Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show

The whole ecommerce industry is racing to ship faster. Paula Mitchell thinks that's the wrong race.
Paula came to that view the hard way. After building ecommerce at Rebel Sport, Dan Murphy's and General Pants across 25 years, she joined Freedom as Digital GM and spent the first few months driving home wondering what she'd walked into. Furniture is not fashion. Made-to-order lead times run 12 to 16 weeks. Customers plan their lives around delivery windows. A $10,000 sofa carries emotional weight that a $70 t-shirt just doesn't.
Five years in, Paula is running one of the most-awarded omnichannel operations in Australia: 50 stores, six distribution centres, 160 third-party vendors, 70,000 SKUs, and a digital team of 12. Nathan Bush and Rosa-Clare Willis sit down with Paula to dig into why the industry's fixation on speed misses what furniture customers actually need, and how Freedom built the stack and team culture to move fast without losing brand trust.
Today, we're discussing:
Why certainty beats speed in high-consideration ecommerce, and what last-mile delivery in big-ticket categories actually demands [10:15]
How Freedom chose dropship over marketplace to protect brand trust, and why that meant owning returns in-store for third-party products too [14:47]
Running 30-plus ad variations per campaign with the same team size, and what AI actually changed about how Freedom's performance marketers spend their time [29:44]
Attribution across omnichannel: why last-click would have defunded every social channel, and what mixed media modelling revealed about TV [35:55]
A digital team of 12 managing 70,000 SKUs, how they're structured, and why Paula thinks the job title itself might be a legacy item [47:46]
What's next: a kiosk trial across 7 stores, an AI-driven inspiration mode for the website, and the feature Freedom just decommissioned [55:22]
Connect with Paula | Explore Freedom | Connect with Rosa-Clare | Connect with Nathan
This episode is supported by Shopify and Klaviyo.
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Customer acquisition costs on paid social have been rising for years. The channels that drove efficient growth half a decade ago are harder to justify today. Physical retail is starting to look genuinely interesting to founders who would never have considered it before.
But there's a gap between finding physical retail interesting and actually making it work. Most e-commerce operators approach the move with a revenue mindset they've carried from online. They measure store performance the way they measure a channel. And they treat the first store like a proof of concept rather than v1 of a repeatable system.
The brands that get it right do three things differently.
In this playboook, based on a conversation with Guy Nappa, COO of Oz Hair & Beauty, we cover three things e-commerce operators need to know before making the move into physical retail:
Know what the store is for before you sign the lease
Model rent as a customer acquisition cost, not an occupancy expense
Build the store-opening playbook before you need to run it fast

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Talea Bader is the founder of SKUTOPIA, a tech-led fulfillment platform rethinking how e-commerce brands scale their operations. What started from running co-working spaces for e-commerce businesses quickly turned into a much bigger opportunity solving one of the most consistent pain points founders face: fulfillment that can’t keep up with growth.
In this episode:
SKUTOPIA is building an “intelligent logistics network” powered by robotics and AI, and why operations not marketing might be the biggest unlock for e-commerce growth.
How own e-commerce frustrations led to building SKUTOPIA
Why most e-commerce brands outgrow their fulfillment before they realise it
What actually breaks behind the scenes when brands start to scale
The hidden cost of bad logistics on growth and customer experience
Why visibility and real-time data are critical in modern fulfillment
What to look for (and avoid) when choosing a 3PL partner

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Explore SKUTOPIA

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The conversation in most ecommerce businesses right now is about which channels to double down on. Meta is getting more expensive. CAC is going up. Every dollar of paid spend aimed at reaching a customer who hasn't found you yet.
But some of those customers have already found you. Through a different door.
Right now someone is buying your jacket secondhand on eBay. Someone is renting your dress through a peer-to-peer platform. Someone is picking up your shoes from a Facebook buy-swap-sell group. For many of those people, that's their first real experience of your brand. That's acquisition. It's just acquisition you're not in.
In this playbook, we cover three things ecommerce operators can take into their business:
Your secondary market is already running without you
Secondary buyers aren't defectors. They're the top of your funnel.
The brand experience of the secondary sale is yours to own or lose

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Most ecommerce founders start with a product and work backwards to find the customer. Melanie Nolan did the opposite.
As a practising naturopath, she watched the same problems show up again and again in her clinic: iron deficiency, prenatal gaps, supplements that caused side effects bad enough that patients would just stop taking them. The market had answers. None of them were good enough.
So she built her own, funded by selling her house, and sold her first batch in three months when she expected it to take two years.
In this episode, there are three things ecommerce operators can take into their own business:
Education-first marketing can drive better conversion rates than paid acquisition
Radical transparency in a crisis is the most powerful retention strategy you have
Trust built in one life stage becomes your greatest asset for long-term expansion
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Explore Naternal Vitamins
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