Thinking Out Loud on Ecommerce

The time Beer Cartel was on a billboard at Times Square New York.

Every year BigCommerce run their Make it Big competition — an awards program that recognises BigCommerce customers for achievement in Design, Innovation, Marketing and Global Strategy.

I remember writing my entry on the bus one day on the way home from work. It talked about our massively successful Australian Craft Beer Survey that helped elevate Beer Cartel from being another retailer, to an authority in the craft beer space.

We had huge success with the survey including:

• Growing our email database by 60,000+
• Generating $100,000 in revenue each year directly attributable to the survey
• Significant media coverage and SEO lift

Content strategy done right doesn't just build an audience. It changes how people see you.

There's some pretty interesting changes in Google search happening right now.

As part of Google's Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) it has introduced Business Agent — which consumers will now start seeing and be able to interact with.

How Business Agent works:

• At high-intent moments, Google surfaces a chat window with the brand's own AI agent
• A shopper can search for something like "best dress" and get answers in the brand's voice
• The agent recommends products, compares options, and guides the purchase
• In time: adding to cart, applying discounts, loyalty linking, or completing checkout without ever leaving Search

If you're in ecommerce and you're not thinking about how your product data feeds into this, now is the time to start.

"I'm sorry, I didn't get that. Try rephrasing your question or click Talk to a human."

That was the chatbot answer I got when I recently asked an online store if it had a book in stock.

The 2026 Online CX Report suggests it's not uncommon. Mentions of "useless bots" in customer feedback are up 70% year on year. Customer support is the reason 17.9% of shoppers abandon a purchase, up from 14.2%.

Three stats that put this in perspective:

• A new abandonment category that didn't exist last year: 3.4% of shoppers leave because a bot looped or blocked their path to a real person
• The share of shoppers citing "unhelpful support" as the reason they don't come back has risen for the third straight year
• Live chat with a human still has the highest satisfaction score of any support channel

A simple support option that works is better than a bot that can't.

Pokémon Go players spent a decade unknowingly building the world's most detailed street map. Now it's being used to deliver pizza.

Over my 16 years in ecommerce, last-mile delivery was one of those problems that never really got solved. Getting a product from a warehouse to a front door efficiently, on time, and at a cost that makes sense, is hard.

Robots have always felt like part of the answer. But the navigation challenge in urban environments is tough. GPS drifts by tens of metres in dense cities as signals bounce off glass and concrete — enough to put a robot on the wrong block entirely.

This is where it gets interesting. Every time a Pokémon Go player scanned a landmark, their phone captured an image with precise metadata — location coordinates, camera angle, lighting conditions. Multiply that by 30 billion urban images captured by 500M players over a decade, and you have the most accurate street-level map ever built.

The data that powers the next wave of ecommerce logistics already exists. Someone just has to connect it.

Have you ever wondered about the colour of your thumbs up emoji? 👍

Whenever I see someone use a different shade, I'm a little envious. They've got their emoji perfectly dialled to represent them. Me? I stick with the classic yellow default.

Unicode chose yellow back in 2010 for three key reasons:

• Neutrality — it doesn’t match any real skin tone, avoiding racial bias
• Ties to the bright 1963 smiley face (created to cheer up insurance workers going through a tough time)
• Strong visibility on screens — you can see fingers pretty clearly

Then in 2015, skin tones arrived via the Fitzpatrick scale. Now you can pick what fits you… or stay Simpsons yellow.

Coming soon to ChatGPT — Virgin Australia. ✈️

Virgin Australia and ChatGPT have just announced a partnership to allow users to research, compare, and book flights from ChatGPT. No need to open a browser or switch between comparison sites.

This builds on VA’s existing AI Trip Planner, but it’s the integration point that matters.

Instead of AI being a feature on their website, their product becomes available inside the tools people are already using. That’s the shift — not AI on your site, but your inventory inside AI platforms.

16% of Australians have received a parcel they forgot they ordered.

New PayPal data confirms what Shopify dashboards have been showing: 79% of Australians are buying online between 9pm and 5am. A quarter say they’re more likely to buy impulsively. Some stores are seeing 59% year-on-year growth in late-night orders.

If you’re thinking about how to convert these customers, mobile experience is everything. 70% of late-night orders are placed on a phone. Simpler pages, fewer choices, and clear CTAs all help convert.

And if your campaigns are going out at 10am, you’re hitting inboxes when people are busy — not when intent and downtime align.

Australia’s subscription ecommerce market is about to grow 20x in 9 years.

According to IMARC Group, Australia’s subscription ecommerce market reached USD $7.9 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach USD $155.6 billion by 2034 — a compound annual growth rate of 38.15%.

The main driver? Eliminating repetitive purchasing tasks. Once that habit forms, it sticks.

At Beer Cartel we launched one of Australia’s first alcohol ecommerce subscriptions — a monthly beer box — back in 2009. Technology has made subscriptions so much easier to offer and manage since then.

In March 2020, our order volume at Beer Cartel went from 50–100 orders a day to 300+.

Same warehouse, same equipment — half the team (we’d split into two groups in case one got COVID) — three times the orders.

The first thing we did wasn’t hire more people. I sat down with the fulfilment team and mapped every single step of our existing process to find the bottlenecks creating challenges.

We looked at how orders were picked, how they were packed, and all the points of resistance throughout. Small process changes unlocked capacity we didn’t know we had.

Amazon has launched its first fresh grocery delivery in Australia, partnering with Harris Farm Markets to bring seasonal produce, meats, and specialty items to Sydney doors via same-day and next-day options.

Amazon Fresh has struggled globally — high costs, slim margins, and fierce competition. But pairing with Harris Farm gives them something they’ve lacked: a brand Australians already trust for quality produce.

For Australian ecommerce, this is another signal that the market is maturing. When Amazon starts competing seriously in a category, it forces everyone else to raise their game on delivery speed, UX, and pricing.

In 2024, I signed up for an 80km ultramarathon from Bondi to Manly, despite previously only running about 100km a year.

What followed was one of the biggest shifts in my health and life approach since high school. I hadn’t run more than 20km in one go in almost 20 years, so big changes were needed.

Research to understand the training required. Lots of running. Learning to fuel properly. Finding out my body was capable of a lot more than I’d ever asked of it.

The lessons from training for something that seemed impossible translated directly into how I approach hard problems at work.

Meta mentioned focusing on “agentic” AI for commerce at their last earnings call, and I think it’s worth serious attention.

Agentic AI doesn’t just answer questions — it takes actions. Book a table. Add to cart. Complete a purchase. An AI agent in WhatsApp or Instagram that can complete a transaction without the user leaving the app is a fundamentally different commerce surface.

Meta has the distribution (3+ billion daily users) and the shopping infrastructure (Shops, Marketplace, payment rails). The missing piece has been the AI layer that can actually close a transaction. That’s what “agentic” represents.