Online wine retailer Vinomofo is not selling better wine than anyone else. The secret to its meteoric rise to a nearly $30 million turnover is the technology it uses to sell it, says Andre Eikmeier, Vinomofo’s joint CEO.
Australia’s top online retailers who spoke at the eCommerce Melbourne 2015 conference last week see themselves less as e-commerce sites than technology experts.
Leaders in this space – male fashion retailer Jackthreads, designer sports clothes e-store Style Runner and VinoMofo – say mobile first and multi-platform strategies are as important as selling quality goods. They repeated almost exactly the same phrase: “We are not a retailer, we are a technology company that sells product.”
There is now a suite of apps and cloud based ERP software for commerce companies to plugin and scale up. For many businesses, the battle is getting to that tipping point.
Jackthreads keeps their technology in house and has a huge emphasis on their mobile app which accounts 58 percent of sales in Australia. Its objective is to get more users to purchase through its mobile app as opposed to increasing its website investment which receives more investment than its website.
Style Runner and environmental packaging retailer BioPak outsources its business management systems to cloud business platform Netsuite which received a lot of attention at the conference. In online retail, scale is simply not possible without an enterprise resource management platform.
Style Runner uses NetSuite to scale through multiple business and platform models, financial reporting, inventory control and intelligent ordering systems. It gives the business a 360 degree view of the customer that helped Style Runner grow 500 percent year on year. A phenomenal growth rate that Netsuite added is not uncommon for companies of that size.
The only other topic mentioned as frequently as technology was customer experience.
“Companies fail because they aren’t having a deep dialogue with their customers,” quoted Col Kennedy of family clothing retailer Cotton On from a Forbes article.
It was a theme repeated by Andre Eikmeier, joint CEO of Vinomofo. “Stand for something, make marketing your product and be human,” he said.
Image credit: Illustration of Andre Eikmeier, Vinomofo by Matt Taylor @ The Explainers
Sholto Macpherson