eBay's recent Australian e-commerce data shows that domestic sellers grew ten times faster than Australia's overall retail trade last year.
In 2010, the top 2000 eBay sellers had annual revenues of between $120,000 to as much as $12.6 million, eBay said, with total revenues up 38 per cent according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
A Time for Inflection?
“We are at an inflection point in Australian retail where millions of Australians are increasingly choosing to shop online instead of going into a store,” said eBay Australia & New Zealand managing director Deborah Sharkey.
As we've begun to document in recent weeks, the Australian retail industry seems to be in a Perfect Storm of sorts.
Among the forces battering the industry:
- Post-GFC, macro-economic conditions for many traditional retailers have deteriorated.
- Australians are increasingly comfortable shopping online and this is driving the growth of the domestic e-commerce sector.
- Meanwhile, the soaring Australian dollar encourages cross-border e-commerce as consumers shop for goods on websites that ship down under.
- Instead of evolving their retail formats to be more customer-centric, traditional Aussie retailers are turning to the government (or anyone that will listen) for help (err, make that protection).
Traffic flows Down Under: Deal sites swamp the brick and mortars
Hitwise reports than eBay was the single biggest web destination for shoppers in Australia through the Christmas season.
The most visited local online-only retailer was Catchoftheday.com with 6.8 million visitors in the nine weeks ending January 1.
DealsDirect, took in 6.5 million visitors in the same time, was followed by group buying site Cudo, which had 6.4 million visitors.
“It's interesting - but unsurprising - that the top ranked pure-play (online only) retailers - aside from Amazon and Apple- focus on cheap deals,” said Grant Arnott, chairman of the Online Retailer Conference, commenting on the Experian numbers.
Australian brick and mortar sites were led by:
- JB Hi-Fi's, with 9.5 million visits (although Apple, which sells thru some retail stores actually led with 10.8 million).
- Big W, which launched its online store last year, followed with 5.7 million visitors in that period.
- Kmart had 5 million visits from Australian web users.
- Harvey Norman, who hasn't made many friends with its push to tax online imports[link] , had 4.6 million visitors
- Woolworths-owned Dick Smith attracted 4.1 million visitors
Forrester Research expects Australian online retail spending to rise from $19.3 billion in 2010 to $33.3 billion in 2015, with the proportion of Internet users shopping online rising by 1 per cent a year until 2015.
Don't be surprised if the Perfect Storm makes Forrester's data seem conservative.
Until then
Cheers
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