The main sections of Australia Post’s 2021 Inside Australian Online Shopping Report eCommerce report, and associated web page, are based on the analysis of 2019 and 2020 parcels data recorded by the Australia Post Group, unless otherwise stated. Commentary relating to online shopping is based on an extrapolation of this data.

Households are defined as residential or mixed-use Australia Post delivery points. New online shoppers are defined as residential households that did not receive an eCommerce parcel in the past 12 months. While regular shoppers are residential households that received an eCommerce parcel in 2019 and 2020.

The data and insights are reported at postcode, state and territory, major city, inner regional, outer regional, remote and very remote Australia levels. For ease of reference, postcodes are substituted with suburb or locality names where appropriate. In instances where more than
one suburb shares a postcode, one location name is referenced.

The top online shopping locations excludes central business district (CBD) locations and postcodes with low household counts.

Helix Personas by Roy Morgan is a classification system for each type of Australian consumer and the communities of which they are a part. It provides a view of Australians that reaches beyond geo-demographic modelling to incorporate attitudes, values and behavioural aspects and provide psychographic modelling on a grand scale.

Helix Personas divide the Australian population into 54 individual segments – Personas – that are then grouped into 6 Helix Communities using a combination of data and existing segmentation models from Roy Morgan Single Source, the ABS Census and third-party data.

The CBD parcel collection statistics are defined by deliveries into postcodes 2000, 3000, 4000, 5000, 6000, 7000, 0800 and 2601.

Specialty retailers are segmented into product categories: Fashion & Apparel, Variety Stores, Health & Beauty, Home & Garden, Hobbies & Recreational Goods, Media, and Specialty Food & Liquor.

The report also draws on: modelled estimates from Australia Post consumer surveys, statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), online retail environment data from Quantium, and publicly available information.