The NAB’s Online Retail Sales Index was released last week and had some very interesting points for anyone with an interest in ecommerce and online stores (or just making a decent profit on the net).
One of the main findings of the report (though I’m sure this isn’t news to any one who’s up on ecommerce), is that online spending in Australia is still going gangbusters – up to a whopping $14.1 billion last financial year. That’s a total of 6.3% of the nation’s overall retail sales. Given that the year started off very slowly, it’s an easy assumption to make that next year’s outlook is set to jump significantly again. And if the year-in-year-out trends maintain their trajectory, online spending will just keep growing.
Across the country it was all good news for online retailers, with the population of NSW spending the highest amount, closely followed by those from the Melbourne/Victoria catchment area – who accounted for 23.4% of the nation’s online spend, and then those from the Brisbane/Queensland area, accounting for just under a fifth of the nation’s spend.
The big winners from the report were retailers with a bricks and mortar store backed up by an ecommerce offering – these guys stole a slice of the market away from those store’s with a purely online presence. Which backs up our theory that if you’re a bricks and mortar store without a online store, you’re losing out on potential customers. The two seem to support each other perfectly.
Another interesting point was that goods sold by Australian-based retailers accounted for 73% of our national spend. That seems to us as a pretty good indicator that for Australian businesses there’s still a very big profit margin to be accessed through establishing a well thought-out, well designed ecommerce website.
So if you’re looking to develop an ecommerce platform for your business or you want to get the most out of your digital strategy, contact us at Bonsai Media – we know ecommerce through and through, we’ve got some great ecommerce designers and we’ve got a presence in both Melbourne and Brisbane.