This Week In Ecommerce

Episode 161 is Wednesday 11 November, Remembrance Day. Mal starts with an apology: he woke up remembering the minute's silence, then forgot it at 11am anyway. Alex is back after a fortnight away, Black Friday has already started for most of the market, and Mal finishes by heading straight off to be first at the barrier for Iron Maiden. The big one is David Jones. Mal said it would trade throug...

Episode 160 is Wednesday 4 November, and it's a solo one: Alex is out this week, so you're stuck with Mal. Recording was pushed back a day, not for the Melbourne Cup but for the Reserve Bank. Ecom Nation was a finalist at the Meta agency awards but didn't take home its category (there's always next year), and there's a thank-you to the Snapchat crew for the after-party. The big...

Episode 159 is Wednesday 28 October. Mal is recording from Sydney after a red-eye and a full day of meetings, then heading off to watch Street Fighter on his own (he says solo movies are underrated). The Meta agency awards are on Thursday night, so the result comes next week. Alex's dad has launched a tinny hire business on the Murray, and Mal has some bucks weekend ideas. The big one this wee...

Episode 158 is Wednesday 21 October, and everyone is flat out getting ready for Black Friday. Alex has another LinkedIn Live on Friday, and Mal is heading to a black-tie Halloween party next week in a tux and a Phantom of the Opera mask. Ecom Nation is also up for a Meta agency award next week, so fingers crossed. The big one this week is LSKD firing the starting gun on Black Friday. It's goin...

Episode 157 is Tuesday 13 October, and Alex has to remind Mal to say the date, after listeners asked for it. Inside Retail's Top 50 People in E-Commerce nominations close the day this goes out, so get yours in. And a shout-out to Andrew Pearce and Hello Sarnie, the Adelaide sandwich shop Mal put on Uber Eats back in 2016, which has just opened its first store outside South Australia, in North...

Episode 156 is Wednesday 7 October, and Mal is recording from a booth at WeWork Pitt Street in Sydney, still getting going after the long weekend. Alex spent hers at a packed Bunnings, photographing products and asking Claude which one to buy instead of finding a sales assistant. Mal's mother-in-law is doing the same with Gemini. Every shopper now does their research with an AI first, and that...

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 Rese...

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...

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...

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-f...

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 estimat...

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...

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 wee...

This week Mal's flying solo — Alex is out, so it's just opinions, no pushback. It's a mixed bag: a couple of quick cost-and-consequence stories, then three deep dives that all circle the same question in different ways — what happens when a business chases the top line instead of the bottom one. The most interesting one might be the last: Mal goes deep on Australia Post's "bri...

Mal and Alex are back this week still hoarse from two big days on the podcast stage at Online Retailer and the ORIAS — congrats to The Iconic on a first-time Online Retailer of the Year win, and to Ben Hare for taking out industry recognition. From there it's a genuinely wide-ranging one: a AI-authenticity reckoning hitting everything from guitar strings to chart-topping AI covers, a Shopify p...

It's bloody freezing, we're one week out from Online Retailer in Sydney (expect an impromptu Qantas Lounge recording), and before the conference chaos kicks off we've got a genuinely grim week of retail to unpack — three collapses, a national outage and a $40m loss. The Stax saga got worse, and it's the one to read twice: customers who "bought" during the late-June pre-sa...

We're on the other side of EOFY and into the thick of H2 — and Australian retail served up one of its messiest weeks in a while. Two heritage-adjacent brands hit crisis on the very same day, a resale platform war escalated, and a two-year-old takeover saga added another wrinkle, all while Myer and T2 quietly proved that some operators are still finding real growth in this market. The standout...

End of financial year is done and — despite the sale noise — the market actually went backwards in real terms, with Roy Morgan tipping EOFY growth of just 1.9%, under CPI. Mal's on the road in Sydney (yet another hotel), Alex is dodging a South Australian thunderstorm, and between the World Cup and NBA free agency it's basically Christmas in Mal's world. Plenty to get through. The spin...

Alex is back from the dead, Mal's discovered the Riverside sound-effects board, and the World Cup has well and truly taken over the Cheer household — but underneath the banter this is a big one. It's the episode where AI stopped nibbling at the edges of ecommerce and started eating the actual buying journey: discovery, the checkout, and the ad auction, all at once. The headline: Google has...

Solo show from a gate at Sydney Airport — Alex is out sick, and the week didn't slow down to match. Regulation, reputation and the biggest float in history, all at once. 🎟️ Online Retailer 2026 — 50 listener passes, plus free expo passes. First in, first served. Use code TWIEPodcast (link below). This week: The EU "withdrawal button" (live 19 June) — if a customer can buy in one clic...

EOFY is in full swing, Mal's recording from yet another airport — Perth this time, en route to a Singapore keynote — and the retail news is ramping as fast as the sales calendar. This week is a tale of two retails: brands hitting the wall, and brands quietly cleaning up by doing the exact opposite. The headline act is a streetwear bloodbath. Trapstar and Geedup — two scarcity-drop darlings on...

The week the funnel finally collapsed. New data shows that when Google serves an AI Overview, only 1% of users click through — down from 15–20% on a standard SERP. People are discovering brands on ChatGPT and Claude, then arriving directly via branded search, if they arrive at all. Traffic isn't dying. Attribution is. Two retail failures landed in the same 48 hours and both told the same story...

The week the market said "thanks for staying focused." Guzman & Gomez quietly closed its eight Chicago stores and the share price jumped 20%. Skin Candy pulled off the first properly successful retail ASX listing of the year. And Alo Yoga planted a flag directly opposite Lululemon at Chatswood Chase — a brand move with a price tag and a clear message. The deep dive everyone needs to...

Mal's back on home soil — briefly — and Alex is dodging the Adelaide rain. Episode 137 lands in a week the ACCC has had its biggest enforcement win in a decade, and the rest of the retail and ecom news has decided to fall in line: discount discipline, brand portfolio pruning, platform consolidation, and the cleanest live test yet of whether the AU consumer is genuinely pulling back, or just bu...