EP322 - 2024 Holiday Recap

 

Episode Summary:

In today’s episode of the Jason & Scot Show, Jason and Scot recap the 2024 holiday season, and give a preview of the upcoming NRF Big Show.

The week of January 20th, we'll be publishing our annual predictions show.

If you enjoyed the episode, help us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in!

Episode 322 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, January 8th, 2025.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Transcript Jason   [0:23]Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode number 322. Being recorded on Wednesday January 8th I'm your host Jason retail geek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot   [0:38]Hey Jason and welcome back Json is Scott showed listeners happy New Year Jason. Jason   [0:45]A happy New Year and happy holidays Scott it's it's been a while it's been it's fun to catch up. Scot   [0:50]Yeah you're kind of crummy when do you start giving people a hard time for saying Happy New Year I I was kind of a little worried because I was thinking I bet Jason draws the line at third or fourth of January and here we are on the 8th so I feel like. Jason   [1:05]I accept all all well wishes I'm totally merry Christmas happy holidays as long as you want any of those variations are totally acceptable despite the fact that I'm nominally Jewish. And I'm New Year's at least through January my lights are still up out front. Scot   [1:21]Okay good I'll I'll try to for the Valentine's show I'll make sure I don't say it that though I'll stop from there forward. Jason   [1:29]If it helps people not judge me I think my Amazon smart plug is broken so I think the holiday lights might not be on. But they're still out there it's too cold to go out and get them is the problem. Scot   [1:41]Yeah yeah you and I both went warm places for the holidays so that was good because I think we're both facing a cold spell here and I think actually here in North Carolina we may get snow whereas in Chicago you're not going to isn't that weird. Jason   [1:56]That that is super weird even if we're both getting snow I'd be a lot more worried for you than me because I feel like we're we're a lot more used to it but yeah it's even weirder that like it's not not snowing here and you guys are going to get get dumped on. Scot   [2:11]Yeah yeah we're just going to shut down and hopefully we don't lose power, the so it's been a while since we laid down a pod there's a lot we could talk about any any trip reports you you've been super busy you've done some vacationing but you grocery shopped before the break and then we definitely want to talk a little bit about holiday to kind of go through some of the tea leaves that are starting to come out on how things happened let's start let's start with a trip report anything interesting there. Jason   [2:38]Yeah so at least anyone worry I have been traveling a lot I just got a note from my my favorite vendor United that they've invited me to their secret. Highest status program for for another year and this year I'm going to cross 2 million miles with United so um. Yeah I feel like that I had mixed feelings about that like it's a a cool accomplishment slash it kind of signifies that I have a sad life. Scot   [3:05]And it's like congratulations all you do is fly would you like to fly some more. Jason   [3:10]Yes and the general answer is no um so I did do a lot of traveling last year there were a bunch of trips running right up to holiday but, but a lot of them were sort of Private Client gigs more so than, industry events and I've been on 2 weeks of vacation so I frankly can't remember where I was right before those but the Big Show of course that I don't think we talked a lot about was was grocery shop which, isn't you know focused on the food restaurant and grocery industry in October in Las Vegas and that show continues to get. Bigger and better longtime listeners of the show will know kind of I talk a lot about how. Every industry is getting wildly disrupted by digital just not all at the same pace so some of the you know first categories to get disrupted. Digital where things like like Borders bookstore and Blockbuster video and then Circuit City and Toys R Us and the gap. Jason   [4:08]And that at the moment it's the Auto industry in the grocery industry that are getting most disrupted by digital so I feel like grocery shops are particularly interesting show because, in many ways that's where all the, the rapid Evolution and action is in the in the digital space so it was a a good vibrant show and. 1 of the things I'll I'll give props to the show organizers for is you know they always get good Keynotes they always get big names on stage but they share more so than many years in the past I felt like. A lot of the Keynotes had like actual interesting. Information and insights in them it was less like sort of CEOs giving the the prepared PR. Can speech and more talking candidly about what was working and what wasn't working and and you know what the priorities were going to be and what was being deemphasized in the future so I I would just say overall again it was back in October and we're in January now so. Don't press me for for a ton of specifics but I walked away. Feeling like there are a lot of useful takeaways and of course like all the all the networking and hallway conversations were were super helpful as well. Scot   [5:21]Cool were you leader of any sessions. Jason   [5:25]I was as per all of these events I'm I'm wildly Overexposed and so I I both presented a session I also moderated panel. The like I probably can't even remember exactly who was on my panel so. Scot   [5:45]It's been a long time you've got you've got vacation fog we'll give you a. Jason   [5:47]I do I do I'm gonna call it vacation fog and hope it's not dementia but yeah. Scot   [5:53]Yeah and then on the holiday recap we kind of have to wait that first week of February last I looked is when Amazon's going to announce and then right after that I think you got some Walmart and some of the other folks Target and whatnot kind of put out their data so we won't really know what happened until we get some of that but several of the folks that do pontificate have some data out did you see any data that was interesting that you want to run through I I I saw some of the Adobe stuff I was going to just run through. Jason   [6:21]Yeah well so maybe I'll just wait the groundwork a little bit like so again there's. In general we see 2 kinds of data like there's people that talk about what happened in retail which is all all of retail so it's brick and mortar mixed with eCommerce and then there's people that just talk about digital so I know you're going to jump into the Adobe 1 which is, exclusively talking about e-commerce, but of course a long time listeners of the show would know you know the history of the last 10 years is that retail tends to grow about 3 to 4% a year, and e-commerce has grown about 10 to 15% a year for each of the last years so 2024 is an interesting year we you know it's still a week or 2 before we have the final data for the the whole year, but with 11 months of data. Retailers slowed down a little bit like it's growing closer to 3% than 3 to 4% and e-commerce has slowed down it's grown about 7% this year versus the typical 10 to 15% and. Jason   [7:22]You know it could be that this is a down year it also could be the law of large numbers as e-commerce is getting you know to be a bigger and bigger part it's hard to grow as fast so it's e-commerce is still growing at more than twice the speed of retail. But that's that's a smaller Delta. Then it has historically been so that's kind of the the backdrop coming into this holiday and then this is 1 of the weirdest holiday seasons of my career. So traditionally what we always talk about is. There's an arms race to start holiday earlier that like you know retailers used to open up their stores on. Black Friday the day after Thanksgiving and they were creeping earlier in the earlier in the morning on Friday originally when I started my career they opened at 10:00 the normal opening time and then they're like wait I'm going to open at 9:00 and get people to get in the line of my store before your store and then I'm going to open at 8, and then retire starts saying hey we're actually going to open Thursday night after dinner and then oh we're going to be open all day Thursday, and fast forward 30 years hey we're going to run our big Prime day sale in the middle of October right and so, every year we talk about how holiday starts earlier and earlier and these sales start her early and earlier but here's the Dirty Little Secret. Jason   [8:39]The retailers may offer deals earlier and earlier but consumers have never spent earlier. So if we look at October sales growth it's the same every October for the last 30 years so I get it has it it's not like October has become more important over time as these sales have gotten early and earlier and so when. Amazon announced a huge sale in October and Walmart and Target quickly followed suit I actually. Kind of thought it was a nothing burger like I I didn't expect it to have a big impact and. I was wrong so October is actually been 1 of the most robust months of growth we had this whole year like it was a big spike much bigger than we had any other month. And I thought oh man that's interesting like these these sales really are having a meaningful effect this year. But then we got into November in the first 2 weeks of November were abysmal. And so you go huh we we had a bunch of big sales in October it appears people jumped on those sales uh we sold more stuff in October than ever before but we probably just pulled a bunch of demand in that would have happened in November because. Jason   [9:47]The beginning of November was awful and so then we got to Holiday the turkey 5 week and you go well what's going to happen is it going to stay soft like it has most of November but it actually bounced back and so we had this, we had this low from November 1 through November you know 26 and then, it jumped up and we had a pretty robust not not like World beating but a pretty robust turkey 5 and so then you go wow you know and by the way the turkey 5. Extended into December this year because of the the way the holiday schedule works, um and then we've all been real curious to see what would happen in December and the real answer is we don't have the December data yet we have a couple data points so. Jason   [10:30]Market MasterCard spending pulse. Is 1 of the companies that publishes an estimate of total retail sales and they published an estimate of November 1st through December 24th so not catching the last minute holiday shoppers, that said all of retail for November and December was up 3.8% so if that's true. Will take it that's that's the industry average growth that's the high side of the nrf's forecast for holiday this year and it, would kind of mean that that, December sales were pretty robust to make up for the kind of anemic November sales so so that's, the big data that I followed about overall retail and then you know we have some better more granular data on the e-commerce side and that that's where like that adobe data comes in so you want to you want to break that down for us. Scot   [11:24]Yeah it's kind of interesting as you as you talk about you know kind of pulling it in October we we always talk about the shape of the