No matter how old you are, the thrill of receiving something in the mail never fades, which probably goes partway to explaining the exploding growth in online shopping over the past couple of years.
In 2017 in Australia, online shopping grew by 10% (to an annual total of $32.56 billion!), while in-store foot traffic increased by just 3%.
In fact we love our online experience so much that as a nation we’re sitting in tenth position for ecommerce sales worldwide!
There’s no need to shop ’til you drop anymore, so settle back in your favourite armchair, put those feet up and get ready to ‘add to cart’ with these four fabulous online stores.
Adore Beauty
Officially Australia’s longest-running online beauty store, Adore Beauty had its humble beginnings in 2000, in the Melbourne garage of then 21-year-old Kate Morris. Wanting to take bossy sales people out of the beauty equation, she soon attracted clients who appreciated being able to make their own decisions about what brands they bought rather than having things pushed upon them.
Adore Beauty is an official stockist of over 200 leading global beauty brands, with a massive range of over 13,000 products including high-end department store brands, professional salon brands, hard-to-find cult brands and everyday affordable brands, so you can mix and match to your heart’s content!
Nearly 20 years on, they’re still 100% Australian owned and operated, and have a service team ready to help via live chat, email, phone or social media.
Their delivery is super fast and efficient (free Express Post for all orders over $50 – I often receive my delivery the very next day!) and they give plenty of opportunities to try before you buy with samples and minis.
(Oh and the free treat they include with each order always puts a smile on my dial!)
Booko
Booko is an Australian site with a very simple goal – to find the cheapest place to buy books and DVDs.
Founded by Melbourne man Daniel Milne, it’s not an online shop as such, but instead goes out to the Internet and looks up book and DVD prices from all the online shops that stock the title you’re after. The fancy term for this type of web-based business is ‘vendor agnostic online aggregator’, in case you were wondering!
When Booko has found the cheapest price for you, just click on the shop name and you’ll be taken to their website to make the purchase. Booko makes their money by collecting referrer fees from many of the sites if you follow a link from Booko to their shops, and then actually buy something, but it doesn’t influence the results of the searches.
Growing from sourcing books from a handful of bookstores in 2007, Booko now has the ability to search up to 64 online stores around the world, calculate the cost of shipping to your home country, convert the price into your local currency and sort this information from cheapest to most expensive.
There’s also a handy blog where they review books, look at book-buying trends, celebrate literary awards and interview some authors and other players in the field they love – the gentle pastime of reading!
Fashion Lane
We’re not sure what it is about Melbourne and awesome online shopping websites, but Fashion Lane is yet another example of a huge success story coming out of the city where there’s four seasons in one day (more chance to show off all the great clothes I suppose!)
The website was founded by two entrepreneurs, Edward Chan and Tony Wan, in 2014 with the aim of building something that would make a positive change in people’s day-to-day lives, and style enthusiasts are indeed thankful for it!
When you browse Fashion Lane, you’ll find the best sales from 547 online stores, covering clothing, shoes, accessories and even some beauty items, which is quite simply a task you couldn’t otherwise achieve without this website.
It’s like the fashion version of Booko (see above), so instead of visiting every fashion store and going through their sales individually, Fashion Lane aggregates all sales and lists them, sorted by the highest discount, and they get a kick-back if you go and make a purchase from one of the online clothing stores.
You’ll find sale items from a mind-bogglingly long list of well-known stores such as ASOS, The Iconic, Sportscraft, Saks Fifth Avenue, SABA, Seed and many more and there’s fashion for women, men and children, so nobody misses out.
I love their ‘Price Alert’ feature, which notifies you when a product’s price has dropped, so if you’re not in a hurry for something you can really pick up a bargain if you’re prepared to wait.
Catch
Started in 2006 by two Melbourne brothers (yes, there’s the Melbourne link again!), Gabby and Hezi Leibovich, Catch Of The Day originally started as an online venture that would sell one unbelievably good deal a day.
It was a slow burn business, built click by click, one member at a time, to turn it into Catch, the $230 million dollar company it is today.
It’s now Australia’s largest privately owned online retailer with close to 400 staff and over 45,000sqm of warehouse space that ships over 10,000 orders per day.
The best part about Catch is that it has literally everything you want and anything you need right at your fingertips, with daily deals that are genuine mega bargains. There’s fashion, beauty, homewares, sports, toys, electronics, health and lifestyle, groceries and everything in between. They have over a million products on offer, and all at incredibly low prices.
You can expect to get things like Elle Macpherson underwear for a third of its regular retail price, find big names in makeup like Estee Lauder, Gucci, Bobbi Brown and MAC, and source bargains from brands like Nike and Apple, with all the products being genuine.
Happy hunting!
1 Comment
Catch owned by Wesfarmers not private