The Conversations That Shaped Ecommerce in 2025 | #583

Between tariffs landing faster than expected, Amazon tightening its grip on customer expectations, B2B finally stepping into the spotlight, and APAC proving it’s anything but a “secondary” market, this was a year that forced operators to rethink fundamentals.

In this special wrap-up episode of Add To Cart, Bushy revisited the eight conversations that personally shaped how he thinks about ecommerce, leadership, and growth. Not the most downloaded episodes. Not the loudest trends. But the ones that landed, lingered, and changed perspective.

Chapters

• 2:29 1. Brett Sinclair - B2B Is No Longer Optional
• 7:47 2. Anna Samkova - Customer Centricity Is a Leadership Problem
• 11:30 3: Ryf Quail - APAC Is Not One Market
• 16:05 4. Viv Conway - Trust Creators, not Briefs
• 19:00 5. Sean Walsh - Amazon Sets the Bar for Everyone
• 23:36 6. Justin Irvine - Panic Is the Most Expensive Response
• 28:00 7. Marianne Marchesi - Legal Isn’t a Cleanup Job
• 31:48 8. Suzie Young - Transformation Starts Inside

Transcript

SPEAKER_05: 0:02

Hey, it's Nathan Bush or Bushy joining you from the land of the terrible people here in Brisbane, Australia. Welcome into Add to Card. Very special episode. I hope you get this episode. As you are winding down, the pressure is coming off. You're thinking about your next margarita, and you're starting to tune out. You're starting to take a load off before we get into planning for next year. But I always do think it's good to go back and have a think around the year that we had. What resonated with us, what hit home, what failed, what succeeded. Because it's so hard, especially in e-commerce and retail, where our busiest season is right at the end, that we often don't go back and think about what impacted us this year and what we would change and progress moving into the next year. It's not a skill that we're typically good at in this industry. So, as we have done in previous years, I wanted to take a look back and think about the conversations that really helped shape or impact me personally in 2025 and bring them to light for you in case you missed them. And to give you a little bit of context on why I think they're important, we're going to do another episode next week where we'll bring together our top 10 most downloaded episodes as voted by you throughout the year. Again, to give you a little taster of what was in there in case you missed them and you might want to go back to some of those most popular episodes. But this one, I'm being a bit selfish here. I'm taking it from a personal lens on what hit home for me. And I hope that you get a few little nuggets out of this as well that you can take into next year. Now, before we get into it, I just want to say a huge, huge thank you to all of our guests this year. I'm constantly blown away by first, the people that approach me to come onto this show and share their story. We are so lucky to have the best people in e-commerce constantly joining and sharing. And secondly, how much they're willing to give away. We've got an amazing community in e-commerce. That's a given. And what I love is what we've built here in Add to Cart is that we've taken that community to the next level of people who are really passionate about e-commerce but willing to share. And I think both our guests and you, our listeners, are great representatives of that. And that's why I love doing what I'm doing. So thank you to our guests. Thank you for listening throughout the year. Let's get into the top moments that shaped this year for me. Kicking us off from episode 487 is Brett Sinclair, founder of the B2B E-Commerce Association. If B2B e-commerce was to ever have a year where it came out of the shadows, I think it's fair to say that 2025 was it. And what Brett is doing is leading an incredible industry body to help upskill, connect, and shed light on the amazing opportunities in B2B. I think there is so much to learn in B2B, and there is so much opportunity when you're talking about revenue numbers at that scale, volumes at that scale, and the change that's required to transition businesses into a B2B e-commerce world. That opportunity is enormous. And we're going to see way more of that in 2026, especially as the B2C and the B2B world start coming together. Because at the end of the day, we're all customers. We all have our own habits. We all know how we like to shop. There's actually no reason that we need to make B2B a totally different process. So this conversation with Brett was really enlightening to set the foundations on what B2B e-commerce is and how to set your business up to ride the wave of B2B that really started pushing off in 2025.

