It is Amazon Prime Day today in Australia, which is an annual shopping event on Amazon exclusive to Amazon members. It is their big push for sales today, so its a good time to review their Australian operations. Now if you want to see if Amazon affects you today is the day.
Worldwide, Amazon is a vast global online retailer with close to 232 billion U.S. dollars in 2018 net sales. {Link removed} So big that when Amazon decided to physically come to Australia, as Amazon already had a firm hold on the Australian market and with a physical presence in Australia, many Australian retailers were terrified. So many of them spent fortunes on developing a competitive online product.
Well, Amazon came here, and the results seem to be mixed.
They have achieved a lot of growth in Australia. Current figures were at 1500% in 2018 but it is only about A$300 million which although is a lot of money is only a small fraction of the Australian online shopping which last year was estimated then at A$28.6 billion and brick and mortar stores do about ten times more than that so as a result few currently pay much attention to Amazon here.
Many here, including myself want Amazon Australia to close down as it restricts us from buying much directly from Amazon US. However, I doubt that it will not close down even though Amazon now report that it is losing money in Australia soon as large companies like that are quite prepared to run at a loss for an extended time to make a viable product. So we are all going to have to learn to live with it.
Australian retailers must see that in the online space the competition is up, and the two immediate issues are they need to look at their e-commerce and their delivery options. This is where Amazon is powerful.
Where we are unique in our market space is that our point of sale software is a unified commerce solution which brings together both of these issues into one platform in your POS system. Pieced together systems, that our competitors offer cost more money and lead to problems as different systems both in use, training and the need to talk to each other. Plus there is no long-term as who knows what the individual and separate parts are going.
Our unified system gives you long-term as well as a day-to-day business solution. Click here for more details.
PS If you want using our system you can sell through Amazon too.
