Add To Cart

How Jethro Marks is Transforming The Nile into a Leading Aussie Online Bookstore | #454

In this episode of Add To Cart, we chat with Jethro Marks, co-founder of The Nile, one of Australia’s longest-running online retailers. Starting out with just a computer, a living room and a few thousand dollars, Jethro has built The Nile into a global platform, shipping millions of products across 120 countries. Jethro shares how The Nile’s focus has shifted to becoming the leading online bookstore in Australia and New Zealand, and why staying plugged into global trends through events like ShopTalk in Vegas is crucial. We also dive into his multi-channel strategy, selling across platforms like eBay, Amazon, Catch, and Kogan, and the challenges of running a successful business for over two decades.

This episode was brought to you by…

Deliver In Person

Shopify Plus

About your guest:

Jethro Marks is the Co-Founder and CEO of The Nile, one of Australia's pioneering pure-play online retailers. With over 15 years of experience in eCommerce, Jethro has been there since the start with co-founder Mark Taylor, taking the enterprise from a living room with two guys and a computer to a global operation across Australia, New Zealand, the US, and UK, offering over 40 million products. A former Director of NORA, he is also a Non-Executive Director at DroneShield (ASX: DRO).

About your host:

Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading ecommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia’s Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email.

Please contact us if you:

Want to come on board as an Add To Cart sponsor
Are interested in joining Add To Cart as a co-host
Have any feedback or suggestions on how to make Add To Cart better

Email hello@addtocart.com.au We look forward to hearing from you!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Duration:: 52m
Broadcast on:: 13 Oct 2024
Audio Format:: other

People are not prepared to wait three weeks anymore, people now want stuff quickly. What you're doing is actually working, you just keep doing it, as opposed to trying to adjust to whatever people think you should be doing. It's usually the co-founder that comes on the podcast is the one that doesn't do anything. I think there's a key there where you've got to separate between the Fed or the short-term thing and what is going to be a sustained change in the market. Welcome to how to cart. Australia's leading e-commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast-moving world of online retail. Here's your host, Bushy. Hello everyone and welcome back to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, otherwise known as Bushy, joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia. Today, we are lucky enough to be chatting to a true Australian e-commerce pioneer, Jesro Marks. He is the co-founder and the CEO of the Nile. Jesro has spent over 21 years building an empire that ships 60 million products to 120 countries. Can you imagine being an e-commerce for 21 years? Well, do we call him the godfather? Maybe he is the godfather of e-commerce. Today, Jesro tells us how the Nile are on a mission to becoming the leading online bookstore in Australia and New Zealand. Plus, we don't often go into this territory, but we get a bit of industry gossip with Jesro sharing how the Nile actually bid for the booktopia business when they went into administration. It's a great conversation there because we talk about the frenemy concept between booktopia and the Nile and how they're in the same category, but they actually learn a lot from each other. I think that happens a lot in Australian e-commerce. Apart from that, Jesro shares how his annual trip to shop talk in Las Vegas keeps him connected with the global e-commerce scene. Sounds like a good excuse, doesn't it? He also talks about the strategy that helped the Nile become the leader in online retail and how the business has evolved through several different waves of digital commerce from the early days of eBay to the current era of multi-channel selling through to major platforms like Catch, Cogan, eBay and Amazon, Jesro has seen it all. If you've ever wondered what it takes to build a business from scratch, but not only build one, but keep one through many cycles of uncertainty, this episode is for you. All right, before we get into it, firstly, our e-commerce social in Melbourne is next week. I think we still have a few tickets left. It's on Thursday, October 17th at the corner hotel in Richmond. Come join us and meet other Ad Decart listeners. We've got an amazing panel featuring Mike from ZeroCo, Emily, Elvie, Nathan from Pear and Dom from Calibre. Tickets are $20 at the corner hotel, Richmond on Thursday, October the 17th. Head on over to addecart.com.au to follow the link to buy yours. A big thanks to our longtime partners. Shopify and deliver in person for making this podcast possible. Let's jump straight into my chat with Jesro Marks and hear how he's kept the Nile at the top of Australian e-commerce for over two decades. Jesro, welcome to Ad Decart. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Long time coming, as we said in our pre-chat, but in our pre-chat, we kind of got a bit off topic and we're like, oh, we better start this interview because we were talking about Vegas, and your adventures in Vegas are shop talk this year. That's our pre-world. Yes, I've been going to let's back up a step and explain what shop talk is. I mean, shop talk is one of the, I think it's the best online retail. I mean, not to disparage all the local providers who I love and have very good relationships with and attend everything, but this thing's just not another level. It's got 10,000 plus people. It attracts all the best of the best of the best, and I use it as an acculturation once a year to get plugged into the US market and get a real sense of perspective. I think one of the problems I run into here in Australia is you spend all the time at the local events, and I think I fall into the trap of thinking this is the universe, and then you step out and you realize, actually, hang on, we're just a very small microcosm in a very big space. I use that as an annual event to go and get perspective on the world. I mean, have a big chunk of our businesses in the US, and it's just one of these things that even with that, one can easily lose perspective of the scale of things. I think I have to shop talk probably for about six or seven years, I used to get other conferences before that, since I've discovered this one, I've kind of just stopped going to the other ones and just focused on this one. We've been getting a really solid cohort of Australian retailers going up and vendors each year, and it died obviously off COVID brought everything to a halt for a couple of years, and then it's sort of building its way back up again. But I encourage absolutely everybody to go up, because it's in March, it's in Vegas, which is fun, it's three or four days. If you're a retailer, you can basically get it all paid for because you have to take a bunch of meetings with vendors, and the vendors are fascinating, because, like I said, you're getting the best of this. Often, you'll end up talking to the local salespeople here, and then you go over there, and you actually need the mothership, like you get to talk to the guys who are leading the charge, and actually the