SPEAKER_02: 3:44

So, you know, more and more expectation and pressure is coming on the B2B, whether you're a manufacturer or distributor, you know, to have an experience, right? A digital experience that it does involve usually placing orders, right? But if you think about the B2B experience, it can extend a lot further than just then placing an order, right? You're talking about other things like gathering information, they want to be able to, you know, view their account, they want to be able to pay invoices, they want to be able to assign certain workflows to other employees that may need to purchase. And depending on, you know, there's a lot of complexity in B2B. So, like, you know, depending on the the industry that you're in, whether you you could be in health and medical or you could be in agriculture or industrial or chemicals and you know, that digital experience can vary dramatically, right? For what the customer needs, the buyer needs on the other side. Whereas in retail, not saying it's not complex, incredibly complex, but you know, if you're selling shoes versus sporting goods or beauty products, a lot of the requirements are very similar. Yeah. How you market and everything is, you know, can be very complicated. There's obviously nuances to all of that. But so but in the B2B world, you know, it's very complex around the rules, the pricing. The machine, the machine itself, the the levers and the cogs are a bit more complicated. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. And so then to get back to your your other question, like, so when people in those organizations and manufacturers and distributors are responsible for digital and transformation within these organizations, you're talking about making significant changes to the business and how to operate and the mindset of people. Yeah. So you're impacting, like, as a the best example is sales, right? Like if you're typically this the salespeople in a B2B organization have been offline sellers, right? They go out, they meet face to face, they communicate on phone, email. And so you're talking about putting a portal in front of their customer to place orders, right? And that opens a whole can of worms within a B2B organization.

SPEAKER_05: 5:49

And so management one of the biggest ones there is threat, especially to those sales teams that have had their big black book of clients for so long, and all of a sudden they're saying, actually, no, they can go and self-service online now.

SPEAKER_02: 6:01

That's right. It's exactly. And that's their world, right? They go out and they see the customer and they sit face to face and they wheel and deal. And the, you know, the funny thing is, like, you know, people automatically think that's sort of you know the threat of you're going to be replaced, but it's really, it's really not the case. Like it's it's more about taking away a lot of those mundane tasks, right? Of just, you know, order taking and doing administration than what, you know, most of the the people, the brands find that implement it correctly is then the the their best sellers are like, this is amazing. I love B2B e commerce because I don't have to do any of this admin work anymore. I can just be more of a strategic seller focused on the relationships. Yeah. High impact relationships or more time to chase those new accounts that they want to land, right? But so all of those challenges, and then we're just talking about sales, and you talk about the executive team, like, you know, trying to get them to buy into this when, you know, there might be from a general baby boomer generation that or a you know, 50, 60 year old family business that has always operated a certain way. So you've got people that are in these organizations responsible for these transformations that, you know, they feel very lonely in their roles, right? And so that was the opportunity with the association was to start a network of people and bring those people together so they could have an active conversation, create connections, start to share insights. And that kind of spanned across, you know, the whole ecosystem because you also had all of the technology providers, right? As well, they're in B2B, which is a massive ecosystem. Like today, we're just still uncovering like more and more players that you know we we didn't know about or just hadn't had time to speak to. And they're just, you know, they're coming, they're coming through now as we're sort of getting more mature in what we're doing.

SPEAKER_05: 7:38

But I mean, that's a massive role for you is to connect that whole ecosystem when you start pulling it apart into tech, into clients, into retailers. There's so much so much there. Of course, I could not have my most impactful episodes without going past my good friend and occasional mentorslash therapist, Anna Samkova. I've got no doubt that you know Anna through her LinkedIn Lives, her Friday live sessions, which are absolutely incredible. She's one of the most generous senior leaders going around in Australian e-commerce. And she's able to take some pretty wishy-washy concepts around customer centricity and translate them into real speak. And that's what I love about Anna. She is always the first one, not just to pat you on the back, but to tell you we can get better. And we all need someone like Anna in our lives. Listening to Anna talk around customer centricity. You can't help but feel inspired to make sure you're looking after your customer.