holiday right and we used to have kind of this you now as you described it it sounds like a w where the the left side of the W is like that October Spike and then you had a little decrease in early November and then the turkey 5 you come is the middle of the W and then you come back down and then we always seem to have this procrastinator kind of pop at the end I don't know about you but I I fall into that for a lot of my things I'm kind of like I get busy at work and I'm like, holy cow it's December 18th I better think about this holiday thing so you always see a little bit of a spike and some of that's driven it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy because that's when all the best prices happen there's the you know the Garff used to call it. Turkey chicken game of chicken discount chicken do you remember that. Jason   [12:17]I do I do. Scot   [12:18]Yeah I saw he changed jobs that was you're not going to be able to do selfies with him anymore yeah Rob gar. Jason   [12:24]Going to do selfies with Rob and I, uh NFS coming up in a few days so I I hope to see them and we'll for sure take a selfie but you're right Rob Garff a long time friend of the show and I I want to say 4 or 5 time guests left Salesforce this year so a big big change he was kind of, face face of Commerce at Salesforce for a long time. Scot   [12:42]You have to give us a an inside scoop of what's going on there it reveals secrets you get from the show on our podcast, okay so on the Adobe data, you know they they they call this November and December and they're saying online came in at 8.7% year-over-year growth which to your point is kind of below that 10% where we've been going. But we're getting to a scale where it doesn't surprise me I I think ultimately the lines for retail and online just kind of merge and blend and kind of become the same thing they did say that Shoppers they called it event based they were waiting for events which were basically price drops and they were kind of I guess they don't want to say discount chicken maybe that's not as uh fancy so they called them Event Event based shopping. Jason   [13:29]Yeah and if you think about it was invented by their competitors at Salesforce so yeah. Scot   [13:34]Yeah oh true yes sorry wrong uh wrong 1 and then this I thought you I thought interesting and it basically said groceries was the fastest growing at 13% so I guess with inflation people were just gifting groceries or or did groceries are just growing fast enough now that you know that's just faster than the holiday what what's your read on that 1. Jason   [13:55]Yeah well a couple of things so like when when if adobe's right that it grew e-commerce grew 8.7% over holiday to me that's that, totally makes sense and put your point it's lower than what we would historically expect but it's actually higher than the year to date averages for e-commerce so e-commerce is growing about 7%, through the you know the whole first 11 months of the year so growing 8.7% over holiday actually means. Jason   [14:26]E-commerce was a more important factor in Holiday than brick and mortar which I I believe and think was true so that that was kind of my first takeaway from the Adobe data and and as I mentioned, you know there's some really mature categories in e-commerce I mean you know 90 something percent of all books and music is is digital now right like you know well over 50% of electronics and toys. Jason   [14:50]Our digital 50% of apparel is digital but. You know less than 8% of groceries are digital so it's still it totally makes sense that grocery e-commerce is growing faster than anything else I don't think it's gifts. Although you know people host a lot more over holidays so they do spend more on groceries than usual. But I think it's just reflecting the the fact that we had lots of busy families that were availing themselves of the convenience of grocery delivery. And you know another Factor overlaying all of this is we we've had this kind of thing that I like to call A vibe session this year that. Consumers have really curtailed their spending on non-essential purchases so when you break down the actual categories uh all year people have spent a lot more on deeply discounted goods and on food and have to have and they've spent less on want to have so you know consumer electronics it's actually been a poor year a parallel you know has been a little mixed but generally a poor year Home Improvement has been kind of a poor year. Jason   [15:58]But you know these these have to have categories like grocery have been 1 of the stars all year so if you kind of factor in that, you know people have tended to spend more on grocery just in general and the e-commerce is a you know more substantially growing part of of grocery than it's ever been before it makes sense that grocery would win the e-commerce race for holiday. Scot   [16:23]Yeah interesting. Then they said this the so groceries number 1 at 13% the number 2 category was Cosmetics at 12.2% I think the Wingo household contributed a. A pretty big piece of that, I go to Sephora a lot against my will and then they said that category hit 7.7 billion and then they pivot into discounts they made this quizzical statement where they basically said retailers discovered that for every 1% price drop demand went up 1% being forces I was like well let's look at the edge if you dropped 100% demand would go up 100% it seems like demand would actually go up more if it was 100% off anyway I didn't really understand what they were trying to say there it's it and it made it seem like it was just like new revelation I'm like wait a minute this is called. Supply demand curve and I learned it in economics anyway I must have misread it or something I didn't kind of like grow what they were trying to say there. Did you did you have a hot take on that 1. Jason   [17:24]Well just a reminder most of the people that were good at Econ economics like don't get jobs at Adobe so I I would just remind you of that but no. I'm just kidding all my friends at Adobe who are super smart um the yeah I. Of course like lower prices generally drive more sales that that certainly true it's probably not a linear scale I think they're more saying like observationally like on their data set that it happened to play out this year that that there was kind of a linear, who asked the city between price and demand but the my bigger takeaway is I think. Jason   [18:02]This was a highly promotional holiday period right and this was kind of expected I mean again overall 2024 was a soft year in retail. We we just we'd had a couple really good years after the pandemic of of really strong growth and this is going to be kind of a. You know we'll be lucky if we get to out to an average year it's probably going to be a below average year of growth and, you know there are all these extraneous factors like you know there's there's positive and negative economic indicators but the consumer confidence has been really poor they're they're only spending on Essentials they're all trading down to cheaper Goods so you know more discounted goods and value Goods, and there was a super polarizing election that you know distracted a lot of people and it was the shortest holiday season we we get on the calendar with fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas than we ever than we get any other year. And so for all of those reasons retailers were desperate to sell stuff and what desperate retailers do is they discount deeper and so what we always worry about in these kind of years is that retailers will. Jason   [19:11]Go deeper discounts to kind of hit their Topline sales goals and clear out their inventory but it actually means that their margins, are going to be really poor and that's 1 of the things I really worry about this year is, I think when all the dust settles we're going to find out it was a below average to average holiday season but way below average on profitability right and that's going to have a carryover effect in 2025. Scot   [19:39]You know that's what's really matters right you know you can sell the Top Line doesn't matter it's the basically the profitability. Jason   [19:46]Bonus on the top line. Scot   [19:47]True but I have a feeling the more sophisticated people are are the kind of caught on to that trick they talked about Electronics was the deepest discount to your point of demand being kind of sluggish at with a 30% off there and then toys was number 2 at 28 toys is just a. Terrible category these days because kids don't really want toys they want to just play electric electronic games we're talking about. You can't climb baby geek anymore but you know uh. Jason   [20:15]The little geek we're going with. Scot   [20:16]Little geek retail geek Junior. You know he's into games and wants digital currencies and stuff the good old Roblox dollars and and whatnot so yeah it toys are just tough so that that 1's kind of an easy call at 28% and then they said apparel had a fair amount of discounting to 23%. So I thought that was interesting traditional Trends we've talked about for. Kind of going on a decade at this point you know this may I hope you're sitting down but a lot of people shop on their phones that was up to 55%. Another call out I thought was interesting was they they saw a buy now pay later a pretty significantly at 9.6% year-over-year and you know. It's hard to tell if that's kind of a new consumer Behavior or there's all this data that's out there that shows the consumer's kind of increasingly Under Pressure they're they're starting to get a bit of a debt thing going and. Interest rates going up have made made home buying slow down all those kinds of things are putting pressure on the consumer so, it's hard to tell the buy now pay later people would tell you know it's a whole generation likes to buy that way I'm a little skeptical that maybe it's just the you know part of the the consumer being under pressure that saw a climb there. And then they on that they said Cyber Monday was a record day for buy now pay later where it it came very close to a billion I guess 991.2 million of transactions had buy now pay later. What do you think is buy now pay later surging so is that about. Jason   [21:45]I do think it is I I do think it's it's kind of a combination of 3 things like I do think it's legitimate that that younger consumers look at debt and credit differently then then older consumers and and so I there is a legitimate thing that's hard for people our age to understand which is like even consumers that you know young consumers that have economic means to buy something. Don't like to go into like debt on their credit card and they do view these like fixed installment things where you you know buy something on 4 payments as. Jason   [22:22]Is a different kind of debt than credit cards and so I do think there's an actual consumer preference for younger consumers to, that credit vehicle so I I think that's what genuinely part of it and the buy now pay later Services continue to grow and be more ubiquitous so they're just offered, more places more retailers have them and more retailers are offering them both online and in store than ever before so, so there's more places you can use it and there's more consumers that have a preference for it that's part of it I also think, there were more distressed consumers coming into holiday so there were you know more consumers that were forced to use it and the the