Buying books online and more......

Years ago business travellers would return from the U.S. with all sorts of new gifts/toys and clothes that were not available in Australia. You were an instant hero with your wife/daughter/son (assuming your taste is not in your bum) with purchases of items that were the latest cool thing to have.... Yet as the net started to encroach on the cosy world of monopolies and "protected" markets things started to change..

For instance there used to be a huge delay between when a movie was released to video/dvd for puchase in the US and then in Australia...Due to this delay people would happily go to any of a large number of US video and DVD online stores and buy the movies well before they were released in Australia....Over time I suspect the collective brains trust of movie distributors locally worked out that the delay (which was the product of lazy scheduling and not much else) was costing them alot of lost revenue and (drum roll please) suddenly the timing of release between US and Australia is generally short...

In other ways it seems as though some businesses don't seem to know that the internet actually works outside Austalia...Books are a case in point...For many years (like just around the time everyone was aughing at the prospect of John Howard becoming Prime Minister - come on...that boring man stuck in the 1950's...don't be ridiculous) Amazon has been selling books and CDs/Videos/DVDs online. Their service has been mature (ie well developed on the basis of user feedback etc etc) for more than 10 years and they dominate the US (and global) retail book selling world. To get an insight into what their service is like you do not have to take a flight to Seattle via LA and sneak into a store carefully disguising yourself. All you have to do is turn on your PC, open up your internet browser of choice and type in www.amazon.com. That's it. So while sitting in your pjs in your study/family room you can avail yourself of the complete service offering of Amazon...

So why, why, why is the online offering from local resellers (you know the big ones) so poor...It is not as if it is hard for these guys to see what the best in the world has to offer..I mean 1hr of viewing the amazon sight will give you a pretty decent view on how the best in the world present book selling online...Any yet the local offerings are so bad it is nearly funny.

Assuming the people at our large local book retailers understand that the internet is global (side point to these guys - you do know that there are these massive cables from Australia to the rest of the world that takes and receives internet and other data traffic?? Just want to be clear on this) then there has to be a good reason to offer such an appalling service online.

It could be that they think Australians will not like annoying features like user reviews, recommendations, inside look, lists of bestsellers from the NYT etc. Or it could be that they are following the creed of anything good in life must take effort..Therefore given buying a book online is a joy then they need to make it hard so that we appreciate the experience all the more..

Perhaps they are hoping that we find the online buying experience so bad that we are forced to get in our cars and go to the shop to buy the book (sneaky and perhaps relevant if you are a franchise network). Or it could just be that our local businesses have fallen into the same trap as many Australian businesses...Which is to compare your service offering to that offered by other domestic competitors and not compare your self to the best in the world...Consumers deserve the best offering in the world and until the internet arrived it was hard to even know what the "best in the world" looked like...Now we know and a message to the local guys goes something like this (cue Peter Finch from the movie Network with slight edits from me)...."I'm as mad as hell with your crappy local offerings and I am not going to take it anymore so I am buying from world best suppliers wherever they are!".

Hundreds of thousands of people are doing the same. Amazon ships an incredible number of books and DVDs into Australia. It's not that the Aussie consumers are not patriotic. It is just that they want to use an online store that is well designed, has compelling features and is easy to use.

Ohh...and by the way...(please no comments on my reading material)...Why is it that (insert local book retailer name whose site I just went to) offers The History of God by Karen Armstrong for $A34.95 (plus shipping) and Amazon offers it for $A15.64 (plus shipping)? Pricing disparity is something I'll come back to on another post...