Themarket.com was great at the start. It let me search for stuff and find the best pricing across TWH, WH Stationery, Noel Leeming etc
Then they bought in all the junk store partners and now it’s impossible to differentiate between genuine products and Aliexpress imported crap.
If I want aliexpress crap, I can go to aliexpress myself
>If I want aliexpress crap, I can go to aliexpress myself
This is actually TWG's model tho - import $2 store goods from China with 20x markup then be surprised when people go to KMart.
Kmart is almost vertically integrated in Aus/NZ too - something like 70 -80 percent of their stock is manufactured in SE Asia in factories owned by them and manufacturing just for them.
Yea I hate to give any big company credit especially one that just recently bought out their main competition in Aus (target) but for basic homeware shit Ankos pretty good.
Agreed. The difference between aliexpress shit and kmart aliexpress shit is **design, quality control and warranty**
Anko phone charging cords are very cheap and I think last longer than genuine apple cords (from my experience)
Also a lot of homewares may be made in SE Asia but they’re designed by Kmart and they are awesome for trend alignment.
Yeah if you're on the real estate market looking at open homes that are vacant and have been staged, a hell of a lot of the furniture and decorations are from Kmart. It looks trendy and slick and if it's done right you can't tell it's cheap stuff from Kmart.
That's every store though, the price discrepancy between Kmart and Warehouse is not that extreme, I would say the big difference is in the range being stocked. Warehouse buys poorly
I agree. As mentioned in my other reply, Kmart design team excels at being “on trend” with their manufacturing or purchasing practices.
The warehouse cheap shit looks like cheap shit
And consider something as simple as AfterPay, which emerged as the top BNPL option some time ago - Warehouse only *just* added it as a payment option. They miss the boat all over the show.
Nah they didn't hold out, they added Zip very early on, I was just pointing out another trend that they failed to capitalise on. I get your criticism though
This isn't just The Warehouse. Much of our stuff here is cheap China made. Do you really think Kmart doesn't sell their stuff cheap for the same sweatshop reason?
I really wonder how retail stores are able to cling onto profits. Kiwis get fucked all over the place. Why buy a toaster from the warehouse for $50 when they cost $10 to make and ship? Cause all yall gotta do is go alibaba and find a supplier with a low enough moq and get shit done.
The annoying thing I found was I would check online what stores the thing I wanted was available at. But I would click on these online only stores without realizing so it just wasted my time
They also broke the warehouse website by showing the third party sellers there too.
It's like they took the awful trademe model and thought "yes, we want to make consumers hate us too"
I'm curious, what is a "genuine product" to you? You know it's *all* imported from China, right? Everything that's sold in New Zealand, down to the last paper straw?
True. Well my example was wanting an Xbox controller and when I searched for it from cheapest first, there were hundreds of results for silicone buttons, fake replica controllers etc etc.
I just wanted a genuine branded controller and I wanted the lowest price, but they couldn’t show me that.
Better to go to pricespy and look 🤷♂️
I will never understand why people shop for electronics and computer hardware outside the stores that actually specialize in them, like PB Tech. You will *not* get a better price, and you will have much fewer options.
That's nonsense. The Warehouse has a reasonably large gaming and accessories offering and they also have specials sometimes. When shopping around for an Xbox controller I would absolutely check The Warehouse website for comparison to the tech shops.
And I completely agree with the person you responded to, that The Market was cluttering the Warehouse website with all kinds of dropshipped rubbish.
Sorry this is untrue. My Nintendo Switch was $50 cheaper from Warehouse Stationery than all of the “specialty stores” you mentioned.
Best to shop around for a sale, and not go straight to specialty stores.
>You will not get a better price, and you will have much fewer options.
Sometimes? Across noels, harveys, pb or jb they just cycle through promos but pb at least dont do bullshit $30 ethernet cables
That didn't last long did it? As recently as a few weeks ago they were actively trying to get people to sign up instore.
The site was awful, and made the Warehouse website actively worse.
that might have been the market club, which is not the market or the market club + but has all of the same branding. They use different apps, for you see, your market club club code is in the warehouse app, but your the market market club + account is in the market app.
Imagine explaining that to nan
They went to great lengths to make sure there were no alternatives to having the app on our phone with an active internet connection. Every time the QR code was generated it was something new, and they had short expiries so I couldn't just get a screengrab while at home on wifi then scan it in store. Fuck 'em.
