Online revenue is the holy grail of retail companies seeking to expand their customer base.
Australians spent nearly $56 billion in online retail over the last 12 months to May, according to NAB’s most recent online retail sales index, which accounts for around 14.7 per cent of the nation’s total retail trade estimate.
Reckitt Hygiene’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Oliver Tatlow, says while the consumer goods manufacturer is seeing livestreaming on social platforms emerge to reach customers, the real growth remains online where the company has seen its e-commerce sales more than double in size since the advent of COVID.“Online will be the largest sales channel in Australia and New Zealand within the next five years,” Tatlow says.
In the past, it was more about shelf space in a supermarket and traditional advertising markets such as television whereas now it’s about ensuring consumers can engage with a product in multiple ways. For example, in a big bricks-and-mortar supermarket, brands can run in-store promotions to engage customers by increasing the amount of valuable floor real estate they can access at the end of an aisle, for example, whereas it’s entirely different online.
Reckitt Hygiene has doubled the size of its e-commerce team in recent years and has now changed its whole business structure with the e-commerce team reporting directly to Tatlow.