In other words, his sales of CE products and the related margins are slowing and he now needs to find new markets to flog cheap gear
He claims that he doesn’t want cheap televisions to define his business any more.
Speaking to Fairfax Media he said “I had a guy at my place to fix the air conditioner a few weeks ago and he walks in and was like ‘oh, so you’re Kogan, the guy that sells the TVs’.
“I was like ‘we’ll there’s 30,000 products on our site right now and TVs are just a portion of that’.”
Recently his Company has moved into categories as diverse as fashion and outdoor goods but now he wants to flog as many categories as possible.
“From a financial perspective, they’re industries that have much-higher margins than consumer electronics, so it gives us the ability to really smash the competition,” Mr Kogan said.
Kogan has quietly rolled out private-label brands of sports equipment, power tools, Manchester, travel goods and even pet supplies in the past year.
When asked how he would approach the new categories he said “We’ll think ‘Is there a demand for towels’? and we’ll take a look at the number of Google searches for towels, then we’ll look at how much we can get them manufactured for,” he said.
“Then we’ll look at how much we can get them delivered to the customer for, see what the other price in the market is, and then say ‘go’.”
Core to his success is a back-end bidding system that manufacturers and suppliers use to compete for contracts.
“What Amazon is letting the customer do at the front end, we’re doing at the back end,” Mr Kogan said.
“You could go onto Kogan and order an iPhone a week, and over the space of a few months one would arrive from France, one would arrive from Hong Kong, one would arrive from the US, one from Singapore.
Kogan who owns his company won’t reveal customer numbers or sales figures.
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