This Week In Ecommerce

🎙️ This Week in Ecommerce is your weekly download on the headlines shaping Australian retail. Hosted by industry legend Mal Chia and rising star Alex Ross, each episode dives into the biggest stories—from billion-dollar deals to platform updates, policy shifts, and consumer trends. Sharp insights, no fluff, and plenty of honest takes. New episodes every Wednesday. Powered by Ecom Nation.

This Week In Ecommerce is a business podcast hosted by Ecom Nation, with 153 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 83. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Ecom Nation hosts This Week In Ecommerce, a business show with 153 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

• 

  Episode #149

  The Iconic's Profit Jumped 53%. Guess Who Paid For It.

  Aug 19, 202625 min

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #148

  The IP Survives, The Customers Don't: Inside Stax's Rescue

  Aug 12, 202621 min

  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 week ago, still insisting it's "business as usual," while Stax — which collapsed back in June — has just been bought out of receivership by the Pushas founders in an IP-only deal that leaves every pre-collapse customer order unfulfilled and unpaid. The RBA held the cash rate at 4.35% for the third time this year, and Mal reckons there's still another hike in it before Christmas. Frasers' hostile bid for Accent Group got messier, with a board resignation landing in the middle of an active ASIC insider trading probe. Playboy's Q2 results confirmed Honey Birdette is the standout of the portfolio — comps up 15%, gross margin up to 65.1%, and US stores hitting $1,500 a square foot. Proud Poppy entered voluntary administration one week ago, and the hosts flag the now-familiar pattern of over-expanded store footprints catching up with founders. Stax has been rescued out of receivership by the Pushas founders — but only the IP, not the liabilities or the unfulfilled orders. Brett Blundy's Lovisa tried to trademark rival brand HARLI + HARPA in the US to block its expansion — and lost.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #147

  AusPost Wants You to Build an Ecosystem. Its Own Data Says Build a Discount Habit.

  Aug 5, 202621 min

  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 "brilliantly Australian" pitch to retailers, and finds a pretty awkward contradiction sitting inside AusPost's own data. Liquidators reveal Stax's real debt load is $24 million, three times what the company itself disclosed — plus an unconfirmed rumour that a buyer may already be locked in. Australia's fuel excise reprieve ends on 3 August, pushing petrol back toward 194c/L and adding both a freight-cost and a consumer-confidence problem for retailers. A new 12.5% US tariff on Australian imports is officially about "modern slavery" — practically, it's just more margin pressure for brands selling into America. Barbeques Galore's collapse and sale to ACOM International lays out, in forensic detail, what a private equity dividend recap actually does to a business. Country Road Group and Michael Hill both chose margin discipline over top-line growth this reporting season — and the market rewarded both of them for it. Mal takes on Australia Post's "ecosystem" keynote and finds it sitting awkwardly next to AusPost's own numbers on marketplace share and discount-addicted shoppers.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #146

  Kogan Gets Caught Comparing Itself to Itself

  Jul 28, 202621 min

  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 platform shift that's quietly displacing freelance dev work, and a healthy dose of FY27 dread. The story with the most teeth this week is Kogan, who an ABC News investigation found has been running a second site, Exclusive Brands, selling identical products at a median $100 more than Kogan.com — inflating the "was" price it then discounts against. Kogan denies wrongdoing, but with the ACCC increasingly active on misleading price comparisons, Mal and Alex dig into where legitimate multi-brand pricing ends and where this starts. BCF's giveaway-only Fisho's Onesie has entries closing this Friday, and it's a masterclass in high-shareability, low-budget campaign design. Shopify's Horizon theme rebuild is being optimised for its Sidekick AI assistant first and humans second — 20% of merchants are already using it, racking up 25 million edits. D'Addario is fending off accusations its new string-demo video used AI-generated music, part of a bigger reckoning playing out across Spotify's AI-track purge and Australia's AI-covered #1 single. Kogan's alleged self-comparison pricing model is under scrutiny, with former ACCC chair Rod Sims flagging it as a case worth investigating. Mal shares how his own clients are handling price rises with upfront comms and subscriber grandfathering — the opposite play to Kogan's. Myer's full-year update shows underlying growth barely moved once the Apparel Brands acquisition is stripped out, against a backdrop of consumer confidence down roughly 20 points. Bricks-and-mortar preference has swung hard, from 41% to 68% of shoppers, as buyers chase the trust and tactility online can't offer. Virtual try-on tech is fast becoming table stakes for online eyewear, and Alex is on the hunt for an Australian Warby Parker equivalent. FY27 is shaping up heavier — CGT changes, tax hikes and a US tariff rise from 10% to 12.5% are all on operators' radars. A respectful shout-out to Jackie and the Black Milk team, who've had to move onshore manufacturing to China, affecting 15 local jobs. Mal's heading to eTail next, Alex is off to Auckland for the Unified Commerce Assembly in a month.

  ListenShow Notes
• 

  Episode #145

  They Took Your Money and Told You to Call Your Bank

  Jul 14, 202620 min

  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-sale weren't paying for stock on a shelf — they were funding product that was never made, and now they're getting neither the goods nor a refund, with founders Don and Matilda pointing them to their banks for a chargeback. It's a masterclass in torching a brand on the way out. We get into that, plus who (if anyone) buys what's left. Prime's Australian distributor collapses with ~$85k in the bank and millions owed — the inevitable end of a hype brand that never converted the queues into a repeat purchase. Stax's pre-sale buyers are left with no product, no refund and a "talk to your bank" — and that trust doesn't come back under new ownership. A four-hour Telstra outage knocked out payments nationwide, and the real lesson is single-vendor reliance plus a crisis-comms scorecard (Telstra fronted it fast; Optus's ghost still lingers). Retail spending is actually up — but only because over-65s lifted spend 14% year-on-year while younger cohorts contract, and most brands are still aiming at the shrinking half. Adairs is prepping investors for a $40m loss that's really a Focus on Furniture write-down, not an operating collapse — the core brand's EBIT still grew 15%, and the squeezed middle of furniture is where the pain sits. City Chic retreats from the US as unit economics and tariffs bite, while Uniqlo books a fifth straight record year — two opposite answers to "should you go global?".

  ListenShow Notes

Based on semantic analysis of episode topics and host coverage, this show is a strong guest fit for executives in:

Industry fit is computed by PitchCentric using vector embeddings of the show's episode catalog.