaps it was just ad dollars) - would have been much more successful to have had retailers align on a hashtag, or provide dedicated deal URLs in advance - there was little reason to build up the hype by promoting "secret deals" and then try to have a million people attempt to pass through any portal at 7.01pm ...

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    magento not up to snuff

    Surely anyone who used it noticed the huge footprint, clunky performance and poor optimization. This is news?

    AC because I use it and those above me might be upset if I don't enthusiastically cheerlead for it.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    It's called Austfailia for a reason, you know....

    And one of those reasons is that 99% of Austfailia's IT expertise is based in, er, Bangalore.

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