Amazon’s Australian Debut Brings Excitement, Dread and Defiance<br />“As you see more sellers come to the marketplace, you’ll see a deeper assortment, depth, and price competition will only go up from there.”<br />Mr. O’Leary pointed out that at Amazon’s debut, the Australian marketplace had only a few hundred<br />sellers — or third-party vendors — who are now listing their products on the site.<br />“We’ve been following it very closely,” Tristan Swanwick, the co-founder of Swanwick Sleep, an Australian company<br />that sells sleep-aiding glasses, said of Amazon’s debut in Australia.<br />They follow us, we don’t follow them.”<br />Mr. Harvey complained about the “free publicity” that Amazon had received in the lead-up to the debut,<br />and said their retail offerings had never posted a profit.<br />Mr. O’Leary, who has studied Amazon’s impact globally, said<br />that businesses seeking to match the company’s product variety and pricing were fighting a losing battle.<br />“I’d say it’s early days — it’s Day 1,” said Jack O’Leary, a United States-based analyst at PlanetRetail RNG, a global retail insights firm.