thing that I don't love for the economy and that scares me about these services, are some of the really inappropriate categories, that consumers are using buy now pay later for right like if you're buying a durable good and you you buy it on installments and you know that like we could argue about the economic Prudence of that but I I don't personally have a problem with that. But if you're buying a monthly consumable on installments. That's concerning right so you know you shouldn't be buying food on buy now pay later right and yet like buy now pay later is showing up and getting used at grocery stores. Jason   [23:33]The that you mentioned Cosmetics are up Cosmetics is 1 of these weird categories where there's been this bifurcation. There's some inexpensive Cosmetics that are kind of an affordable luxury and they're doing really well, the the true expensive luxury cosmetics and the whole luxury category we saw get really soft and Q4 this year and historically, luxury is the category that survives economic downturns right because you know more fluent people tend to be. To be more resilient but this time around we have this kind of it's It's a negative vibe as much as it is an economic factor and so even a fluent people are like, don't feel great about the economy I'm going to cut back on my spending and so luxury overall especially in the United States. Jason   [24:18]Got really really soft but buy now pay later got used a lot for like consumables like lipstick and things like that so that's a a little bit of a, a worry and so I I think you've got kind of and then the the third factor that I think helps buy now pay later is, people don't like pulling their credit card out of their wallet and typing it into an e-commerce site it's just a pain in the neck and economies that have digital wallets like China sell a lot more stuff online than econ then economies that don't have big digital wallet penetration, and so for some American consumers, PayPal and Shop pay our digital wallets for some American consumers Amazon pays a digital wallet but for some American consumers a firm is a digital wallet and so there is a, lower friction more convenient checkout experience that that you know I'm not saying it's the biggest part of buy now pay later but it's another incentive that some consumers have to use it so I think, the combination of those 3 things. Jason   [25:18]You know younger consumers with different attitudes about credit consumers that you know are buying stuff that they don't necessarily have the cash to pay for and consumers that like the convenience of. Of the buy now pay later checkout flow all are helping buy now pay later continue to grow for the moment and we'll have to see if that. That carries forward but it's definitely a big thing. Scot   [25:40]Interesting the other data and I know you love this is from MasterCard spending pulse and they said retail X Autos was up 3.8% and that was kind of they had a couple other things but I know that that 1 has not 100% tracked the the Commerce Department data that that is the gold standard. Jason   [25:58]Yeah yeah so it's weird it it it should be a really good data source all all of these data sources are dubious right like the only. Jason   [26:06]Economic indicators are really care about are the public retailers earning statements right because those those are like audited um and and you know. Tend to be pretty reliable although although Macy's had a glitch this this last quarter that was kind of interesting. The the retail earnings reports are are are pretty credible all of these estimates the the US Department of Commerce data I I'm deep in that data I use it all the time I find it really helpful but you know it's it's very flawed at best and then most of these other data sources are more far than that so so MasterCard data is, a big panel of credit card users right and MasterCard has a lot of users so it it should be a good data set. You know there's a lot of people that pay with cash and so the the MasterCard data set is skewed and the economists at MasterCard would say they normalize the data to reflect All American spending even though they only see a subset of American spending, but I have to say historically of all these data sources I've seen the most fluctuations in mastercard's data versus everyone else's so, they're the only ones that have put a flag down for December and they're saying it's 3.8% which again would be decent I hope the other data sources they will get next week come in and are similar but I I'm. I'm not prepared to to say I'm very confident at this point what what the December numbers are going to be. Scot   [27:33]Yeah what was the I missed the Macy's flood what was that all about. Jason   [27:36]Where like a week before they they were scheduled to do their Q3 earnings call. They acknowledged a massive fraud by an employee in their accounting department and had to delay their earnings and restate their earnings for the last several quarters. Scot   [27:53]Wow holy cow that's a that's a pretty material fraud. Jason   [27:58]Yeah yeah and yeah you never that's never a fun message to give to the market and then you know of course. Meses is in a really challenged category department stores just aren't doing well and are generally declining and so you know odds are we're there and they did you know come out with a soft earnings report, you know that there's a couple favorable things in it but the top line is is that they're shrinking. And you know that's bad news just anyway and then when you have to you know taint it by saying and we're not even sure that that that all the all the losses we've reported the last 3 quarters like aren't even the full story it's it's it's. Investors do not love that. Scot   [28:37]Yeah that's terrible all right 2 other topics I want to talk about we have NRF coming up and you're going to be attending for the Json and Scott show where do you expect him to see there. Jason   [28:49]Retail media networks and AI I think everything is going to be a retail an AI driven retail media Network. Scot   [28:56]Some combinations of the letters a r m n i looks like a uh Wheel of Fortune kind of thing. Jason   [29:03]Yes and generally I throw up in my mouth every time I hear either of those acronyms so it's kind of it'll be a super pleasant pleasant week we. Scot   [29:11]Well I can't wait to hear your show report. Jason   [29:13]Yeah I have approximately 10,000 emails in my inbox right now which are you know from someone that wants to meet at NRF that is inviting me like today. Despite the fact that my internet schedule booked up about 3 months ago. To see their new Innovative AI driven retail media Network solution to that's going to revolutionize the retail industry. That's that's the exact extent of the pitch no more detail than that. Scot   [29:40]Do people say as the chief digital Commerce retail payments officer at pubis do you have any uh are you interested in e-commerce in in retail Solutions you must get the craziest email. Jason   [29:53]Yes exactly yes whenever they do that exact pitch I know it's from you. Scot   [29:59]Yeah for those of you that see Jason make sure you give him a hard time about his title that's it he he really enjoys it it's the only thing that brighten his day and being pummeled by the AI and Retail. Jason   [30:11]It it does because every time I hear it it makes me think of Scott and and Scott Scott is just 1 of my happy places. Scot   [30:17]That's nice, 1 thing I saw in this kind of came from my you know so so I do investing here in the Research Triangle Park area in a bunch of startups and, you know AI you're going to do this but AI gen AI to be specific and you know the the change in consumer behaviors from that are really fascinating so a lot of these folks that Source deals and they're trying to you know do lead gen by emailing you constantly, no none of these companies you're not in their target but they they do send out a lot of cold emails. Scot   [30:50]None of that works anymore except LinkedIn which is kind of odd because I get so much LinkedIn stuff I can't even hardly use the messenger. But anyway and then the other thing they said is content strategies under a lot of pressure because, the amount of traffic going to these these blogs and other kind of you know content you put out there hoping to get some inbound interest is kind of falling off a cliff and you know I talked to a couple of them and dug into it and and then I started poking around back into our world of retail and e-commerce and and started to see some interesting things. Scot   [31:21]You know number 1 what you're starting to see is SEO is changing and you know search engine optimization because Google largely dominate search with like let's call it 80% share and you know it's been pretty well known how the algorithm Works they do tweaks and things and whatnot but it's generally well known with patreon and all that stuff for for decade now or decades, but what you're trying to see is enough traffic is starting to go through openai perplexity and some of these things that and it's pulling the content up a layer your site your content that you put out there may have been part of the answer but you're not getting the traffic anymore and therefore people aren't seeing the form to generate a lead or you know oh my gosh this this is a vendor that can offer me a solution to problem X on researching so so that's interesting and then I I noticed in that same Adobe report that kind of had this little little call out where, they said and this is a quote 1 of the newest factors nudging spending is AI powered shopping assistance such as chat gbt and its competitors traffic to retail sites that came from gen AI powered chat Bots, shot up 1300% 1300 percent compared with a year ago holiday season now I'm sure it was small last year so maybe it was like 5 people in this year it's like you know. Scot   [32:41]What's the math on that 1 6000 but you know just relatively that those kinds of numbers, but still I thought it was interesting that we're seeing it over in 1 part of the world and it it's definitely kind of forming over on the e-commerce side and then, a lot of it is Shoppers are now turning to that technology for gift ideas and for you know kind of what you would call the research and and maybe a little bit of finding the product but we've got this research you know what do I want to get, Jeep this guy named retailgeek he's hard to shop for certainly not a gadget because these are get 10 of everything and they're like how do you find find narrow it down and find it and then. What's the best format to buy it in so that that kind of top of the funnel it seems like a lot of consumers are using that and I thought that was pretty interesting and the quote from the Adobe dude was you have a consumer that's a very strategic and thinking a lot about their strategy around where they're buying when they're buying what's offering the best deal and then that's where they're using gen AI the assistants are helping the consumer and co-piloting that Journey so I thought that was interesting and then right before after we did our last pod but right kind of towards the end of the holiday I saw several articles but this Business Insider 1 was like a good Recaps where. Scot   [33:54]You know there's been such an explosion of stuff out there that is increasingly hard to make a decision so there was this 1 article November 4th willing to