Buy Aussie Now is a recently launched online marketplace primarily built to promote Australian made goods and sellers. A first-of-its-kind, shopping platform dedicated to support Aussie local businesses and help the community to find Aussie brands with a wide range of products.
Due to many concurrent unfortunate events - bushfire crisis, floods, and covid-19 pandemic, Australia suffered a lot in recent times. Many small to medium businesses were closed and the local economy was impacted.
To support Aussie owned businesses, Chris White and Mitchell Catlin created a community to help local brands, both big and small. And also encourage shoppers to buy locally produced and homegrown brands helping each and everyone in the country.
Buy Aussie Now aims to encourage Australian shoppers to buy locally-produced items and showing support for the people behind them. Small businesses are doing it tough, but they continue to produce top quality products.
“Buy Aussie Now is a free platform and a one-stop shop for businesses to list their products and a place for Aussies to shop local. If we support each other, then jobs stay here, investment stays here and the path to recovery is a lot faster. It’s something that we are all very proud of. Let’s Buy Aussie Now!"
He further quoted, "I think the thing that surprised me most over the past few months is just how much wonderful product is made at home, but many of us simply don't know about it,"
Chris White, Buy Aussie Now, CEO said he hoped the launch of Buy Aussie Now saw a long-term switch for Aussies to shop Australian-made first. "Let's always make Aussies brands, business, and products our first thought every time we shop and not just during difficult periods," This will support the nation, families, friends, and local communities.
Overwhelmed Response and Support
Across thousands of Aussie businesses and shoppers have already joined to feature and buy on Australia’s largest marketplace for locally manufactured products.
Including Ponting Wines, a collaboration between renowned former cricketer, Ricky Ponting, and Ben Riggs, an award-winning Australian winemaker.
Further many well-known Australian brands like Batch & Co., Edible Beauty, Made by Cow, and Top Shelf, are also supporting and preparing to sell their items at Buy Aussie Now.
Currently, the marketplace platform offers free product listing across these categories - home and living, apparel and footwear, jewellery and accessories, beauty and skincare, toys, education, food and beverages, pets, and gifts. Later on, it will also plan to include more categories as well.
Following are the eligibility requirements to sell on Buy Aussie Now:
- A business must be 100% Australian owned.
- The products must be substantially made or transformed in Australia.
- Service businesses are not supported at this time.
E-commerce Sector in Australia
Australia is a highly developed country, with the world's twelfth-largest economy. It has a high-income economy, with the world's tenth highest per capita income.
Revenue in the Australian eCommerce market is projected to reach USD 31M in 2021. With expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2021-25) of 5.30%.
The number of online shoppers is expected to amount to 20.7M users by 2025. User penetration will be 75.4% in 2021 and is expected to hit 77.1% by 2025.
The average revenue per user (ARPU) is expected to amount to USD 1,611.14. In 2021, 90% of total eCommerce purchases in the country will be domestic. (Source - Statista)
The e-commerce market of developed nations is in its maturity phase, the growth rate is small and the competition among retailers is extremely high and cost-intensive.
Big brands like Amazon, eBay, Woolworths are flourishing, while many stand-alone retailers struggle to find their USP as brand and store loyalty are decreasing and the who art abandonment rate in the industry is at 75%.
Increasing brand engagement can be achieved through community building, loyalty programs, and a seamless mobile and desktop user experience. (Source - JPMorgan)
Build Australia Focussed Marketplace with Webkul
Buy Aussie Now project started in the initial phase of 2020, the developers were looking for a complete solution to build an e-commerce site using Magento Enterprise Cloud, now called Adobe Commerce Cloud.
The leading e-commerce platform is offered in two editions Open Source and Magento Commerce. The former is free to use and customizable and used by small-business retailers.
While the Commerce edition is the ideal choice for business owners who need an all-in-one cloud solution that is optimized for a large scale market size, easy to deploy, provide enhanced security, and is packed with additional integrated capabilities to accelerate sales.
Once the e-commerce platform was set up, it was time to look for a third-party Multi-Vendor Marketplace solution. Webkul Marketplace has been continuously recognized as the benchmark for the multi-vendor solution.
Besides being awarded as the Best Selling Extension Winner two times in a row by Magento. Webkul Marketplace solution is quite well known and also trusted in the whole e-commerce development community like Opencart, WooCommerce, Shopify, Odoo, PrestaShop and more.
After the Multi-Vendor Marketplace for Magento 2 was successfully set up, the development team created multiple instances to test the platform before making it live for the public.
Although Webkul Marketplace solution offers numerous out of the box functionalities like seller profile, collection, product listing, etc. Further, enable shoppers to buy products from different sellers in single checkout order.
It also allows developers and site owners to personalize the marketplace with custom features, add-ons, third-party integrations, and also make it more flexible to the local market.
Moving on, we will now be discussing some components of Buy Aussie Now, how it was developed, added, and what functions it performs.
Marketplace with 6,000 Sellers
Every seller listed first certifies that they are Aussie owned and their products are Aussie made and will adhere to the Buy Aussie Now Seller Standards. The Buy Aussie Now team member also conducts checks to help substantiate their claims and ensure the shoppers get the best experience possible.
