This Week In Ecommerce

Ecom Nation
  • 0.0 (0)
  • Business
  • Updated Weekly

🎙️ This Week in Ecommerce is your weekly download on the headlines shaping Australian retail. Hosted by industry legend Mal Chia and rising star Alex Ross, each episode dives into the biggest stories—from billion-dollar deals to platform updates, policy shifts, and consumer trends. Sharp insights, no fluff, and plenty of honest takes. New episodes every Wednesday. Powered by Ecom Nation.

  1. 6d ago

    Rates Just Hit 4.6%. Black Friday Is Going to Be Huge

    Episode 155 is Wednesday 30 September, the last day of Q3. Adelaide can't decide if it's summer, and Mal is recording in shorts. The warm snap is pulling summer buying forward. A couple of Mal's clients are selling picnic gear at full price, without discounting. That's a nice counterpoint to last week's "nobody pays full price" story. The big one this week is the Reserve Bank lifting the cash rate to 4.6%. That's the highest in 15 years, and it lands eight weeks before Black Friday. Mal makes the contrarian call: squeezed shoppers will save up and spend big in the sales, so November could be huge, with a hangover in January and February. Alex covers gift edits and event wear. They both talk about a two-speed Christmas, where people with a mortgage cut back and outright owners keep spending. QBD says manga is its fastest-growing book category. The licensing lesson is to look for the fandoms nobody's tapped yet (Alex had to Google what manga is).Vinnies has started selling on eBay Live, beginning with a signed Roosters jersey from $1. Apparently 40% of Australians want to shop by livestream. Mal is not one of them.New research says shoppers barely notice when packs get smaller but do react when prices go up. Would you rather pay the same for less?The RBA takes rates to 4.6% just before Black Friday. Deloitte has retail growth slowing from 2.8% to 1.5%, and it's a two-speed Christmas.Glassons posts a 50% profit jump on the back of Australia, while Cue sits in receivership with Myer, Brand Collective and Oroton circling.Eye-Patch Gate: Fenty, Glow Recipe, Huda Beauty and Vitamasques all launched the same "innovative" eye-patch dispenser within days of each other. Your manufacturer might already be your competitor.

  2. Sep 24

    60% of Shoppers Won't Pay Full Price. We Trained Them.

    Episode 154 opens with the date, because you asked for it: Thursday 24 September. Mal is just back from eTail in Melbourne, where day one was all AI and day two was loyalty. R.M. Williams and Oz Hair & Beauty both argued that loyalty shouldn't mean handing out credits and killing your margin. Mal then admits he's a Qantas Platinum lifer with 1.8 million points. The big one this week is KPMG's Retail Health Index. Six in ten Australian shoppers no longer buy at full price, and the index is expected to stay negative until the end of 2027. Mal and Alex talk about how retailers trained shoppers to wait for sales, and what to do about it. That includes keeping clearance stock out of your site search and product recommendations, giving customers a reason to buy at the start of summer, and running bundles and edits instead of yet another made-up sale. Coles put milk up 20c "for the farmers", stopped paying the farmers, and only took 10c back off.Meta's Muse AI agent lands in WhatsApp. Amazon blocks it, and Shopify switches on agentic checkout for every store.Premier Retail: Peter Alexander keeps growing on licensing and loyalty, while Smiggle drops $34M and closes 13% of its stores.KPMG's Retail Health Index: 60% of shoppers won't pay full price, costs keep rising, and the sale calendar keeps growing (Golden Week sales, anyone?).Larry Kestelman's Brand Collective buys Glue Store, The Dom and Running Bare. Is it a smart play or a clearance channel?KMD Brands posts a NZ$414M statutory loss that's mostly a Rip Curl write-down, while every brand in the group grew.

