ith space for 5800 racks and up to two million products, the new centre can process over 105,000 items a day at optimal capacity. In practical terms, it means millions more customers will be able to receive their online order within 48 hours of clicking ‘buy’.   “Dispatch will be faster than ever before,” Joe Schmieg, general manager of fulfilment at Catch, told Inside Retail. Schmieg would not comment on the cost of the new fulfilment centre, which opened last Thursday, but he noted that Catch has deployed three times the number of AMRs there as it put in its 62,000sqm fulfilment centre in Melbourne just two years ago.  At the time, that represented the biggest deployment of AMRs by any e-commerce marketplace in Australia.  “We can confirm that we have invested into market-leading technology that will benefit our customers greatly, and we’ll continue to invest in growth to give our customers the best shopping experience possible,” Schmieg said.  Every second counts Schmieg described the opening of the Sydney fulfilment centre as a “direct response” to the rapidly increasing demand for online shopping on Australia’s Eastern seaboard, and said it will be key to enabling Catch to compete in a more crowded e-commerce market in the years ahead. “Customer satisfaction sits at the core of e-commerce businesses, as a simple and efficient experience is what the customer wants and has been conditioned to receive,” he said.  “It is crucial to ensure that businesses are able to keep up with growing demand and give customers what they want, when they want it.”  While investing in technology to shave a few minutes off the pick-and-pack process might not sound significant, in the fast-paced world of e-commerce, every second counts. “High-tech robotics, like those within our new Sydney fulfilment centre, mean that when a customer is ordering from their couch or on the bus home from work, within minutes it is registered at the fulfilment centre and can be picked, packed and dispatched at a high speed,” Schmieg said.  He added that Catch will continue to assess the capacity of its warehouses to ensure it is able to fulfil orders quickly and efficiently and deliver them to customers across the country. “Expanding our logistics footprint to benefit our customers will always be at the heart of any future business decisions,” he said. Rebooting growth This increased focus on fulfilment comes as Wesfarmers attempts to turn around Catch, which posted a $44 million loss in the first half of FY22 and a $46 million loss in FY21, a period when the broader retail industry experienced record growth in online shopping. Earlier this month, Wesfarmers announced that Catch managing director Pete Sauerborn will be stepping down at the end of June as part of a restructure that will see the e-commerce business move out of the conglomerate’s department store division and into its data and digital arm. “From the outside looking in, it seems as though Catch haven’t capitalised on the Covid e-commerce boom the way they would have liked, and the recent changes in leadership suggest Wesfarmers might be feeling the same way,” Paul Waddy, an experienced e-commerce executive and adviser, told Inside Retail. Waddy noted that Sauerborn’s investment in logistics over the past two years “hasn’t yet paid off, and would have dented the P&L quite heavily”. At the same time, he said, Catch is facing new competition from fast-growing rivals like MyDeal, which recently achieved 1 million active customers. “The new Sydney warehouse hopes to win customers over through increased fulfilment speed and inventory accuracy, which sounds a lot like Amazon,” he said. “While the logic of holding key inventory closer to your customers is sound, Catch are likely to need more than that to reboot their growth.” Wesfarmers is expected to share more details about its growth strategy for Catch at a briefing day in June, but one area of focus could be OnePass, a subscription loyalty program that Waddy compared to Amazon Prime. “As the Amazonification of Catch continues, Wesfarmers will be hoping the focus on good old-fashioned speed of fulfilment will bring about some good news, although I think it will take some turning around as the pandemic e-commerce dust begins to settle,” he said.