Coles has marked two decades at the forefront of online shopping in Australia, starting from a single Melbourne warehouse to become a $1 billion business leading the market in adoption of game-changing retail and logistics technology.
Coles Online launched in 1999, just a few years after dial-up internet connections became widely available to Australian homes and almost a decade before the first smartphones hit the market. At the time, online shopping was still in its infancy, with fewer than five per cent of all Australian adults using the internet to make a purchase or order goods or services that year.
Brian Donald, one of Coles Online’s longest-serving team members, delivered customer orders in the program’s early days and said the platform has come a long way. “The website was almost just a list and you had to tick the items you wanted,” he said. “Everyone paid via EFTPOS on the doorstep because no one would pay online via the internet back then. So most people were sort of waiting with trepidation about what they were going to get and it was a really new and surprising experience.”
By 2002, Coles Online was delivering 1 million items per month to customers, and in 2003 the business doubled in size. Coles Online also outsourced picking, packing and delivery to Australia Post in 2003 – a sharp contrast to today, with Coles team members handling all aspects of order fulfillment from stores across the country and using Coles Online’s own fleet of 650 delivery vans to bring orders directly to customers’ kitchen benchtops. By 2008 Coles Online had expanded to Queensland, and the following year launched in Western Australia and South Australia.
With annualised revenue passing $1 billion this financial year, Coles Online General Manager Karen Donaldson said the business was now setting the foundations for future growth through a partnership with the UK’s Ocado Group, the world’s leading online grocery platform. Ocado will construct two new automated fulfillment centres in Sydney and Melbourne by 2030, providing greater range and availability, improved freshness, more delivery slots for customers and the world’s leading online grocery website platform.
