I’ve been reading and watching a lot of media recently about the implications of the global meltdown, credit crisis, apocolypse etc. and have been fielding a number of questions about what this means for us here at The Nile.

On balance I think there will be a significant slowdown in consumer spending both in Australia and NZ. Harvey Norman’s announcement earlier today of slower year on year sales is a good indicator of this. However, I don’t believe this is likely to have as big an impact on online retail. In fact, if anything I believe more consumers will now choose to buy online.

As a rule we price to undercut the high street bricks and mortar retailers, on all their books except loss-leaders. Moreover, we aim to be competitive or price better than most of our online competitors, especially those overseas companies who are not offering any benefit to Australian buyers. A lower Australian dollar means it makes more sense to buy locally. Simply put, we think our customers deserve as much value as we can give them.

Do the results support this? To date they do. We have grown 700% in the past year, and aim to continue delivering the value that underpins this growth. We are consistently investing in our IT and infrastructure to provide a better shopping experience and will step this up to ensure that crisis or no crisis, our customers are getting great value.