Why Ferrit is Doomed to Online Oblivion
January 2007
In April last year this writer surmised that the key to Ferrit’s success would be to ensure it had as many retailers as possible, with as much of their stock as possible, and to ensure the site maintained a high presence in the public’s minds. Unfortunately since then the number of Ferrit retailers has fallen from 138 to 107, which indicates all too clearly that 31 of Ferrit’s retailers found their presence on Ferrit somewhat wanting. The advertising has clearly continued, but when the mall has a quarter fewer retailers than in April, this activity of “offering less but advertising more” is frightening to behold.
To be fair, Ferrit had a revamp just prior to Christmas, making it easier to purchase from multiple Ferrit retailers through a single transaction, and the announcement that Whitcoulls is making the stock of its Queen Street store available through Ferrit shows that Whitcoulls have finally recovered from its Flying Pig debacle and is ready to re-enter online retailing.
But the Whitcoulls story, far from showing any kind of success with Ferrit, demonstrates that the Ferrit concept still misses the mark – online retailing is not about simply offering your offline stock online. To do this means offering only the miniscule selection of stock that can be profitably stocked within the expensive constraints of a physical shop, which means that the advantage of shopping on Ferrit is only one of online convenience.
Consider this – a search for items with the keyword ‘book’ reveals a paltry 2000 books on sale on Ferrit, although some in the industry estimate that there’s probably around 50,000 titles. Either figure is tiny though - a quick check with Daniel Robertson, owner of
In Chris Anderson's Long Tail book he writes "The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles... [That suggests] the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are". Which clearly demonstrates that a) Whitcoulls and the Ferrit people “don’t get it”; and b) that over half the titles routinely searched for aren’t available via Whitcoulls’ Ferrit presence.
As well as the Ferrit retailers’ inability to grasp long tail economics, the other problem is the fundamental flaw that exists in the very concept of the online mall. Given the fundamental drivers of online shopping (price, information, range and convenience), and consumers’ now in-built inclination to search for almost everything via Google (which will usually prefer specialist websites over generalist online malls), and it’s not hard to see why the Ferrit marketing consists so strongly of offline hoopla and online search and site advertising – because it simply doesn’t compete when consumers have a particular item in mind and hit Google, TradeMe, or a specialist retailer they know.
Pro-Ferriters may argue that Amazon is just such an online mall now, and thus that it is actually possible to successfully offer almost everything via one site – but that is the key point: Amazon offers a depth and breadth of range that Ferrit cannot hope to offer as long as its products share the same restrictions as its offline retailers, leaving Ferrit in a middle-ground that offers little that is truly compelling.
Jonathan Dodd