By Patrick Avenell

In the haste last week to cover the online launch of Harvey Norman, the even quieter launches of Joyce Mayne and Domayne online went by almost unnoticed. These three retail brands form the Derni Group, the franchise retail arm of Harvey Norman Holdings.

Interestingly, the Joyce Mayne and Domayne online sites are not facsimiles of the Harvey Norman site. They both have unique branding and layouts, though they do retain a lot of the standard online features consumers have come to expect from an online site, such as grouping by price, brand, product type and size along the left margin.

The Joyce Mayne site looks decidedly less optimised and modern than Harvey Norman. There’s also a different range to choose from, with Harvey Norman offering much more variety. For example, Harvey Norman currently has 75 TVs for sale, whereas Joyce Mayne has 61. Harvey Norman has 114 different refrigerators for sale compared to 60 at Joyce Mayne. In DSLR cameras, Harvey Norman offers 51 to Joyce Mayne’s 5.

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Delivery costs are also not uniform. Compare the two tables below, and you can see that Joyce Mayne is more expensive across most of the delivery categories. In-store pick-up is free at both sites.

Joyce Mayne delivery costs:

Harvey Norman delivery costs:

What is retained at Joyce Mayne is Harvey Norman’s Best Price Guarantee, which Current.com.au yesterday covered extensively.

The Domayne website is much more focused on furniture, bedding and homewares; and it has a much more conservative layout than either Harvey Norman or Joyce Mayne. There’s still a sizable electronics offering, with more than 60 TVs for sale, 44 refrigerators and 7 DSLR cameras.

Domayne also has a Best Price Guarantee, though it has not been updated since October 2010. The Harvey Norman guarantee was updated this month to take its new website into account. There is no delivery price table on the Domayne website, though it appears to follow the Harvey Norman model, with free pick-up in-store and a scale based on the size of the goods and the location.