When Korean office worker Lim Ji-han wanted a television made by homegrown Samsung Electronics, he had Amazon.com Inc. ship it halfway around the world rather than walking to a department store.

The two-week wait saved him more than $600.

Lim is one of South Korea’s jicgoojok ― literally, tribe of direct buyers ― challenging local retailers who have long used their protected status to charge prices as much as nine times higher than overseas Web stores. International shipping offered by foreign companies, such as Seattle-based Amazon and Gap Inc., are giving Korean consumers a workaround and forcing brick-and-mortar sellers to cut prices.

“Word is spreading online fast that products can be bought much cheaper abroad and people are blogging about product-specific shopping experiences, boasting about how much they saved,” said Gene Park, a retail analyst at Woori Investment & Securities Co. in Seoul. “Consumers who used to think of jicgoo as a complicated process are giving it a shot after realizing that the price difference is huge.”

For decades, South Korea’s retailers have enjoyed agreements with manufacturers that allow them to charge a premium for foreign and domestic products with little concern about competition. Overseas brands cut exclusive deals with local partners to get a quick start in Korea, said Lee Hay-lim, an economist studying consumption trends at LG Economic Research Institute in Seoul.

Consumer savings

The national government began an effort to spur competition from abroad after complaints about price gaps for consumer goods. Startups have also sprung up, offering to ship products from overseas at a discount.

Savings offered by direct buying often more than make up for import duties, shipping fees and waiting times.

“Why should I pay more for the same, or a very similar, product?” Lim said.

Housewife Han Ji-won said she also finds it easier to ignore brick-and-mortar retailers and shop online. Han, 34, buys from Gap’s U.S. website, pays shipping fees and insurance charges, and waits a couple of weeks for her clothes. That’s preferable to paying the prices at local stores, she said.

“Jicgoo saves me about 30 percent compared with shopping at Gap stores in Korea,” Han said in an interview in Seongnam, south of Seoul, where she lives. “I don’t mind the delivery time.”

Gap, Chloe

Data show that the direct-buying trend is expanding in Korea. Overseas credit-card spending grew 15.4 percent in 2013, outpacing a local increase of 3.2 percent, according to the Bank of Korea. Imports through e-commerce sites rose 47 percent to about $1 billion in 2013, according to the Korea Customs Service.

Under the traditional system, goods from San Francisco-based Gap are shipped exclusively to an affiliate of Shinsegae Co., the nation’s second-biggest department-store group.

Likewise, children’s clothing made by San Francisco-based Gymboree Corp. is sold to Lotte Shopping, of Seoul. Cie. Financiere Richemont SA’s Chloe fashion is among some 20 brands that can only be imported through Handsome Co., an affiliate of Hyundai Department Store Co.

Shinsegae, Lotte and Hyundai together accounted for 83 percent of department store sales in 2011, according to the latest figures from the Korea Fair Trade Commission. Shares of the nation’s three biggest department stores have slumped this year. (Bloomberg)