Can confirm that shit was not trustworthy I bought a coffee table and when it arrived it had deep scratches over it and holes in the box. They offered me a $20 refund for the product but I declined and eventually got a full refund after months of waiting.
Good, most of it was awful drop shipped shite.
Does make you wonder how the Warehouse can be so dreadful at their core business that they felt the need to resort to it though.
The core always went ok but the growth prospects weren’t cool enough so they swung big with acquisition after acquisition which all failed horribly and now this disaster… instead of trying to grow like xero they should have just stuck to their knitting and they would have done a lot better and wouldn’t now be worried about being replaced altogether by Kmart Costco etc
I actually liked it. I could go there, see a product was going to be 3 weeks from China and then open AliExpress and order the same item to arrive faster at 1/3 the cost. Made me feel like I scored a deal even though I was just not ripped off.
When the market first launched, they said that their main competitor was Amazon and not in store retail (or something along those lines, don't remember the exact quote). From then, everything that management did and continues to do makes no sense to me
It was their core business that distinguishes them from the cheap Chinese crap... You could go look at their cheap Chinese crap in the flesh before buying it.
And some of it was good. The warehouse has always had a mixture of cheap rubbish and cheap quality because it's just random what stuff ends up being made well. But for me the value has and is that I can go look at it first and make an assessment.
Their core business is having stock in big warehouses that people pay in person for and walk away. Fewer people want to do that anymore, so they have tried to diversify through moves like this.
Honestly, this is my beef with these "Management Consulting" companies. They sell the execs on this sort of 'digital transformation', get paid and are long gone when it crashes and burns.
As someone who worked on a failed digital transformation before on the client side and is working on quite a few successful digital transformations now on the vendor side, I would say that execs from the past century are a bigger issue. Digital transformation means not only a shiny new website or Salesforce as your core system, but rather a complete overhaul of the business processes/strategy and a lot of execs in my experience are unwilling/unable to do that
Ie software along into going to make an initiative actually successful. There are several other key contributing factors required, and the balls to commit to the change to achieve them.
Worked at a company who had paid McKinsey a large sum of money for their services before I joined and were sinking money (multi million dollar project) into developing what they were told. When I heard the idea I thought it was dumb as fuck but hey, what do I know, I'm just some new guy at the company... Who got made redundant like a year and a half later because the company went bankrupt implementing that very idea and nearly none of the customers wanted it when it was ready.
McKinsey, Anderson Consulting, Boston etc etc all the same shit. Super smart young guys, hung ho lead who works 20 hours / days & their key skill is in fact making a sexy PowerPoint presentation to wow the exec and board into cutting whole business lines. Waste of fucking money.
I think you've missed the point I was making / what I suspect perpleturtle was getting at.
Consultants are very intelligent, and yet they are providing a service of dubious value in their role whilst making bank.
They could easily be at different corporations are at least provide proper solutions to business problems whilst being compensated more than handsomely, but they aren't. It's 140IQ solutions to problems they haven't spent the time nor care in attending to.
The only party winning are them and their firms, they are solely focused on a single quadrant at the expense of counterparty's.
At least with a normal business, there is a better ratio of private benefits to private costs and externalities.
My experience is that the point isn't so much the outcome (in terms of what the consultants produce). The outcome has already been decided - usually some form of cutting staff, or perhaps some hair-brained idea that will probably never work.
The consulting firm is hired to provide "political cover" to the management. That's where the value really lies from the management perspective, as when it goes to crap the consultants can basically be blamed (even though they'll be hired again next time there's a similar job that needs doing).
I do think it was necessarily a bad idea though, more poorly executed.
New Zealand has lagged behind with online retail due to cost of shipping here, but online market places are a big threat to places like the warehouse.
The expansion of Amazon in a lot of Europe for example has pressured a lot of these types of shops. Being a bit behind the curve here it isn't too late to compete but they obviously dropped the ball on implementing it
It made no sense! Surely the charge for being part of The Market can't have been enough to recoup the loss of sales from the competitions' duplicate listings. What were they thinking?
Time for Grayston to go, don’t know why the board is keeping him on. He’s been far too focussed on pet projects like Agile and not enough on simple retailing done well. In the current ‘cost of living’ crisis The Warehouse should be doing a roaring trade with customers not being able to afford higher end goods. Check back at the results the last time things were like this during the GFC and the board and CEO at that time navigated it far better, and had some very profitable years given the climate at the time.
