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Holgate says there is also massive growth – an increase of 127 per cent – in parcels lodged over the counter in Victoria. These included the case of one of her executives "who used to live next door to an old man but couldn't visit him for his birthday, so sent him something by express post", she says.

"We are seeing a lot of that – people outside the state sending things into loved ones. Although clearly, by far, the largest part is [business to consumer] deliveries."

Holgate, a director of the Collingwood Football Club who has mostly been working from Australia Post's Sydney headquarters in Redfern during the pandemic, described the volumes as a "Suez Canal coming down a drainpipe" two weeks ago when the postal service was hit with Melbourne's stage four lockdown rules for business.

After The Australian Financial Review ran a series of front-page stories about the threat to supply lines, including basic medicines, home tech, school equipment, food and drinks, the federal government stepped in and the Victorian government granted concessions for the postal service's distribution centres.

"We've got about 1000 posties fully trained and operating in vans to help with those parcels," Holgate says. "By the end of August, we will have 1500 posties in vans and they will deliver over 6 million more parcels than we could have otherwise. We will have the full 2000 switched over by the end of October."

Australia Post has also struck a peace deal with unions over changes by the federal government to loosen restrictions that require letters to be delivered every day. Labor had opposed the move and the Morrison government accused the opposition of reviving its "Mediscare" campaign.

Communication Workers Union national secretary Greg Rayner has been brought onto Australia Post's leadership council for safety, and Holgate says she has made a commitment not to cut jobs.

"I think that's a reflection of the respect [in which] I hold them," she says. "We will always on occasions have different points of view. But back in July we signed an MOU with them which gave confirmation of their support for this temporary, regulatory relief.

"One of the things they are really keen on, and so am I actually, is we move to what we call a one network operation where we have more streaming into posties of parcels and we stop this sort of separation which had taken place between parcels and letters and we sort of bring it together and keep the postie's job alive."

"We always said from day one, we wouldn't change their wages, there won't be any drastic job cuts. The one-year agreement gives them assurances of no cuts to any salary, and nobody will lose their jobs as a result of rolling this temporary relief out."

Staying in the black

Holgate says the change is inevitable, with the volume of letters falling on average by 25 per cent nationally and as much as 47 per cent in parts of Victoria from two years ago.

She says it is also a requirement of Australia Post's authorising act to remain in the black and, so far, "they are keeping their head above water".

Australia Post reported a half-year profit before tax in January of $83 million, despite an $87 million loss in its letters division, after securing $129 million in cost savings and a 4 per cent increase in revenue to $3.8 billion.

"We have put in place a number of different things to keep our costs really under control," Holgate says. "Operating at the moment does come at a much higher cost. We are still chartering aeroplanes, we've still got this extra cost of PPE."

Almost 260,000 small and medium businesses were trading online in the last quarter and "a lot of those businesses had never traded online before". Holgate believes the pandemic has accelerated a "five-year trend".

JB Hi-Fi and Kogan have reported record online sales during the pandemic. Woolworths has beefed-up delivery chains through partnerships with last-mile couriers Sherpa and Drive Yello, and this week announced it is buying a majority stake in family owned PFD Food Services.

Uber Eats and the Amazon-backed Deliveroo are also pushing into delivery of basic food and drug supplies amid the pandemic. Deliveroo, whose new 16 per cent shareholder Amazon was recently cleared by UK regulators, has partnered with BP and EzyMart to deliver groceries, personal items and basic drugs such as Panadol.

Holgate believes coronavirus has enabled shoppers to get used to shopping online and thinks the change is permanent.

"What we are seeing with the likes of JB Hi-Fi is e-commerce has become a really serious part of their retail proposition. Big W just changed their mission statement and it is about leading in e-commerce, so I think you will see some retailers quite significantly change their model after COVID-19."

"Once someone discovers the benefits of online shopping, I struggle to see why they would ever go back to the old ways of doing things."

The pure-play e-tailer reaped the benefits of an acceleration in the shift to e-commerce during the pandemic as consumers stuck as home splashed out on consumer electronics, appliances, furniture, kitchenware and pet accessories.

