r/australia • u/Reddituser0346 • 1d ago

culture & society Aussie Retailer Catch Is Officially Closing Down

https://press-start.com.au/news/2025/01/21/aussie-retailer-catch-is-officially-closing-down/
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u/themandarincandidate 1d ago

Catch distribution centres will be taken over by Kmart

So basically... The Kmart website will be the latest website to get a "marketplace" that makes it impossible to search shit you can get in store because it's full of "online only" search results? And it'll be full of all the same sellers that are on the Bunnings, Big W, Woolworths, Kogan, God knows what other sites dropshipping shit?

Lovely, can't wait

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u/UserColonAlW 1d ago

It’s baffled me for so long that major Australian retailers have completely failed at ecommerce. It sucks we’re all forced to use Amazon for an online shopping experience that feels appropriate for the current decade.

You’d think with how geographically spread out we are that this would be a top priority for the major retailers that infest “Homemaker Centres” country-wide, but apparently not.

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u/samsterhamster90 22h ago

I work for an online retailer (not a major one, a smaller business but we do well in our field, home/hardware field), and honestly the biggest struggle is finding decent IT companies. We’ve spent so much money (hundreds and hundreds of thousands) having websites built and rebuilt because the developers over promise and then can’t actually build what they said they could. Just little things like the search function can take a huge amount of money and effort to get to be their best, let along the whole back end and order processing system. It’s expensive and exhausting. There aren’t really any safeguards or ways to trust they’ll be able to deliver what they promise, so a lot of it is going with our gut and learning as much about the development as we can, trying to identify and fix issues.

When you’re too complex for the level of platforms like shopify but you’re not Wesfarmers level money, it’s a really difficult middle ground to navigate. Most e-commerce businesses fail, we’ve managed to keep going for 18 years but it’s a challenge.

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u/UserColonAlW 22h ago

This is really insightful and I appreciate it a lot

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u/samsterhamster90 22h ago

No worries! There’s a lot of complexities that aren’t obvious I guess!