Opinion: Side by slide

Gerry Harvey said so this morning, and he’s got a shedload of stores sending him sobering sales statistics.

But Harvey Norman isn’t in the online sales business just yet, and there are those who believe the slide in sales isn’t down but sideways. Ruslan Kogan, founder of Kogan Technologies (www.kogan.com.au), is one who begs to differ.

Kogan reckons that canny consumers haven’t run out of cash and credit just yet – he thinks they’ve run out of the bricks and mortar stores and into the online stores – which is where he sells most of his consumer electronic products.

Is he right?

Is the same thing happening in IT reseller land? Of course, you’d need both a physical and a virtual store to be able to answer the question but there are plenty who fit that category. We’d like to see a graph of online sales matched up with the offline sales to see if both are trending down or if online is picking up the slack.

Of course, should the financial mess last long enough or go deep enough, the online stores will be seeing the same trends – down the slippery slide.

What will be really interesting is to see whether those customers who’ve been given a gentle shove into online to save a buck during the hard times, move back to the malls when the crisis is over. Some habits take a long time to change but other habits get dropped quickly and never revived.

It will be a strange world indeed if the shopping malls become mausoleums while the online stores keep buzzing.

But right now, I’ll bet there’s more than a few resellers wishing they had an online shop.