Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

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Aussie here. The Australia Tax [1] is absolutely a thing here: for example, it's difficult to buy decent kids' shoes for under $100 (!), whereas you can walk into any Payless in the US and walk out with a decent pair for $25 or so. Check this out if you don't believe me, and note that this is not a high-end retailer or anything, it's a chain with an outlet in every suburban shopping mall in Australia: https://www.shoesandsox.com.au/school.html

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Tax

The other thing which has made importing shoes and other clothing items difficult is now that US brands sites won't ship overseas, and they've started blocking shipments to known reshipping services too.

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.

ebay from AUS sellers has served me well this year on their site-wide 10-15% off deals. e.g. Merrell, Colorado, Columbia and Timberland, $50 cheaper than at a physical shop. KEEN doesn't seem discounted much though.

> it's a sum of very high rents and wages, a small market and a general lack of competition

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?

I think so. Also, we are smaller, yet relatively wealthy. Companies tend to like to overcharge us, and then rather ironically, so do our own companies.

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.

> So far, Amazon have sort of stuffed it

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.

Yeah, like H&M, there's no reason for them to enter the AU market with US pricing. They might as well come in with pricing similar to other AU retailers and hope that the other benefits (convenience, fast shipping, better shopping experience) are compelling for consumers.

>payless shoes

as someone who grew up with payless shoes on be careful what you wish for

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