SPEAKER_06: 8:36

I do get uh a lot of phone calls and DMs about our data is a mess. We don't know where to start. We think we know who the customer is, but we don't really. And then I always ask one question who in your organization owns the customer? And I normally get two types of answers. It's rather everyone or it's no one. And both are equally wrong. Because everyone is no one. And no one is self-explanatory. So, and if the this is the answer I get, it means that no one has that ownership of checking the journeys, creating the moments with intent. Everyone sits in salos, e-commerce do their thing, retail obsolete do their thing, and they're all doing amazing things, but most of the time they just sit in BAU and executing the business strategy that is product-led in many cases. Let's just face it.

SPEAKER_05: 9:26

So then, in your view, if it can't be everyone and it can't be no one owning the customer, who should own the customer in a medium to large organization?

SPEAKER_06: 9:35

Look, it's a bit driven by the leadership team for sure, to begin with, because they're the only ones who are prioritizing the projects and the roadmap. So if it's not the priority for them, it won't be a priority for the team because everyone just will come up with hundreds of 50,000 excuses why they're not doing it and how busy they are. So it definitely needs to stem from the executive team and then it needs to be passed on to the people. Person who is in charge of the customer service team cannot own that. So it's rather the chief customer officer, or in many cases it is a CMO. Whoever that centralized body that sits across multiple departments but reports to the senior team rather the the COO or CTO or a CEO.

SPEAKER_05: 10:22

I've worked in large retail as well, and there's plenty of executives who say they're customer-centric, but then the first thing they will talk about is product or stores. What are the signs you look for in a leader that they are actually thinking about the customer?

SPEAKER_06: 10:37

Several questions. What is your retention rate? I normally ask. What is your customer lifetime value? What is the tenure of your customer? Who are your high value shoppers? And normally I just get the eyeballs that get widened. It's like, what do you mean? It's like who is the customer that spends the most uh money with you? How many do you have? How often do they come back? And what is the average order value? And how many people, how do you track? Active customers, how many do you have? How many sit in your one-time buyer, uh, two plus time buyers, three times plus buyer, and what have you? If I don't get answered to those questions, they're not customer-centric.

SPEAKER_05: 11:13

And do you find that it's uh usually a reporting problem or a data problem? That, you know, you mentioned there that the data does does exist somewhere, usually, but it's not in front of leaders in those large businesses most of the time.

SPEAKER_06: 11:27

Neither. It's a priority problem.

SPEAKER_05: 11:30

A personal highlight for me this year was heading over to NRF APAC in Singapore. I was very lucky to be able to go over to Singapore as part of the media contingent and see what is happening in the second year of NRF APAC. And it really opened my eyes to the opportunities around us. I haven't spent a lot of time in the APAC region. And when I went over, all of the tariffs in the US were kicking off. And for me, it makes a lot of sense for us to look at our closest neighbors and see where the opportunities are. What I didn't realize going into it is how different each market is within the APAC market. There is over 50 countries that make up that region, and most of them operate in e-commerce in a totally different way. So for me, that was just absolutely fascinating to do an exploration into what makes each market succeed when it comes to e-commerce and also check out some of the amazing innovations that's coming out from the region. For me personally, I want to get closer to that region. I think it's just so much fun. It's so interesting, so innovative, and we can learn a lot from our neighbors in APAC. So here is Reef Quayle from NRF APAC, the man who puts on the show, you may also know him from iMedia, to give us a little background on what makes NRF AIPAC so special.

SPEAKER_00: 12:50

Well, I think that there's a couple of layers. I think, first of all, Asia Pacific is the largest retail marketplace in the world, but it's not Europe. It's multiple languages, multiple cultures, multiple legislative jurisdictions. You really can't expand. So what we found was that people were really keen to meet other people from other markets because that's how business gets done. You can't expand through the region or learn from each other without finding like minds across the region. So what was really neat is that, you know, is that people were just keen to meet other retailers from other parts of the region and hear new stuff. And that was the cool thing because, you know, we've seen a lot of it in Australia and we're so exposed to it. Australia is so far away from the rest of the world that we we're very aware of what's happening here. But we we're not aware of what's happening, you know, with say Family Mart in Japan or Alpha Mart in Indonesia or, you know, Reliance in India or these, you know, Central Group in Thailand. There's some cool stuff going on that's that's happening in the region, you know, that Australians can take a lot from.