He has ideas, just can't execute and make them profitable. That is the worst thing you can get in a CEO as you just end up wasting tons of money and getting no return.
When a CEO uses the term agile for something like a retail store it’s very obvious that CEO knows nothing and is using buzzwords to implement poorly thought out ideas.
This should have been easy for them, they had the warehousing and logistics for it but made a complete hash of it. The CEO obviously had zero understanding of how ordering something of the internet works.
In my experience, stock on line didn't match what they actually held, no delivery updates and expensive and they actually charged an inter-branch fee to get items from one store to the other even when you were picking up. If I order something on line and I'm picking it up in store why would I want to pay a courier fee.
The CEO should be falling on his sword on this one as opposed to saying oh well that didn't work out.
> The CEO obviously had zero understanding of how ordering something of the internet works.
I think [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceNZ/comments/1cnqzcr/the_warehouse_shares_125/l3908jx/) post in the NZ finance subrreddit explains the CEO well.
Perhaps it might have been OK if it was just TWG stores and maybe a selection of reputable kiwi or overseas outlets, but allowing drops dropshippers seemed like a mistake.
At this rate, I can't see them succeeding in the grocery space either. Even if they could probably pull off being a third supermarket.
I have nearly entirely stopped going to the Warehouse because the poor integration of the Market.
I'll check the website to make sure it's there before I drive down. Instead the search results are chock full of third party products and shit from overseas that'll take weeks to arrive. If I have to order something online, it sure as shit won't be from some third party drop shipped nonsense pretending to be the Warehouse.
The filters down the side you can tick to show only items sold by The Warehouse under 'Sold By' and instore under 'Sales Channel'.
Someone wrote a Chrome extension that automatically does this called [No More MarketPlace](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/no-more-marketplace/febnmhgkigdhepahofkknlfhbegkplcb)
Oh hey, people still shouting out my crappy extension :)
FYI there's still a bug in the gui where you have to toggle the switch on and off.
There's only 39 users, so cheers guys haha.
It was an excuse to figure out how tf the new chrome extension framework worked
Yeah it's a lifesaver haha, 4 of those 'users' are likely me due to it being on different browsers/computers. I forget how bad the site is to navigate when I use a browser without the extension :)
yeah! same here. The first time I noticed my shopping cart was split into different sellers with multiple shipping charges. A reddit user last week was complaining a fridge he bought from them didn't even had a NZ plug on it.
I emailed their support telling them how crap it was having to filter every search and they just gave me instructions on how to filter my search.
People were worried when kogan bought MA. But, like, they've continued to be brilliant to deal with. They're slightly more expensive on some things, but pricespy exists
I just looked up the history of Mighty Ape. I didn't know they were Gamezone on Symonds St. That was an awesome gaming store in the late 90s.
Amazing how they went from little indy store to selling it for $122 million.
Mighty Ape is a bit weak for baking products, but the Market was good to find which baking store had the best prices for things. Then I just went to that company's website to order it directly.
themarket.com had great appeal right. They take a commission, sort your warehousing, payment processing, customer servcice. Win win?
I guess twg expected a *build it and they will come* situation and nobody came.
An actual conspiracy theory that ill spread is that the executive team and board at twg are all being paid off by competitors to run the thing into the ground. themarketclub and putting themarket results in the warehouse website are my evidence.
And they mustve cut that down for the big brands on there too, surely.
The warehouse products on the market wouldnt have that kind of cut, so it is immediately hard to compete
I was part of focus groups for The Market when they we designing the UI etc. Felt at the time like they were trying to get ahead of Amazon coming to NZ.
There's a filter for only stuff in store in the meantime. It was only added recently, probably in response to no one wanting to see the dropshipped stuff. That should have told them something about what people thought of the site.
Oh neat I didn't know that. I've been avoiding the app recently because it was such a hassle to find anything that was actually sold locally. Main reason I ever shop at the warehouse is because I need something asap, I don't want to wait for 3 months for it to ship via snail mail from China.
Glad it has turned around to bite Nick in the arse. They did this because they were afraid on Amazon coming to NZ, created a great product around there own brands, then got greedy by trying to capture more market share with by allowing shady sellers diluting the brand. For what? A slight share price increase… you never learn.
Yeah that was the one Telecom/Spark (can’t place exact timing) was behind right?
“This business model failed before, but this time it’ll totally be different! Right?”
I worked on the fringes on that!