insights in terms of direction can be very different, and just the insights in general. So it's a fascinating experience. If you're open to learning, and this is your space, then I'm, like, I reckon 110% that's the place to be. So the fact that there's a whole bunch of retailers that your friends with, plus it being in Vegas, has nothing to do with it. It's all the learning opportunities? Well, yeah. It's a work hard play hard situation. You do as much, you get to meet the Americans and everybody from around the world. You actually spend a lot of time with your Australians, because we end up as a group, hanging out quite a bit. So you end up connecting in a way with a lot more of the local guys, and you wouldn't normally see them during the course of the year anywhere. Oh, and you told me that there are media passes available as well, so that caught my attention. But let's talk about the Nile. So 21 years of the Nile, which is just incredible in the e-commerce landscape, and it makes a lot of sense why you need to go to the US to constantly refresh, and to think of new ideas, and to be exposed to new thinking, because 21 years in any industry is a long time, let alone the e-commerce industry. Tell us, when you started the Nile back in 2003, Amazon was 10 years old, so not a baby by any means, but nowhere near the beast that it is today, what inspired you to start the Nile? So what happened was, I came back from an eight-month backpacking trip. I was living in New Zealand at the time, and I thought to myself, I either start a business or I get a job. I've got three computers, a few grand in the bank, let's have a crack at this business thing. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out, I'll go get a job, like it's not the end of the world. And so I reconnected with a couple of guys I've worked with a couple of years, just after Uni, who we used to do something in a company vaguely similar to what we do at the moment, but not really. And we started off with three of us, three guys in the room, three computers, I think they're four computers, we had a few thousand bucks in the bank, and we started, and the business plan was highly sophisticated. It involved finding anything we could fit in a box and try to sell to someone somewhere in the world and try and make a few bobbing between, like if you just, you know, make yourself three and offer be good. Is it in tech or is it in retail? Neither, I just did a commerce degree at Uni, really had an interest in doing something. I kind of fallen in love with e-commerce as a concept at the time. I think it was, it was sort of, the dot com crash, it occurred. And we were in the period where it was considered to be, I don't describe it, it was like it was like a period where everybody thought this was a done thing. Like it was, it was a fad that had come and gone, was the general consensus at the time. And we looked at it and said, well, maybe, but things still seem to be moving. You can access the world through eBay and Amazon or whatnot. So it wasn't that you weren't able to transact, it just wasn't attracting the level of attention it had in the late 90s. And so if we went kind of coming out of one of those cycles at the moment with the COVID boom and the excitement around e-commerce during COVID and now the shift back to physical retail, you must have seen plenty of these cycles in that time. I kind of think about it in three or four different ways. I mean, there's a lot of granularity in between where stuff happens, but that first period when we started up, I think of it as being the kind of, I've called it the age of serendipity, it was like the period where you would serendipitously buy stuff because, hey, you could go online, it was like, it's cool, you know, 2003, if you could buy something online, that was kind of a special occasion. And it may turn up, it may not turn up, it may be well priced, it may not be, but it was like a whole eclectic experience. And that kind of went for a few years. And then in the start of '07 or '08, we had the GFC. And then that was the first kind of real pivot in the whole industry, where things moved from being serendipitous to one to being priced. Everything was price, price, price. And during that period, there were the rise of the groupons, sales, those kind of businesses, catch kind of came into its fore. You're going to call it the level of each era? We can call it back. Yeah. Gary definitely built the bulk of his business at that point. But yeah, the level of each era, let's call it that. What you had was a glass of inventory in the market, and everybody was cash put. So, there was brands who were prepared to discount to the vast rates in order to just drive cash and move products. And so, it was ridiculous thing when you had these businesses, which said we've got like a world community because you had to log in, but half the market was already in it. But the brands convinced themselves, I think that this was a safe way to move product without bastardizing the brand, which it's one of these situations where, you know, you know, you'll see no evil, but it all happened. And that resulted in that model kind of proliferating, becoming the mainstream, and there was the thing to do. And I remember we were going along doing our thing at the time, maybe we should try this, we looked at it, we couldn't. It was completely the wrong way of approaching the problems, where the way we dealt with things. And so, we just couldn't get, it was like we'd have to either set up a separate organization, which we didn't have the way we thought to do, or try and re-write the DNA of the organization that we ran, and there's like a bunch of things that couldn't make it happen. But the characterizer, it was go on, find a deal of the day or a period of deals, heavy, heavy discounting, and you got it when you got maybe three weeks to get delivered, whatever it was, which all worked up until the GFC ended. Worked for the retailers. Worked for the retail. Worked for the consumer as well, I mean, because the consumers were getting great deals at the time. The other thing, so the GFC was actually an interesting period, because we grew outside of COVID. There was the second biggest period of growth we've ever had, because what happened, and to this, I applaud Cogan and Jerry Harvey, they managed between the interaction that they had to explain to the consumer that if you wanted to get stuff cheaper, you go online. So, all of a sudden, we had people who were very very conscious, were very concerned about their jobs and about their, you know, not quite to the same level of issues we were having at the moment, but it was that mentality was driving things. And so, all of a sudden, people started buying online who had never been there before, that drove everything up in terms of volumes. Get out of the GFC, and all of a sudden, we now move into where we are at the moment, which is the age of convenience. People are not prepared to wait three weeks anymore. People now want stuff quickly. Amazon hadn't really arrived yet, so that the bar hadn't been raised to that level. But already, we could start to see that consumers were much more focused on convenience rather than on price. And I think to this day, that's kind of what's driven things. So, you think about, once upon a time, your selection was that drove your model. Two, it became the price became the driving