SPEAKER_05: 13:50

That's what I'm excited about because I think obviously we know our Australian case studies pretty well. We've got some great, great retailers here, but it does tend to become a bit of an echo chamber of the same stories over and over again.

SPEAKER_00: 14:01

And we meet speakers all the time. So I've met this guy, Ryan Alphonse, who is the CMO of AlphaMart Indonesia, and he is the CEO of their Global Insights program. So take a step back. This is a 25-year-old business. It takes 15 cents in every retail dollar in Indonesia. So it's big. Wow. They have 22,000 stores across the Philippines or Indonesia and a little bit in the Philippines. They're sort of small format groceries. Think IGA, right? For in Australia, they are opening 40 new stores a month. And so this is big. So 15 cents in every retail dollar in Indonesia is in this thing. So he's this guy's speaking, right? And then he runs their GLI program, which is their retail media loyalty and insights program. So their loyalty program accounts for 60% of their total revenue. Like this guy can do A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H testing. Like he's got that much data. Yeah, yeah. Like, unbelievable. Like he's a speaker. And I have a call with him, and I'm like mind-blown, like epic. It's unbelievable. And then you have these calls with these people, and they tell the stories of the things they're doing. And and it's just like I am literally, I'm so grateful because we just see so many cool things going on any one time. It's just, yeah, I'm like, I get to see everything. And like now, I used I used to sort of look at myself as being fortunate in Australia because you know we would see great stories all the time. But now I'm seeing stories and others. Like, and so we've got Ian CEO of Kmart or MD of Kmart and now chair of Anco speaking. And the Anko brand is now being expanded. So they've opened in the Philippines and they've opened all that. This is cool, right? So this is Australian retailers expanding through the region. And that means they can't just turn up and open a door. They have to partner and they have to find like minds. And and they're doing it. This is Australian businesses doing it, you know. So that's really neat. It's just neat stuff happening all over the place. And so I said I find myself pretty grateful to be sort of in this position to chat to people and understand what's going on.

SPEAKER_05: 16:05

Next up is an episode where I had in the back of my head, stop laughing, stop enjoying this so much. It was one of the funnest, most engaging podcasts that we had this year. And of course, I am talking about episode 512 with Viv Conway, founder of Girls Get Off. Not only can she tell an absolutely brilliant story, she's a great reminder of what actually makes influencer marketing work. I can't think of a category that is harder to get a message out there when you've got so many restrictions, not only from the platforms themselves, but also things that we just take for granted, like setting up bank accounts. Viv's a great story in getting cut through and also just tenacity in getting around the challenges that have been put up in front of her. Here's a little clip from Viv as part of this conversation that I enjoyed so much.

SPEAKER_09: 16:59

And let's start out with like, say, a run of like 500, 1000. We'll do it over like a 90-day period. If we like how it's going, let's renew. And we've just, yeah, we've just been making the most of that at the moment. We've got one coming out tomorrow and then another probably in a couple of months. So just different ways of reaching those new people, you know, because we've can entertain the people that we've got at the moment. And those new products, they'll buy them and we can educate them around that. But yeah, how can we leverage other channels has been big for us.

SPEAKER_05: 17:25

On that revenue split model with influencer, that that's really interesting, I think. What are you asking from the influencers for them to contribute for that?

SPEAKER_09: 17:34

They get paid for what they sell as well.

SPEAKER_05: 17:36

So just keep pumping out the content. Yeah, they can do that. Do they do anything with product development?