it in the show notes and it basically was this couple trying to buy a mattress and they were just or a bed frame and they literally spent like 8 to 12 hours and just gave up they just kind of felt like it had become their job and I I do think that's kind of happening it's like it's so hard to find stuff in it I had this problem where I needed 1 of these you know dumb little dongles for my second HDMI thing for my camera and this 1 died and I had a webinar in 3 hours and I do Best Buy I had 1 but it was the 1 that's far away from me so I had to like find how instacart so then I had to back into instacart tell it. Scot   [34:38]Work address and then I went to work to pick it up and like you know seems like all this stuff is out there but the you know the the consumers are just having a hard time parsing through it all so it it's going to going to be interesting to see next year I think we're going to find perplexity has some shopping features we talked a lot about chat GPT has to be working on it, Google Gemini has some really cool stuff that I've been using their deep research and and if it was shopping capable uh they also put out a paper about agents that actually kind of has a shopping agent little placeholder on it, travel agent you know so you could see them kind of turning Google shopping and Google travel into little agent things that go do stuff for you somehow or at least give you some information it's going to be really interesting to see how this changes e-commerce because the consumer, feels a pain point and they want wanted to change but I don't know what it's going to look like on the other side what what do you think about all that. Jason   [35:33]Yeah yeah well so I I I think you're right I think it's complicated because AI is both an annoyingly overhyped buzzword that I'm sick of people AI washing everything and expecting it to sound interesting. And simultaneously I do think that there's there's a ton of AI use cases which are, totally disrupting traditional business processes all across the the Commerce ecosystem and and I think that this, kind of the idea that you started to touch on this idea of AI agents and you know people not having to go shopping for stuff and find stuff and do research and just have the the robots proactively solve shopping problems for you before you know you have them. I I I'm not going to say oh that's for sure the future and and all stores are going to go away, but I think there's a very high likelihood that it becomes a meaningful part of the consumer's tool set and I think it's going to be wildly disruptive so, I don't think it's, it's there yet and I so I don't think it's economically meaningful at this point and so in this Adobe data I feel like is a little bit it's ironic like it's it's they're kind of SEO keyword stuffing when they're implying that SEO is going away. Jason   [36:51]But the, I I think it's a you know a very small number of people were using AI chat Bots last year and now 13,000 you know 1300% more which is still a very small number, but I think bigger picture we used to all discover products, at this place called the retail store on a shelf and now a huge huge percentage of Discovery happens at this thing called the search engine right and and you know 15 years ago that would have been unimaginable how important Google would be to the to the the shopping process today and increasingly I feel like that that search traffic is under threat part of it is from retailers with better databases so you do the search on Amazon or Walmart instead of on Google part of it is, then I would argue the biggest most disruptive part is on social that you're discovering new products to buy on Tik Tok instead of on Google and, you know it's still tiny but an increasing number of it is happening on these AI platforms and this is even really before the AI agents have rolled out like what happens when there's really powerful AI agents built in the series and Amazon and Gmail and they're all plugged into every email and text message we get. Jason   [38:07]You know what what's the world going to look like then you know I think this is the disruption that we're all living through right now I think it's really hard to predict, exactly how it all plays out but I think you know if you're in the space you need to be paying attention to this and you need to be contingency planning you know how you're going to be good at all these things and what you're going to do you know as these things do become meaningful because I think it's entirely possible that, AI agents are as important to Commerce in 10 years as Google is today as the store shelf was 15 years ago. Scot   [38:42]Yeah and what's it mean like to all your, all this front-end stuff when the e-commerce basically kind of was like headless Commerce but with a you know you're not putting a you're not building any front end there's just like the front door is now the. It's not even API it's like some kind of a a genetic thing that's like calling into the API and doing stuff like hey you got 1 of these uh what's your price okay I'll order 1 of those it's going to be it's going to be tricky because a lot of the things that add a lot of extra margin like check out add-ons and you know recommended products and you previously bought this all that stuff. Maybe it goes away in that world and in some extent so it's going to be I guess retailers are going to have a hard choice to decide to even want to participate in that and you know because in the early days. I remember like the Twitter's been at this like 6 times they've tried to have e-commerce and they always try to bypass the checkout and that's kind of like what perplexity is doing and you know you can imagine a bunch of retailers. Like I think it's 1-800 Flowers they get so much from all the upselling that they do that you know maybe there's certain sets of folks that just kind of opt out of that world but then if your competitor opts in what do you do it's going to be interesting to see what happens here. Jason   [39:59]Yeah no and and 1 version of that is already happened like. The when I say we used to discover stuff on the Shelf we used to put a lot of stuff you didn't know about on the Shelf next to the stuff you wanted right, and you made all these unplanned purchases you made all these impulse purchases do you know what the most profitable real estate is in a grocery store it's the cash wrap. It's the the the Widow refrigerator that has 1 can of Coca-Cola that you can buy right as you're checking out that you drink on your way home from the, the the Kroger store, or the the mints or the gum that you didn't think you wanted that you decided you you had to have while you were standing there that those impulse purchases were a huge part of retail and when. Grocery has gone a digital grocery you know what nobody's buying on digital grocery single single cans of Coke or gum. Scot   [40:51]Yeah yeah. Jason   [40:52]Right um those those impulse items like nobody's figured out what the digital version of those impulse items are right and and you're you're absolutely right when when shopping goes from implicit I have to build a list figure out where I'm going to get that list, proactively go give someone money and then get all those things, to implicit like all the stuff that I need to run my life just magically shows up in my pantry and I don't have to lift a finger or ask anyone. Jason   [41:18]Tons of opportunities I had to upsell and influencer brand selections, and you know Drive impulse purchases are going to go away and some people will see that and say doesn't matter if the future that's where I got to go and they'll embrace it and other people will say no I'm going to hang on to the old model as long as I can right and that that happened in retail too do you know who 1 of the greatest retailers is in the modern era it's Costco they're amazing do you know how much Costco loves e-commerce, they freaking hate e-commerce right like they they say on their earnings call why would I ever encourage someone to go to my website when they'll buy so much more stuff if I get them into my store right and so they're they're 1 of the biggest laggards in digital Commerce because, they're so good at brick and mortar and, like we're likely to see some of those same same kind of companies you know resist moving to AI agents or social commerce or you know what whatever things comes next but these are all the. The disruptions that are playing out right now right and it's it's super fun. Scot   [42:24]Yeah yeah well guess what Jason it's happened again. Jason   [42:29]We've wasted a perfectly good our of our listeners time. Scot   [42:33]Yeah yeah and uh I meant to mention it at the top of the show but we were going to do our predictions but 1 of us which was me did not get a chance to work on them so we're going to make this a 2-part so we're going to this is kind of the the wrap the 24 w and then we're going to do our prediction show next time when Jason gets back from NRF and he's going to have an amazing trip report with with lots of Garff gossip. Jason   [42:59]Yeah and here's the good news if you are going to interfere in New York this week I I leave Saturday I come back the following Thursday and you are a planning on on attending, any event or content at NRF, I will see you there because you talk about Overexposed I think I'm on stage like 8 times at at NRF this year so I owe so many decks that I haven't done yet. But it it's going to be fun I'm looking forward to seeing everyone I think there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff that you know it's going to be a real vibrant exhibit hall with a lot of new, new exhibitors there's an Innovation Pavilion which is always super interesting which is you know where a lot of startups go and and there is going to be a bunch of good content, it all wraps up on Tuesday I'm doing a session on the big stage on Tuesday which is kind of going to be fun it's like a point Counterpoint debate. So a good friend and way smarter colleague of mine Christine Russo and I are going to be on stage and a bunch of our our friends in the e-commerce industry have sent in video questions and Christine and I are going to debate. The the pros and cons of of each of those questions and so I'm desperate for people to go to the show attend that Tuesday session and route for me because I think, there's about 10 Christine fans for every Jason fan. Scot   [44:18]The Jason fans are small But Mighty stuff well uh they'll be allowed loud and proud. Jason   [44:22]My my wife and son are both going to root for Christine I'm just saying um so any any any help I can. Yes anyhow if I could get his appreciated but so yeah so so interest is going to be very fun but busy. And I as Scott alluded to I have already written my predictions for 2024 I do reserve the or 25 got to get better at that, I do reserve the right to update them if I learn anything new at NRF so so maybe the fact that we're doing the prediction show after NRF this year will give me a chance to to be slightly more accurate than I've been in the past which would not be a bad thing. Um but hopefully. Yeah you got some value out of this show and we've teased you with the next show in just a couple of weeks and as always if you if you did enjoy the show we'd love for you to jump on iTunes and give us that 5-star review. Scot   [45:11]Thanks everybody and until next time. Jason   [45:14]Happy Commercing!