It acquired replica vintage furniture retailer Matt Blatt in June and Mr Kogan has flagged further bolt-on acquisitions.

"We expect 2021 will see further growth in exclusive brands, scaling up Kogan Marketplace, new verticals and further growth in active customers," he said.

Kogan.com has been one of the strongest stocks on the market this year, with its shares rising almost three-fold, from $7.47 in January to $21.84 last week, valuing the company at more than $2.2 billion.

The stock slipped 5 per cent to $20.75 on Monday as investors took profits, but is still trading on a multiple of about 50 times forecast 2021 earnings per share.

Morningstar analysts say the stock is "materially overvalued" and the market is extrapolating the current level of sales growth too far into the future.

However, Royal Bank of Canada analyst Tim Piper believes the shares could reach $22.

"With government stimulus measures still in place and retail store re-closures, Kogan's continuing sales momentum together with efficient cost of customer acquisition can drive sustained medium-term growth, as Kogan's repeat order rates are the highest in our ecommerce coverage," Mr Piper said on Monday.

Kogan.com increased its final dividend 5.3¢ to 13.5¢ a share, payable October 19, taking the full year payout to 21¢ a share.

BigCommerce's listing price was bumped up from a range of $18 and $20 to a range of $21 to $23 prior to the IPO. However, Mr Bellm said the IPO had not been under priced.

"This type of adjustment is part of the IPO process where the investment banks are trying to discover what supply and demand is at different price points," he said. "You have to start somewhere, see how the orders respond to that and then adjust."

He said BigCommerce would use the money raised in the IPO to expand further geographically.

Telstra Ventures has been an investor in BigCommerce since 2014 and partner Yash Patel said he was pleasantly surprised by the success of the IPO.

"I'd be lying if I didn't say we expected a good outcome but the exuberance in the equity capital markets has been very impressive and I think rightly so," he said. "The company has made a lot of progress since we first invested."

Mr Patel said BigCommerce started out serving smaller businesses competing with rival Shopify but over the years had shifted its strategy to move more to the mid-market and enterprise sector, which had been critical to its success.

"I think the fundamentals of BigCommerce are very solid to ride through any turmoil in the future," he said.

As coronavirus cases rise across the US, fuelling an at-home cooking boom, Hello Fresh has been able to raise its financial outlook for the 3rd time in 2020.

In the most recent increase, the company raised its revenue growth guidance from between 55% and 70%, to between 75% and 95%.

This move comes after “customers continuing to spend more time at home, the strong habit formation that has been taking place, especially for new customers and the absence of long vacations abroad in the summer season,” said Dominik S. Richter, CEO, in an earnings call.

In a press release from the company, there has been an “overall an increased ordering pattern and higher retention of its customers on average, including customers which were acquired during the second quarter 2020.” The company has raised its revenue by 122% this year.

In 2019, Hello Fresh’s total adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (AEBITDA) was 18.3 million euros ($US20.5 million), as reported by CNBC. This year, it’s already at $US154 million euros ($US180 million).

“What would have taken usually 3 years happened in 3 months and with very little customer acquisition costs,” said Richter in the same call.

Before the pandemic, families would cook about four meals a week at home, and now that number has risen to seven, according to data from Hello Fresh, referenced on an earnings call.

In addition to the pandemic requiring more people to cook at home, many of Hello Fresh’s meal-kit competitors have struggled to find their footing, and have not experienced the same amount of growth during the pandemic.

While Blue Apron reported growth in the second quarter, it wasn’t enough to outpace their “decline in users and revenue” as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

BigCommerce's listing price was bumped up from a range of $18 and $20 to a range of $21 to $23 prior to the IPO. However, Mr Bellm said the IPO had not been under priced.

"This type of adjustment is part of the IPO process where the investment banks are trying to discover what supply and demand is at different price points," he said. "You have to start somewhere, see how the orders respond to that and then adjust."

He said BigCommerce would use the money raised in the IPO to expand further geographically.

