Our Takeaways From the Annual AusPost eCommerce Report

Welcome to Make Good Things Happen, a podcast for makers in business presented to you by Angela
D’Alton and Renee Baker.
Welcome to Make Good Things Happen, season three, episode four. My name is Angela D’Alton and
joining me is Renee Baker. As always, how are you, Renee? Hi, I’m good. How are you? I’m good.
We’ve got a lot to get through in this episode. We are going to do our beloved from scroll to cart
segment again. we’re going to start by talking about the 11th annual australia post e-commerce
report my favorite time of year i actually nearly said that happy easter um it’s something that i
think we even talked about last year on the podcast at this very same time of year when this oh
yeah i think we did when this report comes out renee and i do a nerd dance because it’s so full of
data statistics relevant guidelines and information that can inform decisions that you make as a
small business owner that sells things online. Chock full of awesome data.
There’s so much in there and of course we will supply a link to that in our show notes. It’s free
to download. Australia Post work with a variety of businesses on this actual report.
They team up with the Commonwealth Bank, Shopify and a few other people to give you sort of
additional little insights. But also I want you to remember that it is therefore provided to us
through that lens, that although this is a report, it’s full of data and statistics,
it’s still being presented to us by businesses. It’s important to always look at data critically.
It’s always helpful, but always have a critical eye over anything that you read,
particularly if it’s being given to you by a business. Having said that, this one’s chock full of
really awesome stuff. And I find Australia Post relatively trustworthy. Of course, there is a
delivery postal bent because it is coming from their lens and they do obviously want us to feel
favourable about their business. But having said that, I was really,
really happy to see the amount of data in here. I feel like there’s more than usual.
have come out. The three key things in the executive summary, which I guess is the things that they
want to draw our attention to, shopper promiscuity is rising. I love that that’s the word they’ve
chosen to say that shoppers are browsing around a bit more, even though they’ve still got a strong
focus on value. You can hear that word being used a lot in a boardroom.
That was the first major insight that they share. Purchase frequency is growing. but individual
basket sizes are falling, but our overall spending is climbing. And number three says the delivery
experience is improving. So what I said before, remember? But it’s true.
73% of shoppers also say a good delivery experience makes them more likely to shop online instead
of in store. And that ties in a little to the things that we’ve been talking about recently on the
podcast. Renee, what stood out to you when you first looked at this report?
Well, I think the interesting thing that I gleaned across the report and you’ve brought it up, one
of those first three points about the basket size getting smaller, I think is that people are
feeling more confident shopping online in that similar kind of way that you might pop into the
shops and grab one thing and there’s less pressure for it to be this kind of really thought through
process where you want to make sure you’re getting your value for money, you know, especially with
shipping costs and so forth. We’re feeling more comfortable just grabbing one thing, paying the
shipping and kind of moving on. And I definitely noticed that one of the things the report does
really well, not only from a statistics point of view, but visually, if you’re into graphic design,
it’s a really nice layout across all the different generations. It shows you the millennials, the
Gen X, Gen Z, baby boomer, et cetera. And you can see that the younger generations are more likely
to buy smaller amounts, but they’re spending more, obviously. So there’s a lot.
more of, I guess, a throwaway spending habit that we’re seeing in that, which I think is really
interesting because I think both Angela and myself, I’ll speak on behalf of you, are still
probably, while we are avid online shoppers and have been shopping online for as long as I can
almost remember. As long as it’s been around. Yes, as long as it’s been a thing. I believe still to
this day we’re both very considered when we shop. online same in real life but you know we’re
talking about online in this context because I think we really think about what it is that we’re
buying how it’s going to fit within our lives what the cost is whether we can spend a little bit
more to make the most of say a free shipping threshold or even just make the most of paying for
shipping it’s just interesting to see that trend moving into that into that space I think it’s a
good thing for the maker community because in particular there is a challenge when you’re competing
with other businesses on price in the maker community But I think we do still have accessible
buying options within the maker community. So for example, a greeting card or a pair of earrings
can fall under that $50 price point. If people are comfortable spending that much online and not
querying the shipping, I think it’s a good thing. It’s interesting too that you mentioned those
generations and they’ve got really specific, interesting information about. each of the generations
based on demographic categorisation of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Baby Boomers and Builders,
which is not a term I’d ever heard used before. That describes people that were born between,
it says 1925 and 1945 on the report, which is born in the Depression and during World War II.
