Online shopping: Is it really a threat to the Oz retail sector?

[Vicki]

WRONG.

Telstra has no call centres in India.

Sorry TH, I thought Telstra was one of the many businesses that out-source their customer service depts'.
Must have been another mob that was in the news for doing the same...Cutting back on the local work-force, only to move them [jobs] offshore.

I know I've had frustrations with some of these call centres before.
They appear to speak good English, but still don't seem grasp the concept of what I'm trying to say...Then 'the penny drops' when it's revealed that they're in Mumbai, amongst 4000 odd people at one call- centre, before I hang up out of sheer frustration at being transfered for the fifth time & starting over.

Vicki

 

[Smurf1976]

I run an ebay business so are you talking about cost price or another ebay (chinese) seller?

Cost price from the factory = about $250 according to most estimates. This is the price the factory would sell to a bulk purchase customer (not their actual production cost which would be lower).

Price from ebay seller = $510

Retail at a "bricks and mortar" store = up to about $1600 but some are significantly less. The cheapest I found was a bit over $1000.

Without being too specific and identifying businesses, the item in question is an "off the shelf" electrical/electronic item that commonly leaves the factory by the shipping container load. Essentially it's a manufactured commodity item.

 

[alwaysLearning]

His organisation employs 1000s.
Would you prefer him to be poor and employing 1000s
So when he takes his warehousing to Chindia and opens Harvey Norman Direct you'll harpoon him then as well!



I cant believe Jerry Harvey made such a blunder.
He bought National recognition into every household and admitted it hurt!

He and others will just join the Web Ranks.

How likely do you think it would be to set up warehousing in India or China? It doesn't sound cheap to set up. (good on him if he does).

Gerry and our retailers here don't have very good websites for purchasing goods. While Gerrys point is valid I don't know how gst could be enforced on so many packages coming from overseas. And government sure as heck is not going to remove gst for sand stone retail.

It's a losing proposition for Gerry either way. Aussie retailers have been very slow at coming up with decent online web stores.

 

[Julia]

There is an interesting aside to this, that is, if you want cheap fares you get cheap service. We also need to be careful how far we go to the cheap side of the fence.

.

Very good point. I'd rather pay a bit more and have recourse if something goes wrong. Aren't you going to be disinclined to post something back to the other side of the world if it falls apart, rather than take the faulty article into a store and speak to someone face to face?

WRONG.

Telstra has no call centres in India.

Well, I sure as hell have encountered multiple Indian accents (quite unintelligible often) when phoning about a fault or looking for information.
Perhaps they have purely Australian call centres purely staffed by people who lack the capacity to communicate in English.

Shopping for food and clothes at a store may become a thing of the past.

Do you think so? I'd always want if possible to be able to see what I'm buying.
Just one example in this stone fruit season. If you just ordered a kilo of nectarines, you'd probably get those bullet hard things that go off before they ripen. Waste of money.
I'd also want to try on most clothing.

 

[todster]

Beatles box set in mono JB HiFi online $369
Amazon DHL to my door $210 from Canada 5days
$159 to blow on booze and listen to new CDs

 

[motorway]

Very good point. I'd rather pay a bit more and have recourse if something goes wrong. Aren't you going to be disinclined to post something back to the other side of the world if it falls apart, rather than take the faulty article into a store and speak to someone face to face?

Books and other things under $300

I have had no problem getting refunds
Did not even have to return the goods when they arrived damaged
and in other case never arrived..

And have found significant savings, availability and convenience..

So Vendors online have reputations and good will to protect too
If they are smart......

Of course no doubt .. There are bad ones also

Online for many categories is the future more an more

eg Premium Wine and Spirits ==>The local bottle shops do not ever stock them.

Motorway

 

[Boggo]

One point that I think is being missed, isn't it the same manufacturers and suppliers that are selling online that are also supplying the retailers.

Anything you can buy in a store can now be bought online, who is supplying the online stores.

Don't tell me that the stores haven't figured that one out, they don't want to fight with their suppliers to limit online supply so they try to get our silly pollies to do it for them.

 

[tothemax6]

Yes its a threat, which is a good thing. But imposing extra taxes on imports (protectionism) is good for Harvey and bad for the rest of us. Harvey can take a jump.

 

[Wysiwyg]

A few years ago.

TimeRanger metal detector bought online from America for about $530 AUD including freight from Kellyco.
TimeRanger metal detector exactly the same for sale $1250 AUD in Brizzy.

The dude more than doubled the price and would have imported them cheaper than I. Plenty of bozos cough up for imported goods unknowing they can import for less themselves. The good part of the W.W.W.