Telstra Ventures has been an investor in BigCommerce since 2014 and partner Yash Patel said he was pleasantly surprised by the success of the IPO.

"I'd be lying if I didn't say we expected a good outcome but the exuberance in the equity capital markets has been very impressive and I think rightly so," he said. "The company has made a lot of progress since we first invested."

Mr Patel said BigCommerce started out serving smaller businesses competing with rival Shopify but over the years had shifted its strategy to move more to the mid-market and enterprise sector, which had been critical to its success.

"I think the fundamentals of BigCommerce are very solid to ride through any turmoil in the future," he said.

The security agency informed probe is also expected to examine Chinese apps WeChat and Weibo.

James Cameron, partner at venture capital firm Airtree Ventures, said the security concerns about TikTok would definitely be less under Microsoft's ownership.

Mr Cameron said TikTok was heavily dependent on ByteDance's infrastructure, including hosting and sharing data with its parent company and potentially the Chinese government.

"That's the really challenging part with TikTok and I think unwinding that infrastructure is going to take time," Mr Cameron said. "It's going to take very large engineering assets and so, if you want to be bought by anybody you want it to be bought by someone who has the capacity to unwind that infrastructure as quickly as possible and Microsoft clearly has that."

Mr Cameron said Microsoft had one of the biggest development teams anywhere in the world and so would be able to unwind TikTok's infrastructure faster than most companies.

"There are potential concerns that you're just handing over one foreign government's control over the data for another and I have some sympathy for that argument," he said.

Mr Cameron said the United States government would have more checks and balances and oversight around how the government deals with big technology companies.

"It has a rule of law that I think most Australian legislators will be more comfortable with," Mr Cameron said.

The Indian government announced in July it would ban TikTok and other well-known Chinese apps, including WeChat, saying they posed a "threat to sovereignty and integrity". The decision followed a rise in tensions between Beijing and Delhi over a series of military clashes in the Himalayas.

Atlassian said it had adapted quickly to operate as a fully-remote company in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, and enabled many customers to do the same through its workplace software products which include project management tools such as JIRA and Trello and document sharing platform Confluence.

The company said its aggressive push to move customers to the cloud was tracking well. Cloud-delivered services made up half of Atlassian's revenue but the company said there was still work to be done to reach its ambition of having 90 per cent of its users on the cloud.

Atlassian has been offering considerable discounts to get users to make the shift with many customers offered 55 per cent off subscriptions.

The company said it was investing for the long term and would take advantage of the talent available as a result of the pandemic to hire more than 1000 new employees with the majority in research and development.

Atlassian's acquisition of Mindville, details of which were not disclosed, opens up a new market for the company enabling it to offer a configuration management data base for customers to track and configure hardware and software applications directly into Atlassian products.

Mindville is based in Sweden and has over 1700 customers worldwide including NASA, Spotify, and Samsung and it follows Atlassian's acquisition of Halp earlier this year.

In a call with analysts, Atlassian co-founder and co-chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes said the company would continue to be bold in its strategy even though some of its smaller customers had "churned" as a result of coronavirus.

"We'll make choices other companies may shy away from relying on our past experience to guide our path forward with success we continue our transformation into a $5 billion global software leader," he said.

Mr Cannon-Brookes said 2021 was going to be a challenging year as the world continued to emerge from the impact of coronavirus.

"Whether the recovery sort of slowly comes back like a marshmallow or snaps back quickly like a rubber band that is, that's out of our control," he said. "However, what is in control is our ability to continue to invest prudently and for the long term so that we can come out of this strongly however that happens."

He said Atlassian was looking to make long term investments and its main focus was on "just building a kick ass cloud offering".

The company now has over 174,000 customers, up 14 per cent from last year.

Atlassian's shares have soared since its 2015 initial public offering on the US Nasdaq exchange and are up 43 per cent this year. On Friday, its market value stood at $US46 billion.

Josh Frydenberg has set up a showdown with Facebook and Google over new powers that leave the tech giants facing hundreds of millions of dollars in fines if they don’t pay for news content used on their platforms.

