The ABS current splits retailing into a number of different categories, such as clothing and household goods. However it does not specifically categorise online sales with the existing groups.

“Online retailing is in the ‘other’ retailing area, so you don’t know what percentage of that ‘other’ retailing is the online,” said Australian Retailers Association executive director Russell Zimmerman.

You can read more at smh.com.au

Figures showed the National Australia Bank Online retail sales index jumped 26 per cent in the year to February, increasing from the 19 per cent pace in the year to January.

“This increase was particularly notable given that February 2010 and 2011 recorded little to no growth when compared with the preceding month of January,” said NAB chief economist Alan Oster.

SmartCompany spoke to two entries from the Smart50 who disagree with Gerry, Milan Direct and Fidarsi Furniture. Both have revenue in the millions of dollars.

“speaking to these two companies, it’s obvious people are buying furniture online and they’re doing so because the sites go out of their way to show as much of the product as possible.

This is where high quality photography, demonstration video and interactive features are critical. Shoppers want to take away as many variables as they can. High quality photography and other features go a long way to ensuring the purchase is a successful one.”

One common critcism of buying bulky products online from consumers is that they can’t touch or feel, for instance. However if you put a lot of effort in to your product as described above you can certainly sell bulky products online.

You can read more over at smartcompany.com.au

The online travel start-up was launched in 2009, offering a service to handle short-term rental transactions.

With an average gross booking of $1330 in 2011 and present booking numbers at approximately 200,000 nights to date it’s yet another case of the success of launching a business online.

Featuring more than 2000 Australian properties, Australia was it’s second most frequent user base in 2011.

You can read more over at smartcompany.com.au

Launched in 2000, and attracting many doubters who didn’t believe women would purchase luxury items online, it has been so successful that it was sold in 2010 for 350 million pounds.

For example, if you were using a program that read this webpage aloud to you it wouldn’t know which part of the page to start reading from. If there was some information within the webpage that told the program to only read this blog post it would be much more efficient at working out what part of the webpage is relevant.

You can read more over at smh.com.au

baselinemag.com has 6 pointers on how to use social media to build a stronger brand.

Here are the top 3:

1. Identify interested customers to encourage brand loyalty.
2. Build a community to communicate with customers and improve service.
3. Create viral videos and engage with consumers to promote new products and brands.

Check out of the rest of the tips over at baselinemag.com

Chief executive Ahmed Fahour said,

“The period leading up to Christmas really highlighted a widening gulf in profitability of our letters business and our parcels business,”

“We delivered 3 million more parcels in December than we would in an ordinary month,”

You can read more over at smh.com.au

The company announced an 80 percent jump in online sales for 2011.

You can read more over at crn.com.au

While lowering prices is challenging for the businesses it does go some way to convincing customers to proceed with the purchase.

Telsyte senior research manager, Sam Yip has said,

”All the emerging ways to buy online are tied by a single common factor – discounts,”