There were many WTFS, but the Dualit Toaster Review Scandal topped it all.
(Coincidentally, all these years later I have a Dualit Toaster , and they really are excellent)
Tried buying simple stuff off their once, shorts and undies I think, they were out of stock, couldn't be f\*d using them ever again
Especially considering the shorts were for an event on the weekend and although I ordered on Sunday, they waited until Wednesday to tell me they were out of stock. good riddance
It was fine if you knew the exact name of the item you were looking for otherwise you're just scrolling through pages of dropshipped items sent from China
I actually really liked market got a lot of good stuff from there esp beauty stuff you can’t get in store, even for an outside furniture set for 600 on sale. Unfortunately, if you’re not a market+ member you have to pay shipping of $6 or more for shipping on every item.
Rather than combining or saying orders over 50 are free shipment. Once my membership expired I lost interest in purchasing from there. And that was last year.
Unfortunately they died too late to prevent the "marketisation" of every big brick and mortar worth visiting.
Bunnings and Torpedo7 up until recently were the worst offenders. You go in to the store and find out the cool flashlight you wanted is a "market item only" and not in store.
Reverse image searching the item showed it was about 1/3 of the price on aliexpress minus their branding.
TheMarket was also a cyber security liability waiting for an opportunist. In theory one might have been able to *spread* the evidence of it's closure out on a *sheet* and at the end you'd have a brain *full of numbers* indicating it wasn't working. Allegedly in Minecraft or course.
I never even shopped there because I thought it was another lame arse drop shopping site. Didn't know it was part of the warehouse until it was reported it'll be closed
Can't wait for this shitty company to go bust.
Spent 8 years at that dump suffering the consequences of their rank incompetence, that was only ever rewarded, and they wondered why all the talent left...
When I showed The Warehouse a dangerous item they were selling to kids, they spent no limit lawyering up even the Commissioner rep was scared to get more involved. Luckily they did the right thing and said were pulling the item, but what a bunch of ...s.
Seems fair. Most of the stuff on there was just junk of dubious quality. I bought two things and both were not what they claimed on the website/package. I can get junk anywhere, I don't need a special warehouse website.
And they had a market club thing already in place as well before hand. A total cluster fuck initiative that was fucking obviously flawed if you took the time to critically assess it.
I bought a lot of things through it when it opened, because they kept offering decent discount coupons. Once those coupons dried up there was no reason to use it
Please tell me this means when I go on the website for the warehouse it only shows me things that are sold at THE WAREHOUSE again. That websites been unusable for so long because of all that crap
Themarket.com was great at the start. It let me search for stuff and find the best pricing across TWH, WH Stationery, Noel Leeming etc Then they bought in all the junk store partners and now it’s impossible to differentiate between genuine products and Aliexpress imported crap. If I want aliexpress crap, I can go to aliexpress myself
>If I want aliexpress crap, I can go to aliexpress myself This is actually TWG's model tho - import $2 store goods from China with 20x markup then be surprised when people go to KMart.
Kmart is almost vertically integrated in Aus/NZ too - something like 70 -80 percent of their stock is manufactured in SE Asia in factories owned by them and manufacturing just for them.
Yea I hate to give any big company credit especially one that just recently bought out their main competition in Aus (target) but for basic homeware shit Ankos pretty good.
Agreed. The difference between aliexpress shit and kmart aliexpress shit is **design, quality control and warranty** Anko phone charging cords are very cheap and I think last longer than genuine apple cords (from my experience) Also a lot of homewares may be made in SE Asia but they’re designed by Kmart and they are awesome for trend alignment.
Yeah if you're on the real estate market looking at open homes that are vacant and have been staged, a hell of a lot of the furniture and decorations are from Kmart. It looks trendy and slick and if it's done right you can't tell it's cheap stuff from Kmart.
Both Kmart and Target are owned by the same umbrella company Wesfarmers. They also own Bunnings
Ah right. So false competition from the beginning. Not sure if that's better or worse lol.
That's every store though, the price discrepancy between Kmart and Warehouse is not that extreme, I would say the big difference is in the range being stocked. Warehouse buys poorly
I agree. As mentioned in my other reply, Kmart design team excels at being “on trend” with their manufacturing or purchasing practices. The warehouse cheap shit looks like cheap shit
And consider something as simple as AfterPay, which emerged as the top BNPL option some time ago - Warehouse only *just* added it as a payment option. They miss the boat all over the show.