Under a mandatory code of conduct, which the government will legislate before the end of the year, Google and Facebook must negotiate agreements with media companies to pay for news and share data-collection methods.

As public broadcasters, the ABC and SBS will be excluded from entering into the bargaining arrangements for paid content but will benefit from new minimum standards the code imposes on Facebook and Google.

These standards require the tech giants to provide 28 days’ ­notice of changes to algorithms or internal policies affecting the ranking of news and advertising.

They will also have to explain the types of data they collect when users interact with Australian news websites.

The new rules were outlined by the Treasurer on Friday, and come as the world’s largest tech companies face growing pressure from regulators around the world about their market dominance and potential adverse effect on competition.

A US congressional inquiry this week heard executives at Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple had previously tried to “neutralise” smaller rivals by buying them, copying them or denying them service.

The proposed Australian laws, which follow a long investigation by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, will not immediately apply to Amazon or Apple. But Mr Frydenberg said the changes would address the “very unequal bargaining position ­between Australian news media businesses that produce original content and the digital platforms”.

“As the power, the wealth, the influence of these digital platforms, namely Google and Facebook, has grown, our regulatory framework has not kept up,” the Treasurer said.

For every $100 spent in Australia’s $9bn-a-year online advertising market, $47 went to Google, $24 to Facebook and $29 to other participants, Mr Frydenberg said.

The code-of-conduct legislation was declared a “watershed moment” by the news media, but met with anger from Facebook and Google, which said it was “deeply disappointed”.

Google Australia managing director Mel Silva said the “heavy-handed intervention” threatened to “impact the services we can deliver to Australians”.

“Our hope was that the code would be forward thinking and the process would create incentives for both publishers and digital platforms to negotiate and innovate for a better future — so we are deeply disappointed and concerned the draft code does not achieve this,” Ms Silva said.

“It sets up a perverse disincentive to innovate in the media sector and does nothing to solve the fundamental challenges of creating a business model fit for the digital age.”

Facebook, which has threatened to remove news from its platform if it was forced to pay for it, said it was reviewing the draft code to understand the impact it would have in its “investment in the news ecosystem in Australia”.

Despite the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy — which has led to hundreds of journalists losing work across the country — Facebook, Amazon and Apple have ­recorded surging quarterly sales and profits.

Facebook this week reported an 11 per cent rise in revenues — to $US18.7bn ($26bn) — for the three months to the end of June. Google reported revenues of $US38.3bn in that period.

ACCC chair Rod Sims said the mandatory code would be a “forcing device for real discussions on payment that haven’t happened before”.

Mr Sims said Google and Facebook faced harsh penalties if they did not follow the new rules, including $10m fines per breach and 10 per cent of their turnover in Australia.

“The Australian turnover of Google and Facebook combined is many billions of dollars. So we’re talking quite large potential penalties, and the ACCC is the enforcer,” he said.

“If they say ‘we just don’t want to play under this regime’, then that’s when they’ll be taken to court. And that’s when the ­hundreds of millions of dollars of penalties will apply.”

News Corp Australasia executive chairman Michael Miller said the code was a “watershed ­moment” and would end the “platforms’ days of free-riding”.

“The tech platforms’ days of free-riding on other people’s ­content are ending. They derive immense benefit from using news content created by others and it is time for them to stop denying this fundamental truth,” he said.

News Corp is the publisher of The Weekend Australian.

While the ABC is excluded from bargaining over paid content, the public broadcaster ­argued in its submission to the ACCC that it should be allowed to be part of any revenue arrangements reached.

The News Corp submission put forward a range of suggested codes, including a “collective ­boycott” model in which the digital platforms could not publish the content of any news outlet with a unique audience of over one million per month unless they reached agreement with all of them, assuming the inclusion of the ABC. Mr Sims said the code was a “world first” and flagged the regulations could be extended to Apple and Amazon if a “power imbalance was identified”.

