The eCommerce landscape in Australia is a dynamic one. COVID, cost of living and shifting workforce demographics have all played a role in shaping the market today. With eCommerce representing just shy of 1 in every 6 dollars spent in retail, and influencing instore sales in far greater volumes, many brands are simply not investing enough in the space to future proof their organisation.
In this piece, we unpack the state of eCommerce in the Australian market in 10 charts.
1. How much of retail spend occurs online?
eCommerce as a total of retail spend (in 2023) down under now equates to 16.8% of total retail sales according to the 2024 Australia Posts Inside Australian Online Shopping report. This has slightly dipped from 18.1% the year prior as a result of an underlying shift in consumer spend from discretionary to non-discretionary items.
2. What are people buying online?
With the cost of living crunch in full swing, consumers are pairing back on an array of discretionary spend items with fashion seeing the biggest contraction of any category on the eComm front. Home and Garden has also seen big falls. Whilst the total spend at variety stores is closing in on Home & Garden to become the biggest sub-category of spend in the Australian eCommerce space.
3. How many Australians buy online?
The number of Australian households now buying online has risen by 1.4m over the past 4 years, which demonstrates how eCommerce behaviours are ingrained in household behaviour across the vast majority of Australian households.
4. Who is spending online?
Contrary to the belief of many - it isn’t just those under 40 that spend online. $30bn is spent online by those over the age of 44, which makes up 47.1% of total spend in the Australian eCommerce market. Gen Y, however, are by far the biggest spending cohort – racking up a whopping $22.1bn online.
5. How frequently are they purchasing online?
When we look at the frequency of purchase in Australia over the past 4 years, we see growth in the number of consumers shopping online more than 26+ times.
Approximately 1 in 7 Australians made weekly online purchases, which illustrates the growing reliance on eCommerce.
6. Where are they spending their cold hard cash online?
When we look at the latest 2024 Pattern data, we can see that for categories like books, electronics, toys, home and kitchen products, marketplaces like Amazon are becoming a go-to destination for these categories, whilst food related purchases are still heavily skewed towards retailers. For categories like beauty and haircare – there is a more even spread of where consumers shop online.
7. How dominant are marketplaces becoming down under?
Data from a recent 2024 Pattern report has shown that Amazon now receives over 75m visits a month, now dwarfing eBay.
Temu has over the last 12 months come from nowhere to already eclipse the audience of Catch.com.au and is hot on the heels of Kogan.
8. How likely are Australia’s to shop abroad to get what they want?
According to a 2023 study from Rithum, Australians are some of the most likely consumers to purchase from an overseas retailer or marketplace.
9. Where do consumers go to research products online?
Compared to markets such as the US and UK, where many consumers start researching products via Amazon, the portion of consumers undertaking product search is far less – but 1 in 10 still say they start their product research via the marketplace giant. A further 18% state they search via other marketplaces. We anticipate marketplaces to increasingly become the go-to place for product research down under.
10. Buying on-sale has never been so cool
When it comes to buying online, thrifty is the new cool – with the Inside Online Shopping in Australia report from Australia Post showing substantial increases in consumers participating within online sales.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday have now pulled spend forward, becoming the new equivalent to the Boxing day sales.