That particular generation buys the least online and that will come as no surprise to anybody.
They are the most ingrained in an analogue life. they still do shop online.
These people are still able to spend money and do. I think it’s a 10%. Yeah, 10% shop online
weekly. In my own family, my grandmother would be one of them and I think it’s very interesting to
know that not only does she have the skills to be able to do that and use the technology in that
way, it’s also interesting when you think about how that demographic might be marketed. to and how
you might market to them if they are your target market. And of course that raises a whole lot of
ethical implications as well because they’re probably the most likely generation to be susceptible
for scams and ghost websites and unethical shopping and so on. Which is why it actually summarises
them as being particularly cautious and they are more likely to buy from retailers they already
know from shopping in a retail experience. They are more comfortable buying from those retailers.
I guess, online than businesses that they’re unfamiliar with. It all makes complete sense to me.
The data says what I think anecdotally many of us would already notice about that generation.
The baby boomers, there’s a lot of vitriol towards this generation, sometimes unfairly,
but 23% of the baby boomer generation shop online weekly. Interestingly enough,
57% of them say free returns strongly influence where they shop. That ties in exactly with what we
were saying last week about the way that the internet’s matured. It did have to start with free
returns because it needed to mimic the real life experience closely in order to break through.
And now that’s less. important to younger generations but it is to this generation having free
returns they still see the comparison in the real life experience very much it’s embedded in their
in their minds you know they’re comparing apples with apples with gen z who i saw actually that
they use 69 of that generation use social media for product discovery which i guess it’s no real
surprise But very interesting when you’re thinking again about whether those platforms are worth
promoting. To go back to the shipping point, they are probably also more likely to use things like
Uber Eats and have alcohol delivered, for example, for convenience. And so they’re very comfortable
spending $8 or $9 on delivery if it means they don’t have to leave their house. Many of them
probably don’t even have a car because it’s expensive. And I think the same applies for the other
categories as well. So clothing, fashion. homewares, whatever they’re buying, they probably don’t
see shipping as this huge barrier because what their actual barriers are in life are access to
transport. I think this is largely a generation that stayed at home a lot longer than previous
generations. I’m not casting any judgment on that. I’m just saying that’s a fact. I think that many
people who are in their mid-20s are still at home and even older. You know, we’re looking at
generational cohabitation as opposed to leaving the nest. So getting something delivered is
probably way more considerable because you don’t have those other expenses there’s an element of i
can cover that in that moment because of the convenience they value convenience i think one of the
interesting things was your generation renee the millennial generation are the biggest weekly
online shoppers in all of those divisions 47 of your generation many discuss convenience as being
the major motivator that is an interesting thing as we were saying it’s convenience again as
opposed to needing to compare like I said, with the baby boomers, the pricing. But I think that
generation is, and like all Australians, very price sensitive and very much about waiting for
sales. Well, I think also with the convenience thing for millennials,
there’d be an element of browsing in real life. But for example, if they had young children with
them or they’re trying to… something quickly in a lunch break while they’re at work or something
like that there’s not a lot of time to do that additional research and so sometimes it might be
that they’ve looked at something in store and then go home and at night when they’ve got time on
their phones on the couch they can do a bit of that price comparison they can make sure that
they’re getting the best price for what they’re looking for and that’s I guess where the online
comes in the reason that we get so excited about this is because one of the things that we talk
about all the time with our website clients also our mentees our members of make good things happen
is one of the most fundamental business activities that you must do if you are trying to sell
products is to understand your target market and to have a really clear picture of who they are and
what their shopping habits are what influences them how they spend their time what their pain
points are what their challenges are and sometimes when we ask those questions it can feel a little
bit either tempting to just give kind of generic one-word answers because this feels like a bit of
a waste of time and am i really going to need this information Or it can just kind of feel like you
don’t know where to start with the research. And so we like to bring these reports to you because
they are presented in a way that helps you kind of have these ideas and spark these conversations
around who your target market are. And even in just what Angela and I have said, you might
hopefully have found something that’s useful when you think about your target market. It’s just,
I guess I like to remind you as to why we’re talking about this, because even if it might feel
dull.