  3. Sep 15

    Proud Poppy's Comeback, Cue's Collapse, and the RBA's Surcharge Ban: TWIE 153

    Black Friday prep is well underway, and this week opened with something you don't get often on this show — genuinely good news. Tara McKeon has won back control of Proud Poppy after creditors voted to keep her running the business rather than winding it up, a real vote of confidence from the people she owes money to. But the story every operator listening needs to act on is the RBA's card surcharge ban — from October 1st, surcharges are banned outright across eftpos, Mastercard and Visa, paired with cuts to interchange fees. That's just fifteen days' notice for a change the RBA claims will save businesses and consumers up to $1.8 billion a year, though the real story is who actually recoups the cost. Tara McKeon has regained control of Proud Poppy after creditors approved a Deed of Company Arrangement rather than winding the business up.Ralph Lauren posted another quarter of margin expansion by selling fewer units at full price, adding 1.5 million new direct-to-consumer customers in the process.Frasers Group has demanded Accent Group chair Lawrence Myers resign immediately, drawing a line in the sand at the end of September.Cue Clothing has entered administration just 18 months after Hilco Capital bought it, despite narrowing losses and growing sales.Card surcharges are banned outright from October 1st, and the RBA's promised savings may not reach consumers the way it's being framed.A new category of "dopamine sites" lets people simulate the entire online shopping experience — cart, checkout and all — without ever placing a real order.Culture Kings turned the NFL's first regular-season game in Australia into a 635% sales week without ever officially sponsoring the event.

  4. Sep 9

    Gen Z Isn't Broke, They're Just Not Buying Houses

    Alex is back in the hot seat after two solo weeks, and it's a lean, sharp episode: five stories, no filler, in and out in twenty-odd minutes. The headline number this week belongs to Shein, whose Hong Kong debut shed $5 billion in value in five trading days — the second-worst opening week of its size on the exchange, behind only Baidu — and Mal and Alex dig into whether that's ultra-fast-fashion cracking or just Shein specifically wearing the regulatory target on its back. Aje is reportedly courting private equity and family offices to fund its next growth phase, fresh off a Lara Worthington denim collab.A credit-card-sized e-reader called the Xteink is quietly showing up Big Tech, and you can buy it on Temu, TikTok Shop and Amazon.Coles has ended its three-year Palantir partnership after a GetUp campaign topped 85,000 signatures — and its "wasn't surveillance" line raised more questions than it settled.Gen Z's financial stress is real, but the wallet's moved toward toys, charms and travel rather than vanishing altogether.Shein's Hong Kong IPO lost $5 billion in its first week, and Mal's not convinced one bad week makes an IPO.

  5. Sep 1

    Ooshies, AI Music Bans and a Golf Brand's Worst Week: TWIE 151

    Solo week. Alex is off carving up the slopes in New Zealand (allegedly back next week — you said that last week too), which means it's just Mal, a jam-packed lineup, and a moment to mark a brutal 48 hours for pop culture that took Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Peter Cullen within days of each other. The story everyone's already talking about: Woolworths' Ooshies giveaway added an estimated 1.5–2 percentage points to their sales growth in the first eight weeks of FY27, and dented Coles hard enough that a month of sales growth visibly slowed — all from a rubber toy clipped onto a $30 spend. Australia's music charts body ARIA has banned wholly AI-generated tracks from charts and ARIA Awards from 31 August, forcing a "substantially human-made" test after an AI-assisted Madonna cover cracked the top five.A 90-year-old Mitre 10 franchise in Jimboomba, Queensland has won a Federal Court costs order clearing the way to sue Bunnings over a store opening next door.Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle a teen-safety case with 47 US states, with almost a third of that payment contingent on YouTube and TikTok matching its restrictions.Woolworths' Disney Ooshies promotion shifted genuine shopping behaviour — 39% of adults and 64% of parents with kids under 18 changed where they shopped to chase them — while raising real questions about plastic waste dressed up as recycling.Golf brand Callaway split from creator group Good Good within a day of a co-branded ad backlash, in what's shaping up as one of the cleanest brand safety case studies of the year.