SPEAKER_09: 17:40

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So they will like test it, decide what they want. I mean, there's a little bit of like we'd had a better back and forth with one person we were working with, and there's a part of you that kind of goes, Oh, maybe we should just like let them have full creative reign because you know, you want someone to be super and you know, you need them to be invested in it, otherwise they won't sell it. But then I think there's also in our industry there also comes a point where you go, okay, that's not like our recommendation would be slightly different, or you can't actually fit the motor in that size, or um, have more creature cocks out there. Yeah, exactly. No more of those. But you know, or or we know that this, you know, if you make it an internal and external hood, that's gonna sell better than this one, you know. So there's yeah, there's like a certain amount of it's like any brief for an influencer, right? You kind of want to let them go for it, but you still need to have all the bits together that you know is gonna make it right. But the best thing about that is that you can say to them content-wise, do whatever you want. Like I had a talk with AJ yesterday and he's like, Do you want this? I'm like, AJ, I literally do not care what you say. I'm like, you can say anything you want. We already know we've got the same, you know, we're we're aligned. I'm like, you just sell that toy however you want to sell it. I'm like, totally up to you. He's like, oh, thank God. I'm like, yep, go for it. So that's been really cool because then you're not trying to, you know, say, oh, you've got to talk about this and you're gonna talk about that. They'll find out very quickly which what kind of content sells and doesn't sell. So yeah, that's been cool.

SPEAKER_05: 18:59

Of course, we could not be talking about 2025 without talking about that massive, big giant in the room, Amazon, after many, many years of slowly, slowly, creepy creepy, getting into the Australian market, people wondering whether it would actually take off. Think it's fair to say that in 2025, Amazon is a key player in the Australian e-commerce industry, and they're here to stay. Not only that, but Amazon are now setting customer expectations for what other e-commerce businesses need to do. So I really enjoyed this conversation with Sean Walsh from Patent on episode 514, where he broke down so many features of Amazon from both how to list in there, how to work with them, how to advertise on Amazon, and broke it all down in really simple fashion for anyone who's thinking about getting started. Because I dare say that if you don't have an Amazon strategy, whether how to work with them or how to work against them, in 2026, You're going to be scrambling for one soon. Here's Sean. All right. So let's talk about winning on marketplaces. Uh, the question that I had as you were talking through the Amazon example, cast my mind back to the buy button because for a long time there was a lot of talk around winning the buy button because the Amazon prices were dynamic and you had to position yourself competitively to win that, because essentially they collated everyone offering the same product onto the same product page to win that buy button.

SPEAKER_01: 20:28

Is that still the case? It is. Yeah. So it used to be called buy box, it's now called featured offer. What it actually is is a mirror of your distribution. So you're right, it is one product page, there can be multiple sellers for it. The best customer experience will win that, which boils down to a number of different factors that Amazon will talk about, but price, delivery offer, they're kind of the main thing. So if your product is available in e-commerce in a lot of different places, and Amazon finds prices that they think are a better consumer offer, they'll do what's called suppression of that featured offer, which means that yellow box to buy it changes to a white one and essentially removes 98% of the sales that you would typically do. Or it pushes you below that because there might be other sellers on that listing. So distribution is foundational to all marketplace success, but specifically on Amazon where it is a mirror of your distribution. Because if there, I think a common misconception with brands is Amazon's cheaper, it's not cheaper. You just don't know what retailers are showing that at a different price, which Amazon can't talk about price in Australia, but what Amazon thinks is a better customer experience. And we present that to brands. We say, well, as part of this growth strategy, you need to think about what's happening over with these retailers because I'll look at Google Shopping and it'll be$10,$20,$30 cheaper, which means Amazon's seeing that and saying, hey, we need to think about what we're doing here from a customer experience perspective.

SPEAKER_05: 21:49

So winning that exposure on Amazon isn't necessarily about the price. You've got to be competitive. When Amazon talks about customer experience, everyone has a different version of customer experience. From your perspective, do you think it's weighted towards delivery time frames, stock availability, post-purchase customer service? I know there's a lot of factors, but where do you think they hold the most weight?