EP321 - Amazon Q3 2024 Earnings Recap

In today’s episode of the Jason & Scot Show, Jason and Scot dive into the latest developments shaping retail, tech, and consumer trends heading into the 2024 holiday season. Here’s a breakdown of the topics covered in this jam-packed discussion:

• Amazon Q3 2024 Earnings Release

• Amazon Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

🎉 Holiday Season Sentiment & Retailer Anxiety

• With the holiday season shorter than usual due to a late Thanksgiving, retailers face the challenge of fewer shopping days. Consumer behavior trends indicate a shift toward essential purchases over non-essentials, creating mixed expectations for holiday spending.

• The impact of the election is expected to influence consumer sentiment, media spending, and holiday promotions, with Amazon and Walmart predicted to perform above market averages.

📈 Amazon Q3 Earnings Highlights

• Retail & GMV: Amazon’s retail revenue surged by 7.2%, with U.S. gross merchandise volume (GMV) rising 9.9%—nearly three times the industry average.

• Efficiency Improvements: Amazon’s focus on fulfillment efficiency under CEO Andy Jassy is paying off. The company’s same-day delivery options and regionalized inventory system have led to a 25% improvement in fulfillment cost efficiency.

• Growth in Essentials: With increased demand for everyday essentials, Amazon is capturing market share from traditional pharmacies, offering same-day delivery for prescriptions in select cities.

🏢 Amazon’s New Store Concepts

• Whole Foods & Amazon Grocery: A new Amazon grocery concept opened in Chicago, catering to convenience items like packaged snacks and sugary drinks, which contrasts with Whole Foods’ health-conscious inventory.

💸 Amazon’s Profit Engines: AWS & Advertising

• AWS: With a 19% increase in AWS revenue, Amazon is now operating at a 38% margin. Demand for AI-powered compute continues to push AWS growth, even as it faces GPU supply constraints.

• Advertising: Amazon’s advertising revenue reached $14.3 billion, growing 19% year-over-year. With a nearly 70% estimated gross margin, advertising may soon outpace AWS in profitability.

🛒 Rise of AI-Powered Search & Perplexity’s Native Checkout

• Perplexity’s Surge: Scot shares his switch from Google to Perplexity as his primary search engine, noting the emerging competition from OpenAI’s ChatGPT search. Perplexity now includes shopping links, allowing users to check out directly through Amazon, hinting at a new era of AI-driven shopping.

• Impact on Retailers: Retailers need to rethink SEO strategies as search shifts toward AI-powered “answer engines” that may fundamentally change how products are discovered and purchased online.

📡 What’s Next for Alexa?

• Amazon’s next-gen Alexa, powered by large language models (LLMs), faces delays into 2025. Scalability and usability challenges highlight Amazon’s shifting internal dynamics and potential headcount reductions in its Alexa division.

🔍 Is Google Search Under Threat?

• Perplexity’s and OpenAI’s expansion into search could spell trouble for Google. With monetization still in the early stages for these answer engines, the retail industry is watching closely to see how they’ll shape online shopping behavior.

⭐️ Tune In, Subscribe, and Leave a Review!

If you enjoyed the episode, help us reach more listeners by leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for tuning in!

Episode 321 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, November 4th, 2024.

 http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Transcript

Jason:
[0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scott Show. This is episode 321 being recorded on Monday, November 4th, 2024. I'm your host, Jason Retail Geek Goldberg. And as usual, I'm here with your co-host, Scott Wingo.

Scot:
[0:38] Hey, Jason, and welcome back, Jason and Scott Show listeners. Well, Jason, you've been out there traveling more than I have. What are retailers saying about the holiday? Are they lots of excitement? Are they more worried about the election and they'll worry about the holiday? what's going on out in the retail end.

Jason:
[0:54] Yeah i feel like the the like webster word of the year is going to be anxiety obviously we're a day before election day and everybody's anxious half the country is going to be depressed no matter what happens there but i feel like retailers are also anxious about holiday it's a weird thing we won't we don't have to get into the whole thing but it's the shortest holiday season we get uh thanksgiving super late so it's five days shorter than last year. So there's fewer days to spend on stuff. Consumers have been spending slowly, trading down the lower priced goods, buying more everyday essentials and foregoing non-essential purchases for a while. And then the election is a major distraction. It also is really hard to buy media and break through all the noise. You live in a swing state. So I assume you haven't been able to turn on a tv or look at your phone for several days um yeah.

Scot:
[1:54] Wall-to-wall and three inches of mail every day it's crazy.

Jason:
[1:56] Yeah yeah and so like like even if you're not someone that's super focused on the election like it just like the black friday ads just don't break through all that noise and it's more expensive to put that by the media for those ads and all of those things so you know there's some there's some historical precedent in previous elections that you tend to get a little bounce in spending after the election, but no election's been this polarized before. So I'm less confident that history tells us exactly what's going to happen here. And then there's this huge vibe session thing still going on where, you know, people are generally pessimistic and anxious about the economy and, you know, laser focused on the price of goods and spending less, even though honestly, like most of the macroeconomics are actually like pretty solid. Like there's a lot of economic good news that you would ordinarily expect to translate to consumer confidence and more spending. Now there was a slight uptick in consumer confidence for the first time in a while this month. So there's plenty of tea leaves, however you want to interpret them, but there there's very little certainty. My I look at all this and I say, on average.

Jason:
[3:15] The biggest retailers that are, you know, best at really being highly efficient and low cost. So the Amazons and Walmarts of the world are going to do reasonably well. They'll outperform the market. They'll have lower margins and a bunch of specialty retailers and big box retailers and people that aren't quite as efficient are going to have a really hard time. But, you know, I hope I'm wrong.

Scot:
[3:39] Yeah. Wow. Lots of wasn't there. So we got through the the longshoreman thing. Right. And then isn't there a big budget thing where the government could shut down or are we is that been kicked into.

Jason:
[3:53] It's kicked till post-election. It may still be in, there may be another budget thing in December. But again, like, depending on what changes in the House and Senate, like, that could be like a trivial additional continuing resolution or, you know, someone could go nuclear and try to shut down the government. So I think it is a risk.

Scot:
[4:17] Yeah. Okay. I don't know. We'll see. So lots of mixed messages out there for retailers to try to parse there.

Jason:
[4:25] Yeah, exactly. But we at least know what happened to Amazon in Q3.

Scot:
[4:36] Amazon News. Your margin is their opportunity. Yeah, yeah. So on the eve of Halloween, Amazon announced their results. And coming into that report, Microsoft had reported kind of slowish cloud growth. Turns out they're having a hard time getting enough GPUs and they're really having to stretch to handle all their customers' needs, which you would think would be positive. But Wall Street is kind of because they also see this whole mixed signal thing. All they care about right now is short term signals. So they were kind of down on Microsoft. And then everyone and then Meta also reported and they had a great quarter, but then they said they're going to really ramp their spending on GPUs going into next year. So there's this really big kind of wall of worry around all this money on these GPUs, which are for AP.

Scot:
[5:28] Artificial intelligence or ai and they're mostly nvidia chips so nvidia is off cycle so that i think they report in the 20s like right before thanksgiving so i'm going to be watching that one carefully so you know amazon is largely driven these days by aws so that was kind of feeding into that there's a lot of concern that amazon was either going to miss for a similar kind of thing like microsoft or they were going to announce they're just going to like buy an ungodly number of GPUs. So there was a lot of, I believe the stocks sold off going into the report, which was interesting. Usually Amazon kind of lifts a bit the day of the report. So those ended up being unfounded. They achieved an 11% overall revenue growth and operating income hit 17.4 billion and beat forecast by 18%. And that was the seventh consecutive quarter of operating income above guidance, which is good. So Jassy kind of like reset it low enough and has gotten better now that he's CEO of kind of managing expectations is kind of how I read that. And then the looking forward guidance was very well received. So looking at Q4, they kind of gave a band of seven to 11% growth. When you have 11% and you're going into Q4 and you're kind of showing 11%, that's good because a lot of people worry that they're going to project a slowdown Because when they do this, they've already got a month's worth of data. So in a way, Amazon being Amazon, they're pretty good at reading these tea leaves and kind of figuring out how the holiday is going to shape up.