  6. Aug 26

    Why City Chic's 'Forced' Retreat From the US Might Be Its Best Move Yet

    Episode 150 — and Mal's flying solo this week with Alex over in New Zealand, so the proper 150th milestone celebration is on hold until next week. In the meantime, it's a big one: seven stories, four quickies and three deep dives, built almost entirely around Australia's reporting season and one theme underneath all of it — who's actually disciplined enough to make hard calls, and who's just getting lucky. We open with the messiest story of the week: Valley Eyewear, the celebrity sunglasses brand worn by Chris Hemsworth and Margot Robbie, has gone into liquidation — not because the market turned on them, but because its own co-founders took each other to the Federal Court. From there it's a run through Adore Beauty and Temple & Webster's very different record years, a hot-topic detour into the Tate brothers' court filings and what they reveal about the AU 'ecom millionaire' course industry, before three deep dives on Step One, City Chic, and Kogan — three very different companies all leaning on the same thing right now: operational discipline. Valley Eyewear's celebrity-worn sunglasses brand has gone into liquidation via a Federal Court order filed by its own co-founders against their business partner.Adore Beauty posted record $207.3 million revenue but saw underlying EBITDA nearly halve to $3.8 million, the deliberate cost of doubling its store network to 20 locations.Temple & Webster's underlying EBITDA jumped 28% to a new record, helped by a $3 million AI-automation saving in H2 alone and exclusive products now over half of revenue.Court filings in the Tate brothers' US extradition case reveal their signature luxury lifestyle was largely rented or paid promotion, and Mal draws the parallel to AU 'ecom millionaire' course marketing.Step One swung to a $6.4 million loss as it deliberately walked away from deep discounting, protected by a debt-free balance sheet with $25.8 million in cash.City Chic's underlying EBITDA nearly doubled as ANZ growth offset a forced 42% pullback from the US market, alongside a quiet shift of its Amazon business to a marketplace model.Kogan's core business grew 16% on AI-driven margin gains, while Mighty Ape finally returned to positive EBITDA after an 18-month operational clean-up following its botched 2024 platform migration.

  7. Aug 19

    The Iconic's Profit Jumped 53%. Guess Who Paid For It.

    This Week In Ecommerce

  8. Aug 12

    The IP Survives, The Customers Don't: Inside Stax's Rescue

    Mal's calling in from a Bali sunrise mid-reset before Q4 hits — squirrels, banana trees, the lot — while Alex is back in Adelaide mopping up after cars got swept down a creek in the weekend's flash floods. The news doesn't take a holiday though, and this week's two deep dives bookend the AU retail distress cycle from both ends: Proud Poppy filed for voluntary administration one week ago, still insisting it's "business as usual," while Stax — which collapsed back in June — has just been bought out of receivership by the Pushas founders in an IP-only deal that leaves every pre-collapse customer order unfulfilled and unpaid. The RBA held the cash rate at 4.35% for the third time this year, and Mal reckons there's still another hike in it before Christmas.Frasers' hostile bid for Accent Group got messier, with a board resignation landing in the middle of an active ASIC insider trading probe.Playboy's Q2 results confirmed Honey Birdette is the standout of the portfolio — comps up 15%, gross margin up to 65.1%, and US stores hitting $1,500 a square foot.Proud Poppy entered voluntary administration one week ago, and the hosts flag the now-familiar pattern of over-expanded store footprints catching up with founders.Stax has been rescued out of receivership by the Pushas founders — but only the IP, not the liabilities or the unfulfilled orders.Brett Blundy's Lovisa tried to trademark rival brand HARLI + HARPA in the US to block its expansion — and lost.

See All (160)

Trailer

About

🎙️ This Week in Ecommerce is your weekly download on the headlines shaping Australian retail. Hosted by industry legend Mal Chia and rising star Alex Ross, each episode dives into the biggest stories—from billion-dollar deals to platform updates, policy shifts, and consumer trends. Sharp insights, no fluff, and plenty of honest takes. New episodes every Wednesday. Powered by Ecom Nation.

Information

  • Creator
    Ecom Nation
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    160
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Ecom Nation
  • Show Website
    This Week In Ecommerce

You Might Also Like