SPEAKER_01: 22:12

Yeah, I don't think it's one thing. I think it's a combination of things. So we talked about selection. Not many people browse Amazon for inspiration, or it's not, it's not like a direct-to-consumer website where you're pulled in from a content perspective, you're you're sort of engaging with a brand. It's really, it's a lot more intent-driven, bottom of the funnel. So it's I have a need. It's very much keyword driven, it's search-driven. No one browses categories like you might do on a direct-to-consumer site. It's I have a need, or I've been targeted with a promotion. I'm going sort of direct-to-consumer pages or product pages, which is why conversion rates on Amazon are significantly different, right? So direct to consumer might be 2%, 3%. In the beauty space, if you're doing quite well, it might be six, seven, eight percent. On Amazon, you're sort of you're more dealing with sort of 10 to 25% conversion rate. So it's more just it's more intent-driven. Um there's a purpose here. So I think from a selection perspective, that's driving that. But also it is so easy from an ordering perspective, but also on that sort of post-purchase piece. My Amazon account is a shared household account, and I get a number of emails about how easy it is to return products that my wife might have purchased. So it is very easy, very low effort for consumers to sort of interact with that, which means there's limited risk, like the friction of the checkout isn't there where it is with others. But also, I'm conscious that if I buy that this product and there's a problem, I'm not going to be sending emails back and forth for a month trying to get my money back.

SPEAKER_05: 23:36

Now, can we recap 2025 without talking about tariffs? I think not. That was a nice little curveball. I don't know if you call it a curveball. We kind of saw it coming, but it actually got enforced very quick, very fast. And I scrambled pretty quickly to find someone who could explain the options to us. And I couldn't think of a better person than Justin Irvine, who I had the pleasure of interviewing in a quiet room that we somehow took over at Retail Fest on the Gold Coast. So I pulled Justin into this quiet room, set up the podcast gear, and said, tell us everything that you know about tariffs and how retailers should be preparing to tackle them. And looking back on it, now that we've kind of got through the tariff shock, his advice was really great. It was to not panic and to make sure your foundations are right, to know your numbers, to know where your inventory is, and to make decisions according to what you've got, rather than upending your whole business in response to this quick change. This advice is still really relevant today. And if you are struggling with international shipping or maybe still tariffs, as I've seen in our Ad to Cart community, head back to this episode because he gives away so much of his IP that we don't often see consultants give away.

SPEAKER_04: 24:51

When you're working with brands that have gone from operating in Australia and maybe taking international orders, but shipping from Australia to setting up in other countries. What are the top things that you think catch them by surprise?

SPEAKER_03: 25:04

Paying duty on duty is my favorite. Paying duty on duty. Yes. So people factor in duty into their price, but when they submit the value to the carriers, they forget to take the duty off. So let's say they've got a$100 product. We'll just use round numbers. That's what works for me. Yeah. Yeah. We haven't embed yet. So it's like$100. Let's say there's$30 in duties and tariffs, and they roll it up on the cart, so it includes duties and taxes. They then take$130 and sends that data to the carrier. What they haven't done is taken the$30 off. So they're now paying 30% tariff, which I just say out of that, for example. They're now paying that on$130, not on$100. Wow. So they've collected$30 or factored in$30. So effectively they've collected her. But then they don't remove it again before they send it out. You can see how it happens. Oh, all the time. Canada, UK, EU. Hands down, it happens all the time.

SPEAKER_04: 26:03

And do you need special software to do that?

SPEAKER_03: 26:06

Not really. Most of the warehouse management systems these days allow you to have a value for duty. And then whatever the sales price is short. Yeah. That's an absolute killer. People not being aware of iOS tests for Europe, URE for the UK, and it's just like registration things. Yeah. And then understanding that they have to file for VAT. So there's a whole lot of fintech companies that have come in and made that life easy for everybody. That's the other thing that I've that I see people not thinking about just how they package product. And then they get these huge bills from DHL Express, UPS FedEx, or even just the standard carriers. They've got no concept of what they're doing internationally. Small problems here equal big problems when you send it to the other side of the world. And then returns, oh yeah. Like people don't understand that it's actually a profit. Like with all the technology that's available now, it's now a profit center. If returns is not a profit center for you, there's money on the table. Which doesn't mean you've messed it up, it just means there's money on the table. What do you mean? Well, I mean, there's functions within a lot of the platforms now to like basically shop. And you know, you have this in exchanges and you're able to shop during the returns process. And basically, all we're trying to do is create a revenue string through your returns flow and things like making sure you're charging handling fees. Like the amount of people that are doing free returns now is very low. You should be capturing something. So between the revenue you're capturing on X amount of returns on exchanges, keeping them on the hamster wheel, as well as the freight recovery for the handling fee that you deduct out and you, you know, that I'm not seeing big conversion drops. I'm not seeing card abandoned it because of that returns fix. And that should at least net out. If you're burning cash on returns, there's money on the table. And it should be seen as a retention tool. That's where I don't think people make the most of it.

