I recently bought a new Chromebook (Acer R11) from Amazon because the there are soon few available here. Harvey Norman and JB Hi Fi had none in-store or online and Office Works had only 2 choices. Samsung don't sell their Chromebooks here anymore it seems but every web article I read says Chromebook sales are going gangbusters.
My theory is because they are cheap retailers have little interest in stocking them preferring to push more expensive offerings with bigger profits although most people don't need expensive laptops.
Why Is There Such a Small Selection of Chromebooks Available in Australia?
Ozbargainite on 30/01/2017 - 14:49
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JB have 6 laptops under $300. They all run Windows.
I spoke to a JB rep once about the super cheap Linux laptops they sold for a while.
He said they pulled the Linux laptops because of an unacceptably high rate of returns. He said they would tell people black and blue it wasn't Windows but a crazy proportion of machines would get returned because they wouldn't run what people wanted on them, i.e. MS Office.
It's presumably the same for Chromebooks.
These places will sell whatever they can, but if there are returns and so on they pull the product.
JB are perfectly happy to sell Chromecasts and cheap Android tablets. They will sell whatever they can that makes money.
Kogan have a decent range of Chromebooks. Most of it is grey stock though.
I used to work at a pawnbroker, and these were nigh impossible to sell locally after we got them in, I had to explain to the rest of the staff that we can't take any more Chrome Books as 90% of our customer base wouldn't have the slightest clue what to do with it.
Because our internet is too slow and crappy. Idea behind Chromebook is to host everything online.
They're pretty decent offline nowadays.
True that, but why buy a Chromebook, when you can buy a decent lightweight laptop for same price, which has more functionalities than what Chromebook (android phone with the key-bored) has?
Love Chromebooks. The latest models are great, replacing Android tablets. Kogan and Officeworks only have kinda old models unfortunately, so yeah I mostly buy from Amazon or bhphotovideo.
There were more Chromebooks in the retail shops back in 2014-2015. I too have no idea why they disappeared when they are very popular in the US especially education sector. Maybe Google AU not pushing it hard enough to schools & business, therefore little demand?
2017 is supposed to be an exciting year for Chromebooks. Most new models will be able to run Android apps from Play Store out of the box, and have USB-C charging as standard. I'll be looking at importing an ASUS C302CA from Amazon if I haven't got two Chromebooks myself already.
Chromebooks are not liked by Aussie retailers as they:
- Are hard to explain to customers with little computer knowledge. Buyers see the cheap price tag then salespeople have to waste their time explaining the chromeOs, doesn't work with ms office etc
- Are slow sellers which means holding stock. Holding stock is bad for cash flow. Holding old tech stock is hard to sell without heavy discounting.
- Sales people make very little commission on chromebooks. They cannot up sell ms office, anti virus etc software as they are not required.
They are selling in a market that is used to Windows… ingrained purchasing and usage from decades… Chromebook has to try to sell to the buyer who has actually done research.
People largely have odd expectations about what the computer will do for them. Chromebooks have limitations that people dont want to educate themselves about.
Perhaps the sales staff in Australia don't receive the same sales training as in the US. If a customer is not knowledgeable about Chrome OS, they will require a trained sales person or some private time to play with the device.
Its rare to walk into an Australian retail chain and the sales person know the differences between Microsoft Windows laptops (eg. Windows 10 vs Windows 8, 64 vs 32 bit, Professional vs Home, Windows Mobile/RT, etc).
Its also difficult for an Australian customer to hang around a store for 30 minutes to just play around with a laptop. In Australia a sales person will always interrupt you. Plus the laptops don't have access to the external internet which will make Chrome OS very useless.
because they are rubbish