 

[Trembling Hand]

Well, I sure as hell have encountered multiple Indian accents (quite unintelligible often) when phoning about a fault or looking for information.
Perhaps they have purely Australian call centres purely staffed by people who lack the capacity to communicate in English.

Thats probably the case. After all its is a very poorly managed company.

I'd always want if possible to be able to see what I'm buying.
Just one example in this stone fruit season. If you just ordered a kilo of nectarines, you'd probably get those bullet hard things that go off before they ripen. Waste of money.
I'd also want to try on most clothing.

Yes I'll buy everything I can online but for my weekly Fruit & Veg and (meat, fish, cheeses) I need rub the flesh. Actually like the whole market day process.

One point that I think is being missed, isn't it the same manufacturers and suppliers that are selling online that are also supplying the retailers.

Anything you can buy in a store can now be bought online, who is supplying the online stores.

Xactly. I can understand differences in pricing when our AUD moves up so fast as they have inventory and contracts to fill but it seems the local retailers take a very very long time to adjust prices, if at all.

And have you ever tried to order something from a store in the US that ships internationally but says "we cannot ship that brand OS"!!!

 

[bellenuit]

WRONG.

Telstra has no call centres in India.

A couple of months ago I called Telstra regarding my Bigpond account. The lady I spoke to had an Indian accent and I asked her where she was located. She said Bangalore.

 

[Trembling Hand]

A couple of months ago I called Telstra regarding my Bigpond account. The lady I spoke to had an Indian accent and I asked her where she was located. She said Bangalore.

She may of been born in Bangalore but she wasn't speaking to you from there. My partner is a senior Exc at TLS. And assures me that that they don't have any call centres there.

They did for 6 months have one in the Philippines.

 

[Dowdy]

Cost price from the factory = about $250 according to most estimates. This is the price the factory would sell to a bulk purchase customer (not their actual production cost which would be lower).

Price from ebay seller = $510

Retail at a "bricks and mortar" store = up to about $1600 but some are significantly less. The cheapest I found was a bit over $1000.

Without being too specific and identifying businesses, the item in question is an "off the shelf" electrical/electronic item that commonly leaves the factory by the shipping container load. Essentially it's a manufactured commodity item.

There are more costs then just what the factory price is. You got duty and customs (which is heaps) and just because it's an online business doesn't mean there are no overheads that they take into consideration...

 

[GumbyLearner]

If it's cheaper online, I would always want to purchase and pay less.

But here's a couple of hypotheticals

To what degree will the 'therapeutic' element of shopping and the public show and/or public transaction of shopping diminish through online discounting?

I wonder how online retailing would fare if the Australian dollar bought say 70 US cents?

Julia raised a great point earlier about clothes. Does everywhere outside of Australia have a returns/replacement policy? If the goods you'd purchased from outside Australia, are not fit for the purpose intended when you decided to buy them on-line? What recourse does an Australian consumer have to get their money back without getting tangled in a bunch of foreign legalese? Of course in the absence of a decent Fair Trading, Consumer Protection and/or Trade Practices Act? Could this be a problem for consumers?

Does online shopping from overseas based retailers pose a "buyer beware" element?

Just throwing stuff out there

cheers
Gumby

 

[Junior]

Surely for every new Harvey Norman store that opens and 'creates' new jobs, there's X number of small businesses that suffer and shed jobs in the immediate area.....also are Harvey Normans products manufactured in Australia in order to protect and create employment locally? Or do they import all of their goods from Asia just like the rest of us?

Level playing field...what a load of bollocks.

 

[Boognish]

http://thingsboganslike.com/2010/12/13/202-gerry-harvey/

It took Matt Taibbi, a thirty-something writer for Rolling Stone magazine, to succinctly articulate the role played by Goldman Sachs, one of the corporate arch-villains behind the Global Financial Crisis. He commenced his 10,000 word missive in 2009 by proclaiming that the investment bank was “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. The article reverberated around the world, triggering widespread debate about the manner in which Goldman Sachs abused its market power to engineer asset bubbles and bend laws. It may come as some surprise to discover that the Australian bogan has its very own vampire squid problem, in the form of a 71 year old former door-to-door salesman of vacuum cleaners.

The first store co-owned by Gerry Harvey opened in 1961, and, after various co-owners and buyouts, Harvey Norman emerged in 1982. Today, Harvey Norman operates over 160 franchised stores in six countries, and is one of Australia’s most powerful retailers. Gerry Harvey, Australia’s hungriest mouth and squeakiest wheel, can thank the bogan for his current 1.2 billion dollar station in life. So what has he done to transform this disorganised drove of self-interested donkeys into an obedient sleigh-pulling collective?

