Brisbane-based e-commerce provider Neto announced a new partnership in early 2016 with Australia Post to integrate the fulfilment side of online retail into their platform.
The move allows customers to pick, pack and print Australia Post shipping labels for local and international orders and get real time shipping quotes in the Neto backend.
It comes as the Telstra-backed business grows 250 per cent year on year, with Neto’s merchants ranging from very small hobby businesses to large clients including Spotlight and Anaconda, with the total base turning over $500 million in 2014.Neto founder Ryan Murtagh told KBB the original idea for his business was born out of necessity.
“I used to work in online retail many moons ago. I was running an eBay store, then my own store, and was fulfilling thousands of orders a week. I had all these systems but they weren’t talking to each other. I ended up designing Neto to solve that problem, at that took off more than my online store.”
Using Neto as a basis for people to sell their products online, we have partnered with a number of accounting, point of sales, inventory management and marketing platforms, as well as key shipping providers such as Australia Post – enabling businesses to fulfill their orders efficiently.
When it comes to standing out from competitors – notably BigCommerce and Shopify – Murtagh says there are three core ways Neto differs: its service offering, the product itself, and its target market.
“We offer a fuller service turnkey solution for SMEs. As well as the platform itself, we offer a range of professional services like web design, onboarding and system set up.
“Then it’s our product. It’s very backend focused. You can build a beautiful website but we’re really focused on the core functionality, the pick pack, dispatch, integration with accounting systems, ability to generate toll ipec consignment labesl. With other platforms, you need a third party add on. We’ve got accounting integration with MYOB, Quickbooks and Xero and we’ve also got a cloud POS solution and eBay integration.”
Finally, Murtagh says it’s about their purely Australian target market, with no plans to offer the platform internationally in the near future. Neto is majority owned by Telstra, an investment which came by chance after running into the right person at a trade show.
“I ran into a guy from Telstra at a trade show and he said they were looking to get into digital commerce. A huge percentage of their customers were looking to go online but didn’t know how to do it. They asked if we’d be interested at working with them and that evolved into them acquiring a stake in our company.”
We remain outside of the big beast of Telstra, so we continue to run our business like a startup and can draw down on Telstra resources when we need them. We can gain access to their customer base and have the opportunity to service them better.”
For now, Murtagh says it’s all about relationship building. “Anyone can build software that works. Our relationships with key providers are what actually solves pain points for small businesses. There’s a lot of people that want to go online but don’t know where to do it. We want to be that trusted adviser where they can do it all.”
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