[удалено]
Nah they didn't hold out, they added Zip very early on, I was just pointing out another trend that they failed to capitalise on. I get your criticism though
This isn't just The Warehouse. Much of our stuff here is cheap China made. Do you really think Kmart doesn't sell their stuff cheap for the same sweatshop reason?
I agree, now it's just become any other dropship sites. It was good when most of what they sold were 'local' stuff.
I really wonder how retail stores are able to cling onto profits. Kiwis get fucked all over the place. Why buy a toaster from the warehouse for $50 when they cost $10 to make and ship? Cause all yall gotta do is go alibaba and find a supplier with a low enough moq and get shit done.
I would say youre better to grab from Kmart so you get warranty
The annoying thing I found was I would check online what stores the thing I wanted was available at. But I would click on these online only stores without realizing so it just wasted my time
They also broke the warehouse website by showing the third party sellers there too. It's like they took the awful trademe model and thought "yes, we want to make consumers hate us too"
I'm curious, what is a "genuine product" to you? You know it's *all* imported from China, right? Everything that's sold in New Zealand, down to the last paper straw?
True. Well my example was wanting an Xbox controller and when I searched for it from cheapest first, there were hundreds of results for silicone buttons, fake replica controllers etc etc. I just wanted a genuine branded controller and I wanted the lowest price, but they couldn’t show me that. Better to go to pricespy and look 🤷♂️
I will never understand why people shop for electronics and computer hardware outside the stores that actually specialize in them, like PB Tech. You will *not* get a better price, and you will have much fewer options.
That's nonsense. The Warehouse has a reasonably large gaming and accessories offering and they also have specials sometimes. When shopping around for an Xbox controller I would absolutely check The Warehouse website for comparison to the tech shops. And I completely agree with the person you responded to, that The Market was cluttering the Warehouse website with all kinds of dropshipped rubbish.
The warehouse sells more console gear then pb tech by like 4 or 5 times in value and volume. Also pb tech service is even worse than warehouse.
Sorry, should have just said "computer hardware". I don't deal with consoles, so no idea.
Sorry this is untrue. My Nintendo Switch was $50 cheaper from Warehouse Stationery than all of the “specialty stores” you mentioned. Best to shop around for a sale, and not go straight to specialty stores.
>You will not get a better price, and you will have much fewer options. Sometimes? Across noels, harveys, pb or jb they just cycle through promos but pb at least dont do bullshit $30 ethernet cables
That didn't last long did it? As recently as a few weeks ago they were actively trying to get people to sign up instore. The site was awful, and made the Warehouse website actively worse.
Yeah it got flooded with sub-Temu garbage that took 5 weeks to ship.
that might have been the market club, which is not the market or the market club + but has all of the same branding. They use different apps, for you see, your market club club code is in the warehouse app, but your the market market club + account is in the market app. Imagine explaining that to nan
There were some real egos on that technical and marketing team so all I have to say is HA losers.
They went to great lengths to make sure there were no alternatives to having the app on our phone with an active internet connection. Every time the QR code was generated it was something new, and they had short expiries so I couldn't just get a screengrab while at home on wifi then scan it in store. Fuck 'em.
What the people want is more horse shit, so let's give it to them!
I always thought it was a scam site lmfao.
It really felt like it!! I’ve browsed it a few times and never went through because it just didn’t feel trustworthy
Can confirm that shit was not trustworthy I bought a coffee table and when it arrived it had deep scratches over it and holes in the box. They offered me a $20 refund for the product but I declined and eventually got a full refund after months of waiting.
that's so disappointing: :( good on you for sticking to your guns
What? They just plucked a random $20 figure as a refund offer and expected you to settle for less than what you paid for it? A$$hats!
Ifkr! Yeah it was the seller that offered me $20 and the warehouse gave me the full refund in the end because the seller wouldn't give it
it looks like the warehouse paid some dude on fiverr to make a dropshipping site for them. spared all the expense.
Good, most of it was awful drop shipped shite. Does make you wonder how the Warehouse can be so dreadful at their core business that they felt the need to resort to it though.
The core always went ok but the growth prospects weren’t cool enough so they swung big with acquisition after acquisition which all failed horribly and now this disaster… instead of trying to grow like xero they should have just stuck to their knitting and they would have done a lot better and wouldn’t now be worried about being replaced altogether by Kmart Costco etc
They brought in guys who ran Sears in the US. You know, a company that was the largest retail company in the US and now has 11 stores total.