Firstly, he has told the impulsive and greedy bogan that it doesn’t have to be patient. One of the pioneers of interest-free consumer finance in Australia, Harvey Norman has partnered with Flexirent and GE Money so that Gerry can insert his blood funnel into bogan bucks that don’t even exist yet. This time travelling funnel extends up to 48 months into the future. Despite Gerry being on the record as saying that Flexirent is a bad idea for the average Australian, his company will promote this type of finance to all of its customers. As for GE Money, 1.5 million Australians have taken out $5 billion of interest-free GE finance via Harvey Norman since 2004 (an average of $3,300 per person), which currently reverts to interest rates of up to 29.49%, four times the mortgage rate about which bogans squeal so tremulously.

While the bogan’s attention span and values system limit it to only participating in one-off acts of charity that involve celebrities, Gerry Harvey has taken boganic benevolence to an entirely new, subterranean level. Asked in 2008 about the role that he and Harvey Norman played in the community, Gerry offered the following insight: “You could go out and give a million dollars to a charity tomorrow to help the homeless. You could argue that it is just wasted. They are not putting anything back into the community. It might be a callous way of putting it but what are they doing? You are helping a whole heap of no-hopers to survive for no good reason. They are just a drag on the whole community.” Indeed, it can be concluded that Gerry Harvey only values human life if it passes the credit checks to obtain 48 months interest-free finance.

But somehow, the bogan still loves Gerry Harvey. He has developed his pro-bogan image via regular appearances on bogan information-sources Today Tonight and A Current Affair, where he portrays himself as the heroic defender of the decent underdog. This is a triumph in public relations, with very few bogans realising that Gerry is shamelessly using television appearances to campaign for the maintenance and expansion of his own extortionate empire. One highly amusing example of this has been Gerry’s ongoing flame war with online electronics entrepreneur Ruslan Kogan, 43 years his junior. Gerry, who himself does not use a computer, spent years stubbornly refusing to participate in the Australian retailing landscape’s shift towards online, and routinely engages in angry scaremongering via the media to remind the bogan that P!nk will never tour again if bogans desert his highly profitable superstore retailing method.

More recently, he has been the most vocal opponent of the prevailing tax-free status of overseas online purchases of less than $1,000, which has seemingly progressed from indifference to “urgent” on Gerry’s lips in the space of a month. For decades, Harvey Norman enjoyed buying its stock on the cheap from Asia, but Gerry has concluded that it Costs Australian Jobs when anyone other than Gerry does it. The power of the interwebs threatened to enable bogans nationwide to bypass Gerry’s supply chain blood funnel, so he fired up his bogan-wrangling media machine in the hope of Gerrymandering Australia’s rules.

With the boss of Myer also currently sharing Gerry’s bluff about setting up an online retail function based in China as a protest to the tax laws, Gerry is hopeful that he can blackmail the ATO into legislating against the Australian consumer, and for Gerry Harvey. This is the Harvey modus operandi – whenever something is not to his personal liking, he bleats to the media and government until it changes, all the while reserving the right to change his once-vociferous position when it becomes convenient in the immediate term. In short, he’s the ultra-bogan.

More often than not, though, Gerry does not want change. As the kingpin of one of Australia’s most boganic businesses, he wants things to stay just as they are. This requires the bogan being forever ensnared in his franchised web of superstores, signing up for an interest free deal on a maxtreme 3D LCD LED HD HDMI WTF TV for a mere 30% more bogan bucks than it’s really worth. However, the bogan’s enwebment is not entirely to its displeasure, because the relationship between it and Gerry can be seen as symbiotic. In it, the bogan gets “free” consumer electronics and formal living area furniture, while Gerry the vampire squid gets the bogan’s soul. Forever.

 

[Vicki]

What a great post/article.

I remember Gerry saying some years ago, on the subject of achievement & personal success, that If you haven't kept up with the pack, or even been the 'leader' or innovator in your given industry, and found true success by age 30, then you probably never will.

Well, It now appears society & the WWW, have moved-on and are threatening to leave Gerry behind, and so all he can do is bleat about it, rather than follow his own business acumen....Assess what the market wants, or how it opperates, and be the 'leader'.
Or at least keep on the same page.
Sorry Gerry, but that's business, keep up or perish....Or maybe you should retire & just enjoy your true passion...Horses.

Vicki

 

[doctorj]

She may of been born in Bangalore but she wasn't speaking to you from there. My partner is a senior Exc at TLS. And assures me that that they don't have any call centres there.

They did for 6 months have one in the Philippines.

Not sure what it was, but I'm fairly confident I've seen a building with Telstra signage in Bangalore within the last 12 months. Back office functions (billing or something?) perhaps?