Scot:
[6:58] A couple of things I thought in the report I just wanted to call out for listeners. We've talked about this a little bit. This kind of really part of Jassy's era has been efficiencies. And he's really dug into the fulfillment part of Amazon. and it's been interesting to see the results. So they had a lot of progress on the cost of fulfillment and they attributed it to three areas. Number one, we've talked about this before, but they had this new regionalized inventory system where they're just getting better at spreading inventory and predicting demand across their fulfillment centers. So if they can predict, hey, it's getting cold in Chicago, we're gonna kind of balance some cold weather stuff there or anything in that regard. Obviously, that saves the money versus having to ship stuff across the country. So they've improved that over the last year, they've improved this system 25%. And it's interesting, I triple checked this because I thought I was hallucinating. I thought I had LLM bring, but they've, you know, many of these, these have resulted in 25% improvement. So this is not a typo.

Scot:
[8:04] The, so when you get the product closer, not only is it lower distance to the customer, therefore lower costs, it's like in a closer quote unquote zone, but it also increases the number of products they can put in a box. So there are a lot of customers like you to get a daily Amazon box. And the more they can put in that JSON box every day, the better off there.

Scot:
[8:25] Then they have really expanded the same day facilities, which results in more of the products being available same day. So they now have over 40 million customers a quarter benefiting from same day delivery. That's up 25% year over year, that number of customers that are having access and getting products delivered same day. And to deliver on this, they've built a bunch of new facilities and a lot of new processes increased. And that ends up really increasing customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and speed to reorder. And then the last one is robotics and automation. There was a lot of talk on the call and then some various notes and in the Q&A from Wall Street around this one fulfillment center in Shreveport. And that's what they call a quote unquote 12th generation system. So I think it's like their showcase where Amazon has put all their best automation ideas into this fulfillment center, and it is showing really promising results, which gets Wall Street excited because if they do it one, they can scale it across their network of north of 200 fulfillment centers. It'll take a long time, but these are the types of improvements that are pretty material. It also saw that fulfillment center and the things they do in there, which is lots of robotics and new ways of automating. It had a 25% reduction in the cost for fulfillment center cost per unit.

Scot:
[9:43] That's pretty material. So let's say it costs $6 to ship one of these things. You can knock a dollar or two of that off. And this is Amazon and you're shipping some billions, tens, if not hundreds of billions of products. That is just basically margin that kind of falls to the bottom line.

Scot:
[10:03] So together, these did help with that earnings beat. And they caused a somewhere in the four to 6%, let's call it 5% underage in what Wall Street was thinking shipping, total shipping spend would be. So, you know, the good news is they're making progress on these things. And it feels like it's still early days for, I think the regional, they're probably kind of at the end of that one. I think same day facilities, they have a lot more they can do there. And I think robotics, they're very early. So it feels like they've got another two or three years of runway for improving the economics of fulfillment.

Jason:
[10:39] Yeah, I think in the press call after they released their earnings, the CFO even said that they believe there's headroom in all three. So they think they're going to continue to get additional efficiencies. And they talk a lot about those three things together, like fundamentally reducing the cost to serve is kind of the language for talking about all this stuff and what the average price is to get a box of goods to Jason's house.

Scot:
[11:09] Yeah. Another theme that you'll kind of hear as Jason, I go through some of the pieces is this has really dramatically increased consumers ordering replenishables. So, so we'll talk about that.

Jason:
[11:20] Yeah, yeah. So obviously the most interesting and important segment of Amazon's business is the retail part of the business. The numbers were all pretty favorable. So they hit $61.4 billion in revenue, which is a 7.2% year over year growth. It's a significant acceleration from the 4.6% growth in Q2. And it's a significant beat over Wall Street's expectations. It's like 3% over. So I think the revenue number was very encouraging. And a number of other retailers had reported and were saying that there were a lot of signals of the consumer slowing down. So this was, I think, surprising and well-received. Of course, listeners of this show will know you probably shouldn't care too much about revenue because revenue is a blend of the cost of goods for 1P sales and the take rate for 3P sales. So when we kind of are thinking of them as a pure retailer, the number we really like to know about is their GMV, their gross merchandise value, which is the value of all the goods they sell, whether it was on the marketplace or first party.

Jason:
[12:31] And they don't tell us what that is, but…

Jason:
[12:34] Citibank has released their estimates. Morgan Stanley's released their estimates. A couple other sites have released them. And in my pull of polls, the Morgan Stanley numbers are kind of right in the middle and most believable. And they have Q3 GMV in the United States going up 9.9%, so 10% essentially. In that same quarter, we know from the US Department of Commerce that core retail went up 3.6%. So Amazon grew almost three times as fast as the industry average, which, you know, Amazon's number one or number two are just retail out there. So that's super impressive. That's slightly lower GMV growth than they had in Q2, which was 11%. The number we'd most like to compare this to would be Walmart's number. Walmart doesn't report Q3 till November 19th, I want to say. So, so it'll be super interesting to look there. I would expect Walmart to come in somewhere between Amazon and the retail industry average. So above the retail industry, but below this 10%. So that in and of itself is super interesting. You know, Walmart probably beats the industry average. Amazon triples the industry average. Then we still have Timu Sheehan and TikTok shops out there growing faster than anyone's ever seen before. And so you've got, you know, Those five horsemen eating up most of the growth in the retail industry.

Jason:
[14:03] One thing that did negatively surprise people a little bit was the mix of, which you alluded to, is the mix of 1P and 3P sales. So ordinarily for a long time, 3P sales are creeping up as a bigger and bigger chunk of the overall mix every year. I think it was 61% last quarter, maybe. And it dipped down this quarter to 60%. So that's the first time 1P sales have gained share over 3P sales at Amazon. And the management tells us the reason for that is increased demand for everyday essentials, right? So that's the cleaning products for your house, the, you know, affordable skincare products, the things you use in your bathroom and shower. Or all of those products are more often sold 1P than 3P on Amazon.

Jason:
[14:57] And, you know, both because of the vibe session and the economic situation that I talked about earlier, and because Amazon's better at same-day delivery, they're winning more of these everyday essential trips. And that is shifting their mix slightly to 1P. In theory, it should also be eroding their margins because these items are lower margins. But Amazon did so well on the efficiencies and the cost to serve that you covered that those efficiencies more than made up for the lost margin from the slightly less profitable mix of products that they're selling with everyday essentials. So that's a super interesting trend. When you hear management talk about it, they're like, we love these everyday essentials, even if they are slightly lower margin because those customers are way more sticky and we get way more wallet share in the long run and the the more those orders we get the more volume we have to drive our.

Jason:
[15:59] Cost to serve down and the lower our cost of serve, the more we can profitably fulfill all of this everyday essentials demand. And so this is a sort of a new flywheel for Amazon, if you will. But like one tangible proof point on this is they said something like when a customer sees a one-day delivery promise or same-day delivery promise, conversion rate is 20% better than when it's a two-day delivery promise. So kind of, you know, giving evidence to the fact that like consumers have an insatiable appetite for faster and faster delivery and the faster and cheaper they can deliver, the more they can sell.

Scot:
[16:37] So- Where do you think they're taking that share from you? That's like Target and Walmart or like, you know, do you see any evidence of it?

Jason:
[16:44] Target is totally possible based on the last couple of earnings calls, some grocery, the super vulnerable place that we'll talk about a little bit later is the traditional pharmacy. So Walgreens, Rite Aid, CVS, and then all the independent pharmacists. They're for sure taking share from those guys. And they talked about that in the earnings, which in pretty funny language. So I'll get to that in just a second. But it doesn't feel like it's coming completely at the expense of Walmart, because again, both Amazon and Walmart are growing faster than the industry average, but it's pretty much everyone else that sells everyday essentials that's dipping below. Side note, we're now seeing these Chinese direct-to-consumer companies start to lean into everyday essentials. So Timu has a ton of everyday essential goods on there. So the world has noticed that that's what consumers have an appetite for spending on right now.

Jason:
[17:40] Interest rates are still a little high. People aren't moving houses. So people are not buying as much home improvement goods as they normally do. They're not buying as much, except for you and I are not buying as much consumer electronics as they normally do.

