I just changed my account settings from the US to Australia in preparation for the local store opening, ten minutes later I receive an email saying they believe my account was accessed by an unauthorised party…. they are reversing the change, locking the account for 5 hours and resetting the password.
As someone who has studied economics I do know what 'sending our money overseas' does.
At the margin, it decreases the exchange rate making Australian exports more attractive.
The argument against Amazon isn't that somehow Australia loses wealth from a foreign company increasing a consumers utility and beating local rivals. That's creative destruction and a more efficient redistribution of resources.
The argument against Amazon is if they use their size to long term decrease competition AND then use that situation to increase their economic profit (as opposed to normal profit).
Will that happen? I'm personally unsure. But it's a potential issue whether the firm is local or foreign.
Yawn,
Why should I feel sorry for a small business owner had zero qualms about buying a dress for $25 and selling it for $130 ?
They have no concerns about ripping off their local community "so daisy can go to ballet lessons".
@smashed: actually its more like buy for $25 sell for $400- $800
Then realise you can get a dress made for $6 in Asia and you decide to outsource your entire operation.
I didn't wish to be called out for exaggeration :)
And these shops have been doing it to their customers for years and years.
The same thing happened with Dick Smith etc who no doubt charged thousands on mark up of every TV when the internet didn't exist.
Agreed. Greed in business owners and the "get rich super quick" idea is one of the main reasons small businesses cannot compete these days.
Engineer larping as an economist?
We already are sending money overseas with everything we buy, the difference will only be how much money the man in the middle takes from us (less).
Bonus points if they sell baby formula on there :D
Amazon's advantage is in its huge range imo, that's where I got a replacement lga1150 mobo recently, couldn't find a local one with specs I wanted.
Competition?
Do we have to actually have an account to buy stuff from amazon?
I know buggar all about how it actually works
tnx
Yes.
And I believe the only way to pay is debit/credit or Amazon Giftcards.
I paid with my visa?
It requires little effort to register.
They better try to impress us. If they do Amazon fresh, then coles and woolies will take a huge beating
then coles and woolies will take a huge beating
Sorry, have you looked at Coles and Woolies profits? 2.5 billion per year was it? (And people think they're getting great deals at the same time!)
404'd
Oh, poor Coles and wow, my heart bleeds.
But don't you know, we all own coles and wow through our super funds. So it's ok we pay a bit more :)
Getting ripped off by middlemen is the Australian way
Amen to that.
Hah? I don't know about you, but almost all my super was lost in risky sub-prime mortgage and US housing investments during the GFC. Same with most people I know.
Did you write the recent ad for BHP?
I know it's cliche but the username checks out.
@shawnsmaggot: Yep clogged arteries, gut fat and a decreased life expectancy are among the highlights haha :)
Amazon fresh from what I resd once on bloomy was that it is a bit of a fail. They were selling bananas in handles of 5 and regularly cutting bunches of non-5 bunches and throwing away the individual bananas. Incredible really
Come off the grass amazon australia what is this crap in your fineprint? …from australian webpage
"To begin an arbitration proceeding, you must send a letter requesting arbitration and describing your claim to our registered agent Corporation Service Company, 300 Deschutes Way SW, Suite 304, Tumwater, WA 98501. The arbitration will be conducted by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its rules, including the AAA's Supplementary Procedures for Consumer-Related Disputes. The AAA's rules are available at www.adr.org or by calling 1-800-778-7879."
It’s unlikely anyway. Their customer service (returns etc) is VERY good.
I have dealt with Amazon for years their returns policy is A1, and they deal with all issues immediately. Never had a problem with them responding to issues.
dealt with amazon for years - service has consistently declined to the point of just like anyone else with a reasonable policy
It's not that good. Yeah you'll probably get a good result in the end but the processes are painful. Many chats to different people, being asked to return items that never arrived, etc.
Also those arbitration clauses are common in almost every big business 'contract'. They should be outlawed IMO.