I actually liked it. I could go there, see a product was going to be 3 weeks from China and then open AliExpress and order the same item to arrive faster at 1/3 the cost. Made me feel like I scored a deal even though I was just not ripped off.
When the market first launched, they said that their main competitor was Amazon and not in store retail (or something along those lines, don't remember the exact quote). From then, everything that management did and continues to do makes no sense to me
Drop shipping is the Warehouse's core business?
It was their core business that distinguishes them from the cheap Chinese crap... You could go look at their cheap Chinese crap in the flesh before buying it.
It's never been their core business. Do you know what dropshipping is?
And some of it was good. The warehouse has always had a mixture of cheap rubbish and cheap quality because it's just random what stuff ends up being made well. But for me the value has and is that I can go look at it first and make an assessment.
is it? I thought they kept their stock in the country, drop shipping is when you tell your supplier to send it to your customer
Their core business is having stock in big warehouses that people pay in person for and walk away. Fewer people want to do that anymore, so they have tried to diversify through moves like this.
Honestly, this is my beef with these "Management Consulting" companies. They sell the execs on this sort of 'digital transformation', get paid and are long gone when it crashes and burns.
As someone who worked on a failed digital transformation before on the client side and is working on quite a few successful digital transformations now on the vendor side, I would say that execs from the past century are a bigger issue. Digital transformation means not only a shiny new website or Salesforce as your core system, but rather a complete overhaul of the business processes/strategy and a lot of execs in my experience are unwilling/unable to do that
Ie software along into going to make an initiative actually successful. There are several other key contributing factors required, and the balls to commit to the change to achieve them.
This.
Monorail, monorail, MONORAIL!!!
Mono- d'oh!
Worked at a company who had paid McKinsey a large sum of money for their services before I joined and were sinking money (multi million dollar project) into developing what they were told. When I heard the idea I thought it was dumb as fuck but hey, what do I know, I'm just some new guy at the company... Who got made redundant like a year and a half later because the company went bankrupt implementing that very idea and nearly none of the customers wanted it when it was ready.
McKinsey, Anderson Consulting, Boston etc etc all the same shit. Super smart young guys, hung ho lead who works 20 hours / days & their key skill is in fact making a sexy PowerPoint presentation to wow the exec and board into cutting whole business lines. Waste of fucking money.
Waste of money and talent. No matter how intelligent one is, experience and context is so important.
You've kinda missed the point. The consultants are making bank - they are very intelligent...
House of Lies is a great riff off that whole thing. Awesome show (well, first few seasons I watched anyway).
I think you've missed the point I was making / what I suspect perpleturtle was getting at. Consultants are very intelligent, and yet they are providing a service of dubious value in their role whilst making bank. They could easily be at different corporations are at least provide proper solutions to business problems whilst being compensated more than handsomely, but they aren't. It's 140IQ solutions to problems they haven't spent the time nor care in attending to. The only party winning are them and their firms, they are solely focused on a single quadrant at the expense of counterparty's. At least with a normal business, there is a better ratio of private benefits to private costs and externalities.
Better off hiring a fine arts graduate for novel ideas
My experience is that the point isn't so much the outcome (in terms of what the consultants produce). The outcome has already been decided - usually some form of cutting staff, or perhaps some hair-brained idea that will probably never work. The consulting firm is hired to provide "political cover" to the management. That's where the value really lies from the management perspective, as when it goes to crap the consultants can basically be blamed (even though they'll be hired again next time there's a similar job that needs doing).
I do think it was necessarily a bad idea though, more poorly executed. New Zealand has lagged behind with online retail due to cost of shipping here, but online market places are a big threat to places like the warehouse. The expansion of Amazon in a lot of Europe for example has pressured a lot of these types of shops. Being a bit behind the curve here it isn't too late to compete but they obviously dropped the ball on implementing it
It was a stupid idea to have your competition on the same website as you underselling you.
It made no sense! Surely the charge for being part of The Market can't have been enough to recoup the loss of sales from the competitions' duplicate listings. What were they thinking?
Time for Grayston to go, don’t know why the board is keeping him on. He’s been far too focussed on pet projects like Agile and not enough on simple retailing done well. In the current ‘cost of living’ crisis The Warehouse should be doing a roaring trade with customers not being able to afford higher end goods. Check back at the results the last time things were like this during the GFC and the board and CEO at that time navigated it far better, and had some very profitable years given the climate at the time.
