How New Aim engineered Australia’s largest big and bulky e-commerce operation

The growth of e-commerce has been driven by small, lightweight products that are easily packed and shipped. Automation has allowed a handful of global companies to rapidly scale in these categories and take market share. In this competitive environment, one Australian operator has quietly built a formidable position, specialising in big and bulky goods - an area where automation is significantly more difficult and operational efficiency is essential.

E-commerce infrastructure company New Aim has developed its digital supply chain to address the sector’s biggest challenges for big and bulky goods - procurement, warehousing, inventory management, dispatch, and customer experience.

While not a household name, New Aim is the backbone provider to Australia’s retail ecosystem and one of the nation’s most successful e-commerce operators with products delivered to more than 70% of Australian homes since 2005. Impressively, the company has delivered year-on-year growth since inception without a direct-to-consumer platform or high marketing spend with its products sold through more than 30 leading retail channels.

New Aim’s proprietary technology underpins its e-commerce operations, optimising everything from trend identification, pricing and margins through to warehousing and courier selection.

Big and bulky goods - classified as products over 10 kilograms - have unique challenges for retailers, requiring significantly more warehouse space, higher-touch handling, tighter inventory control and greater exposure to freight volatility. And unlike smaller products, warehousing of big and bulky goods with irregular sizing cannot be easily automated.

“Big and bulky forces discipline. You don’t get the luxury of hiding mistakes in volume. Every decision - how you buy, where you store, and how you move inventory - shows up immediately in your cost base,” said New Aim CEO Alex Ji.

“If you don’t own the value chain, you can’t own the economics. In big and bulky, scale without infrastructure does not translate into profitability.  Every inefficiency is amplified through the cost base, which is why the category structurally favours operators with deeply integrated supply chain and technology systems.

“Our digital supply chain infrastructure allows us to scale efficiently while maintaining profitability, even as we expand into new categories and SKUs.”

That philosophy has been a key driver of New Aim’s decision to operate more than 120,000 square metres of self-managed warehousing, processing over 8,000 standard shipping containers in 2025, and shipping around four million units annually.

Ji is quick to point out that the physical footprint alone would be unmanageable without the systems New Aim has built to support it.

At the centre of the business is AimCore - New Aim’s proprietary operating platform that is embedded across the entire value chain and leverages over two decades of operational data. AimCore seamlessly integrates procurement, inbound freight, warehouse allocation, replenishment, picking, dispatch and aftersales into a single workflow.

“In most businesses, these are separate systems talking to each other imperfectly,” Ji said. “For us, it’s one decision engine. The system decides where a container goes, when stock is replenished, how pick paths are created and which courier is used, all based on live data. This is incredibly difficult to replicate without scale and infrastructure ownership.”

In the warehouse, put-away simulation reduces forklift travel and maximises cubic efficiency, while replenishment algorithms prioritise retail channels with the most stringent service-level requirements. Wave planning optimises pick routes, while courier selection balances cost, delivery speed and regional performance.

“These aren’t efficiency gains at the margin. Without this level of automation, operating big and bulky at scale would simply not be viable,” Ji said.

The result is consistently high fulfilment accuracy, near-perfect inventory integrity and sub-one-day order cycle times, outcomes that are difficult to achieve even in small-item e-commerce, let alone oversized categories.

The company’s broader technology stack, AirOxy and Dropshipzone, builds on AimCore’s capability. An AI-powered marketplace intelligence platform, AirOxy processes more than 100 million data points across pricing, search behaviour, category rankings and competitor activity, forming a closed-loop decision engine that continuously translates real-time market signals into executable actions across pricing, inventory allocation and channel strategy.

Dropshipzone extends New Aim's infrastructure externally, allowing thousands of SME retailers to plug directly into New Aim’s systems for catalogue management, fulfilment and integration with major retail platforms.

“When you operate across multiple channels at scale, yesterday’s data is already outdated. AirOxy allows us to adjust pricing, visibility and category focus based on what the market is doing right now, not what it did last month.”

“None of our platforms were built as products first - they were built to solve operational complexity inside the business. We didn’t become large and then invest in technology,” Ji said. “We invested in technology because operating at this level of complexity is impossible without it.”

As New Aim continues to commercialise the systems that have powered its own growth, the company is positioning itself as an enabling layer for the sector. By combining proprietary technology, owned logistics capability and deep retail channel integration, New Aim is building infrastructure that can help brands, suppliers and retailers scale more efficiently in an increasingly complex online market.