Haven’t experienced that once, and I used Amazon regularly for a decade in the UK. I’ve been out here 6 years and I’ve experienced painful processes with Hardly Normal, David Jones and Dick Smith.
^^^ That as well as they cannot legally operate here unless they follow ACL.
Oh wait the Australian gummints doesn't enforce rules against big business, we're (profanity)ed :|
Really? The ACCC receives funding from government right? They've fined plenty of big businesses for ACL breaches. MSY, Harvey Norman, others.
@diji1 You can visit the msy home page right now to see a conclusive argument for why what you just said is completely wrong.
NOTICE ORDERED BY THE FEDERAL COURT OF AUSTRALIA
False, misleading and deceptive conduct by MSY Technology, MSY Group and MSY NSW
Following legal action by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Federal Court of Australia declared that MSY Technology Pty Ltd (MSY Technology), MSY Group Pty Ltd (MSY Group) and M.S.Y. Technology (NSW) Pty Ltd (MSY NSW) (together MSY) engaged in conduct that contravened the Australian Consumer Law (ACL).
The Court found that:
· MSY Technology and MSY Group made false, misleading and deceptive representations about MSY’s terms and conditions on its website; and
· MSY NSW and MSY Technology made false, misleading and deceptive representations instore and by email communications to certain consumers who purchased faulty computer products from MSY,
lol
loopylou…
Did that 5 hours just happen to coincide with midnight sydney or melbourne time tonight?
Add 5 hours to the time you posted and see if it is midnight in melboune??
I am on the left coast and 3 hours behind melbourne time.
hmmm
This topic seems to have drifted away from the original OP, but seeing as it has, here's my two-penny's worth.
Competition is good for the consumer, that's you and me, joe public, who work hard to earn a crust. The likes of Dick Smith, and more noticeably Gerry Harvey, are only worried about retaining the huge profit margins that Australian companies have enjoyed for decades by ripping off the Australian buyer. The advent of the internet has shown this to be true.
Does it really matter to anyone what companies sink or swim in the commercial world? Sad I know for the employees who lose their jobs because the company they work for goes under but who's fault is it when one does, certainly it's not the new kids on the block, it's the directors of the company they work for who have lost their way in an ever-changing world, or perhaps were just hoping to retain the greed they've enjoyed in the past.
I see things changing for the better in Australia, and about time too, but what I don't see is prices falling to the level that others in the world enjoy, well not yet anyway.
All true, but don't forget government imposed taxes, overheads and other costs of compliance that push local business costs way up. If a business is big enough they can mitigate these impositions with tricky tax avoidance plans, a lot of the smaller players can't.
Then blame government, not bigger players for competing. As it stands, this whole: "I'd rather give money to Australian millionaires instead of overseas ones!" makes no sense.
I thought I just did?
@EightImmortals: Haha sorry, must've interpreted it wrong - to me it sounded like the ol' "Big company vs Small business" fight, when really the govt makes all the rules.
@0blivion: Australia is a land controlled by a happy triumphirate of Big Business in bed with Big Union enabled by Big Government. This system makes those not part of the system unhappy and doing stupid like voting for white shoe Clive Palmer or Hanson.
It won’t be fixed until the role of government is shrunk, unions are broken up and once again controlled by the shop floor rather than head office, and big business can no longer use their mates in government and the super unions to keep their smaller competitors at a disadvantage.
This is so true, but even this understates the level of unevenness, Amazon is becoming so big sometimes governments has provided incentives for them to set up. So not only do they hardly pay any tax to support society, but they receive benefits (as though they need it) in order to set up ( in the name of, bringing jobs to my city/country).
Amazon’s business model is to eliminate competition by selling at tiny margins. You don’t pay much tax on tiny margins cloudy.
So tell me, when it eliminates all competition, and there is no one up against it, what do u think they will do next? Continue selling at near zero margin forever?
I’ve studied enough corporate strategies in business school to know how this ends.