SPEAKER_05: 28:00

In testament to how far and wide we go in e-commerce, I really wanted to bring us back to this episode with Marianne from Legal Light. And she's an incredible person, first off. And if you haven't listened to a podcast, maybe go listen to a podcast. It's called Bold Ideas. But she gave us a lot of practical advice when it comes to legal blind spots in e-commerce, especially for fast-growing or founder-led brands. We talk about how to set up documentation for success, how to protect your IP, and how to set up some guardrails with AI from a legal perspective to protect you down the track. An amazing episode, episode 547 with Marianne, if you want one hour of amazing e-commerce advice. Tell me about those foundations. So if you were starting an e-commerce business today, what are the essentials that you would have in place from a legal perspective?

SPEAKER_07: 28:53

So I would get legal and accounting advice on the structure. They have to go hand in hand because one is about tax minimization, the other one is about asset protection and limiting your legal liability.

SPEAKER_05: 29:08

So in that in that case, you're talking about being a sole trader versus being a corporation.

SPEAKER_07: 29:13

Or it could be a trust, or it could be a unit trust if you want to uh get investment in future. And there's no one size fits all. So not setting up in a way that you know Bob down the road set up and he's been really successful, it needs to be unique to your business model and to your vision where you want to go. Yeah. And the other thing is intellectual property protection. So there's different types of IP. There's trademark, copyright, patents, designs. You need to identify firstly what is your IP. What is it that you know you've got that's valuable? Um, and then the way that you protect that is different depending on the IP.

SPEAKER_05: 29:56

How do you know what IP is? Because I think there's a lot of retailers sitting on IP that they might not realise is actually IP.

SPEAKER_07: 30:04

Yeah, I think just a good rule of thumb is if it's something that's a bit different and valuable, if you think it's valuable, it probably is. So find out how to protect that. Um but as a minimum, your business name, that's a trademark, you know. That's a uh some a form that's a form of IP that you should definitely be protecting.

SPEAKER_05: 30:30

Okay. And for those who may not have done that step, and add to cart is not trademarked. So guilty.

SPEAKER_07: 30:39

I can help you with that.

SPEAKER_05: 30:41

Is it a complicated process?

SPEAKER_07: 30:43

No, it's not a complicated process at all. It's actually quite simple, but you do need to get the right advice. Um I've seen trademarks that have been protected in the completely wrong class, which effectively means you've got no protection. Okay. So trademarks are registered in classes of goods or services. Um, so you need to register in the class that's relevant for what you do. Um but yeah, it is actually a very simple process through IP Australia.

SPEAKER_05: 31:13

Cool. And do you find that they are generally, if they're set up right, enforceable? So if a competitor comes along, has a similar name, it's easy enough to enforce them?

SPEAKER_07: 31:24

Uh yes, if it's protected properly. Um, it is about enforcement though. So no one's going to enforce it for you. IP Australia doesn't enforce it for you. So if someone has infringed your intellectual property, it's up to you to essentially write a letter of demand to that party and ask them to cease and desist. And if they don't, to take legal action.

SPEAKER_05: 31:48

And lastly, this is a very personal one. I wanted to call out episode 506 with Suzy Young from Metagenics. I had the privilege for working most of the year with Susie and her team at Metagenics in a transformation and consulting role. And honestly, Susie is one of the most amazing leaders that I've ever had the pleasure to work with. What she has been able to do in transforming that business, not just from a digital transformation perspective, but in terms of changing the whole business model, has been fascinating to watch. And I've been lucky enough to work with her on projects from loyalty programs to launching TikTok and even had the pleasure of going over to New York to work with the US team later in the year. But I can say it all starts with Susie here in Australia and how she's managing the change. As you hear here, Susie talks around e-commerce transformation. But what I love about Susie is she doesn't just start with the platforms, vendors, and features. She looks inwards to the business. What does the business need? What do we need to change in the business? And how do we set our team up for success? If we get that right, the rest will follow.