model. Three, then it became the convenience factor. All the throughs, three, the whole you try and brew things. And now, all that's table stacks, you kind of have to do all of it. It's not enough to do each one of those things by itself. It's got all plugged together in a perfect sort of way to be able to make it very compelling from the foot consumer. And I feel that's what's coming out in a lot of the reports. They're talking about value, right? It's customer wants value, but no one can really describe what value means to them. It means something different to everyone. And I think what you said there about those three eras of product, price, convenience, it's like all of these have to come together now. So, it's not just, you can't just be the cheapest and ignore the other two. You've got to find a way to bring all of them together to give value to your customer. Absolutely. And I think with that as well, like I said, it's not, I guess one of the observations I've had is that consumers behave in multitude of ways. So, our strategy for many years had been about being everywhere, being omnipresent in every channel that people wanted to buy. Wherever you want to buy, that's where we want to be. So, we want all the marketplaces domestically, globally, were significant before the whole proliferation occurred. We had our own sites. We just basically said the ethos is we will be where the customer wants to be. And we don't necessarily need to be the winner in any one particular market if we're distributed across enough places and pick up enough business across the board. It all comes together. That was our proposition to consumers versus some of our competitors who said, you know what, you've got to be, you've got to purchase on my site in order for us to give you the experience that we want. The thing is neither of these are wrong, but there's no right and wrong here. Like you can, there's such a big market. You can kind of adopt a whole bunch of different strategies and some will work, some won't work. And just because you haven't done this one doesn't mean that one's wrong or right. You follow the data and figure out what's working. I think that that's been one of my key learnings throughout the entire time. It's like whatever the conventional logic says, and I remember there was a personalization craze that everybody had to be personal and stuff. We can personalize that past. It's just, what does your data sit? When we started up coming back to an earlier point, people said, Amazon is here. Like they earned the bookmark of what are you doing? Like you're wasting time. And I said, well, you sent us, but like, my data supports a different outcome. I'm seeing sales coming in on a regular basis. I'm scaling this thing. So it might be that the conventional logic is it's a winner takes all. But our experience has been it doesn't want to take all. And that as long as your data supports what you're doing and what you're doing is actually working, you just keep doing it as opposed to kind of trying to adjust to whatever people think you should be doing. So I'm interested in your strategy at the moment because you talked about that be everywhere to everyone. From what I saw on the outside, now selling to 120 countries, 60 million plus products ranged your own website, which is custom built on the look of it plus Amazon, eBay. I'm sure there's more marketplaces that I'm missing. How do you decide where you are going to be and direct you your efforts at the not? So I think the way we started out, we were a marketplace only business to begin with. So eBay and Amazon to begin with. And then over time, we built our own site. We rolled on to other additional marketplaces as they became viable for us to sell on. So we're on catch, we're on COVID. We love all these companies, even though we're friend of these with half of them and then that we're in co-op position. We compete in the morning, we cooperate in the afternoon. But coming back to it, I think the consumer is where the consumer is. Our view is that we want to be there and sometimes we'll be under our brand and sometimes it won't. But at the end of the day, if we can move a box and make some money and make someone happy, then that's a better outcome than worrying too much about whether it's null branded and arriving in a null box and that is nice to have, but it doesn't need to be the thing that happens. It's got to be just that we satisfy consumer demand as and where we can. So over time, we've evolved since we've rolled out new sites and we've had new marketplaces as marketplaces go to business, we've removed them or some don't work, we've removed them. It's just an ongoing sort of ebb and flow and you just kind of do something you tested. If it works, you do more of it. If it's not working, you do less of it. And that's a very pragmatic approach. I think that's what's kind of allowed us to survive as long and keep going at it rather than trying to be too dogmatic about the way we approach it. And in terms of your time, where do you spend most of your time? Do you spend most of your time in the product world, the marketing world, the tech world? Where do you like to fly the most? It depends. I think Paul Greenberg's analogy is that when I always come back to it, which is that of spinning plates. So it's like a question of which plate needs adjusting at that point in time and where the opportunities present themselves at that point. So at the moment, we are fixated on becoming the best online bookstore for Australian New Zealand. That's our current ethos and that's everything we're working on at the moment. So we used to do that as part of a bunch of other things that we've just said. Look, this is now currently the most important thing we can be doing. So that's what we're working on. So that's where my energy's going. And then I'm sure once we get to a point where that project has got to the level we need to get to, my attention's with us and where else. I'm very lucky to have an amazing team who've been with me for many, many years, including a business partner who I've been in business for 21 years. So I get to chase shiny balls and sort of chase flies or whatever you want to choose your analogy in terms of things. And they get to make sure that things actually happen rather than relying on me, in which case nothing else. Not much more operational and in the detail of that and you're more strategic and growth. That's probably a nice way of putting it. They'll probably just tell you that I don't do anything that they do everything. So it's just a question of who you ask and what your perspective is. It's usually the co-founder that comes on the podcast is the one that doesn't do anything. Okay, we can't we can't let it slide. Obviously, a huge ambition there to be the number one bookstore, online bookstore in Australia and New Zealand. We've obviously just had the booktopia saga, you know, from the outside. I think we're all in awe of what was built over a number of years there, especially with the challenges around Amazon and the threats of Amazon, plus some big legacy book retailers in Australia. They did a really good job of infiltrating the Australian market for everything unraveled. Did you put a bid in to take over booktopia as part of that vision? Right now, online retail is changing rapidly and it doesn't look like it's slowing down. And maybe it never will. So when retail