So what will we will be buying, if anything?
Books, CDs, hampers, sporting equipment and thoughtless corporate gifts will dominate the online spending spree this year, says Rosenberg. Pretty much what you'd expect. And pretty much what the more astute etailers have been busy lining their catalogues with. For this reason, he defends the tactics taken by the likes of offline retail giant David Jones, which will try its hand at Christmas etailing for the second time this year. Some laughed when DJs launched a Web site in late 1999 that offered little more than a selection of hampers, but now, with a few carefully-chosen additions, Rosenberg reckons DJs has this time catered exactly to those who will be buying online: the wealthy, the Net-savvy, and the "time-poor".
"David Jones came online with very little strategy. But now the product range is very well suited to those people," he says.
However, Rosenberg says there are some product types that simply aren't going to move units online. What's not hot on the Web, he says, is clothing. Australians just won't get into buying clothes over the Web, not for a long time. He cites the familiar "look and feel" argument as the reason. Americans may get into catalogue shopping, even when it comes to clothes, but Australians still like to try stuff on and feel the fabric in their fingers and look in the mirror and imagine what it would look like with different shoes. That's kinda hard to do, even with a Pentium III.
"There's a limited space for online shopping," he says. "There's no way that online will be bigger than bricks-and-mortar." No one could agree with this sentiment less than Milton Burrell, CIO of outdoor clothing chain Colorado. Colorado launched its etail site in mid-October, only to find that some items - watches, sunglasses, towels - were selling three times as many units online as they were offline within three weeks. Sure, these are the items you don't have to try on, but even the company's anticipated "toughest" online sell, footwear, was selling around one-third as many units online as off in the same time, Burrell says.
Burrell agrees that clothing has not exactly been the hot favourite of Australian etail thus far, but he doesn't attribute this to any kind of national fixation on "look and feel". Maybe, he suggests, the finger's being pointed in the wrong direction. Maybe it's as simple as the fact that "no-one's doing it well in Australia."
