Online becomes off limits

If it had been April Fool's Day, the news that Amazon would no longer send goods to SA using the local Post Office would have had me snorting with glee.

But unfortunately it's June and the news is no joke.

Look, Amazon doesn't even bother trying to ship goods to Zimbabwe. But before we start feeling better, it should probably be said that Zimbabwe is hardly the benchmark we want to measure ourselves against.

But let's think of all those offshore sites that we can't download music from because of the nationality of our credit cards. Amazon is one of them, as is iTunes. In these instances the record companies just don't care about the technological progress other climes have achieved. And it has always seemed that these huge online stores don't care either about the fact that there are millions of people outside of the US and the UK just dying to pay them for their services.

Maybe this was the kick in the teeth we needed, because Amazon wasn't and isn't catering to us. Nor, unfortunately, is iTunes, although I love my iPod very much.

There is a huge gap in the market and I wonder who'll be brave enough to step in and snap it up. We may have Wantitall shipping goods from the US, but that's not all we need and want. We want our own full-service Amazon - from music downloads to books that take just a day to reach you and at a decent cost.

Disturbingly, a Harvard economist said during the week that profit margins for many goods and services in this country are 50% higher than in other markets, both developed and developing.

The obvious candidates to nail with this sort of information are the telecoms companies. But when you start thinking about it, books are more expensive than they should be, as are DVDs, cars, computer equipment. I could go on.

And sure - South Africa does have to import many goods, which means sea and rail and air travel. But where on earth is the competition? Why is no one trying valiantly to undercut the prices we're being charged and why is it that when we have dominant players, they don't use their procurement power to lower prices?

Look at Exclusive Books. For those of us outside of the Western Cape, it's pretty much the only choice if you're looking for a large selection of books and a store that may be housing a certain title or author.

As an aside, I don't rate online company Kalahari - it never has the books I'm trying to find.

We pay through the nose for almost everything and we've become so desensitised that we don't think it should or could be any other way.

Ren'ee Bonorchis, editor at large, Business

But the prices on both imported and locally printed books at Exclusive Books are unacceptably high. And I could use the tired old adage that if customers are willing to pay those prices then that's what they'll get. But if you look at a centre like London, the likes of Waterstones and HMV dominate books, music, DVDs and games, but their prices are a lot better than those we are forced to stomach. Those stores always have great specials on. In fact, when I'm in them I find myself sneaking around picking up the goods on special feeling like a criminal, because I can't believe the deals I'm getting and I have this suspicion that someone in the store must have not noticed they've made a serious mistake.

When was the last time you felt like that in South Africa? We pay through the nose for almost everything and we've become so desensitised that we don't think it should or could be any other way.

But with Amazon now forcing people who buy directly from the site to cough up another R400 for shipping, there are a whole lot of people who are going to look for alternatives - we will have become sensitive to price again.

Which is exactly the point at which a new player could capture our attention.

We've got everything we need right here. We manufacture DVDs and CDs; we print books. At the rate that some of these items are pumped out they've got to be costing the manufacturer just a few rands at a time. So if some large online retailer got in at just above cost and pulled in one of our cheap and efficient courier services, then what we could have would be a lot of happy consumers who still had enough cash in their pockets to buy a tank of petrol. If that were to happen I would probably think it was April Fool's Day again, but in reality the last laugh would be on those who have been doing us out of our hard-earned cash for an inordinately long time.

* Ren'ee Bonorchis is Business Day's editor at large