Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show

If you've worked in ecommerce for more than five minutes, you know the pull of the conversion number. The moment leadership discovers that one magic number, it's all they want to talk about, and it doesn't matter how rubbery that number gets when you pull it apart. Meanwhile brand cops it. Brand gets called fluffy, and it's the line cut first when the quarter gets tight.
We've got the fight back to front. Brand and conversion aren't rivals. Brand is the thing that makes your conversion cheaper. The brands that win the argument don't insist brand is special, they treat it like an investment and hold it to account with real numbers, the same as everything else in the business.
This Playbook is anchored by Dave Dullens, Head of Brand and Consumer at Conquest Sports, which runs Converse in Australia and New Zealand. He's spent 20 years keeping iconic brands relevant, and he has the fight with the conversion number every single month.
In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about winning the brand vs conversion fight:
Pitch brand as an investment with a job, not a cost, and ring-fence its budget from your conversion targets
Hold brand to account with real numbers and KPIs, so it earns its seat at the boardroom table
Remember that if you never plant, you never harvest, and watch your cost per acquisition prove it
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The last time Justin Bausch was on the show, in May 2024, he was leading CRM at Ryderwear and AI meant product recommendations. He's back as a founder, this time with his partner Felisha Mina, and everything has changed. In a year he's grown Style My Wall to seven figures, and he's built his own AI platform to run the whole thing.
Style My Wall started as a Facebook Marketplace side hustle selling art while Justin still had his day job. He turned it into a print-on-demand ecommerce business, kept everything in-house, poured the agency savings into profitable ad spend, and went from one employee (his nephew) to 22 in two years. Then he built the tool that runs it: an AI platform, made with Claude Code, that manages his Meta and Google ads on autopilot, scans inventory, runs customer service through Gorgias, and updates shipping windows across Shopify and Klaviyo when dispatch blows out.
We get into how he built it, why he thinks most small businesses don't need a paid media agency, the Mattel deal that came from founder-led content, and how he and Felisha Mina now help other small businesses do the same through their agency InHaus Digital.
In this episode:
Keep it in-house and reinvest the savings into profitable ad spend, which is what took Style My Wall to seven figures in year one
Small businesses spending under a few grand a day on ads often don't need a paid media agency, they need to understand their own margins
Build AI into the whole process chain, not just one-off tasks, but roll it out in stages and never straight to autopilot
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There's a link in ecommerce that mostly goes unsaid, and it's a slightly awkward one: the connection between giving and commercial benefit. When a brand partners with a charity, they're doing it for the right reason. But to get it off the ground and keep it alive when budgets tighten, they usually have to rationalise it commercially, and that's the part that feels a bit icky to say out loud.
It shouldn't. GoGenerosity carries a real commercial upside, and being honest about that is often the very thing that lets the good happen at all. The thing worth chasing is the win-win-win: a win for the retailer, a win for the charity, and a win for the community in need. Get all three and it's powerful. Miss one and it falls over.
This came out of a conversation with Rohan McCloskey, founder of GoGenerosity, a pay-it-forward platform that turns small customer donations at the checkout into full-value gift cards for people in need, without ever touching the retailer's margin. Rohan has since sold the business. This episode was co-hosted by Rosa Willis.
In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about making giving a commercial lever:
Let purpose lead, but give it a commercial backbone so it isn't the first thing cut when the year gets tight
Weave the giving into the problem you're already solving for the customer, rather than a guilt trip at the checkout
Make the impact visible and pick a cause that fits, because alignment plus visibility turns a giving feature into a real relationship
Connect with Rohan McCloskey
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Four years ago Elysia Krstevski didn't know what ecommerce was. She'd spent 15 years in musical theatre, working her way from receptionist to co-CEO. Today she runs Mekė Baby, the brand behind Australia's first portable milk warmer, she's in the 2026 Top 50 People in eCommerce, and she's the face of Australia Post's national "Big Boss Energy" campaign.
It started with a bad moment. Stuck in a supermarket during Covid, dealing with mastitis and unable to warm expressed milk for her screaming baby, Elysia went looking for a product that didn't exist and decided to build it herself.
In this episode, Elysia sits down with Nathan Bush to break down how she created a feeding category from scratch. We get into why she built the brand before she had a product, why she handed prototypes to high-profile mums instead of waiting for perfection, and the wild story of answering a copycat competitor by borrowing Adrian Portelli's jet for a Black Friday film. Elysia is refreshingly direct about the numbers, why she stopped chasing top-line revenue on Meta and moved into Baby Bunting, why she runs her own ad account, and why she'll never hand customer service to AI. Plus building a brand while raising three kids, and launching the Go-Box while she was in labour.
Brands and tools mentioned: Mekė Baby, Baby Bunting, The Memo, Australia Post, Shopify, Meta, TikTok, Claude
This episode is brought to you with thanks to our partners:
 🛍️ Shopify → https://www.shopify.com/au
📧 Klaviyo → https://www.klaviyo.com/au/
Connect with us on LinkedIn:
 👤 Elysia Krstevski → https://au.linkedin.com/in/elysia-krstevski-b41485b7
👤 Nathan Bush → https://au.linkedin.com/in/nathbush
👤 Rosa Willis → https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosa-clara-willis-23761066/
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There's a link in ecommerce that mostly goes unsaid, and it's a slightly awkward one: the connection between giving and commercial benefit. When a brand partners with a charity, they're doing it for the right reason. But to get it off the ground and keep it alive when budgets tighten, they usually have to rationalise it commercially, and that's the part that feels a bit icky to say out loud.
It shouldn't. Generosity carries a real commercial upside, and being honest about that is often the very thing that lets the good happen at all. The thing worth chasing is the win-win-win: a win for the retailer, a win for the charity, and a win for the community in need. Get all three and it's powerful. Miss one and it falls over.
Rohan McCloskey, founder of GoGenerosity, a pay-it-forward platform that turns small customer donations at the checkout into full-value gift cards for people in need, without ever touching the retailer's margin. Rohan has since sold the business. This episode was co-hosted by Rosa Willis.
In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators need to know about making giving a commercial lever:
Let purpose lead, but give it a commercial backbone so it isn't the first thing cut when the year gets tight
Weave the giving into the problem you're already solving for the customer, rather than a guilt trip at the checkout
Make the impact visible and pick a cause that fits, because alignment plus visibility turns a giving feature into a real relationship
Connect with Rohan McCloskey
Explore GoGenerosity
Subscribe to the Add To Cart newsletter 
SMS us to Suggest a Guest
Connect with Nathan Bush
Join the Add To Cart Community