Yeah.
Disconnected was the other D word I was thinking of to the work that you’re doing in your studio.
Perhaps feels like you’re overthinking this. You’re not. I think that some people can fall into the
trap of thinking that they don’t need to worry about this or that they can worry about it later or
they know enough about their target market to commence. making decisions it’s important to stay
across them because even if you do know them today you won’t know them next year they’ll have
changed something will be different the world will have changed and their behavior will have
reacted accordingly to those changes one of the interesting things about that actual report there
was some shopify tips mentioning features to prevent abandoned carts one of those things is the one
page checkout which is a shopify solution but also having more payment options making sure paying
is quick and easy making sure people don’t have to register forcing them to create an account trust
badges and SSL certificates because security is more and more important the larger this internet
thing gets. And also leveraging the abandoned cart notifications that are built into your Shopify
store, should you have one. yeah not only do they say having more payment options so as many as you
possibly can they’re also saying if there’s a way within those payment options you can do a one
click type of payment and it’s connected through take advantage of that as well i think that’s
helpful advice if those features are available to you yeah and often they aren’t on by default or
they are in difficult areas to find i mean as much as we do love shopify and they do make things
easy it’s not always straightforward so it’s definitely worth spending a bit of time just looking
into how that all works as well speaking of that there is a whole big section on ai i almost don’t
even really want to talk about it but it is interesting to think about the way it’s impacting
shopping i had a friend through the week actually ask me if i used ai to do price comparisons when
i was shopping i actually have and i’ve done it on big ticket items i actually find shopping
enjoyable and fun some people think it can be a bit of a chore but if it was something like an air
fryer for example there’s an interesting whole big section about how that works and that they are
noticing that my generation and younger use it for that price comparison the things that we suggest
you look closely at is the things that customers want that are in your target market so if there’s
a bracket of people in here that you feel reflects your particular customer then consider that
information use that data to guide the decisions that you make regarding your technical
infrastructure your delivery setup your payment setup your checkout process and your customer
service and just making sure that you are remaining on top of those things will give you the
advantage or at least it will help you to make better decisions for the business.
Sounds like a plan.
This week’s Making News, we’re very much focusing on a couple of stories we’ve seen about social
media in particular. The first was that with the Australian first Media for children under the age
of 16. There’s been a lot of interesting policy conversation about social media going on around the
world. During the week, I saw that Brazil are moving to ban the concept of endless scrolling,
talking about… it’s designed to keep you on there there’s no end you know the next video will
always keep playing the notification dopamine if you’ve got all of those things on the younger
brains are not developed enough to be able to cope let alone critically analyze that information as
it’s coming in so they’ve created what’s called the digital child and adolescent statute. And that
requires the platforms to remove the infinite scroll for children that are using it. No autoplay,
any notifications that are manipulative, age verification, things like that,
and biometrics that are involved in the security process. I just think that is a fascinating story
to hear because it was also off the back of Australia’s eSafety Commissioner report from 2025
talking about the use of social media in children between ages 10 and 15 and the fact that they can
be exposed to harmful content and bullying and other predatory behaviours. I think this is a step
in the right direction. These are the trends that will affect social media use in the longer term.
