00:00CCC is very concerned about, I guess, rogue retailers that might jack up the prices only to mark them down for Boxing Day.
00:10Now, I suspect we're not going to see any of our big major retailers doing that.
00:13But, you know, just keep an eye on that.
00:15It's very, very hard to determine.
00:17The other one we've seen this year is ghost stores.
00:20And ghost stores popping up on our social media feeds.
00:23They look like legitimate sites, very professional.
00:27But be very careful before you put your credit card into these types of sites.
00:33Yeah, Gary, how do we protect ourselves?
00:35If we think that a site, for example, might be a ghost site, what do we do to ensure that we're not falling for a scam?
00:43Yeah, listen, it's really difficult.
00:44I guess a couple of telltale signs is they all seem to have a very common story attached to them.
00:50They tend to have been in the business for, you know, 35, 40 years, slowly going out of trade, you know, and therefore very big discounts.
00:58One of the things I would do is I'd take the business's brand name, put it into Google, and see where the physical store is.
01:05If there's no physical store, that tends to be a warning sign.
01:09The other thing is look for testimonials.
01:11You'll often find there'll be no testimonials attached to it.
01:14And websites like Trustpilot are very good to put these brand names into.
01:18The other one we need to watch out for, again, on social media, it tends to happen online, is, you know, big, well-known brands with exceptionally low discounts.
01:27So, you know, RM Williams at 85% off.
01:30Those types of deals, again, tend to be scams.
01:34And, again, the only way to check this out is to actually go to that site and actually just check exactly if it's a legitimate website or not.
01:41So if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
01:44You're talking there about sort of invented brands or just like really, really straightforwardly scammy behaviour.
01:51But you were saying that also jacking up prices artificially, you know, can be caught by the ACCC.
01:57For retailers who are misleading and deceiving customers, doing the wrong thing, what are the consequences that they might face?
02:04Well, from the ACCC, significant fines and penalties.
02:09But at the end of the day, it also breaches customer trust.
02:12I mean, this is obviously a very short-term strategy.
02:16You get caught at it, you'll tend to find that customers simply won't shop with you any longer.
02:20Like I said, it's incredibly rare to find that type of behaviour play out here in Australia.
02:26But certainly the ACCC putting those warnings out saying just before you go out and make a purchase, you know, take a look to see if it's a legitimate discount or not.
02:34Now, what we tend to find in the Boxing Day sales is a shift from, you know, buying for others in the lead up to Christmas to now self-gifting and buying for oneself.
02:43So listening to your shoppers out there in the malls today, talking about products that they were looking to buy, most of us today have got a list of things that we're looking to buy.
02:54We've probably looked at the prices, so we know what the original price was before Christmas.
02:58So we're looking for that 30, 40 or 50% discount post-Christmas.
03:02Yeah, and Gary, our reporter who's down there in the Melbourne CBD has said that crowds just seem to be quite small this year, at least in comparison to previous years when we'd have people, you know, queuing up outside the stores, down the road and around the corner.
03:18Have we seen the end of this sort of in-person shopping on Boxing Day?
03:23Is this all moving online?
03:24What's happening?
03:26Yeah, online's taking a very large chunk out of it.
03:29I guess at the end of the day, you know, as we hit Boxing Day, consumers are quite fatigued from shopping in shopping centres.
03:38So the smart shop or the savvy shop is actually jumping online and making those purchases.
03:42And most of those sales went live early this morning at midnight.
03:47So I guess shoppers are out there early on their tablets, on their smartphones, making those purchases and then simply having them either delivered to their home in the next couple of days or they're clicking, collecting and avoiding those busy car parks.
03:59So, yeah, a decade ago, people were lined up the front of the big department stores and pushing and shoving to get in.
04:06Now we're just being a bit more smart in the way we spent.
04:08Today alone, we'll spend about $221 million online alone, $1.6 billion spent today in the Boxing Day sales.
04:18Wow.
04:18Yeah, I'm all for avoiding that crowd crush.
04:21It gives me the heebie-jeebies on Boxing Day so I can understand the move online.
04:25We'll leave it there, Gary Mortimer, Professor of Retail Marketing and Consumer Behaviour at the Queensland Institute of Technology.
04:31Thank you so much.
04:32Great to get your thoughts.
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