Quoting moshi, reply 51i don't know how much of the goods IKEA sells in Australia are manufactured in Asia.
Probably most of them, other than the ones made locally.
They do their pricing as 'what-we-can-get-away-with' .... in other words...if there's not a lot of equivalent product they put the price high enough not to get people thinking 'rookery'....until the WWW bites them in the arse because you could get a desk sent from the US cheaper all up than bying it local....and both options have the same manufacturing source - in this case Indonesia.
No, it is the same absurdity that could see an Aussie airmailing himself some Nikes from America....cheaper than they are sold here....and they too are NOT made in the US OR AUS.
The Internet means this bullshit pricing will eventually be a thing of the past.
it's by far not as easy as you think.
see, you live on an island (technically a continent, but the number of people living there makes it smaller) and are culturally very close to the US (maybe closer than to the UK nowadays?).
but come to Europe (or any other continent than North America) and things will get a lot more complex when you have different societies with different income levels and different cultural values.
for example it would be impossible to sell goods in Switzerland or Norway for the same price as in Germany or Australia (sic!), as it would be impossible to make a profit with the costs of labour there.
or look at how the French value their food. they are willing to spend a much higher amount of their income for food than other societies. that's why their supermarkets are so expensive (and provide much higher quality stuff than everywhere else). in Australia i hear ALDI is the place to get food. i pity you if that is really the case. there are companies that sell worse junk than ALDI in Germany, but it is still a place that feeds the lower class (and Germans do by no means consider their food as valuable as the French).
transport costs depends mostly on how much taxes a country's government puts on gas and toll roads and ports.
etc, etc ...
it's far more complex than "it's cheap there, so it should be cheap here is well"
