Editor’s Note: Welcome back, John Baulch!
As I am writing this week’s Blog on April Fool’s Day, I’ve been looking at the usual crop of corporate ‘look at me’ gags across social media and one in particular caught my eye. It was from someone pretending to be the US President, Donald J Trump. A hilarious post purporting to be from him on Truth Social implied that having started the Iran War, he is now planning to flounce off and leave everyone else to finish it. Apparently we have to “learn how to fight for ourselves” and “go get our own oil.” I don’t know whose job it is to come up with these hilarious quips every April 1st, but all credit to the White House for maintaining a keen sense of humour in the middle of a war with a potential global recession on the cards.
Wait a second, news just in – apparently that wasn’t a joke….?? Ah, ok, as you were – which, effectively, is waiting for an end to this ridiculous situation so we can all get on with our lives.
Not an April Fool’s joke as such, but someone at JD.com obviously also has a good sense of humour. Why else would the China eCommerce giant’s new Joybuy website bear such a striking resemblance to the Argos website? The font, colours, tiles… the likeness is uncanny – it’s almost as if it was done deliberately. Maybe they’ve taken a leaf out of Aldi’s playbook? Anyway, graphic similarities aside, everyone is now watching closely to see how Joybuy goes about recruiting customers and scaling its operation in Europe.
Talking to a few toy companies this week, they’re braced for a potential price war between Joybuy and Amazon (the obvious competitive ‘target’ in the UK and EMEA). That is most definitely a battle we don’t want to be caught in the middle of – a bit like the Iran conflict, there will be no winners but a lot of pain for everyone dragged into it. At a time when cost pressures are inevitably going to start ramping up the longer the situation in the Middle East remains unresolved, the last thing we need is two eCommerce giants going at each other hammer and tongs. Hopefully a price war won’t happen in the short term, but it does remain a plausible scenario, so it’s one to keep an eye on.
Elsewhere on the eCommerce front, the EU has done a good thing this week, having announced a major overhaul of its customs regime. As a result, online platforms selling goods into the EU will henceforth be treated as the importer, making them responsible for product safety compliance rather than the end customer. I view this as a positive step. Of course, it depends how rigorously it is enforced – but treating platforms as the importer of goods is long overdue, and the size of potential fines may act as a genuine deterrent. Now it’s time for the UK government to do the same (although why it will take three years to do that is anyone’s guess. “What do we want?” “A level playing field.” “When do we want it?” “In three years’ time” … said no-one ever.). When it finally happens, we might start to stem the tide of potentially unsafe or counterfeit goods flooding the market from certain Chinese platforms, undercutting legitimate retailers and suppliers.
There have been several other eye-catching retail moves in recent weeks…
Read the rest here.
