eBay sniffs out Australia's sweet retail wastes

Beverley Head
Thursday, 16 February 2012 12:21

IT Industry - Strategy

The Australian retail landscape is something of a wasteland as far as e-commerce is concerned, with bricks and mortar companies still scrambling to get online. For eBay it represents a sweet opportunity as the company prepares to make its cloud based x.commerce fabric , or middleware, widely available at the end of next month.

Last October eBay unveiled x.commerce, its bid to create a global developer community focussed on writing applications to support online commerce. Its x.commerce fabric is currently in limited beta release with 26 companies using it, but is slated to go live at the end of the quarter according to Matthew Mengerink, vice president and general manager of eBay Inc, who is currently in Australia.

The x.commerce fabric, which is hosted on a cloud in the US, is intended as a secure, scalable and open message broker, or middleware layer. X.commerce apps can be plugged directly into the fabric, which provides individual merchants with the ability to quickly link to everything from online rewards and purchasing systems to comparison shopping services and shipping companies.

According to Frost & Sullivan Australians spent $13.6 billion online last year, with about half of that going to offshore sites. According to Mr Mengerink the time is ripe for local retailers to lift their online sales profiles, which will allow them to reach both local and international customers.

At the moment he acknowledged; 'Merchants are struggling to keep up.' Part of the problem was the skinny margins in retail which left few companies with much money to invest in online technologies.

'Amazon spends $US2.6 billion annually on technology and innovation. The largest retailers we can find are spending $US100 million,' he said.

In addition retailers were hard pressed to attract the right sort of technology smarts with ICT professionals not viewing the retail sector as an employer of choice.