Now, with Webkul Multi-Vendor Marketplace installed, anyone can sign up and become a seller on Buy Aussie Now.
It involves a few steps, creating an account, completing seller profile, adding product listings, and once approved they are ready to sell.
The sellers can also manage the shipping for their orders and can print packing slips, invoices, and other documents with their business information.
Currently, there are more than 6,000 sellers who have already registered, making Buy Aussie Now the largest marketplace for Australian made products. This is quite an achievement for everyone who is involved in building this thriving online shopping marketplace.
Multiple Ways to Add Product Listing
Buy Aussie Now requires that all Products listed for sale on the Marketplace are either 'Grown in Australia', a 'Product of Australia', or 'Made in Australia', as defined by the Australian Consumer Law and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
With Webkul Marketplace, the sellers can add various types of products - simple, configurable, virtual, downloadable, and more.
In Buy Aussie Now, the sellers currently have two ways to add a product listing - manually- one by one or via. Shopify Connector for those businesses who are already running their separate online stores with individual domain names.
The mass upload process is also in the development, for helping medium and large scale sellers to quickly add bulk products using CSV or Excel spreadsheet files.
Simplifying Complex Product Attributes
Product attributes have many purposes, but mostly they are needed for item variant selection like colour, size. Or, they are used as filters during the search process to narrow down the results.
Further, they can be shown on the product view page as specifications or display more detailed information about the listing.
As there are broad categories of products sold by thousands of sellers, there were many complexities involved. The client wanted to make the attribute selection and management process more streamlined for the sellers.
Product Approval Process
The Buy Aussie Now team follows strict quality checks on the products which are listed on its marketplace. Sellers are allowed to upload any number of products, but they are not live and ready to sell until each item has been approved by the Buy Aussie Now team.
For this, Webkul Marketplace already has a product and seller approval system with status updates and email notifications for both sellers and the admin. We further customized the approval workflow and added some more statuses.
Once the product is approved by the team, the seller can live it and make further changes if needed. On the storefront, the shoppers can see the seller branding and some details. Contact Seller option is also provided to the shoppers to make any direct queries with the sellers related to the products or anything.
Develop Custom Shipping Rates Calculation Model
A completely new shipping fee calculation system was developed for Buy Aussie Now. In this, the sellers have three dynamic options to set shipping rates:
- Flat rate shipping - charge a fixed cost per order, item, or both
- Per weight band shipping - calculation based on different weight ranges
- Per price band shipping - varying rates based on total order value ranges
With this, every seller is now able to charge a shipping fee for their items however they want. We also added a free shipping option to override the shipping rates set before.
Moreover, to induce shoppers, the Free Delivery highlighted text is also shown on the products.
Seller Profile & Collection Pages
There were a lot of visual changes made in the Webkul Marketplace for the Buy Aussie Now you are seeing today. The client wanted a cleaner and simpler look for the online marketplace.
On the dedicated seller profile page, shoppers can view the business logo, description, policies, shop recently added items, drop a message to the seller, and report a seller to marketplace admin (if the items listed don't meet Buy Aussie Now policies).
The seller collection page looks similar to its profile page, but it shows all the products sold by that retailer. Here, the shoppers can sort the items as per price or time.
Further, they can view the prices, free delivery available, use pagination, and see the banner image below.
Seller Dashboard
Similar to Magento Admin Panel, the Webkul Marketplace also offers a dashboard for the sellers to quickly view the real-time overview of sales and business activity.
The seller dashboard data provides for order statuses, top-selling products, customers count, lifetime sales, payout, top-selling categories, ratings, and recent orders placed.
For the Buy Aussie Now, the whole seller panel navigation panel was redesigned as per the requirement. There are new menu items, labels are changed and few options are hidden for the sellers.
Further, there is the 'Get Help' menu item on the bottom of the seller panel menu that connects to the Buy Aussie Now helpdesk system. Looking for a powerful cloud-based ticket system like Zendesk, then view UVdesk Helpdesk by Webkul.
Product Return Request Management (RMA)
At Buy Aussie Now, every business has its own return policies and conditions. There is no default or set policy. But to standardized the whole order return process for all the sellers and buyers, Webkul Marketplace RMA is being used.
Stripe Connect Onboarding Integration
Stripe is a popular fintech company that primarily offers online payment processing software solutions and application programming interfaces (APIs) for e-commerce websites and mobile apps.
Webkul being an official Stripe plugin partner has developed various solutions to integrate Stripe services into various leading e-commerce frameworks and mobile apps.
For Buy Aussie Now sellers, we have developed the Stripe Connect Onboarding integration. It is a solution that provides a prebuilt user interface to seamlessly onboard sellers to connect and use the Stripe services.
Stripe Connect Onboarding securely collects sensitive personal details and ID documents needed for seller verification and handle updates to the UI to meet changing compliance requirements.
To process and receive online payments, we have integrated the Stripe payment gateway that allows shoppers to use their VISA, MasterCard, AMEX cards.
Still More To Come
Buy Aussie Now online marketplace is still an ongoing project, where many teams are currently working around the clock in different time zones. Webkul as a development agency is very proud to be associated with Buy Aussie Now team in helping local communities and businesses to recover and prosper.
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