Lachlan Mercer, Founder and Editor

The short version

I got into this the boring way. My first job out of a commerce degree at UTS was running the online store for a Sydney homewares business that was doing about 90,000 dollars a month and had no idea which of its products made money. I spent eight months building a spreadsheet nobody asked for. When it was finished it turned out that a third of the catalogue was being sold at a loss once freight was counted properly, including the product on the homepage.

That spreadsheet got me the next job, and the one after that. By 2023 I was ecommerce manager at a 30 million dollar retailer, and I noticed I was answering the same question in three different industry Slack groups every week. What does a 3PL actually charge. Is Amazon worth it for a 40 dollar product. Does anyone really know what free shipping costs. Nobody could point me at a source, because there was not one.

I started The Ecommerce Report in March 2024 out of frustration, initially as a Thursday email to 60 people I knew. It grew because the numbers in it were real and because I was willing to print the ones that made vendors uncomfortable. I still get the occasional angry phone call from a platform partner. I take that as a sign it is working.

I am not a journalist by training and I have never pretended to be. What I am is someone who has had to make these decisions with real money, and who now gets to ask other people how theirs went. That is the whole editorial strategy.

Why this site exists

Australian ecommerce is covered either by platform vendors marketing to retailers, or by general business media that treats an eight figure retailer as a human interest story. Neither is useful when you are trying to decide whether to move your fulfilment. This site fills that gap by asking operators what a thing actually cost them and printing the number.

How the site is put together

Everything here is written by hand, published on a static front end and fed from a WordPress back end so contributors never have to touch code. Sources get to see their quotes before publication. Sponsored articles are labelled at the top and stay labelled forever.