Published on the 22/08/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Although more than half of Australian retailers have a website, only a third can take orders online meaning sales could go to nimbler rivals…
Australian retailers are behind their peers in the US and UK in terms of their embrace of online retailing according to cloud based software provider NetSuite. The company’s general manager of commerce products, Andy Lloyd, who this week presented at a major online retail conference in Sydney, said that the proportion of US retailers able to take orders online was roughly double what Australia could manage.
However he claimed that one of the benefits of coming late to the party was that Australian retailers could potentially leapfrog the standalone e-commerce systems which many international retailers had built, and create integrated commerce platforms that could be used to support online sales, in-store sales, or hybrid sales where a customer can place an order and pay, potentially from a smartphone, but then collect the goods from a local store.
Lloyd said the proportion of retail which was coming from e-commerce was rising and, “when you see the growth numbers it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know you need to invest where the growth is”.
NetSuite pointed to new research which it sponsored in association with the Australian Retailers Association which predicts that online retail purchases by Australians (on both international and local sites) will reach more than A$18 billion this year and grow to A$25 billion by 2015. Standalone platforms built solely to take online orders can however leave retailers with blind spots. According to the research less than a quarter of local retailers which can take orders online have software that can link that information with the inventory management system, potentially allowing them to take orders for products not in stock.
NetSuite’s Australian managing director Mark Troselj said that local retailers were starting to explore what retail might look like in three to five years and creating platforms which were able to provide access from any device whether that was in store, or in a customer’s pocket. The company this week announced two new retail customers for its cloud based solutions – fashion retailer Tree of Life and animal products supplier Pet-N-Vet.