changes, you change retail. Sell at the speed of change with Shopify Plus and grow with demand on demand using a commerce platform that can handle up to 10,000. That's 10,000 transactions per minute. For bigger business at startup speed, visit shopify.com.au/plus to learn more that shopify.com.au/plus because the future belongs to the fast. We absolutely did. But unfortunately, we weren't successful in our endeavor, but it's just the way it goes. It looks at something in a trip. It's a certain value to it and they attributed a high value than we did and they got the deal. But we've got, in a booktopia, it's one of those. We start up around the same time as they did. I think they were within six months of us and we've known Tony and Stephen Wayne and all those guys forever and we love them, but they're all one for people. But they went on a certain path and things ended up where they weren't very unfortunate. I'm very sorry that it went that way because it wasn't good for anyone. But that's how the market works. And maybe the guys that have taken over will do a great job of it and good for them. I think it's a big... I can come back to the same thing. All these markets are big markets. None of us are dominant players in the space. So there's space for many of us to be able to do things in different ways. And it's just as true in the more developed markets like the US and the UK where the likes of Amazon have got a much more dominant ship. But as an able store there, there's still an existence to take into if we're going to keep running with the book example. There is plenty of space to be able to do things. You just can't necessarily sit in the laurels and assume that doing things in a specific way or always going to work in different ways. I think that's where a lot of companies could have come unstuck. Those need to be able to be pragmatic, not hold on to sacred cows and just kind of keep moving with where the requirements are that the market is basically to take. And I think it's very, very important. I'm hearing a lot of Paul Greenbergisms coming in. I feel like you've influenced each other a lot over the years. Tell me more about booktopia in terms of what you saw. Obviously you followed that journey as a competitor and a friend over all those years. What parts of the booktopia business or experience to UK? That was really special. That is something that we would love to see continue on in Australia. They had a very customer focused approach to doing things. It's not to denigrate on my team's efforts. We do as well, but it's just that we have a different approach to how we did it. I think that up until the end, that was what drove their success, they were very fixated on providing the book via something. I think that that was a great thing. They had built a great business. The underlying business wasn't the problem. They just made a bunch of decisions that didn't work out. Is that mainly around the warehousing and the operation side of it, do you think? I don't have any insight information beyond what I've read and seen and spoken to the guys. My take is that it was not really one specific thing, but if you look at them, there were a series of decisions that seemed to have been made where they placed them very big bets, which didn't necessarily pay off, and maybe lost a bit of the focus that it got them to where they got. Again, it's one of these things where sometimes the outcome isn't necessarily due to anything anybody did specifically wrong. Sometimes the market just moves against you. You make a decision. You make a bet on the assumption that certain things are going to happen and they don't happen, and then you lose out. I'm very sorry it happened. I hope that hopefully the legacy will continue. In the meantime, we'll just keep doing what we're doing. No, absolutely. I think you've summed it up really well there is to use another Greenbergism. It's around the rising tides, it helps all ships. I think they contributed to that as they all have over the years in making it stronger for Australian e-commerce. There's definitely a legacy there, and I've got no doubt that you picking that up and filling that space will extend that legacy even more. It's an interesting point just to say we're slightly up there, but I think what I've noticed when I go to most conferences each year, and in the beginning, going back 10, 15 years ago, it was founder operators that I would see most of the time. Today, they're in the minority. What's happened is over the course of time, this industry has grown so fast, and it has brought so many new people into it that you've got people in all different levels of the businesses and the bounce around. They're all amazing at what they do, like five better than we were doing then, but obviously the market is they're more specialized and so the talent pool is phenomenal. The people in the industry who are so inspirational, who I meet all the time for the first time ever because I walk into the room like I don't recognize anybody here, and I can start talking there. I've been around for eight years, nine years. How is it possible? I didn't ever see you, but it's just one of those things where it becomes so big, and the merging of what e-commerce used to live by itself as a silo, and then retail did its own thing over here. Now, today, it's all the same thing. I mean, the terminology shifted really. It's currently unified what was on the previously multi-channel fulfillment blah, blah, blah, blah. It's always been the same thing, but now it's just a fidget or please, don't say it. I'll leave that to you. I'm really interested in the product selection, because you talked about the importance of data and using that data to make decisions in your business, and what's really surprising to me is that you're still selling books, obviously, but also things like CDs, DVDs, what others might say as legacy or declining categories. You're obviously seeing something very different in your data. What data do you look at when it comes to merchandising and stocking the right products? Our first approach is we don't pick winners. Our view is the consumer need. Our view is we aggregate supply and allow consumers to decide what they want, and so the decision-making is not so much. It's more to category level. Like, do we want to partake in a particular category? Take DVDs as a good example. It appears to be a dead category. It is really a serious decline, and one in their right mind would be investing in that space. We made those investments 15 years ago, and we haven't had to really do anything to it some other than upkeep, because the relationships with the suppliers are there. It all just kind of trucks along. It's all algorithmically run, and in that particular market, it's an interesting one in there. There is an amount of the business that is declining on an annual basis, so you wouldn't enter into a sunset industry, but if you're in it, you can still continue to profit from it for a period of time while the existing participants exit the market, and the base of consumers while declining and while the market is still buying stuff. There's like a period where JB Hi-Fi left the market. There's still a bunch of people who buy on a regular basis. They've got to buy from somewhere, so it might as well buy from us. That actually is one area where it probably won't be in for too much longer, just because we've reached