The Australian market, sized from primary data

The geography gap — the idea originated in Australia and Australia had never been researched — was closed using ABS data cubes and IBISWorld public pages.

The structural problem comes first: there is no ANZSIC class for tiles, and none for lighting. Both trades are statistically invisible. ANZSIC 4212 Floor Coverings Retailing explicitly excludes ceramic floor tiles, which sit in 4231 Hardware & Building Supplies Retailing alongside Bunnings. Ceramic tile wholesaling sits in 3339 Other Hardware Goods Wholesaling. IBISWorld inherits the gap — there is no "Tile Wholesaling in Australia" report at all. Any tile count has to be built bottom-up.

ABS business counts at 30 June 2025 (8165.0, released 16 December 2025), shown as total and the $2m+ turnover cut:

IBISWorld corroborates the ABS closely: Floor Covering Retailing AUD 3.7bn across 2,049 businesses; Furniture & Floor Covering Wholesaling 6.6bn across 1,832; Electrical & Lighting Stores 2.8bn across 1,802; Ceramic Product Manufacturing 791.5m across 452. Its note that "imports account for a high share of industry revenue" confirms the Australian tile trade is an import trade — exactly the situation this idea started from.

Apportioned from those inputs: roughly 1,500–2,000 Australian businesses at $2m+, about 1,800–2,450 including New Zealand. Working number: ~2,000. The full universe including sub-$2m operators is roughly 6,000–9,000. NSW leads wholesale and import while Victoria leads retail, consistent with Sydney as the import gateway.

What those suppliers actually run

Measured by fetching the sites and matching platform markers, not assumed:

• Magento 2: Amber Tiles, National Tiles, Beaumont Tiles, Beacon Lighting.
• Shopify: TileCloud, Earp Bros, Cult Design.
• WooCommerce: Signorino, Tile Factory Outlet.
• No storefront detected: Artedomus, Academy Tiles, Di Lorenzo, Skheme, Surface Gallery, Living Edge — catalogue and brochure sites only.

There is a clean split by scale: large Australian chains run Magento/Adobe Commerce; newer DTC and mid-size importers run Shopify; WordPress/WooCommerce covers those that grew out of a brochure site; several premium importers sell entirely offline.

This matters more than it looks. The Shopify-running importer this idea started from sits in the middle band, and its peer group is genuinely mixed rather than Shopify-dominated. A Shopify-first product addresses a subset of a subset. It also means the Cin7-to-Shopify gap does not reach the biggest Australian players — they are on Magento, where Cin7 also drops attributes.

The organised supply side is tiny

The Australian Tile Council is the real body — 50+ years, "Australia's only recognised tile industry representative" — and claims members represent around 70% of all tiles sold in the country. Its live directory shows 140 members: Tile Merchant 45, Contractor 31, Other 21, Consultant 14, Builder 11, Wholesaler 6, Manufacturer 5, Industry Supplier 4. So the entire organised supply side is about 51 merchants and wholesalers plus 5 manufacturers. Membership is AUD 150–330/yr. By state: QLD 36, NSW 35, VIC 32, SA 28, WA 28.

New Zealand: New Zealand Tile Council 52 members; TANZ about 197 listings of which roughly 100 are genuine independents; FloorNZ 314 unique; Lighting Council NZ 25.

(A correction from the research itself: ATTIA is the Australian Tea Tree Industry Association. There is no "Australian Tile and Terrazzo Industry Association" — the research brief invented it.)

Nobody occupies this space locally — which is both the finding and the warning

• Cin7's own 700+ integration directory has no PIM category and lists no PIM vendor. Akeneo, Plytix, Salsify, Pimberly, inriver and Bluestone are all absent. The only Cin7-to-PIM offerings anywhere are agency consulting pages (Cogent2 selling Cin7 Core to Plytix / inriver integration work) — services, not products.
• Comestri, the Australian PIM/commerce vendor, now redirects to ultracommerce.co. Absorbed.
• BCI Central rebranded to LeadManager and is not a product-data business — it sells construction project leads.
• No Australian digital agency publicly claims building-products ecommerce as a specialty.

The sharpest standards finding: ETIM AU/NZ exists and is dormant. ETIM International lists it, run by the Australian Industry Group, announced 26 November 2021 as a multi-country membership for Australia and New Zealand, with scope "initially the electrotechnical sector" and discussions to expand into HVAC and plumbing. Its own website, etim-aunz.com, is a parked NameBright "coming soon" page — verified by direct fetch, nearly five years after launch. It does not cover tiles, flooring or decorative lighting.

No Australian product data template regime exists either. NATSPEC's work is BIM-shaped: an Open BIM Object Standard v1.0 (2018, jointly with Masterspec NZ) plus a BIM Properties Generator, targeting geometry and object properties rather than commerce attributes. Its ~50 Product Partners get branded worksections, not a data feed. There is no Australian equivalent of the UK's NBS/CIBSE Product Data Templates. The ABCB runs conformity registers (NCBP, CodeMark, WaterMark), not product data. buildingSMART Australasia publishes no AU/NZ product data dictionary. New Zealand has miproducts — 1,161 suppliers, 9,590 listings, 115 added in 30 days — on its own CBI taxonomy with no published schema.

Nobody will standardise this out from under you. "Nobody" is also a warning.