The Rise of Ecommerce in Architecture, Construction and Consulting

My view is that if you want to make housing more affordable you should forget about modular homes, digital twins, AR or VR. Much bigger marginal gains are to be found in the delivery of services. 

Today I can buy shoes, plane tickets, insurance, bikes, boats and insanely expensive watches online. Meanwhile construction and particularly small businesses which make up the bulk of the industry have been left behind, progressing marginally beyond the fax machine in the way services are procured and delivered.

The benefit of being around for a while is that you get a greater sense of perspective on the world. I was lucky enough to have worked at Amazon in 2001, and I got the sense there was something special about this business. The company really lived and breathed customer service and this was baked into the training and support I received. At the time Amazon sold predominantly three things: books, CDs and DVDs. 

Amazon and other ecommerce platforms at the time were dabbling in other things like toys and electronics, but they were simple standardised products. It seemed inconceivable that a significant number of people would ever buy anything that they had to try on and wear like clothes. A few years later people were starting to buy t-shirts online, but shoes were touted as something that could never be sold online. Today I don’t actually remember when I last bought shoes in a physical store.

The point is that wherever you are you’re in a continuum and everything that seems like a stretch for e-commerce becomes commonplace in the blink of an eye.Since my time at Amazon I have built a career and a business in architecture and construction. I founded Ballast Point almost a decade ago and it has since become the leading architecture and construction business in Sydney’s Inner West. And when I set about launching an e-commerce architectural consultation service there were many reasons put forward by some smart marketers as to why it would not work. “No-one will pay this much online without at least speaking to you first” I was told. “The data does not support what you are doing!” 

So I ignored all that, launched a way customers could book and pay online for architectural services. And it turns out just as they like browsing for shoes in their spare time, people also like browsing architectural services online — and they don’t always want to speak to us until we show up at their house for a consultation.

Spending $1800 online might seem like a big investment, but people already spend that amount online all the time, on things like shoes, handbags, wine, antiques, insurances, bikes, holidays, inflatable watercraft. And when people are spending $2 million on a property and plan to spend another $900,000 on a renovation the $1800 they spend on a design consultation is a relatively small value

We only began offering this service a year ago, but we have already sold 30 paid consultations. Not only did our sales increase, but by charging for consultations upfront we removed people who were exploring but were not committed from our sales funnel. We made sure that we provided additional resources and we are working towards releasing more.

We also learned a lot and created some valuable IP along the way. We’re now working towards automating brief creation and proposals.

Today people still say to me that e-commerce is never going to work for consulting. I believe they are wrong.

For an industry like construction which is an absolute behemoth in scale but a complete laggard in productivity, perhaps e-commerce can yield the largest marginal gains — not AR or VR glasses or modular homes. We’re leaning into ecommerce. We’re creating new ways for customers to automate the creation of a brief and get customised products in their time and their space.