The changing landscape of the retail industry pushes into forefront the increasing attractiveness of online operators, which industry players said have been enticing both consumers and investors attentions for their value offerings and return promises.

The sector has been flexing its muscle in an industry gradually suffering from sales declines, which became more prominent during the last holiday season, when giant retailers complained of soft results.

Traditional retailers said that the dismal Christmas shopping season last year may have been caused by budget constraints on consumers part but they also argued that online retailers are gobbling a big share of their revenues and competing directly with web site business operators put them at a disadvantaged position.

Online retailers do have to worry about large overheads such as rentals and employees' salaries since most of these operators maintain a lean team and their online presence negates the need to keep shops and even branches for expansions, according to major retail players.

Yet the most worrying point for Australian retailers is the way GST is being applied on online purchases. At present, website operators enjoy the $1000 limit for tax free online transactions and Harvey Norman publicly complained of the situation, which it deemed as privileges that spawn an unfair competition environment in the industry.

Gerry Harvey, the retailer's head, and along with leading Australian retailers launched a campaign discussing the issue but their collective efforts only created further consumer sentiments against traditional retailers and further pushed surging sales for online retailers.

Such developments caught the attention of investors and reports said that group buying sites are not only hitting it right with consumers looking for value purchases but also luring venture capitalists to check on them and perhaps plunk down considerable investments.

Reports of investors injecting cash on Australian online retailers have emerged, with successive developments that saw Yahoo7 snatching Spreets, NineMSN purchasing Cudo and Amazon-backed Living Social placing considerable stakes on Jump On It.

The rising interests shown by investors on online retail, experts said, could be attributed to projections recently published by Forrester Research that online shopping would grow by one percent over the next five years and sales performance of the sector would jump to $33.3 billion within the same period, coming from the $16.9 billion posted in 2009.

Those number are only expected to soar in the coming years as the emerging industry continue to calibrate its operations to further attract virtual audiences that could number from millions to even billions, experts said.