Have your say: Online shopping

People shop online because its much cheaper, says one reader.

Here we go again with another round of moaning and groaning from the retail sector in relation to lost sales via internet purchases, and this time the Government is wading into the discussion as well.

When in business, the single most important skill anyone must have is the ability to meet and move with its market. If you retail milk at $23 a litre it's not going to sell, easy right?

However, the retail market in New Zealand seems totally unable to realise that we now live in a global community of shoppers, where anyone at any time can visit a webpage and see the standard global price of goods.

The big shock is that the global price is usually around half what we pay locally even including the addition of GST.

The reason for this seems to be, because it can. Most goods these days are manufactured in bulk at a location somewhere in Asia where they are warehoused and then dispatched to the location of sale.

All the goods are usually the same size, colour, shape etc for the global market. So this massive price increase from when the the goods leave there and arrive here seems somewhat unjustified.

The retailers' market has moved on and they are simply unwilling to give up their massive profits to lower the prices and reflect the global price.

Now, I understand the issue may sit with the distributors of these goods rather than the retailers but the result remains the same. As with the milk scenario earlier on, if the general cost of goods was around the same or even 10 per cent more than overseas, people simply would not buy from the internet.

They would go into the shop and walk out with it.

Trevor Kalkhoven
Maungatapere

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