an average support rate. It probably doesn't make sense, but from our view, there are certain areas where we put a lot of focus and to continue to grow, and there are some where we just get it in, and then we just let it do its thing, and then unless all of a sudden there's a spike, actually I'll say a funny one. DVD is kind of just tickling during their thing, and then in April 2020, when COVID hit, for the first time ever, we had a DVD in the top 10 of us selling items. I was like, that's very unusual, so I looked into it a bit more closely, and it turned out that the DVD was contagion. I think what had happened was people were looking for an answer as to what was going to happen next in the start of COVID, and so they went and got the one movie they really shouldn't have seen, because it's got a terrible ending. It's not at all positive, so I don't know if we contributed to people's misery at that point, I would hope not. You should have done, you should have got all the contagion DVDs, and just change the ending, to give people a bit of hope, and it all works out fine. It does me instead, it just does me. And tell us about how you manage your supply partners, because 60 million products, but going through your website, going through the Nile, they're not junk supplies, they are big name brands, a lot of the times, and with quality products and well household names, how do you manage that, because they've got options everywhere, similar to what we're talking about, like with sell wherever they want, what makes them go actually, I think that we'll be treated well and represented well on the Nile. It's a very good question, so our initial starting point is, we only work with branded product, and we only work with branded product that we can buy in one of the four countries that we operate, we're housing, so we don't import our own product out of Asia on our own brands or anything. We are literally just buying branded items, but someone has already gone to the effort of creating a quality product with a great brand story, and then over time, we enter certain verticals or certain categories, and the initiative is always hard, it's always difficult, because to the point you made direct, well, who are you guys and why would I want to potentially integrate it, but then over time, you add more, and you create a house of brands, and then as they see five or six or seven of their contemporaries in there, then they feel more comfortable about it, and so as we've gone into the various verticals, where there'll be toys, baby, homeways, kitchenware, it's kind of worked that way. With books, it's a little bit different, books we've been in there since day nought, and there it's just about aggregating the full supply of available product anywhere in the world, with the brands a little bit more, a little bit more considered, because we're looking more for the quality end of the product tip that we can get in there, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, like I said, we don't pick winners, so if the consumer responds to their offering, they're great, and if they don't, then we should move on. The not picking winners is interesting, because it's falling into the department store model online a little bit, and obviously the narrative around department stores at the moment isn't fantastic unless you're a kmart or a heaven for beta team, what's the difference for you in marketing to a department store style customer? Are you meeting specific needs, so for example, I'm typing in that I need a pillow, and they're our audience, or are you trying to target a certain kind of customer or demographic to shop the range? It's somewhere in between, so I think we often get mistaken for being a marketplace, which I think we are in some respects, like we're sort of somewhere between a retailer and a marketplace, in that we aggregate a lot of supply, we don't necessarily hold all the inventory, but we've got tight relationships full of supplies to make sure that we can meet customer demand, meet customer expectation, so if we say we're going to deliver by Tuesday, we need to get it two by Tuesday, and we do it in a way where like a traditional department store would be kind of aggregating six or seven categories into one store, we seek to aggregate millions of SKUs into one offering that we then allow people to buy from across a multitude of different channels wherever they're happy to go and buy from, so the way I see the space is that each of the different platforms that we sell through our own site, whether it be eBay, Amazon, they've all kind of got their core demographic of people who are very comfortable in that space, an eBay customer will always be an eBay customer, and they may occasionally look at other ones, but that's generally where they feel Amazon's got its core base, so if you kind of think about there's a Venn diagram where everybody's got their core and then there are overlaps where somebody might shop between the two, so our view is that we just want to put a lot of product up in front, a lot of good quality product, good pricing up in front of all those customers across all those different channels to be able to allow them to purchase from us in a way, shape, and form that they feel comfortable with. Makes a lot of sense. When it comes to your own website, I'm assuming that is generally more profitable if customers choose to shop directly with you. How do you position your USP there to shop via the Nile? Because I notice you don't have a loyalty program, which seems to be the go-to at the moment for a lot of brands trying to get people to shop direct. How do you position the Nile D2C experience for customers different to other experiences? Very good question. There's what they're what we are today and hopefully in time in the near future, this will be very different. So our view has really just been about having an EDLP in everyday low price on a wide variety of products and allowing consumers to find, when they go looking for their products, if they do through Google or wherever we happen to be advertising their point, that they will then come through and find their products on our site. So we've kind of behaved a little bit like our marketplace behaves. That's changing. So we're rapidly moving. There's a lot of development going on. You'll see a Regis. Maybe even the time this comes out, the site will be redeveloped and redesigned by the end of the chat. Maybe not by the end of the chat, but at least for the chat. Give me a little bit more time. Actually, a good point. At this good, the IoT goes on straight away. It's the end of the work to the moment. So we're redesigning and redeveloping that. And on the roadmap will be a lot more of the traditional things that one would associate with a D2C play that we typically haven't really worried about so much in the past. And your website, custom built, and you've been in the game. And like you said, set up with four computers, four laptops sitting around, developing the Nile 21 years ago. And you've been custom built ever since. You would have seen a lot of trends and a lot of changes in tech over that time. Back then, you kind of had to be a little bit nerdy to spin up a website, even let alone an e-commerce offering with payment go-ways and all the rest integrated into it become a lot easier today in that anyone can spin up a site within an hour. Have you ever had moments