https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/books/australias-amazon-b...
is that there is a culture of loyalty in Australia. So, this should be a walk in the part for other companies.
Though as far as I know, and all of this is secondhand knowledge, normal retail in Australia is costly. So, there is a market for cheap discount based retailing in Australia. But I could be wrong.
There's a huge slew of reasons for this, but it's a sum of very high rents and wages, a small market and a general lack of competition. Ebay, Aliexpress and Amazon US are consequently very popular, but most retailers are international so shipping is slow and, for anything bulkier, quite expensive. (Also, the deals aren't quite as good as they used to be since the Aussie dollar has depreciated against the USD.)
So, if Amazon can build a local operation here that -- for the first time in Australia -- has the trifecta of low prices, wide selection and fast shipping, they will crush the competition, online and offline. Which is why local retailers are scared shitless.
I can still buy three pairs of name brand shoes from a US purchasing service (who purchase from the brand's own site) and have them shipped to Australia for less than the price of one pair on that brand's site here in Australia.
Australia is like Canada in a lot of ways yet retail in Canada is nowhere near as bad as Australia. Why is that? Is it all about proximity to the US?
Retailers have been trying to cut rates for weekend work. Now they are worried about cheaper alternatives. There is less and less sympathy for them in Australia. They have been lazy for a long time, and it shows. They have been ripe for disruption for so long, and now Amazon has a chance to walk in and take it all from them.
So far, Amazon have sort of stuffed it. If they were more like Costco, they would almost certainly immediately take away a huge chunk of market share. They have decided not to compete on price, that's a huge mistake.
I would guess Amazon knows exactly what they are doing. The worst thing in the world for them to do would be to go in hyper-aggressively. A slow, bumbling start with very long term (but fluid) plans is the best strategy and Amazon is lucky that they can afford a long, slow start.
as someone who grew up with payless shoes on be careful what you wish for
I wouldn't be sweating it much at the moment if I was for example a local bookshop. OTOH an electronics retailer...
Take for instance what Bunnings has done to the Mitre 10 brand.
The moment there's a lower price that's at least as convenient and serviced, we're gone.
Another point of anecdata is what Amazon and other overseas stores have done to local stores.
Loyalty by older generations perhaps, but younger generations can see how much we've been screwed by local retailers for years.
E: the reason Starbucks failed was because they sold American style coffee, which not enough people like. Cafe culture is incredibly picky about exactly how to make good coffee, so all the chains that hire uninterested inexperienced kids off the street all have problems in places where there's a lot of quality coffee.
Aussies know a good deal when they see it: we adopted mobile phones and DVD pretty quickly. Whe alao know a bad deal too: see how Masters failed miserably.
His campaigning for eliminating/lowering the tax-free threshold on items bought overseas online was based on so much spinnning of the truth it's a wonder he didn't catch fire.
Of course a large part of it was price and selection. But it seemed though that it was mostly a me too type offering and unless there was a drastic reduction in prices ( drastically better range would have been very hard) people were already pretty happy with Bunnings.
Such is our supermarket duopoly.
In most developed nations, including Australia, consumer spending typically grows at low single digits over time. There is no room for Amazon to build a significant business in Australia without taking share away from other domestic retailers.