Jason:
[17:52] And they're spending more on the center store grocery assortment. And so that's, you know, Amazon through great insight or luck or whatever combination you want to attribute it to, that shift to regionalization of their fulfillment center and this like laser focus on cost to serve has really positioned them to take advantage of this trend, where arguably four years ago, they wouldn't have been well positioned for this trend. They would have said this, that's all stuff that craps out that we can't realize a profit on and that we're discouraging sales on. Now they're encouraging sales on all this stuff. So that's interesting. And then the slightly, if there's a negative sentiment in the industry regarding all of this, it's, hey, 3P sales ticked down slightly, but the revenue that Amazon is earning from 3P sales went way up because Amazon has found a lot more fees to charge sellers than ever before. And so, you'll hear a lot of noise from the 3P seller community that they're, The overall, not the raw take rate, but the overall cost to sell on Amazon when all these fees and marketing services are factored in has never been higher and makes it harder than ever for three-piece sellers to truly be profitable.

Scot:
[19:14] Yeah.

Jason:
[19:14] So that's the story on online sales. I mentioned pharmacy another trend happening in our industry is you know the way pharmacies normally work is the traffic to a pharmacy is to get pick up your prescription and then while you're there you go oh I need paper towels and you buy paper towels by design they're the worst place to buy paper towels they don't have a great assortment and they they don't have a good price but you're already there to pick up your Lipitor prescription so you know you just want to save yourself a trip and you pick and you take them home from there. So the front of house of a pharmacy only works because of the back of house. And the back of house is under huge stress. There's like three companies called pharmacy benefit providers, and they get to dictate the price that a pharmacist gets reimbursed for every prescription they fill. And these pharmacy benefit providers are reimbursing the pharmacy less than the pharmacy is able to collect from the consumer. So on a lot of popular prescriptions, pharmacies are now at negative margins and all the chronic prescriptions, if you take something every day or every week, instead of getting a 30 day supply from Walgreens, that pharmacy benefit provider is making you get a 90 day prescription from mail order.

Jason:
[20:35] So people are going to the pharmacy to pick up prescriptions less, which puts more stress on the front of the store. And then, of course, their lower overall profit, that 10% loss of traffic has a huge impact on their profits. And then they start freaking out about shrink and they lock up all the products and that chases even more customers out of store. And the pharmacies are kind of in a negative flywheel from all this. And Andy Jassy summed it up perfectly in one sentence on the earnings call. He said, brick and mortar pharmacies often require customers to make trips to forlorn physical venues with much of the selection behind locked shelves, wait in line for meds, and only to find out about pricing at the point of purchase. The largest mail order pharmacies offer delivery in five to 10 days. We think customers deserve better, which is a clear shot across the bow at the pharmacy industry. Amazon has doubled the number of cities that they do same-day pharmacy delivery to. But I actually think the big story here is not Amazon's prescription business. It's Amazon getting all this everyday essential traffic that used to go to the pharmacy in conjunction with the prescription business.

Jason:
[21:52] That has other healthcare implications in the long run. a lot of people in America go to a pharmacist to get a vaccine. And if all these pharmacies close, you know, we got to figure out how we're going to get those vaccines and things like that. They, of course, do break out their physical stores. Physical stores for Amazon is almost exclusively Whole Foods at this point, and maybe a few Amazon Go stores left. And physical stores grew like 5% year over year, which again, on itself, that's better than the industry average. that's better than most other big grocery stores are growing. And that was also a beat versus the analysts that thought they were gonna be at 5.16 billion.

Jason:
[22:32] Same story there. The mix is shifting to more essentials. And what's fascinating and interesting and controversial here is Whole Foods is a unique grocery concept. They have all of these food quality guidelines that dictate what products they will carry and what products they won't carry. And so they won't carry products that have artificial colors in them. They won't carry products that are sweetened with corn syrup, for example. And so the assortment in a Whole Foods is very different than the assortment in a Kroger or an Albertsons. And a lot of the Everyday Essentials volume is traditionally those products that Whole Foods chooses not to sell. So the fact that they're doing better at Everyday Essentials is interesting. But what's super interesting is in Chicago, where I live, Amazon opened yet another new grocery concept this month.

Scot:
[23:25] Which is now like the fifth or sixth one.

Jason:
[23:27] Yeah. So, yeah. So now called Amazon grocery. So they have, of course, Whole Foods, they have Amazon Go, they have Amazon Fresh. A few of these, they have multiple iterations of Amazon Fresh used to mean an online grocery store, and now it means a physical grocery store. And now they have this new concept, Amazon grocery. And the one and only Amazon grocery store is downstairs from a Whole Food in downtown Chicago, and it carries all the unhealthy stuff that Whole Foods isn't allowed to sell.

Scot:
[23:59] So you go down for your Rice Krispie Treats.

Jason:
[24:01] So it's literally, they carry like 3,500 SKUs and it's mostly Kraft and Hostess and Coke and Pepsi, right? And so it seems superficially, it seems very explicitly like go upstairs and get your organic produce and feel good about your purchases there, and then stop on your way out and get your guilty pleasures.

Jason:
[24:25] From Amazon Grocery on the way out, right? And so, It's unclear. Did Amazon already own this real estate and it's a convenient place for them to test it? And Amazon believes that the world needs another, you know, small format grocery store with 3,500 SKUs. That strains credulity a little bit. Or is this an overt, you know, first step at eroding the Whole Foods quality promise that was, you know, part of the core mission when John Mackey started the company and the Amazon said they would respect when they took it over? Like don't know it's super interesting i would say you know i got back from grocery shop three weeks ago amazon was on stage at grocery shop and they talked about like you know how much they're leaning into grocery and they and how synergistic all these grocery offerings are and how they're unifying them all and then the week later the ceo of grocery resigned at amazon and they and this they revealed this new concept and it seems totally muddled to me so i'm not saying Amazon can't win at grocery, but it does not seem that there's a crystal clear hypothesis from Amazon as to what a winning grocery concept looks like at this point.

Scot:
[25:39] Have you been in it?

Jason:
[25:40] I have, I have. And in fact, I'll put a link in the show notes, but I uploaded a little video tour on LinkedIn, so you can, you can go check it out. It's, I would call it most similar to an Amazon Go store without the tech. So there's no just walk out. There is Amazon.

Scot:
[25:55] It's like a convenience store kind of stuff.

Jason:
[25:56] Yeah. It feels more like a 7-Eleven. There's a cafe, a small espresso bar in there. There's an Icy machine, so you can get your non-Swerpy branded Icy. And yeah, all the Twinkies and Apple Jacks you want.

Scot:
[26:12] Nice. You have to hit that first before you go out to Whole Foods because by then you'll spend your whole paycheck. You don't have any money left for Rice Krispies.

Jason:
[26:20] I would feel personal shame dragging that stuff around in my cart on my Whole Foods shop. So I feel like it's more likely to be on the way out to avoid the shame. But in fact, I took all these funny pictures because there's all these pictures about the ethical principles at Whole Foods. And it's like giant wall-size signs that say, eat good food. And then you go downstairs and it's like, buy more, get more Twinkies.

Scot:
[26:49] Maybe it's a higher conversion rate for the people that are cheaters, Whole Foods cheaters.

Jason:
[26:55] Yeah. Yeah. Again, there's probably a small cohort of people that Whole Foods is their own grocery store, but I feel like there's a lot more that are like my household where Whole Foods is definitely in our mix and there's a lot of products we only get from Whole Foods. But I have a nine-year-old son and like a lot of his preferences do not exist in the Whole Foods environment.

Scot:
[27:13] He's not eating tofu potato chips.

Jason:
[27:15] No, no. He wants the good Pringles.

Scot:
[27:20] Cool on the aws side revenue rose 19 for 227.5 billion which kind of met expectations but they were just a little bit higher so it was like right in line so that wall street was thinking 20 to 21 but they came in at 19 so they didn't really get much heat over that because they did talk about the strong demand they've they've started talking about a backlog or kind of a bookings backlog so So that was interesting. I saw a wall sheet analyst kind of do this whole thing around it and felt like there's a lot of positivity in the number that they gave there.