of going, "Oh, I wish we weren't custom." I remember we did this piece of development. It took us close to two years, like it was just an ongoing thing. I swear within two months after having rolled it out, finally got away, we wanted it to be. Some guy came out with a product for 50 bucks a month, which did essentially the same thing. And I was like, "Well, how are we doing this?" But, you know, some of this is, you know, go back to the legacy. We started out the options at the time, and this is really showing my age, were basically enterprise software, which we couldn't afford, or it was Yahoo stores, which was a complete load of crap. Like, it was the first version of what eventually Shopify became, but it was like the worst of the worst. And so we had to do it ourselves. And so then, progressively over time, you build out a system which gets more and more complicated, which is positive and negative. And so you're always running into this trouble. So when you're looking to be platforming two or three times, it's like each time you eventually end up in a situation where you're like, "Okay, this thing does 90% of what we want, better than what we do. But that 10% is going to make this unworkable. Like, there's kind of do what we need to do. And if we don't have that actually 10%, then it's not going to work, like at all, period." So you kind of end up with what you are with what you are. I think overall, I enjoy the flexibility. I get a bit frustrated sometimes where we have to develop functionality, which I would be able to just plug in an Apple SaaS product or whatever. Correct. It's going to be out into the ecosystem and just push a button. So instead, we're going to do a whole integration with the set of APIs. But we're getting better at it. We're getting better at kind of playing nicely with other systems so that we can take best of breathing and go, "You know what? We don't want to be developing or maintaining. This is something that needs to be done by somewhere else. And we just need to kind of plug into it and use it to the extent that we can." Yeah. And has having that kind of control helped you as you've expanded into all those markets, like 120 international markets that you ship into, that sounds like a logistical nightmare, let alone a technology nightmare. Has your custom platform given you the flexibility to be able to do that more easily or has it made it harder? In this case, it's made it much easier. There are things you just wouldn't have been able to do. So the way we work is we have sort of four core markets, which are the English-speaking markets, Australia, New Zealand, US, UK, Canada. So there's a fifth. And then we sell globally. And with the core markets, we've kind of come up with very bespoke shipping solutions, which we run ourselves. So if you look at our shipping solutions, they look similar. I like to think better than some of the third-party providers that are out there that we would otherwise have to use. And then for the vast majority of the other countries, we are using third-party providers because we just haven't got a critical mess to be able to support being able to do it yet. So as we get better at a particular market, and we get certain levels, then we can switch on some of our more bespoke solutions. And none of this would be possible. We've just been stuck with the existing platforms that we're out there. At the moment, we use multiple platforms to do various things, but it's about how you string it together in order to get a cohesive, consistent outcome. If we've been tempted to productise any of the developments that you've done for the Nile to sell it to other e-commerce friends. We've looked at it in the past. We tried doing it a couple of times. I guess one of our core weaknesses here is that we're very excited on doing what we do. When you think of your last e-commerce experience that went wrong, how did it go wrong? Was it because there wasn't enough product images? Was it an out-of-whack mobile experience? Was it that one rogue negative review? I doubt it. I bet it was because of your last mile experience and whether your product turned up on time and undemished. That's what we remember. Delivered in full on time, or die-fot for the sexy shortened version, is a key metric for retailers and customers. Why? Because it's a critical indicator of reliable on-time delivery and the post-purchase customer experience. However, many Australian retailers are settling for 70-80% delivered in full on-time results. That's a lot of unhappy customers. That's why brands such as July, Samsonite, and the party people turn to deliver in person. With an average die-fot score of 99.6%, you are delivering experiences to remember. Do not settle for less. Find out more at deliverinperson.com. The problem is, I've tried to get stuff in, project in, and various things into the existing flow, but because it's contrary to the way we do things, it ends up breaking everything. We end up saying, "Look, if we're going to do anything that needs to be outside of what we're doing here, and we haven't got it." We've tried. We may in the future. I don't know. It's my work. It does make sense. Like I said, what we're doing is very comparable in the shipping space in some of the international markets. We do some things that are very similar to what are the third parties that's applied to the market. It seems like it's not the current focus. Because you're across such a wide range of categories, I could imagine that the application is so broad. I don't see it as a weakness. I know you called it out as a weakness, but I actually think it's the strength to be able to go, "This is our focus. This is what we do." You call it out yourself. You said, "We've got the goal right now of being the number one online bookstore in Australia, New Zealand." For a team, that's pretty amazing to hear you go, "That's our focus right now." I have to keep taking over and over so that I'm not tempted to try and do anything else. It's not for the chance for you. If I can convince myself of something, then usually I can convince others. Coming back to the shiny ball, I do see the opportunities. More broadly speaking, this is the most amazing thing about this industry. If you look at any chart of online penetration to retail, it's upwards into the right with the sole exclusion of maybe 2022 when we came out of COVID and we dropped back a bit. Our numbers were back to COVID levels again, like we went down substantially, '22 when everything unwound, and now we're back to where we were. It's non-stop trajectory up into the right. I think as that has happened, the opportunities have become much easier. To a point you made earlier, the ease and ability to be able to do things, like if you're a shopper by merchant, you want to sell into America, two or three things, Ben, you're into it. Everything is lined up. Your tax issue, go talk to Abilara. Your shipping issue, go talk to the three or four providers that I have to do, and you can put together an offering within the space of a few days. It could be years to do that. Years. Why? Because we have to do everything from scratch and build it all out. Today, it is truly the end of opportunity in terms of being what you want to do. On the flip side, everything's more competitive. Everything's a lot harder. Now you've got higher cost of acquisition, you've got more players, everyone's a lot more