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Online Shopping Outside the US?
Michael Roy asks: "With the boom of online shopping, especially eBay-esque sites, those of us north of the border (or anywhere outside the US) have noticed a problem: most online stores are in the US! In Canada we have North American Free Trade Agreement, but even so we wind up paying huge tarrifs, taxes, and brokerage fees to buy from US websites. While there are a few online stores outside the US, most US stores with Canadian locations don't have Canadian sites. I don't mean to bash Americans, but is online shopping a US-only thing? Is the rest of the world just more expensive to buy for?" If online-shopping is going to become a thing of the future, this is something that we really need to address. It seems the internet has gone a long way in erasing the political borders that sit between the people, but maybe it hasn't gone quite far enough. Is this even a problem that can be solved with technology (as taxes, tarrifs and brokerage fees are political creatures)?
The importance of a .CA name is that it indicates strictly Canadian content. To register a .CA domain one had to have offices in two provinces, or be federally incorporated, or have a trademark. Even so, only one domain name was allowed per organization. And the process takes well over a week.
Finally, after many years, this will change as of November 1st 2000 when any Canadian resident can register as many domains as she or he wants. Still, what about companies that did meet the requirement? Can you explain why (until recently) more Canadians bought books across the border from Amazon.com than from Chapters.CA? That has to do with marketing, plain and simple. Amazon was first to market and has built up an excellent user experience. I still go to Amazon for the reader's book reviews before buying from Chapters.
Perhaps more important that domain names is the issue of payment. Canadian banks have been slow to offer online credit card merchant account systems. Small companies just couldn't open a site and sell strictly to Canadians in Canadian dollars. Only the large bricks-and-mortar stores had the resources to implement online payment.
It's not an issue of consumers being scared away from online payments, either. Look how Canadians have taken to debit cards, telephone banking and online banking! We're ready to spend, but there's nowhere to go!
Regarding the observation that most US stores with Canadian locations don't have Canadian websites, don't forget that the Canadian operations are different entities, and make their own decisions independently from the parent company. It would be a poor business practice for a multinational to attempt to force its branches to be exactly like the US parent company, including selling online.
As the issues are addressed, I think we'll see more Canadian online e-tailers. Be prepared to invest in Canadian banks as they start to rake in more profits by offering easier online payment systems in the form of turnkey solutions for startup web companies.
David
As a resident of the UK, I've been online shopping for 4 years or so - bought my first Slackware distribution from Walnut Creek in mid '96. I'd class myself as a moderate online shopper ,averaging 1-2 transactions per month. I can only offer my own experience but anyway...
The hassles have been covered already, and fall into the areas of:
Availability. There's a very marked difference here between companies that "get it" and those that don't. There are a *lot* of online vendors (both within the US and outside) that aren't aware of, or can't be bothered with shipping internationally. Smart companies will take business from anywhere; hey - they've gone to the trouble of setting up a mail order distribution business so adding the minor hassle of international distribution is trivial.An excellent example is Thinkgeek. Counter-examples I can't provide - whilst shopping for cheap GPSes a while back I came across a few (mainly US) shops that just couldn't deal with the concept of places other than US states. My response is to instantly forget all about them. The lesson should be obvious.
Shipping, by which I mainly refer to hassle and cost. For many reasons it's a lot cheaper to go with "local" companies. In the UK we're a fairly enlightened bunch so by preference I'd usually by from a local distributor - Amazon UK rather than Amazon US for example. However there's always something you can't get locally (such as ThinkGeek's Map of the Internet, for example) so it's a simple trade-off: Do you want it bad enough to pay shipping?.
In fairness, intercontinental shipping is usually not too bad - you guys in the States have things *so* cheap that can still be cheaper for me to buy (shippable) electronic goods from US stores, pay shipping, customs AND Tax, and come out ahead of the local offerings... Certainly for more esoteric gear (like GPSes).
This feeds into Delay. Generally if I buy from a UK store it gets to me within a week. Your Mileage May Vary. Shipping from the States is highly variable - my Inet map arrived 10 days after ordering, my last Walnut Creek order took 6 weeks. The simple answer is: Do you want it bad enough, can you afford to wait, is it cheap enough to go for it? (It's that whole time value of money / money value of time thing).
Lastly the whole area of the legal & fiscal obligations. For consumer goods, it's (nearly!) always going to be legal, but you can get hassle from local Customs folks trying to prove it. Given the amount of this trade going back and forth 'cross the Big Pond, however, I'd estimate that maybe 1 in 5 packages is actually inspected at all. This is a good thing, from a delay perspective. However you can view it as a downside - it's your responsibility to report incoming good for import duty so if the Customs folks don't do it for you that's one more hassle (or you can just ignore it...).
I sorta went off on a fuzzy one here, but hopefully brain-dumped some of the thought processes I go through when online ordering. In practice, as time goes by I'm doing far far less international shopping because the whole internet revolution is (slowly!) driving down costs in the UK as well as increasing availability. Hell, we can even do our groceries online here now.
Conclusion: Online Shopping is NOT an Americans-only thing, it's widely available throughout the Western world at least. Whether it's right for you depends on a range of factors, not least of which is your own circumstances - For instance, my job keeps me away from home during the week and I value my weekend time. Online shopping lets me use little dead spaces during the week to "batch up" stuff I need (or more commonly want) ready for quick weekend processing of the incoming parcels.
Oh, and one last comment. Online shops are *exactly* the same as high street ones. There are those I keep coming back to (see above), those I've tried once or twice and will never use again (no names, no packdrill) and those I just plain don't like the look of. Generally the ones I've had most success with have been big, recognisable web-only firms (Amazon, Thinkgeek) that got in early and/or know the business. Johnny-come-lately .COMs and high-street shops trying to get their heads around this "internet" thingy are generally... less satisfying :-).
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Coming from Sweden, I thought I would point out that here we have loads of e-businesses. Having said that, much of the online shopping I do comes from either the US or the UK, either because VAT is cheaper there (books sent from the UK cost almsot half the price of books in Seden) or because I'm buying items I can't get in Sweden (ThinkGeek).
:-)
It sounds to me like the problem has more to do with Canadian lack of national identity on the Web. Shame, as I would rather have a Canadian web than an American web, but that's digressing
Seriously, it takes entrepeneurs to start e-businesses (Like the infamous Boo.com, Boxman or Letsbuyit.com which are large Swedish / UK successes). Who was the last successful Canadian entrepeneur? I don't mean any disrespect to Canada, but you guys are living in the shadow of the US. Talking to my Canadian friends, they are all in agreement that if you want to start a successful business as a Candian, you move to the States.
"Give the anarchist a cigarette"
A little planning goes a long way...