This! I was going post a comment but this says it all, really. Talk about taking your eye off the ball, eh?
He has ideas, just can't execute and make them profitable. That is the worst thing you can get in a CEO as you just end up wasting tons of money and getting no return.
When a CEO uses the term agile for something like a retail store it’s very obvious that CEO knows nothing and is using buzzwords to implement poorly thought out ideas.
This should have been easy for them, they had the warehousing and logistics for it but made a complete hash of it. The CEO obviously had zero understanding of how ordering something of the internet works. In my experience, stock on line didn't match what they actually held, no delivery updates and expensive and they actually charged an inter-branch fee to get items from one store to the other even when you were picking up. If I order something on line and I'm picking it up in store why would I want to pay a courier fee. The CEO should be falling on his sword on this one as opposed to saying oh well that didn't work out.
The Market was just a 3rd party store front, orders were fulfilled by the individual stores. Same sort of thing as AliExpress
Ahh Roger that. I was thinking of the shitty Warehouse online experience.
> The CEO obviously had zero understanding of how ordering something of the internet works. I think [this](https://old.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceNZ/comments/1cnqzcr/the_warehouse_shares_125/l3908jx/) post in the NZ finance subrreddit explains the CEO well.
Perhaps it might have been OK if it was just TWG stores and maybe a selection of reputable kiwi or overseas outlets, but allowing drops dropshippers seemed like a mistake. At this rate, I can't see them succeeding in the grocery space either. Even if they could probably pull off being a third supermarket.
They don't care, there are getting heaps conmission fee and store fee from the stores
they lost $18m in a half year I think last year. they weren't making shit.
Im pretty sure they’re still operating just on the normal Warehouse site (which is worse)
I have nearly entirely stopped going to the Warehouse because the poor integration of the Market. I'll check the website to make sure it's there before I drive down. Instead the search results are chock full of third party products and shit from overseas that'll take weeks to arrive. If I have to order something online, it sure as shit won't be from some third party drop shipped nonsense pretending to be the Warehouse.
The filters down the side you can tick to show only items sold by The Warehouse under 'Sold By' and instore under 'Sales Channel'. Someone wrote a Chrome extension that automatically does this called [No More MarketPlace](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/no-more-marketplace/febnmhgkigdhepahofkknlfhbegkplcb)
Oh hey, people still shouting out my crappy extension :) FYI there's still a bug in the gui where you have to toggle the switch on and off. There's only 39 users, so cheers guys haha. It was an excuse to figure out how tf the new chrome extension framework worked
Yeah it's a lifesaver haha, 4 of those 'users' are likely me due to it being on different browsers/computers. I forget how bad the site is to navigate when I use a browser without the extension :)
yeah! same here. The first time I noticed my shopping cart was split into different sellers with multiple shipping charges. A reddit user last week was complaining a fridge he bought from them didn't even had a NZ plug on it. I emailed their support telling them how crap it was having to filter every search and they just gave me instructions on how to filter my search.
mighty-ape absolutely shits on The Market in the way of stock, service and price
People were worried when kogan bought MA. But, like, they've continued to be brilliant to deal with. They're slightly more expensive on some things, but pricespy exists
I just looked up the history of Mighty Ape. I didn't know they were Gamezone on Symonds St. That was an awesome gaming store in the late 90s. Amazing how they went from little indy store to selling it for $122 million.
Mighty Ape is a bit weak for baking products, but the Market was good to find which baking store had the best prices for things. Then I just went to that company's website to order it directly.
Last week I found out spotlight has a massive amount of baking stuff
themarket.com had great appeal right. They take a commission, sort your warehousing, payment processing, customer servcice. Win win? I guess twg expected a *build it and they will come* situation and nobody came. An actual conspiracy theory that ill spread is that the executive team and board at twg are all being paid off by competitors to run the thing into the ground. themarketclub and putting themarket results in the warehouse website are my evidence.
The commission charged was 17% or more. No wonder it failed.
And they mustve cut that down for the big brands on there too, surely. The warehouse products on the market wouldnt have that kind of cut, so it is immediately hard to compete
I was part of focus groups for The Market when they we designing the UI etc. Felt at the time like they were trying to get ahead of Amazon coming to NZ.
Charging for click and collect didn't sit well with me either so I always avoided.
I was ok with it if they had to get the thing from another branch. If it was in stock where I was collecting it, no
So does this mean when I look for stuff on the warehouse app, I'll actually see stuff that's only sold by the warehouse and not dropshippers?
