Grays set to become Australia's largest online retailer after acquiring Dealsdirect and TopBuy



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This is turning out to be a very interesting week for Australian online retail since the news of Grays Online making another acquisition has become public. This time Grays have acquired Mnemon, an ASX listed Ecommerce Company, which happens to own Dealsdirect and TopBuy, two major online retailers in the Australian market. This week, Grays also started integrating oo.com.au (a previous acquisition from 2013) into their platform. (see this deal).
 
This means Grays will become the largest online retailer in the Australian market with annual sales of more than $440 million and 6.2 million registered users across the GraysOnline, Grays Outlet, OO.com.au, Deals Direct and TopBuy online stores. The new company will be listed on ASX and will be one of the largest internet stocks on the market.
 
Dealsdirect and oo.com.au are two of the pioneers and arguably the most successful ones in the early days of online shopping in Australia but most online retailers lately have been struggling to grow and this current move is being termed as a marrriage of convenience by industry analysts.
 
So what does this mean for bargain hunters?
 
We think this is a good sign. Australia needs a single big online retailer like Amazon.com in the case of US to develop the industry. Amazon itself is perhaps not far from setting up their Australian retail operations and none of the original Australian online retailers had the capability to compete against the likes of Amazon. This new set up will hopefully create some meaningful competition and force Amazon and other retailers to bring US price parity to Australian online shoppers.
 
In the short run, expect a lot more deals coming from all four of these players as they will need to integrate their warehouses and that means a lot more of those warehouse sales.