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Jon Bovard is an e-commerce expert with incredible experience in the UK e-commerce market. He was involved in the start-up of www.net-a-porter.com, now a $100 million business; as well as the exclusive www.couturelab.com. Prior to that, he was web marketing manager at www.motormouth.com.au.

Having returned to Australia, Jon is now consulting to Bienalto and sharing his valuable expertise with some of our clients. Here, he offers some invaluable perspectives about where Australia sits on the ‘totem pole of sophistication’ when it comes to e-commerce and online marketing.

So where, exactly, is Australia on this totem pole?

JB: The good news is that Australia performs as well as overseas counterparts in some industries. In travel and publishing, for example, we can see as much innovation here as elsewhere.

However, it’s not necessarily fair to compare Australia to the UK and US. We will never have the same volumes of people online - their huge populations make it easier to justify spending more money at a greater intensity to achieve more sophisticated results in the online space.

Additionally, I would argue that the Australian retail industry is dominated (almost monopolised in some cases) by a handful of large players who simply do not understand or value the concept of eTailing. There is often little competitive impetus for these guys to push the online model. All it takes is for someone in the marketplace to “get it right” in terms of their website and e-commerce model, and the landscape will change rapidly as everyone else scrambles to catch up.

So that’s why we’re currently three or four years behind when it comes to e-commerce. But we’ll keep catching up - particularly when our broadband access improves from its current levels. I think we’re on par with Columbia at the moment, so there’s clearly room for improvement!

Let’s look at e-commerce first, then. What’s different in Australia?

As mentioned above, the number of people online and access to broadband are two key differences, as is the low competition here.

In Europe, perceptions have shifted from seeing the Internet as a giant price comparison portal, to a tool that offers convenience and choice. As more and more people come on board, retailers improve their level of sophistication and efficiency in logistics - you can place an order in the morning and have the product arrive in the afternoon. This sort of service increases consumers’ faith in the whole process, whereas in Australia products can still take a week to arrive.

Last year in the UK, retail shops on high streets suffered a terrible Christmas. Online, however, sales were huge. Year on year, online stores are selling significantly more volume than their biggest retail stores - people are changing the way they shop and the retailers are responding, not with cannibalism of retail stores, but with the positive displacement of resources.

Australia needs a sea-change of attitude - and it’s starting to happen - for retailers to embrace the online model of business.

Web analytics would play a role in this, to show them what’s working and what’s not. How does Australia rate in web analytics?

At the top end of town in Australian web analytics, businesses are just as sophisticated at their European and US counterparts.

But across the board, Europe and the US are simply more sophisticated in their use of web analytics because the increased volume of traffic makes it easier to justify the investment.

So overseas, you see web analytics bringing information in from multiple sources: email, web analytics software, paid search, CRM systems and the like. This creates a rich repository of information that online marketers use to create a single customer view, for instance. This centralisation of information empowers businesses to make more informed and balanced decisions.

What about email marketing? Bienalto is doing some great things with local customers, which would be on par with overseas companies…

What Bienalto is doing with customised dashboards and Salesforce.com is very similar to what I’ve seen overseas. Creating bespoke systems that enable powerful segmentation and targeting is what it’s all about.

For example, we had about 300,000 names in the net-a-porter.com database, and were able to deliver unique emails to every single one of them. We did it by building a bespoke system using Lyris, bringing information in from multiple disparate data sources, and populating the emails with completely different content for each user.

This is true one-to-one marketing, and Bienalto is certainly achieving it with its email marketing programs, especially in the B2B space.

We’re moving closer to the top of the totem pole, then. When is Australia at the top of the game?

What Hurol Inan and the Bienalto team are doing in multivariate testing is as advanced as anything I saw being done in the UK.

For large organisations in Australia that enjoy significant online volume, multivariate testing produces significant benefits with the spend justified through completely accountable and measurable results.

When I was working in the UK, we didn’t have access to the multivariate testing systems that Bienalto has access to. It is shaping up to be a strong area of growth for Bienalto.

So what do you hope to get out of working at Bienalto?

Hurol Inan and the Bienalto team are the smartest in Australia. They are so far ahead of the competition, pushing things that are being done overseas and attracting clients that are true thought-leaders.

Bienalto’s clients are very switched on in the commercial sense, looking at sales growth of 50-80% year on year in e-commerce. These are the sorts of figures that excite me, and I am looking forward to applying my experience in such a dynamic and progressive environment.