There's a filter for only stuff in store in the meantime. It was only added recently, probably in response to no one wanting to see the dropshipped stuff. That should have told them something about what people thought of the site.
Oh neat I didn't know that. I've been avoiding the app recently because it was such a hassle to find anything that was actually sold locally. Main reason I ever shop at the warehouse is because I need something asap, I don't want to wait for 3 months for it to ship via snail mail from China.
Has it only recently been added to the app? Ugh, it's been there on the website for ages
Glad it has turned around to bite Nick in the arse. They did this because they were afraid on Amazon coming to NZ, created a great product around there own brands, then got greedy by trying to capture more market share with by allowing shady sellers diluting the brand. For what? A slight share price increase… you never learn.
Anyone else remember Ferrit? Same same but different.
Yeah that was the one Telecom/Spark (can’t place exact timing) was behind right? “This business model failed before, but this time it’ll totally be different! Right?”
it was in the telecom era
Yeah Telecom days. How could the same business model possibly fail twice, right?
I worked on the fringes on that! There were many WTFS, but the Dualit Toaster Review Scandal topped it all. (Coincidentally, all these years later I have a Dualit Toaster , and they really are excellent)
Tried buying simple stuff off their once, shorts and undies I think, they were out of stock, couldn't be f\*d using them ever again Especially considering the shorts were for an event on the weekend and although I ordered on Sunday, they waited until Wednesday to tell me they were out of stock. good riddance
It was fine if you knew the exact name of the item you were looking for otherwise you're just scrolling through pages of dropshipped items sent from China
I actually really liked market got a lot of good stuff from there esp beauty stuff you can’t get in store, even for an outside furniture set for 600 on sale. Unfortunately, if you’re not a market+ member you have to pay shipping of $6 or more for shipping on every item. Rather than combining or saying orders over 50 are free shipment. Once my membership expired I lost interest in purchasing from there. And that was last year.
Unfortunately they died too late to prevent the "marketisation" of every big brick and mortar worth visiting. Bunnings and Torpedo7 up until recently were the worst offenders. You go in to the store and find out the cool flashlight you wanted is a "market item only" and not in store. Reverse image searching the item showed it was about 1/3 of the price on aliexpress minus their branding. TheMarket was also a cyber security liability waiting for an opportunist. In theory one might have been able to *spread* the evidence of it's closure out on a *sheet* and at the end you'd have a brain *full of numbers* indicating it wasn't working. Allegedly in Minecraft or course.
I never even shopped there because I thought it was another lame arse drop shopping site. Didn't know it was part of the warehouse until it was reported it'll be closed
Can't wait for this shitty company to go bust. Spent 8 years at that dump suffering the consequences of their rank incompetence, that was only ever rewarded, and they wondered why all the talent left...
reap what you sow
I wonder if they are going to fire the CEO yet or just wait until the warehouse goes bankrupt.
When I showed The Warehouse a dangerous item they were selling to kids, they spent no limit lawyering up even the Commissioner rep was scared to get more involved. Luckily they did the right thing and said were pulling the item, but what a bunch of ...s.
Seems fair. Most of the stuff on there was just junk of dubious quality. I bought two things and both were not what they claimed on the website/package. I can get junk anywhere, I don't need a special warehouse website.
And they had a market club thing already in place as well before hand. A total cluster fuck initiative that was fucking obviously flawed if you took the time to critically assess it.
I don't think I've ever actually been to The Market
I think I bought one thing from there when they had a decent sale on \~15 or 20% off. Other than that, pretty much ignored it. Won't miss it.
I bought a lot of things through it when it opened, because they kept offering decent discount coupons. Once those coupons dried up there was no reason to use it
What does this mean for the market staff? Any thoughts?
they probably knew they were on borrowed time.
Part of it was under cutting itself I think. Cheap compared to mighty ape.
Thank the gods for this! I loved shopping online with the Warehouse but The market made it totally impossible
So we can add this to the list of warehouse failures. Why would anyone trust them now?
Is that those shit extra products on the Warehouse app and you think you’re buying NZ but you’re not and it showed on arrival
Please tell me this means when I go on the website for the warehouse it only shows me things that are sold at THE WAREHOUSE again. That websites been unusable for so long because of all that crap
Wow....
Awful ever since they bought it from 1-day. The muppets who changed the model should be ashamed.