So it’s worth considering how it might impact as a person who owns a business and maybe uses social
media. It’s interesting how these things do get announced and create news and then you wonder how
the implementation is going to happen. I guess much like our social media ban that we’ve had for
people under 16 years of age. where I know anecdotally a lot of people I’ve spoken to have said
that their children still have access, there’s been no issue or they’ve found workarounds. For
something like this, it’s actually making the platforms accountable. in order to actually create
changes within the platforms themselves. And so I guess I wonder how that looks and how that works.
I mean, of course they would have the capability, but do they really have the resources and the
time and the care to dedicate teams into implementing it or are they happy to just wear the $9
million US fine for breaching it? Yeah, well, it’s like people that paid a parking fine instead of
parking. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I don’t have the information in front of me, but I know there has
been a campaign. in Australia. was trying to encourage something like this like to put a bill into
parliament to sort of start this conversation about turning off the algorithm and to me that
endless scrolling kind of falls within that same category i’d love to have no autoplay on videos
this is really interesting story i’d like to sort of follow it hopefully we do hear more but i
agree i think the interesting part of it is that the enforcement is being pushed to the businesses
as opposed to the users the customers it’s actually going back to the company and saying you can’t
design it like this, especially for these young people. So we’ll see how that works.
It did remind me of the time where we used to get to the bottom. I know. You’re all caught up.
You’re all caught up. Another item I saw in the media week Australian news,
and I think it’s been fairly widely shared, is that Meta has been ordered to pay $375 million in
civil penalties after a New Mexico jury found that they’d misled consumers and failed to protect
children on its platforms, including enabling conditions linked to child sexual exploitation.
So this is the very first time. that any court has held the tech liable,
particularly meta, for harm linked to activity on its platforms.
I think this is a big breakthrough. Again, as we’ve just talked about in that previous story,
making businesses responsible, reining in the profits that they’ve been making from content.
And I found this a really, I guess, encouraging. piece of news I don’t know how did you feel when I
read these sorts of things I find myself feeling a little bit deflated that this is even the
conversation on the table I agree with you it’s certainly something that I hope means that there is
a trend in this direction because you know if you think about it in a real world context if you had
a venue then that facilitated illegal activities the venue there is you know consequences so why
isn’t that the case for the meta and others like it Again, let’s hope that we see changes moving
forward because it’s just not good enough and I know a lot of people who feel the same. Another
thing that we saw or I noticed, I think we both shared this one with each other, Instagram quietly
announced that by May they’ll be removing end-to-end encryption on their messaging platform.
What that effectively means is they will now, as a platform, have access to what is being said
within those messages. End-to-end encryption means that the company responsible for the messaging
isn’t actually able to access whatever is being said. I mean, that’s what they tell us, right?
Yeah. There’s an element of privacy that is expected when you are working within a platform that
has end-to-end encryption. And from what we’ve read, there’s an article on The Guardian which we
can share. It’s all a little bit vague and they’ve sort of blamed it on, oh, people weren’t opting
in. You know, we’ve got WhatsApp if you want that kind of feature. So they’ve just kind of quietly
shelving it. But what it of course means is on the flip side is that that gives them access to the
conversations within the messaging for use in advertising or some might say to train AI.
We’re not actually seeing that explicitly stated by Meta. I will give that caveat, but it’s always
worth thinking about the implications. I know, again, just from our personal experience,
Angela and I have always. tried to keep any kind of personal conversation off the platform and
that’s not because we feel like we’re saying anything dodgy but just out of habit yeah i just
thought again it’s interesting i know a lot of commentary i’ve seen online around this news was
that i thought they already were reading our messages i think the worry that i have though is again
the australian e-safety commissioner’s officer mentioned in this article as well The concern is,
again, the safety of younger people on the platform. It will weaken the ability to a degree of
keeping children safe. Because those messages are no longer encrypted,
they’re easier to hack into, they’re easier to find. It’s just easier for the hackers to get in
there as much as it is for the platforms themselves and as much as they want to use the data,
there’s still… The data then exists in an unencrypted format. You don’t have to unscramble
anything. You don’t need special keys at either end to unlock the encryption code.