SPEAKER_08: 32:57

At one stage before I joined the business, they'd built our internal dev teams. Like it was just a bit of a mess. And one of the things we did early on was we created design principles for our project. And our project manager, James Hallam, who you know from working at Metagenics, he really helped lead this with us and establish some design principles up front. And they were things like we will seek the best practice functionality in platforms that are, you know, leading the way. We will aggressively avoid custom code and use out of the box wherever we can.

SPEAKER_05: 33:36

I always loved hearing that one.

SPEAKER_08: 33:37

Aggressively aggressively, yes. We'll be informed buyers. So when I say that, I mean like we'll do an excellent job at building requirements and understanding what we want so that we're not stuffing, you know, agencies and platforms around in project. You know, we're not a software house, we're a vitamins and supplements business. So that was super clear up front. And I think that that was really great foundation for us as we then moved through this process of selecting platform and selecting partner. And I think I had personally been watching Shopify for a while. Shopify, without a doubt, is the number one choice for D2C, right? There's no question. You don't even have to think about that. But we do have a B2B side to our e-commerce because our practitioners also do buy product for their practice and we sell to retailers as well. So we had complexity in our solution and in our requirements that you'd expect for for a B2B channel around pricing and shipping options and complexity in customer groups. So obviously, like the Shopify roadmap for B2B has picked up quite a bit in the last couple of years. And so what we decided to do was run like a proof of concept stage up front. And we approached Shopify first and worked with their technical people. And we basically built requirements of all the things we're worried about, got together with them, workshop that, and they came back. And I think they came back, and of our say 15 things that we were worried about, maybe there was two that they couldn't solve. And that gave us confidence to kind of move to the next stage, which was a proof of concept with a Shopify agency. And the reason I like this, and this is a great learning for me too, because my last project, I just went full RFP. But doing this is great because, you know, in our business, because we're a global business, we have committees we have to get approval from, like project approval committees, we have steering committees, we have, you know, test committees. It's very different when you go to one of those committees and you're asking for a small amount of money versus a massive amount of money. And that's what I love about the proof of concept stage. So we said, hey, we need to do an eight-week deep dive with a partner to just flesh this out. Because we're pretty confident, but we want to be 100% confident. They gave us the support and backing to do that. We engaged overdose digital who have deep Shopify experience and who I had worked with before, so knew that there was, I guess, a cultural fit and a ways of working that would suit our business. And they kind of prototyped some of these parts of our solution for us. And so once we then got, say, you know, I think we got about six weeks into that proof of concept and we had enough confidence that we knew that that we were on, and we were able to go back to our steering committee and say, okay, here's actually the evidence that this solution is going to work. And then from that point, we got into a project, we rolled it out in six months, which still blows me away when I think about that because that is huge to do both a B2B migration, but also a launch a whole new D2C channel.

SPEAKER_05: 36:48

So they're my personal highlights from 2025. And looking back on that, I'm like, that was amazing. I got so much out of those conversations and connections that I had there. And it's amazing to think how much has changed in 2025. When we think about tariffs, when we think about social media regulations, we talk about Amazon here in Australia, the rise of B2B. It's been a 50 year. And I don't think, oh, I didn't even mention AI in there. Should we mention AI? But I don't think it's slowing it down next year either. So I hope this episode gives you a little bit of perspective on what has happened in 2025 and gives you that moment to think back on how much you've achieved and how much you've changed throughout the year and start thinking about those big rocks for next year that you're going to have to attack and the gaps that you've got. Moving into next year, of course, there are some things that we do know are coming. There's going to be a lot of surprises. But hey, that's the fun of e-commerce, isn't it? All right, that's it from this episode. We'll be back next week to give you the countdown of the top most downloaded episodes from 2025. There are some absolute bangers in there. Do I sound like a radio DJ? Dude, it's a great tasting plate if you have missed out on a few episodes to see what you might want to go back and tune into. All right, I hope you're enjoying your downtime. If you've discovered this podcast for the very first time, make sure you hit subscribe in YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. And we'll continue to bring you episodes all through 2020. Enjoy your break. See you next week.