In an idle moment today waiting in the Koru Lounge, I was thinking about statistics around online shopping in NZ (apparently, only 50% of statistics are correct - only kidding !). The latest Neilsen report claims there are 1.4million adults in NZ actively shopping online. Global research carried out by Mastercard each year into online shopping habits, concludes the average online shopper in Asia/Pacific spends over $700 per annum. That works out around NZD$1 billion (and doesn’t include online purchases of airline tickets, travel or accommodation, which are some of the most popular categories !). So conservatively, if 1.4 million NZ online shoppers saved 10% of their annual spend by researching on www.priceme.co.nz , that would total a whopping $100 million in savings for NZ households! It suddenly gives a very good reason to search online before purchasing anything online, and grabbing your share of the more than NZD$100 million to be saved from smarter shopping!
Happy saving!
Chris

Many companies are under pressure to lower there IT costs due to the recent financial crisis. Normally marketing, HR and IT are the first operations in a company that have to spend less.

Outsourcing of IT services and software development is one way to cut costs. However, outsourcing can often be frustrating, time consuming and more expensive than originally planned without the right IT partner. The other way is to postpone IT project until the economy improves, but investing in IT is often necessary to boost sales and improve efficiency. This is especially true for brick and mortar retailers that can gain a lot by opening up an online store. Hopefully, the current crisis will not hinder offline retailers in New Zealand to move online.

One of the main consumer trends in recent years is ‘transparency‘. Transparency means that all the stakeholders have equal access to all the relevant information of a market place. In the online shopping space, this translates into accurate price info of the total price of a product and an objective insight into retailer service and product performance.

The increased transparency is a true blessing for consumers, who now know what’s really going and don’t have to make decisions based on incomplete info. A transparent marketplace enables consumers to find products that are truly good value for money (total cost, product quality and service, on time delivery etc.). No longer have consumers second guess the value of a product. Both the buyer and the seller are equally informed in a perfectly ‘transparent’ world. The market needs to provide the following information in order to become fully transparent:

• price comparison that shows the actual price of a product or service (incl. shipping and payment costs) - what’s the total cost?
• product availability and delivery time - when and how do I get it?
• product and retailer reviews - what and where to buy?

But transparency is not only a blessing for consumers. Retailers that provide excellent service and competitive products also benefit from the increased transparency through positive reviews and exposure of the true value of a product (quality vs. price).

It’s clear though that while transparency is a blessing for some, it’s a ‘tyranny‘ for others. Retailers that don’t provide competitively priced products and don’t deliver superior services to their customers will have a difficult time in the transparent world. Their sub-par performance will be widely known in the buying community through reviews, comparisons etc. There will be know hiding places left for retailers that don’t deliver what they promise.

The New Zealand online retail market is currently lagging behind many other countries in terms of product/retail transparency, and it’s PriceMe’s goal to change that. We intend to increase the level of transparency for NZ consumers. Let’s make the market more transparent!