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I'm back from Online Retailer with a head full of new ideas, a heart full of great catch-ups (awwww) and a fistful of random swag.

My focus for the back half of the year is bringing in more mind-blowing guests on the show. If you know someone doing genuinely interesting, different or counterintuitive work in ecommerce, I'd love to hear about it. The nerdier, the better. Shoot me a note.

CHEERS, BUSHY

01

I'm not going to get in the habit of running every Australia Post quarterly update, but this one scares me. The headline is promising: online spend is up 14% YoY. The major alarm bell is the average basket falling to $90, down 5% YoY, a record low. Marketplaces and food and liquor are driving most of the growth (meaning most SMBs won’t see it) and almost half of shoppers say they're switching to retailers offering better value during peak.

That means two things. For the next few months, it's hold-on-to-your-hat territory while customers wait for the sales, and I've never heard so many founders just hanging on already. And peak strategy is more critical this year: you need to make a call. Either a loss-leading customer acquisition play or play it cooler for less revenue and maybe a bit less profit. The half-arsed sale just to feel involved is what gets you in trouble.

On the upside, congrats to our ATC Friends of the Show at Mr Pool Man, THE ICONIC, Freedom, Appliances Online and The Nile, who all took out awards at the ORIAs on Thursday night. Special mention to Add To Cart alum Ben Hare, who won the Industry Recognition award. Online Retailer of the Year went to THE ICONIC. Very iconic. To the winners we haven't had on the show yet, I'm coming for you.

02

I don't get a kick out of bagging anyone, but I'm tired of companies that say they're "customer first" and clearly aren't. This week, the ABC found that Kogan has been quietly running a site called Exclusive Brands (I’m not linking!), stocking its own products at higher prices and allegedly using them as the comparison price against which it discounts. There’s history. They’ve had years of run-ins over dodgy discounts, banned products, email spam and difficult returns.

Kogan can run its business however it likes and wear the sentiment that comes with it. What gets my goat is rocking up on LinkedIn the same week to complain that the ORIAs scrapped the Shopper's Choice Award and saying that they only care what customers (not judges) think anyway. Based on online reviews, customers are telling you where you can put your pointy trophies. Not expecting Ruslan on the pod any time soon.

There's just something icky about the marketplace end of town right now. The same week, Kmart got called out for copying Heliograf's Light Soy lamp, the soy-sauce-fish light designed to cut single-use plastic, which, naturally, ended up as more plastic on a shelf. Ugh.

03

That little college startup grew revenue by 28% to $60.8 billion in Q2, driven by impressions up 14% year-on-year and average price per ad up 12%. The maths maths… and you paid for it. Significant because this was the quarter Meta launched its official Ads MCP, allowing advertisers to plug straight in. The gap between operators running smart AI optimisation and everyone else on the Meta train tracks is only going to widen and get more expensive. Don't expect any bargains heading into peak.

It wasn't all champagne. Meta’s net income fell 14% to $15.8 billion, free cash flow collapsed by 91% to $784 million, and shares dropped by around 10%. All of it is AI spend, with Meta now guiding to $130-$145 billion in capex in 2026. How do they sleep at night?

Meta also shipped its own Seller app for Facebook Marketplace, with AI that turns a photo into a listing. Let your freak flag fly, Marketplace sellers.

While we're on freaks, here's a competition if you're lucky enough to be endowed with large… ‘hands’. This story got off track pretty quickly.

04

Shopify's Shop Campaigns have rolled out in Australia, and you should see them in your dashboard under the Shop channel. It's pay-per-sale: you set the goal and the guardrails, and Shopify finds the channels that can hit them using your existing catalogue.

The channel list is interesting. The usual suspects, Meta, Google, and Snapchat, but also OpenAI, X, Pinterest, and Shop itself. An interesting way to automate placements across different channel types and emerging channels. This explainer is a good start.

05

In the US, DoorDash has integrated directly with Shopify, so merchants can sell on DoorDash without extra tech. They reckon you can be live in days, down from weeks. If they're saying days, it's probably weeks, which is still down from months, if you get what I'm getting. No word on Australian merchants yet, but it's more of Shopify's “sell-wherever-the-customer-is” playbook.

And in DoorDash's quest to own the roads and the sky, the FAA has cleared it to run its own drone fleet, DoorDash Air, launching in San Francisco. Why does the US get all the cool stuff?

ATC PLAYBOOK #649

The customer who's gone quiet usually hasn't gone anywhere. Reach for a discount to win her back and all you do is teach her to leave again.

Every so often, someone suggests deleting the dead segment (ie. the customers who haven't opened anything for months). This Playbook argues that deleting them is one of the more expensive things you can do. Dom Moretti runs ecommerce across Tiger Mist and I.AM.GIA and is one of the best CRM operators I know. She shared one little hack at K:SYD that I think is worth unpacking.

Also in this Playbook

Dom is the main example, but she is not the only one making the case.

📩 Ed from Klaviyo reckons someone you've stopped emailing isn't someone who's stopped caring, so don't delete the dead segment to save on the bill, talk to it.

🏷️ Rob from Quad Lock is blunt on the trap: every win-back discount trains the customer to wait for the next one. Try back-in-stock or a price drop before you reach for a code.

🧮 Justin from Ryderwear actually ran the test. The big blast wins on raw revenue, but once you price in the unsubscribes it collects, the smaller engaged send comes out ahead.