sophisticated. You've got to be on your game a lot more. We can get away with a lot more before that you can't today. I think that's always the case. Things always get more competitive as they've got, but I think there's no shortage of opportunities. If we're staying to 120 countries, everyone gets to drive into many countries. All you have to do is just enable shipping to 120 on your eBay store, your Amazon store, whatever, or where you've got. You just have to be able to support it going forward. But to your example, before, around developing for two years, and then someone comes in with a plug-in that's $50 a month, I could imagine that that flexes a muscle in you, that you have to be very critically aware of the trends and the fads in e-commerce that you choose to double down in that. We can play around a little bit with this. It's like, no, we're actually all in on this, or we're leaving it behind. It's like a black or white decision rather than a little dabble along the way. Do you think that's made you a hyper-aware of analyzing decisions and actions and not just following trends because everyone else is doing it? Yeah, I think there's a key there where you've got to separate between the fad or the short-term thing and what is going to be a sustained change in the market. There aren't that many sustained changes in the market. The market kind of operates the way it has been for long. And like I said, coming back to the personalization example, there's some great personalization businesses. Tiny me, you guys, brand a brilliant business. Love it. It's very, very in awe of what they do. But I mean, that's the race they're running. But there was a time when everybody said, this is the thing that's going to happen, or the catch of the day, the deal of the day type sites, that was the thing. And you've got to go, well, A, is this significantly shifting what I'm doing? Like, this is an existential threat to my business. And if the answer is no, then you go, okay, well, is this an opportunity I want to pursue? And if the answer is yes, then figure out the way to do it. And like that's probably one of the things that we haven't been good enough at. I mean, we take actually a bit of a cheer on those guys, but phenomenal. It just is spinning up new ventures. And then there was the one rolled into menu log and then that could solve the just eats for the most insane valuation anyone's ever seen. So there's obviously a lot to do there. But at the same time, that takes away from the focus. So we kind of come back full circle and then just say, well, what is my data support? Is this whatever this thing is? Is this going to be any threat to me or an opportunity? And then assess it and move accordingly? So I think, you know, again, just being kind of pragmatic, humble, be humble. I think humility goes a long way. And just being persistent. What do you do with sort of the main, the main kind of independence of success? That's awesome. That's, that's brilliant advice. I love that. I want to touch on a slightly different topic. Just out of curiosity, you're the non executive director at Drone Shield. And I'm like, Oh, I just saw the name and I was like, we've got a video about this. I almost went to like look at the website. I'm like, actually, no, I'm going to look at the website because I want to hear it from you. Tell us what Drone Shield is and how your relationship there came about. I highly recommend you go look at it because it's the most amazing set of systems and to see what it's all about. So that was, it's a listed company. It's in the defense tech space. It works in detection and defeat of drones, smaller sized drones, and primarily sells into military. And there's some civil applications as well where it goes into places like airports and the like. I got on board with them about four and a half years ago. So it was a relatively small microcap at the time. I knew the guys who ran it and the opportunity arose and we got on board. And you know, sometimes it's just a question of timing. These guys just persevered and kept doing the same thing. And then all of a sudden Ukraine kicked off and then that became drones became a very apparent, you know, now in Israel and around the periphery there. You can see what's happened with drones. And all of a sudden it's gone from being a thing which is a nice to have to all of a sudden it's becoming a thing that people have to have because drones are an act of new, one of the new waves and warfare and in other applications. So this company, when I joined it was probably trading, I'm probably going to have about 100 more. And it's peak a few months ago, got us highest two billion. Just a phenomenal, phenomenal story. It's a company that's come of age, the right time with the right tailwinds, with the right tech, the right, you know, just an absolute world leader in what it's doing at the moment. Now it's becoming competitive. They were the only guys in the space for years now. But now the industry grows around them. And all of a sudden you've got 100 competitors you didn't know you had that ever fall. But the key, it's just an amazing business in terms of very R&D focused. They're in an arms race with the drone manufacturers to make sure that they're, you know, whoever's system, you know, can defeat all the drones that are out there. There's a proliferation. It's a fascinating space, but just really, really amazing ride. Completely, everything about is completely different to what we do on a day to day. We're ideal with consumers where we take money up front and it's all very quick. These are long sell cycles, selling into defense which can take years at a time. But just an amazing, amazing product with an amazing team. So really, very privileged to be a part of that. Very different version of all products that's looks like as well. Just got to put into ASX 300 a few days ago. So yeah, really interesting. Well done. I love that because yeah, I was, I was on the deep dark depths of Reddit this week, which you never know what will throw up. One of the trending stories was actually a Russian soldier lying in a ditch. I'm not sure if anyone else saw that who was actually surrendering to a drone, like so trying to work out, you know, how do I show them surrendering to a drone? So it's a, you know, exactly like you said, it's just this whole new world of, you know, combat and the way that international relations will unfold and to be front and center of that with drone show in Australia, which is phenomenal. I just couldn't imagine going from that world into back into e-commerce. And I was, I'm going to ask it anyway. I was going, I was like, this is a stupid bloody question coming off the back of that, but drones in e-commerce, do they, will they have a role in the next five years? There's been talks about for 20 years, right? I think that's, that's been, I'd look, I don't know. I mean, I think there were definitely use cases where it makes sense. You know, if you want to get something asked to a, you know, a certain area regionally that, you know, doesn't support someone going over there and driving them, that makes a lot of sense. I can see the use cases. I just have, I'm doubtful we're going to see anything in the immediate future, simply because I don't, there are a couple of reasons. I think the technology is probably there now. I think there's a lot of regulations around the use of drones