“We should probably get a website.”

I have heard that sentence more times than I can count. It was never laziness. Through the 2010s the customers really were on the footpath, and building a store nobody would visit so you could compete on price with a warehouse was a bad trade.

In 2025 New Zealanders spent more than $12.7 billion online, up 10% on the year before, while spending in physical stores managed 2%. Close to one in four dollars of physical retail spend in this country now goes through a screen — that is NZ Post’s Business IQ review, drawing on delivery and payment data across a large slice of national commerce.

The headline is not the interesting part, though. The interesting part is who has been winning.

It turned out the internet was local

The great fear about selling online was that you would be standing next to Amazon in the same aisle, and there is only one way that ends.

It has not gone that way here, and the margin is not narrow. Domestic retailers took roughly 80% of all online spending in New Zealand last year, and their share grew at more than twice the rate of the international sellers. You can see it most clearly in what people put in the basket: the average order from a New Zealand retailer came to $136, against $83 from an overseas one. Kiwis are not just buying local. They are spending more when they do.

NZ Post’s own read on why is the part I keep coming back to. Local retailers are not winning on price — they are winning on trust, on delivery speed, on returns that do not require a customs form and a prayer. Which is to say: the things a small business is already good at are the things that convert online. Knowing your customers. Answering the message. Being a real person in a real town who can be held accountable. You are not entering a price war you cannot win. You are extending a relationship you already have, into a channel where a fair number of your competitors have never bothered to show up.

The regions are moving faster than the cities

If you are anywhere outside Auckland, this is the part worth writing down.

Online spending grew in every region last year, but the fastest growth was not where you would expect. Southland and the West Coast both hit 15%. Bay of Plenty, Otago, Taranaki and Waikato all came in at 12%. Auckland, still about a third of the national total, managed 9%. Wellington managed 6%.

I would read that as demand outrunning supply. Shoppers in provincial New Zealand are picking up online buying faster than the people who have had it longest, and comparatively few of the businesses near them are set up to catch it. Someone in Gore looking for a specific thing will buy from whoever appears when they search for it.

It stopped being an occasion

There is an old mental model where e-commerce is for the big considered purchase, the thing you research for a week. It is out of date, and it is quietly costing people money.

Last year’s growth came from both directions at once: about 6% more transactions and a 4% larger average basket, landing at $120. People are buying shampoo on a Tuesday afternoon without thinking about it.

For a small business that is a cashflow story before it is a revenue story. Frequent small orders smooth out the lumpy months, and they make the boring mechanics worth building — standing orders, a decent “buy it again” button. All of it is a nuisance over the counter and nearly free online.

The 25 to 44 crowd still accounts for close to half of online spending, but the fastest growth is in the over-45s, including shoppers past 65 — people with money and less tolerance for a checkout that hides the total until the final screen. Clear product information, a phone number a human answers, no surprises. Mostly it is just declining to be slick at the customer’s expense.

What it will not do for you

I would rather say this than have you find out in month three.

An online store does not create demand. It captures demand that already exists, and only the portion of it that can find you. Cart abandonment in this market runs north of 60%, which is completely normal and also a standing reminder that traffic is not revenue. business.govt.nz is refreshingly blunt about the trade-off in front of you: a marketplace like Trade Me puts you where the customers already are, cheaply, but limits your branding and parks you beside your competitors, while your own site gives you full control and hands you the entire problem of getting anyone to visit it. Neither option is free. Both need looking after.

And New Zealand is a small country. You cannot grow forever on new customers, because eventually you run out of them, which means the growth has to come from people buying a second and third time. Which brings the whole thing back around to the same conclusion it started with: the businesses that do well online are the ones that were already good at looking after people.

Start with one thing

Pick a single channel and do it properly. If you sell something with obvious search demand, a marketplace listing will teach you more in a month than a year of planning would, and cost you almost nothing. If your customers already follow you on Instagram and have no way to actually buy anything, that is your gap — close it before you think about anything else.

Credits and Sources:

• Image by Iuliia Pilipeichenko via Unsplash
• Inside Retail NZ (2026, June 11). Online now accounts for one in four dollars spent on retail
• NZ Post Business IQ (2026, June 10). Growth shifts, favouring local retailers in 2025
• IBISWorld (2026, March). Online Shopping in New Zealand industry report
• business.govt.nz. Deciding where to sell online