Australia Post chief executive Ahmed Fahour has foreshadowed a network of accelerators to help bring to market the ideas of ecommerce startups as well as its own staff, with equity stakes an option.

“The funding is actually the least important part of what these accelerators will do," Fahour told an Australia-Israel Chamber Of Commerce lunch in Sydney.

“There’s plenty of other sources of funding out there, but what Australia Post has that other accelerators don’t is a brand that everyone knows, a network of 4000 shops, and a logistical operation already delivering hundreds of millions of packages every year," he said.

“If you’ve got an idea to make ecommerce better, it’s access to our managers and that network that you really need."

Fahour provided scant detail of where the accelerators would be located and how they’d actually work, but said more would be revealed ahead of their planned rollout in 2016.

Still derided as expensive and out of touch by some ecommerce startups, Fahour said Australia Post had been doing more to help emerging Australian businesses. For instance he said there had been “huge interest" in its partnership with Alibaba’s third-party platform, Tmall Global, which sees it translate Australian etailers’ websites into Mandarin (or occasionally Cantonese) and handle all of the logistics in selling directly to Chinese consumers.

Fahour said Swisse Vitamins and various baby milk powder companies had already benefited from this arrangement.

The postal giant is also buying more startups - such as POLi Payments, snapped up by its SecurePay subsidiary last December.

It’s also working with more startups. For instance the beta testing of its digital products like myPost - which Fahour bragged had amassed 2 million users since its launch last year - is handled by Melbourne startup Bugwolf.