Neto
A Note From Ryan, Our CEO
01 Aug 2017 • 7 min read
Firstly, I would like to thank you for being a Neto customer and for your ongoing support. I would also like to acknowledge that over the past 12 months, our service levels have dipped below what I would deem to be acceptable. This is something I am actively addressing as our highest priority and I would like to take this opportunity to share some of our progress and plans with you.
Before I get into our plans for FY18, I would like to congratulate all our customers on what has been a record breaking financial year. When I started Neto, I never imagined that ‘Neto’ and ‘Billion Dollars’ would be mentioned in the same sentence. But, it brings me great pride to announce that this year, our customers turned over $1 Billion through our platform at an average order value of $151. That translates to over 7 Million parcels being shipped and tens of millions of products being sold.
The web store was still our customers strongest sales channel, followed by eBay and POS. The top 5 industry verticals (by sales volume) were Electronics and Hi-Fi, Homewares, Toys and Hobbies, Motor Parts, and Sports and Recreation.
FY17 was the year of buy now, pay later with Afterpay growing faster than any other payment method. Paypal continues to be the most popular payment method for both web store and eBay transactions. Sendle continues to build momentum as the fastest growing shipping option, while Australia Post eParcel is the most popular carrier across all sales channels.
Like our customers, Neto has also experienced significant growth through this period and balancing this growth with ongoing changes to our team, product, infrastructure and back-office systems has been a challenge. The good news is that the foundational systems and infrastructure for scale are in place and it is now time for us to start rolling out various programs that will improve your experience as a Neto customer.
The first and most critical project to ensure a performant, resilient and scalable platform for our customers is migrating to AWS hosting infrastructure. This complex migration has been underway for the past 12 months and is due to be complete by the 1st of August. AWS is trusted by companies like AirBnB, Netflix, Xero, Atlassian and many others with complex technical requirements.
As part of this migration, we re-architected our infrastructure from the ground up, which has enabled us to take advantage of Amazon's cutting-edge services. Our new infrastructure is also much more capable when it comes to measuring the performance of our customer websites and identifying specific components of the software which need to be optimised, enabling us to expedite the resolution of issues. Already we are seeing performance improvements of up to 30%.
Although these improvements are exciting, over the past month, the AWS migration has caused our customers pain and frustration. I would like to sincerely apologise for this and highlight that we are continuing to work 24/7 to ensure that any issues related to our new infrastructure are resolved with the highest priority.
For more about our AWS migration take a look at our AWS migration blog post.
We recognise the importance of excellent local support. This year, we will be making significant changes to the way we deliver support to all of our customers. Below is a summary of what you will see come to life within the next 90 days.
We will continue to grow our service team and improve our team’s capability. This includes hiring additional resources in front-line customer support, and building a dedicated capability team with a focus on staff coaching and training. We have also recently appointed a new Head of Customer Service, who we will be introducing to you all soon.
We will complete our migration to Salesforce, the leading CRM platform on the planet. Salesforce will enable us to connect with our customers in a whole new way. In fact, all the initiatives below are driven by the Salesforce platform, enabling us to better understand our customers and deliver superior customer service.
We will launch a new support hub and documentation website. We have rewritten and recategorised hundreds of support articles. Learn how to setup, run and grow your business in the new support hub.
We will launch a new customer community. The Neto Customer Community will consist of an open forum and discussion groups. Talk with ecommerce experts, like-mind entrepreneurs and Neto employees in the new customer community.
We will launch a public ideas portal. The Neto ideas portal is where you can post, vote and comment on ideas related to product enhancements, new features, or improving our support offerings.
We will launch a customer and partner Learning Management System (LMS). The Neto LMS will consist of guided learning tracks that chart your course through Neto skills.
You will soon be able to login to a new support hub with your Neto credentials to raise support cases and track the progress of outstanding support cases.
The new support hub will incorporate a global search that will search across all forms of support content including documentation, videos, community questions and answers. Enabling you to quickly find the answers you are looking for.
Our new telephone support solution is directly integrated with our new support hub, giving our customer support team a 360 degree view of a customer's history and status, enabling them to better respond to incoming calls. Additionally, we will be implementing a call back service and skills based call routing, which means you will be directed to a team member that can better solve your specific needs. This will help reduce our time to full resolution.
We understand that platform performance and usability are key to your success as a retailer. This is why we are dedicating more than 60% on our engineering resources to these two priorities in FY18.
On top of the move to AWS, we are also moving our customers to a new content delivery network called CloudFlare. CloudFlare improves website performance through its global Content Delivery Network and web optimisation features. Within the next few months, we hope to have all Neto merchants on CloudFlare. As part of your Neto subscription, you will gain access to CloudFlare's enterprise features. That is over $300 in additional monthly value included - for FREE.
Learn more about CloudFlare’s services here:
Other key engineering projects include:
For more information, take a look at our product roadmap.
View our list of existing certified partners on our Partner Directory page.
We are confident that our investment in product, capability, and support over the next twelve months will enable us to deliver a far superior customer experience than anything we have delivered to date. Thank you for joining us on this journey and I look forward to seeing you at one of the many industry trade shows or events that are planned for this coming year.
