You can now track shipments purchased with WooCommerce sites with the WooCommerce Shipment Tracking v1.1.4 Plugin.
You can use the plugin to add shipment tracking information to your orders and provide customers with an easy way to track their shipments.
After adding details to an order, the tracking information will appear in emails, the order tracking page, and the order view page in their account section.
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2013, although only half over, has been heralded as the year when online retailing in Australia grew up. Even people who were decrying online retailing just a few years ago have come to realize that it’s an essential part of a business plan now and businesses that started online are growing in leaps and bounds.
Telsyte senior research manager Sam Yip says, it’s been a “very big year of change”.
“There have been players early in the space that have dropped out, and a lot of bricks-and-mortar retailers are doing more.”
“We’re not hearing any more Gerry Harvey stories; everyone acknowledges that this is the channel to be operating in.”
Even Australia Post is acknowledging the change, altering its operations to accommodate the influx of parcel shipments it now has to deal with because of the online retail boom.
Now that Australia has embraced online retailing, Yip says, platforms like mobile are up next.
But first, the actual logistics of online selling have to be perfected.
“The other big challenge here is around delivery,” Yip says. “In the past year we’ve seen horror stories of where logistics have gone wrong, with people getting wrong orders all the time.”
“There’s a need to really refine that back-end logistics functionality.”
Considering traffic data from Experian, revenue, and noteworthy achievements (and excluding local divisions of global companies, such as Apple and Amazon, along with auction sites such as eBay and Gumtree), the top 20 online retailers of 2013, in no particular order, are:
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Started in 2007 by Dr Carolina Tillett in Bendigo, Price USA is a site that lets Australians purchase things from the USA helping them to save a lot of money and allowing them to purchase items only available in the USA.
Working with partners in the USA, Price USA simply asks customers to fill out an order form on the website indicating what they want and from where. The US-based agents then buy the goods, package them up and ship them straight to the customer’s door.
Tillett charges the buyer 5 per cent of the total order price to handle the transaction and is raking in close to six figures every year from the comfort of her own home with relatively few business costs.
When stay at home mum Kristy decided to have friends purchase children’s party supplies and ship them to Australia so she could re-sell them in the country, she was only expecting to take in maybe an extra $50 per week.
Well, she’s getting a lot more than that, bringing in a tidy six-figure profit every year.
Starting out with an eBay story, she eventually switched to selling from her own website www.discountpartysupplies.com.au and started pulling in a quarter of a million dollars, all from her spare bedroom and all without borrowing a single cent.
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Garnering 30 million site visits and over 250 million page views since its launch in 2008 by Justin Cameron and Lex Pederson, SurfStitch, an online retailer that specialises in surf gear that is headquartered on the Gold Coast, is one of Australia’s most highly trafficked eCommerce sites and has pulled in $30 million in revenue for the company.
The online coupon site CatchOfTheDay.com.au, founded by Gabby Leibovich, netted an increase in revenue of 62% in 2012 to $230 million.
The site, which has distribution centres in Braeside and Truganina, Victoria, started in 2006 and has been going strong ever since.
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As Australia continues to roll out its $38 billion National Broadband Network, which will bring high-speed internet to almost all the 23 million population of the country, some government higher ups are predicting a boom in online and high tech businesses.
“As the rollout of the NBN continues, the capacity for start-up companies, particularly in the tech and digital sectors, to create game-changing businesses and applications is unprecedented,” said Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, recently.
Currently, online and high-tech start-ups only account for about 0.1% of GDP and 9,500 jobs. But the sector is growing rapidly and a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) suggests it could account for 4% of GDP and 540,000 jobs by 2033.
The rise of young startups has seen them start to populate the ranks of the Business Review Weekly Young Rich List, which ranks the wealthiest people in the country under 41.
The list includes 24 tech and online startup company founders, including: software entrepreneurs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar at the top; PC Tools founder Simon Clausen at No. 4; serial entrepreneur specialising in online retail sites Ruslan Kogan at No. 8; Bigcommerce founders Mitchell Harper and Eddie Machaalani at No. 10; and freelancer.com founder Matt Barrie at No. 50.
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Founded in 2009 by former Google employees Jodie Fox, Michael Fox and Mike Knapp, Shoes of Prey allows people to design their own women’s shoes using a virtual 3D designer that lets them pick style, shape, height and materials. The shoes are then custom made and shipped anywhere in the world within a few weeks.
The Sydney-based company reportedly received $3 million in funding last year.
