“I am delighted to be joining the Australian team to provide strategic direction at a time when there is great demand for PayPal to help grow online shopping in Australia,” said Malte.  “My main priority is to continue to provide PayPal’s more than five million Australian customer accounts and 18,000 merchant partners with a secure and innovative online payments solution to facilitate safe, global e-commerce.”

Malte takes over the role from Dinuke Ranasinghe, acting managing director since March 2009.  Dinuke was PayPal Australia’s first employee and has now moved into a regional role as head of product for Asia-Pacific.  He will be based in Singapore.

“The fact that PayPal is Australia’s favourite way to pay online is a tribute to the success and hard work of Dinuke and my predecessors in building a strong Australian business,” said Malte.  “I look forward to building upon this with my team, especially as more Australians look to shop online safely, including via their smart phones.  More Australian businesses are also considering their online strategy to drive growth into local and international marketplaces, and this provides an exciting opportunity for us.”

Malte is taking charge of PayPal at a time when it is the most preferred online payment service with Australians when compared to other online payment systems and individual credit card brands, according to Nielsen research[1].

Malte originally joined the eBay group of companies in 1999.  Prior to joining PayPal Australia, he was managing director for eBay Germany, and a member of the European Leadership Team.

Between 2004 and 2008, Malte was managing director of PayPal Germany, Austria and Switzerland, during which time he launched PayPal in these markets.  By the end of his tenure, PayPal was considered the leading German online payments service serving more than seven million accounts at the time.

[1] Nielsen, June 2009: ‘Consumer Report 1H2009: Profiling online and mobile commerce activities in Australia’

From 10 September all store listings will have increased exposure as they will appear within the main eBay search results.  This will provide sellers with increased exposure on search results pages, however eBay is also introducing monthly store fees, ranging from $19.95 to $499 per month.

eBay Australia managing director Deborah Sharkey said that 50 per cent of eBay’s global sales were now fixed price and that, in the March quarter, such sales grew by 12 per cent globally while auction sales declined.

“Buyers are telling us that they want the same convenience and immediacy of payment on eBay as they get in their favourite department store,” she said.

For detailed information and explanations of all the changes, visit eBay’s “The Big News” page.

IT News and eCommerce Report have reported on the launch of the Australian PayPal developer program.  It’s the first market outside of the United States to be included in the developer program.

The program includes free technical tools and resources, PayPal developer certification and  developer days to be held in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth later this month.

Spiro Rokos, PayPal’s senior manager of technical engineering, said it would help Australians tap into revenue opportunities.

He said the program was designed “to help organisations outside of the retail sector, including non-profits, education and local government, take advantage of e-commerce”.

For more information on the PayPal developer days, visit:
https://www.paypal-education.com.au/devdays/

You can also follow PayPal Australia on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/PayPalAustralia

MIS

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

On the surface, the site looks great with a number of listings for various real estate agents and portals, however upon closer inspection there are a couple of noticeable omissions from the listings, namely the two gorillas of online real estate,  realestate.com.au and domain.com.au.

Patrick Stafford from SmartCompany spoke with former chief executive of REA Group, Simon Baker who views Google Maps as a competitor but not a major threat:

“You have to think about this one logically. For this to shake up the market, for it to have real impact on realestate.com.au or domain.com.au, it has to take away visitors to those sites and therefore leads, and then have agents have to stop using them. Firstly, for consumers or visitors to stop using domain.com.au or realestate.com.au, they’re going to have access to an equal number of listings on Google maps. Currently they’re not there yet.”

According to The Real Estate Marketing Maven, agents, franchises, marketing groups, and listing portals can upload their property listings through Google Base, either a formatted data feed or via the Google Base Data API. Listings are then displayed on a map when a user conducts a search using Google Maps.

Although widely adopted overseas, this is the first implementation of Google Base’s functionality in Australia (that we’re aware of).  Is a local version of Google’s Product Search in the works as well?

Reporting a massive 2.7 million people shopping for the month of June, getprice.com.au has seen an increase of traffic of more than 500% to the site from June 2008.

“As one of Australia’s fastest growing websites, we are seeing a huge increase in consumers coming to us to make their money go further,” said getprice.com.au Chief Executive, Chris Hitchen.

“Knowledge is power when making purchase decisions and consumers want to be able to see all their options quickly. This is with good reason too with consumers saving up to 60% by going online and comparing before completing their purchase.”

“From electronics to perfume – www.getprice.com.au can deliver consumers with thousands of product comparisons in a matter of seconds.”

Shopping trends reported by www.getprice.com.au in June:

• Australians are heading indoors to exercise in the winter months with treadmills being the most popular sports and travel product, followed by pilates machines and exercise bikes.
• Panasonic, Cannon and Olympus digital cameras remain extremely popular with their products being in the top ten most search electronic items.
• The traditional trampoline remains the most popular product for Aussie kids, followed by swings and scooters.
• Perfumes such as Gucci Flora by Gucci, Issey Miyake L’Eau D’Issey and Giorgio Armani Acqua were the most popular health and beauty products
• Sony Playstation topped the computer and games category – followed by the Asus EE Laptop, HP Mini 2140 and Acer 5533

Read the full Press Release here

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 set up as a siloed operation.

“In the US, major retailers made the mistake of establishing their online business as a separate operation to their bricks and mortar stores, with different strategies, management and P&L statements. This gave rise to numerous customer service problems,” he said.

Read the full article at eTailToday.com.au

Kogan’s Australian head office will manage the Kentucky-based warehouse and products manufactured in China will be shipped directly to the US.

Ruslan Kogan founder and CEO said the company is in the final stages of opening the US branch after three years of growth in Australia.

He said the US market is 20 times bigger than the Australian market and shoppers purchase online there, which directly fits with Kogan’s direct online sales model.

“Our buying power will increase and products will become cheaper for everyone especially our Australian customers who will then benefit.”

Read the full article at CRN

According to Coremetrics, which surveyed the buying habits of more than 75 million shoppers worldwide, Australian and New Zealand shoppers are returning to the world wide web in droves to peruse global e-commerce websites and make online purchases.

Since the global economic downturn, consumers have been naturally careful about their spending habits but it seems that online opportunities are proving too good to pass.

“These figures represent a smarter modern shopper; one that takes time to visit e-commerce sites all over the world before deciding on a purchase. ANZ consumers are becoming more e-commerce savvy; they’re enjoying perusing the breadth of products and services available over the internet and take advantage of online discounts and special offers unavailable in-store.”

Read the full article at RetailBiz.