Today the e-commerce in Australia is 7.3% compared to brick and mortar businesses and its annual growth rate is 6.0% but in less than two weeks a major change in online e-commerce is about to happen in Australia because the large players will have to get Australian to pay GST.
Plus in less than two weeks, much of Amazon will be cut off from the Australian consumer plus GST will be added. So presumably this is why Amazon is now releasing their local prime deal which is a VIP club that gives its members better delivery and some better deals for a cost of $59/year plus 30 days free. If you are Amazon you can get people to pay to be part of their VIP club. I suspect this is an attempt to build up their local presence, which needs shoring up from what I can see as currently getting many complaints from consumers. From what I hear Amazon delivery times are slow, Apparently, now it is faster to get an order from the USA than Australia. The big problem is that the Australian site has a smaller range of goods available than the USA site and the prices tend to be dearer on the Australian site. So I am sure that many consumers will go elsewhere unless the range and prices in Australia dramatically improve. So what is going to happen to one of our largest e-commerce site?
Also many Australia retailers both large and small are moving onto the net with their own websites. Quite a lot of our clients are now doing a lot of their business online from their website. From what I can see they all have deals just as good, if not better then Amazon so exactly how this is going to play out in retail, we will soon see. I suspect that Amazon will not AS IS take much from Australian consumer market but that the e-commerce retail world will in Australia explode because too many Australian businesses its crunch time.