Former ACCC chairman Allan Fels, now chairman of the Public Interest Journalism ­Initiative, said Facebook and Google would have to make ­“serious offers” of payment for content. “The proposal for the code to be compulsory and to include final arbitration puts real teeth in the process,” he said.

Free TV chief executive ­Bridget Fair said the code recognised the significant value of news. “Neither Google or Facebook were prepared to genuinely negotiate a reasonable payment for their use of our news content on key services such as Google Search, Facebook Newsfeed or Instagram,” Ms Fair said.

Adore Beauty boss Kate Morris has tapped advisers for a potential ASX-listing.  AFR

As Street Talk revealed, Adore Beauty's board formally mandated all three firms on Wednesday, after interviewing a handful of investment banks for the role in the past few weeks.

The firms are expected to help prepare Adore Beauty for an initial public offering, while its board and majority shareholder Quadrant Private Equity consider their options.

Sources said the mooted IPO was still at a preliminary stage, and the company had yet to lock in either a timetable or valuation. Early estimates are it could seek to raise about $200 million for a $600 million-plus valuation.

Should it front listed equity markets in coming months, it is expected to be pitched as a private equity and pandemic success story with revenue pegged at more than $100 million this year.

Online visibility analysis platform SEMRush has revealed the top 50 online retailers in Australia, with Bunnings taking out the top spot. 

According to the platform, Bunnings had the highest website traffic up 74% year-on-year with 5.7 million visitors more than second place Amazon Australia. 

However, department stores made their presence known in the top 10, with Kmart and Big W taking out number four and number six respectively. 

Looking at the top 50, department stores made up the majority of retailers SEMRush analysed, with traffic towards department stores surpassing any other sector in the last three months, increasing 58% year-on-year to 63.5 million visits. 

In total, department stores have seen 633 million visits for Q2. 

SEMRush head of global marketing Olga Andrienko said that consumers are looking to buy good quality products in a COVID-safe environment. 

"When it comes to seeing how the top retailers are stacking up in 2020, SEMrush has been able to track consumer behaviour and trends by analysing online searches from the past year with a noticeable difference during the peak lockdown period. 

"Department stores made up the majority of the top 50 retailers, SEMrush’s data shows a clear trend in consumer preference towards at-home items with Bunnings, Spotlight and IKEA all experiencing significant spikes in website traffic during the past year. 

"The data suggests people are looking for good quality products at affordable prices and they are spending their time online in a COVID-safe environment in order to do so.

"Changes in consumer preference is not only reflected in the website traffic, but also in the search volumes, with a significant reduction in searching for flights especially with searches relating to cheaper flight websites such as Webjet, AirAsia and Jetstar," she said. 

Fashion retailers included in the top 50 list kicked off with The Iconic coming in at number 19. 

Rebel, Asos and Cotton on followed close behind at number 24, 25 and 26, while City Beach and Forever New came in at 34 and 36 respectively. 

Bonds, SurfStitch, Jeanswest, Showpo, Birdsnest, Marks & Spencer and Beserk rounded out the top 50 in the fashion category. 

The full top 50 retailers by search volume is listed below: 

1. Bunnings Warehouse
2. Amazon Australia
3. Woolworths
4. Kmart
5. JB Hi-Fi
6. Big W
7. Coles
8. Microsoft
9. Harvey Norman
10. Officeworks
11. Target
12. Kogan
13. Catch
14. Chemist Warehouse
15. Myer
16. IKEA
17. The Good Guys
18. Supercheap Auto
19. The Iconic
20. Dan Murphy’s
21. EB Games
22. Spotlight
23. David Jones
24. Rebel
25. ASOS
26. Cotton On
27. BCF
28. Fantastic Furniture
29. Priceline
30. Booktopia
31. Best & Less
32. Mecca
33. Ozsale
34. City Beach
35. HP
36. Forever New
37. Adore Beauty
38. Bonds
39. SurfStitch
40. Sephora
41. Vistaprint
42. Jeanswest
43. Showpo
44. Nourished Life
45. Birdsnest
46. Marks & Spencer
47. Beserk
48. Naked Wines
49. GraysOnline
50. Anaconda