Today’s Waikato Times (among others) has an article on online Christmas shopping quoting Coriolis’ resident retail guru:

“Tim Morris, a retail analyst for Coriolis, says although online shopping is clearly gaining ground here, there are structural issues to deal with.

“There’s an issue in New Zealand of scale.  You’re servicing a market of four million people and to do it properly, to reduce cost, you’ve got to build a huge packing warehouse.”

“EziBuy do a really good job but they have got the business and scale to build a proper warehouse that packs orders on demand and ships them to people around New Zealand and Australia . . . they can’t reduce costs that much unless they are efficient behind the scenes.

“The success of Trade Me suggests that online retailing has further to run but I don’t think this Christmas is going to be it.””