@cloudy: well, yes. Wall Street is certainly betting that Bezos will one day lift margins, so Profit!, thus AMZN’s PE is many multiples of the PE of a hardware maker like Apple (yes I know Apple is more complex than that) which trades at a discount as we all know it is beleaguered.
Thing is, I think Bezos just moves onto disrupting the next market. Like a industrial cleaner, or maybe a locust ( take your pick), and keeps margins low where AMZN is established to stop another competitor entering and doing to Amazon what he has done to everyone else.
Also, volume has its own value.
Where do you change your location? I went into my account and didn't really see anything for it.
bottom of page change store
That sounds different to what OP was saying, he said he changed his account settings.
All the bottom of the page does is change the webpage.
account setting are available once logged in top right of page next to your name
i haven't had to change this though to buy from other marketplaces
@Toons: Yea that's why I'm confused, I don't recall ever setting a region on my account, and have bought from multiple different amazon country store-fronts. I don't see anything under my account when logged in that would suggest a region change.
@enceladus94: it sounded like they had officially given up on opening this week from what i'd read in the news, and the soft opening would be next Thursday and fully operational friday, sounded like they had conceded to the pressure of needing all hands on deck for black friday around the world.
Why do you have to change account settings? I have been buying off Amazon US and Amazon UK using the same account.
You don’t have to. I’ve been buying from US, UK, French and German Amazon stores all from my US account. It really only makes a difference to geographic licensing stuff like Kindle and Prime.
About time we have some competition in this "isolated" country. Ripped off for too long.
I'd rather bet on the skinny horse than the plump dead one.
Mass job losses are inevitable.
It's interesting to see people carp on about it… manufacture is shifting towards automation, transport and shipping are shifting towards automation, and while people might argue that the technological advances that allow them to do their jobs quicker, easier, more accurately or safer are a good thing (which they are) we're only a few steps away from automation being used for more and more tasks.
So…. what do we propose?
Did workers going out of work stop the industrial revolution?
So…. what do we propose?
TO not let vulture corporations into this country. You only think of things through an economic perspective. Little to no care for the Americanisation of our culture.
any capitalist system has no protections for an increasingly autonomous future. robots doing workers jobs should be a good thing because it should mean workers reap the benefits (shorter working hours for a given wage) but the current setup produces the opposite
Bang on the money dltra. Rather than converting the working class to the leisure class, we run the real risk of converting most of us to an underclass (which isn't sustainable in any fashion).
And smuggler: my concerns with the Americanisation of our culture learn more towards attitudes towards civil rights, civil liberties, and democratic socialism being things hard won which we shouldn't turn our back on. I'd also add that it would be nice to avoid the bullshit impression of democracy (really an oligarchy) that is the American political system too
If we have to be a capitalistic society, it would be nice if we followed in the footsteps of a successful one at least, and one that values it's citizens (which sure as shit isn't America).
In the short term yes, but in the long term it should create more jobs that overcome the initial loss. I'm not too sure about that though
Why are you so worried? Thousands are happy to be dependent of welfare income. They don't worry as much as you about themselves. Let them smoke, do drugs and gamble on a tab. Don't over worry.
A lot of professionals from commsec etc, were calling it for a long time, no one listened. They said manufacturing etc will die in Australia, and services were the way to go. Unless you have a niche experience, you arent going to get to far here, and that goes to anywhere. It not about what you can do, but what can you do differently. Look at S**t the bed, offer something they cant. Manufacturing isnt going to be China forever, it will move to Africa eventually to once China get to expensive, and then automation will be the way to go, once that get to expensive. It cheaper to buy robots in Australia then to hire in Australia
How come all I see on amazon.com.au all I see are kindle books? Am I missing bargains?..
Apparently, only the chosen few special snowflakes have been allowed inside to test what's coming for the rest of us plebs.
Going by Amazon 's comments in the AFR, key Australian suppliers let them down so they don't have the stock they require to throw open the doors to the public. Off to a good start then: Welcome to Australia!
