Published on the 25/07/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
E-commerce specialist Magento claims that although later to online commerce than their northern hemisphere peers, Australian merchants are now leapfrogging technology to put them on par…
Australian merchants are learning best practices from more mature online commerce markets and implementing many innovations earlier in the lifecycle than organisations which had to start from scratch.
According to Roy Rubin, chief operating officer and co-founder of Magento, who is speaking at this week’s Magento users’ conference in Sydney, local retailers for example have been quick to understand the importance of mobile devices and the need to streamline the way in which customers interact with brands to provide a seamless multi-platform experience. He offered the example of Harvey Norman as an Australian retailer which was late to online retail compared to international peers, but which was now learning from more mature markets to offer services such as “click and collect” functionality, where customers can order online and collect a product from a store.
Magento, now owned by EBay, offers an online commerce platform used by 150,000 organisations worldwide.
The company claims that there are now more than 200 Australian users of its enterprise e-commerce systems, and another raft of organisations using the community edition version of the systems. Magento was expecting around 300 at its first Australian conference bringing together end-users of the system, along with people drawn from its ecosystem of 17 major solutions and technical partners.
Online commerce continues to grow in Australia. According to the most recent NAB Online Retail Sales figures which were released earlier this month, in the year to May 2013 Australians spent around $13.7 billion with online retailers – about 6.1% of the spending in the traditional bricks and mortar retail sector (excluding cafés and the like).
This trend is driving investment in retail technology – but according to Magento’s head of product, Jimmy Duvall, because, “the investment in technology comes at the cost of the investment in traditional marketing, it has to pay itself off pretty quickly.” He said this was only possible using streamlined technical solutions which provided a single touchpoint with the customer across all channels.
In some organisations the e-commerce platform was now so integral to the overall retail process that it was actually being used as the broader retail system, which is the case at Harvey Norman according to Duvall.
