Australian flower retailer 1300 FLOWERS today announces the friendly acquisition of the privately held Fast Flowers Group. The acquisition further cements 1300 FLOWERS’ position as one of Australia’s leading floral retailers.
1300 FLOWERS’ chairman Jack Singleton says he is “delighted by the transaction that brings Fast Flowers under the 1300 FLOWERS umbrella. Fast Flowers has strong brand recognition and has grown to become an industry leader over the last decade. This is testament to the abilities of CEO Jonathan Barouch and his management team”.
1300 FLOWERS will take operational control of the …

In a recent interview on ABC’s Inside Business, Myer CEO, Bernie Brookes comments that online sales would be “one of our three or four big drivers” of growth.
“For us it’s very profitable for the simple reason that you get no cost of fulfilment, you only get the cost of freight. So this can be an enormous opportunity for us going forward, but we’ll move along with the customers.”
Click here to read the full interview transcript.

SMH has reported shopping centre giant, Westfield, is in the final stages of negotiation to develop an online shopping mall for participating retailers.
It is understood the online mall will be led by fashion, which the company sees as its strongest attraction, and split into categories including electronics and books.

MEDIA RELEASE – Although Australian bricks and mortar retailers have been slow to expand online, they have a distinct advantage over web-only retailers, according to the Executive Director of Salmat Digital, Paul Marshall.

In his presentation to the Online Retailer conference in Sydney today, Paul said that brand awareness, loyalty and an existing customer base are key assets when Bricks and Mortar retailers take their business online. Combine that with the power of the store network to give their customers a true multichannel shopping choice and they have …

MIS reports today that the Colorado group is preparing to take the plunge into online retailing again after suspending it’s ecommerce operations a few years ago.
The company upgraded it’s 500 stores to a wide-area network to assist with real-time information transfer between stores.
“Not a week goes by without us receiving emails from people asking when they will be able to buy from us online, so we are very keen to get back into the space,” Ms Ryan, Colorado Group’s chief information officer said.
Read the full article at MIS Australia

Australian retailers trying to reach and retain consumers online will underperform if they fail to learn from the mistakes made by their counterparts in the US, according to the Paul Marshall, executive director of Salmat DigitalForce.
Speaking at the Retail World Summit in Sydney, Marshall warned that retailers risk losing market share if they do not synchronise their strategies across different channels – otherwise known as cross-channel retailing.
“The internet has opened up a whole new channel for retailers to reach consumers, however, it’s critical that a retailer’s ecommerce business is not …