and where you can, where you can't, how you deal with it. And especially in Australia, which is the land of regulation and regulations upon regulations, doubtful that there will be a world leader in terms of how that gets rolled out. That's it. I was talking to someone who's working on something in Europe and they seem to have, they were quite, you know, quite adamant that we're going to get something across the lines. I don't know. Look, I think autonomous vehicles make sense. I have a high level of conviction, and I hope that my kids never need to get a driver's license. I mean, that would be awesome, or autonomous vehicles are there by then. So, the next 10 years or whatever, we can get to that point where Ubers are basically just autonomous vehicles around the road, then that'd be great. If we get to that point, I think maybe the application would be, would make sense in a variety of different ways, whether it be on the middle mile, like around trucking or whether it's like drone delivery by air, as you would imagine, like a small drone dropping and stuff. Or maybe it's what was described to me is like light aircraft, which do just purely cargo, but autonomous and therefore can drop the cost of doing things. I think there's a ton of application. I'm just not convinced it's going to be within the next five years. That makes a lot of sense. I love that perspective. You know what I was just thinking as you were saying that? The inverse relationship between youth drinking at the moment, obviously drinking is going down amongst youth and autonomous vehicles. So, we're going to have this generation that doesn't drink but has drivers for them everywhere. Well, we're going to be the ones using the driverless vehicles. I don't think it's going down that generation, but yeah, you're up. No, it's a very funny. I hadn't thought of that. Just wrote, I love this chart. It's just bringing such great perspective to the industry that we're in, but also I think some of the wisdom that you shared around longevity in our game and how it's not flashing the pan, that you've got to build something that has longevity, but have your moment of focus really stood out to me. So, thank you for sharing that. Obviously, you've got that big goal over the next however long to be Australia's number one online bookstore in Australia or New Zealand. What does the next 12 months look like for you? Exactly, that's just heads down focus on that. Building out all the capabilities that we don't currently have, improving on what we do, and just getting the entire team entirely fixates on this customer experience and how we improve it. And that I think for anybody to listen to this, no matter what business you're in, that should be the starting end of every day. It should just be, am I improving the customer experience in some way, shape, or form? And if not, then I don't think I'm doing the right thing. That should be the absolute old stuff every single business ends. It's easy to say. It's a lot harder to do. Yes, absolutely. Apart from going and meeting you at ShopTalk in Vegas next March, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you or learn more about the non? Well, for the now to check out the site, then I'll come to you. But for me, bowel means reach out to LinkedIn. Very easy to find. Always open to discussions to anybody who wants to have a chat. When I'm done with more of the business, you want to find out if you've got just questions in general. If you're looking for some help, I don't know if I can help, but I'll try and do what I can. And if you do want to find out, come along to debate the Trip to ShopTalk in bowel means reach out. We'd love to hear from you as well. Lovely. Jeff right. Thank you. It was great chatting and about time. We've got you on that decast. Thank you for coming on. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great. Super interesting chat with Jeff Ro there. I've known Jeff Ro for a long time, not closely, but we've run in the same circles and had a few conversations over the years. But that was the first time I've really got to sit down and understand the story in full and what a story it is. I love how ambitious he continues to be after 21 years to put it out there, that he wants to be the top bookstore in Australia and New Zealand. I love that the passion and the fire is still burning. All right. Here are the three main takeaways I think we can take from that discussion. Number one, focus on your core strength. While the Nile has such a wide range of products shipping to so many countries through so many different channels, Jeff Ro shared how they've recently narrowed their focus to becoming the leading online bookstore in Australia and New Zealand. This strategic focus shows that even though it is a massive business with so many options and so many possibilities, being able to communicate not only to your team, but as Jeff Ro said, to keep it in his mind, one clear purpose and vision is so important to making sure that something comes to life that you don't try and do everything and then become nothing. All right. Number two, be everywhere your customers are. Jeff Ro's philosophy is be everywhere that the customer wants to be and it is the cornerstone of the Nile's success. While the Nile is one of the first D2C businesses in Australia, they haven't held on to owning the customer through their channel only or this time. They sell across multiple platforms like eBay, Amazon, Catch and Cogan, which allows them to reach a broader audience and move product as it needs to be moved. You've got to keep your mind open to new opportunities to sell your products and reach new audiences, whether that be marketplace, wholesale, physical stores, just because you are grounded in one channel such as D2C doesn't mean it's always just got to be that. And number three, learning from global markets, staying connected to international trends is a high priority for Jeff Ro. As we heard, he regularly attends events like shop talk in the US, which allows him to keep a pulse on what's happening in global e-commerce rather than just being in the Australian bubble. By engaging with retailers and innovators all around the world, Jeff Ro's able to bring back fresh ideas and insights into the Australian market and get ahead of those trickle-down trends that we tend to see a little bit after those leading markets and it's played a huge role in keeping the null competitive. So if you are after a little bit of secret sort of something that others in your direct competitor set here in Australia might not have, maybe it's time to look overseas for your next piece of inspiration. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with your colleagues or friends and don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts. And of course, a big shout out to our fantastic partners, Shopify and Delivering Person, as always, for their continued support in bringing this podcast to life. Before you go, we'd love to invite you to join our free e-commerce learning platform, Add Decart Campus. Meet other professionals and learn from e-commerce experts to take your business and your e-commerce career to the next level. Register to join campus at add2cart.com.au/campus. Now if you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with a friend or a colleague or even better. Leave us a review on Spotify or Apple. It really makes a difference.