Amazon Marketplace partners in Australia, who have already shipped goods into the Country for what they thought was going to be a Black Friday launch are getting “tetchy” with the big US retailer still refusing to tell them when they will officially launch.
One participant who already has millions of dollars’ worth of stock sitting idle in Australia told ChannelNews “We have spoken to them; the problem is that even their front line staff who we deal with are in the dark as to when they intend to launch. We have been told that they are checking our content loadings and their system”.
“What we were told is that they got over two million hits on their site last Thursday afternoon, it would be interesting to know as to whether they got a big spike in book and Kindle sales”.
Earlier this week it was confirmed that Amazon has signed a 10-year lease at the Goodman Group’s Bungarribee Industrial Estate, Eastern Creek, in Sydney’s south-west.
This is right next to the main Linfox depot in Sydney, that is being used by the Melbourne based distribution Company to distribute Belkin and Sennheiser stock in Australia.
Amazon also paid $7 million for a vacant site at Lot 4331, 42A Bluett Drive, Smeaton Grange, from private vendor, Kingcor P/L last February.
Industrial property agents have also said Amazon is in discussions with Goodman for a larger warehouse centre at its Oakdale South industrial estate, also at Eastern Creek. Goodman chief executive Greg Goodman has repeatedly said he could not comment on any Amazon deals.
IBISWorld’s senior industry analyst Kim Do said that Amazon’s imminent arrival in the Australian market is set to shake up the retail sector.
“The company intends to challenge domestic retail prices by offering items for 30 per cent less than domestic retailers. This is expected to appeal to price-conscious Australian consumers, and is likely to affect local retailers that have found it difficult to adjust to a shift in consumer spending behaviour over the past five years,” Ms Do said.
“With the entry of Amazon, the online shopping industry in Australia is expected to grow at an annualised 13.5 per cent over the five years to 2017-18, to reach $20.1 billion. Although Amazon has largely kept its plans for the Australian market under wraps, IBISWorld expects Amazon will be prepared to make initial losses to help it gain market share within Australia’s online retail sector as quickly as possible.”
An example of Amazon’s dominance in the US market is revealed in the Hitwise online numbers.
They reveal that Amazon absolutely, unequivocally dominated e-commerce over Thanksgiving and Black Friday, Hitwise reported.
According to the website tracking service, Amazon got as much as 55 percent of all transactions processed by the top 50 online retailers, followed by Walmart with 8.8 percent and Best Buy with 5 percent (see charts, below).
Driving Amazon’s bounty were its proprietary tech products, including Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick, which were the two best-selling items over the holiday weekend, the e-tailer said.
Rounding out the top five retailers were Kohl’s, with 3.4 percent of transactions, and Target nearly tying with 3.3 percent of purchases.
Walmart had a better showing on Thanksgiving, but still trailed Amazon 45 percent to 14 percent, with Best Buy in third place with 8 percent of purchases. With a conversion rate of 6.6 percent.
Hitwise senior analyst John Fetto revealed that total transactions were: 39.8 million among the top 50 e-tailers during the four-day holiday weekend
Top two days: Black Friday, with 13 million transactions, and Thanksgiving, with 12.5 million transactions, up from 5 million and 4.7 million, respectively, on Thursday and Friday of the prior week
Total Amazon transactions: 7.1 million on Black Friday and 5.6 million on Thanksgiving. By comparison, second-place Walmart processed 1.1 million and 1.7 million transactions, respectively.
Hitwise was founded in Melbourne by Adrian Giles and Andrew Barlow. Today it is a a unit of Connexity (formerly Shopzilla) and a corporate sister of PriceGrabber.