Oh! So much for the hype then. Thank you for replying.
I was wondering the same. Does that mean Amazon AU hasn't really launched yet? The hype suggested it will happen yesterday?
That's right. We're still waiting.
Sounds about right, piss off the Australian distributors too. They are unnecessary middle men and will be the first to go.
They are unnecessary middle men and will be the first to go.
Man, I hope so…
Bets anyone on the fact that Amazon aus will be mostly shit and ppl will still go to US Amazon for real bargains. Too much hype and not enough substance for me yet
I’m kinda thinking the same. However if they look at their top selling maybe 20% of items in the US, stock them locally at the same price and then have free shipping, the train will be off and moving pretty quick.
Hell, most items could by 50% more than US prices and still be the cheapest we can get, with free shipping…
The challenge is that our Compliance standards for many active Consumer Electrical lines are different than the US (read far stricter) this will limit some of the direct transplanting of US stock into an Australian warehouse. This is especially true for plug pack power supplies and many wireless products.
For major branded stock it is different as they mostly produce to a high level of compliance that is able to be sold in most markets.
Have an Amazon account from way back, go on, automatically takes me to US site. No idea how to redirect to Au as OP did. No contact option for help, all completely irrelevant. FB 'msg' service didn't reply to my automated 'can you help' query.
Then there's the amazon.com.au website which is just books.
Huh? So confused.
amazon.com.au has been open for years selling just ebooks. Eventually this will change and they'll start selling regular items - but it hasn't happened yet.
change is inevitable, people really need to accept this. no one will ever have "the good ol days". the world will always keep moving forwards. you can either accept this and adept, or try do deny it and struggle for the rest of your life.
people also need to realise that with change comes new opportunities, its not like all of a sudden half of the population will be unemployed because they can no longer get a job in retail. there are "do-ers" and there are whingers. the do-ers will adopt, the whingers wont, and they are the ones who will be crying poor peddling their sob story on some cheesy late night "news" show like a current affairs.
Adept, adopt, adapt
Did Amazon officially announce they were launching on Friday or was it market analysts and news reporters speculating?
Nothing official at all, just good old aussie news outlets sparking off each other,
just more fake news
It was more unofficial. The rumor I heard (before Friday) was that the Friday launch wasn't really an Amazon AU starting to sell their stocked items type of launch. It was more that their partners can start selling on Amazon AU.
Quite a number of small businesses already have relationships with Amazon (mainly US). Competition will be good for consumers. Amazon AU are not quite ready yet.
News outlets ran out of recycled stories.
It really makes me think Amazon won’t be that good…
If your business cannot compete against these foreign businesses, then you deserve to lose your business. Protectionism is bad for any economy, causes ineffective allocation of resources - basic economics.
If your job depends on these inefficient business, then you also deserve to lose your job. Shifting times calls for adaptation rather than inertia.
Funny how people baulked at subsidising the car industry at $18USD per person (Germany and USA are $90-100) which generated a 18X return on investment, and real jobs - jobs for the people; but happily and naively “buy local” for things straight out of China at enormous mark ups and support only 1-2 people that are already wealthy to begin with.
It didn't generate "18x return on investment". The German/US car makers actually turn profits. In our industry, 2 of 3 platers were bleeding money hand over fist. People don't buy large sedans any more, it's that simple. Ford and Holden failed to keep up. Had Ford made the Ranger in Australia, they'd probably still be in business.
The car makers were not going to stay, no matter what you threw at them. The Falcon and Commodore were both orphan platforms with no export markets. At 20,000 cars a year, the economy of scale simply doesn't exist to keep a factory running, especially with our wages.
Both Ford AU and Holden were bleeding money for years…the coup de grace ultimately had to be delivered. Plenty of countries don't make cars and they do just fine economically.
@Kunalk222: Don't buy Samsung or Apple. Buy Australian phones. Good luck.