I guess these three stories unintentionally all very closely linked in many ways.
Who is responsible ultimately for the safety of people and indeed children on the platforms?
Where does the responsibility lie? And when these laws and… policies change what do we do how do
we adapt what do our customers do and how do they adapt it’s mind-blowing that this is the
conversation that we have about instagram now i know i know it still spins me out i have to say
what started as us hacking html on myspace profiles this
week i have been watching a tv show i don’t know if i’ve spoken about a tv show in a while is it
even called tv when it’s just on netflix just side note yes because it’s not on netflix It’s on
Apple TV. Oh, it’s on Apple TV. So it is a TV show. I’m watching a show on Apple TV called
Shrinking. It’s in its third season, I believe, at the moment, which is what I’m up to. And it is a
show about therapists. And that name, I guess, comes from the American word shrinks,
which is what therapists are. I don’t know if that’s jargon. It comes from like a voodoo.
term people who used to do voodoo were head shrinkers psychiatrists started to be called head
shrinkers then it got shortened to shrink and it became the nickname for your psychiatrist.
Wow. it was a show that was recommended to me and it was kind of one of those ones where i thought
i thought nah that doesn’t really like look like i would be into that show i’m not really sure
about how i feel about that wrong branding for you i think so one of the main characters is
Harrison Ford but also Jason Segel is the main character and i’m not really like i never watched
how i met your mother but does have also have Christa Miller who was from Scrubs and i did really
love that show but also Brett Goldstein who was in Ted Lasso. They were the kind of people that I
knew. What I’ve found is that I’m absolutely delighted by all of the other characters that are on
the show. It’s one of those shows where there’s not really like anyone you don’t like and there’s
no real bad character or evil person it’s just a show about relationships and the way that we kind
of interconnect our social lives with our personal lives and our family lives and our traumatic
lives it is centered around the main character losing his wife and the grief that kind of surrounds
that and of course him being a therapist there’s a lot going on there it’s light in that it’s only
the 30 to 40 minute mark of an episode and the first season is quite gentle i felt i think as it
goes on obviously it does get a little bit more rich and in depth than i have a bit of a category
of tv watching which is non-confrontational humor with a little bit of drama and emotion that’s
kind of my favorite category especially at 10 o’clock at night when i’m depleted of all energy
Everyone’s looking for a salve in their TV at the moment. I think people are really craving much
more comforting human connection shows at the moment. And that reminds me actually,
I was watching it last night and I saw the name Zach Braff pop up on the screen as a director or a
producer, but I meant to follow that up and see because it made a lot of sense to me if he was
connected to the show based on some of the characters that are in it. But also I’ve always been a
fan. I remember when I was in my early 20s, I really loved the movie Garden State.
The millennial indie movie, wasn’t it? It was. That was big for your age group, I remember. Yes,
recommended if you’ve got Apple TV and you feel like that kind of a show. My favourite character in
the show, Gabby, is played by… Jessica Williams, who I hadn’t heard of or was familiar with.
It’s super witty dialogue. It’s fast comedy, good writing, but also a couple of the characters have
really fun fashion. good outfit combinations. Well, that sounds good.
I look forward to checking that one out. It’s not as like millennial as some of my other
recommendations. I feel like it spans the generations. I also don’t really have a problem with
watching shows that aren’t intended for my generation. A good story is a good story. I’m just
looking at all the other casts. There’s a lot of people in there that I recognize from the sitcom
scene. Wendy Malick. Wendy Malick. I love her. She’s so good.
Well, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. We hope you’ve enjoyed it. Bye.
Thanks for listening to Make Good Things Happen. If you enjoyed this episode, why not write a
review or share it with a friend? For show notes and more, head to mgth.com.au.
This has been a D’Alton Baker production.

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