Scot:
[27:55] And yeah, so the margin there was very nice. So 38% operating margin. That's not even a gross margin. That's a net margin. And they saw their own benefits from cost efficiencies. They're getting more life out of their servers. Imagine what's going on here is those workloads that are not GPU bound. They're probably flat right now because everyone's obsessed with moving everything over to GPUs. So they're probably having to spend a lot less on traditional CPU type things and getting more life out of the machines than maybe they initially had thought they would. Let's see the they were also supply constrained they did call out they have their own chip that can do some inference and they're they're deploying those as quick as they can and they're also supply constrained on the nvidia chipsets they did say they're gonna spend you know they prepared wall street to buckle up for more capex that were on this one time in a lifetime demand curve so that was interesting and but no one really freaked out about it so that was good, what'd you see on the advertising business?

Jason:
[28:58] Yeah. Well, I would just add that, that 38% margin that was up from 30% the quarter before. So that, that was a.

Scot:
[29:05] Yeah, that's material. Yeah.

Jason:
[29:06] Uh, very, very meaningful. And, and I think nobody freaked out over the CapEx because they're like, Hey, we, we thought like regular AWS was like a pretty good demand curve. And, and the AI AWS demand curve is ahead of where AWS was at this point. And so I think they think there's a lot of headroom. It was interesting. They used to talk a lot about how we really only have scratched the surface on cloud compute that like, you know, some ridiculously low percentage, like only like 5% of all the workloads are in the cloud at all. So, you know, traditional AWS has all this headroom. And I assume they still believe that's true, but they don't bother even talking about it because there's so much demand for all this AI compute at the moment. So advertising, I always love talking about right after AWS, because I feel like there's this common notion that AWS drives Amazon. And you said it earlier, like all the analysts think that Amazon's at AWS with some annoying side projects. So the advertising business also had a good run. Exact same growth rate, 19%. The difference is 19% is an acceleration of their advertising business, where it's a site deceleration of their historic AWS rate.

Jason:
[30:26] So that 19% growth gets them $14.3 billion this quarter. So if you look at their last four quarters, they're now at a $58.7 billion run rate, or not even run rate, trailing 12 months. So nearly $60 billion in ads. To put that in perspective, the trailing 12 months at AWS is like $100 billion, $102 billion. So AWS is a bigger business in terms of revenue, no question. But the ads business is growing fast. They're adding a lot of advertising products, like almost all this advertising is still just in support of search. It's mostly sponsored search ads on the website. But of course, Amazon is winning more eyeballs with their media, right? And their NFL stuff is going really well. Their original programming is going really well. And they're increasingly putting ads in all that content. So like this really is like $60 billion of search ads. And there's still a lot more headroom in, you know, monetizing all of this other media that Amazon is increasingly succeeding in. And so that's interesting. Unlike AWS, which is highly CapEx intensive and, you know, constrained commodity because of these silicone chips, the ads are very low CapEx, right? And so they don't tell us what the gross margin is for the ads, but let's call it 70% gross margin. There's no cost of goods, right?

Scot:
[31:55] Yeah.

Jason:
[31:55] Let's call it 99%.

Scot:
[31:57] Okay.

Jason:
[31:58] Very popular. Yeah. They pay a lot of sales, guys, right? Like that's the one, that's, that's the one cost. And I think those are the only sale guys that don't get fired if they don't go to the office, by the way. But so 60 billion, 58 billion in revenue at 70% gross margin is 41 billion in earned income, operating income that they've made over the last 12 months for the advertising business. If we go back and apply the 38% gross margin, which is the highest gross margin they've ever achieved and not what they actually achieved over the last 12 months and apply that 38% growth margin to the last 12 months of revenue on AWS, it earned $39 billion worth of operating income. So like in the most conservative version of this, advertising is contributing more dollars of profit to Amazon than AWS's and growing faster.

Scot:
[32:48] Yeah. I 100% believe that because the cost structure for AWS is pretty, pretty big.

Jason:
[32:53] Yeah. Yeah.

Scot:
[32:54] And it's going to get worse, which is amazing that they popped up to 38.

Jason:
[32:59] Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a testament. They do a lot of stuff really well. So that is the advertising story. Scott, I know the future of Alexa is very near and dear to your heart.

Scot:
[33:12] It is. And I've had some interactions with Amazon in like the last year. I won't go into specifics. And I came away thinking, man, the company seems like different. Like they're just like not as engaged and the people you meet are very… Company kind of feeling, which is way different than, you know, when I was at Channelvisor dealing with Amazon, you would meet a VP and he or she would know exactly how everything at the company worked. And it was like freakishly, you know, freakishly informed about everything. So, you know, case in point, they're coming out. They've been working on this for a long time. At first, it was going to be kind of, you know, late summer, fall, and then they moved it to kind of late to catch holiday. And now they just announced that they're delaying till 2025, that they're not going to have any kind of LM type technology on Alexa. They started with having, saying they're going to do their own in-house kind of a model. Then they moved to Anthropic. But what they're doing is they're finding some problems with it that in the beta testing, I read an article that said it likes to show off. So instead of just answering a question, it will give you all this extra expository. It just kind of like basically has the Jason version of the LLM.

Jason:
[34:26] All right. You were thinking it.

Scot:
[34:31] Alexa, what time is it? Fascinating you asked. The nuclear standard for time began and then it like, it can't understand basic things. So it's gotten, it's better at answering questions Alexa currently can't ask, like, you know, certain facts and stuff but it it's not good at turning your lights on and off and those types of things so they're having a really hard time with it and they even got someone they weren't on the record but they i think this is in what's the one that's in seattle starts with a v i want to say vibe that's not it anyway they they got some amazon folks to say it's because because we have a management layer that's bloated and no one can make any decisions above us and they're constantly jerking around what they want the product to be.

Jason:
[35:12] It's not a two pizza team.

Scot:
[35:14] No, no. The two pizza team thing is not happening on the Alexa product. So that's pretty interesting that they seem. And then I think Jassy just basically nuked the leader and put a new leader in there. And they're doing all this return to office stuff, I think, as a way of kind of thinning out the employee base. I think next year, we're going to see them get pretty serious about reducing headcount in a lot of groups. So it's going to be a lot of companies have gone through that. And I don't think Amazon's done as much as they probably could based on how slow they're moving on some things.

Jason:
[35:48] Yeah, yeah. It is going to be interesting. I'm a little disappointed that the devices haven't gotten better faster. I think you and I both expected, like with all the amazing things that are happening in the outside ecosystem of LLMs that like, we can't figure out a way to make these devices better. But, you know, I think we talked about it in the last earnings call that there's this kind of more advanced concept of what AI can do called agent-based AI or agentic AI.

Jason:
[36:22] And there was a little bit of a hint in the earnings call when Andy was talking about this ecosystem. And he said, you know, all these LLMs out there are amazing. They're super good at processing information and summarizing information. But what we haven't seen yet and we think is going to be a huge part of the AI capability set is systems that can take action on that information. So actually do stuff for you, not just tell you stuff. And he optimistically said, and we think we're going to be pretty good at that. And so that, you know, my interpretation there is, hey, we at Amazon are going to lean way into agentic AI. They kind of have to because they've already been beaten in the first generation of LLM. So, you know, it kind of makes sense at this point to try to leapfrog. And of course, the guy that invented the concept of agentic AI, the super credible AI scientist, Andrew Ng, is on the board of Amazon now. So like none of this is particularly surprising.

Scot:
[37:29] Yeah. Yeah. So you, you wanted to bring up something that a lot of clients are talking to you about, which, which is interesting.

Jason:
[37:36] A lot of my clients have noticed this, this intersection of three very scary events that happened in the world of retail last week. So event number one is that Scott Wingo deleted the Google icon from his dock in his iPhone and replaced it with a perplexity icon.

Scot:
[37:57] True.

Jason:
[37:58] So, Scott is all in on perplexity as his primary search engine. Like, I'm less relevant, but I totally agree. Like, it's amazing. It's my daily driver for search.

Jason:
[38:11] And I think a lot of other early adopters have all now found it to be far, far more useful than traditional Google search. So shortly after Scott announced to the world that perplexity had beaten Google, OpenAI launched their first true kind of search competitor called ChatGBT Search. For me, the jury is still out on if ChatGBT Search is better or even at parity with perplexity. It's way better than any other OpenAI at doing search type things. I still think at the moment I prefer perplexity, but if you do 10 searches, you're going to prefer the answer for both of them for different things. And so this was the second big announcement was OpenAI getting directly into the search. And then in response to that, perplexity unveiled a new feature. They unveiled a public feature, which is shopping links in the search. So now, you know, you do a perplexity search for best Thunderbolt monitor to add to my new MacBook M4, and it comes back and gives you a bunch of answers. And at the bottom of that page, it gives you links to go to product detail pages of various retailers that are selling those monitors.

Jason:
[39:29] So that's interesting. But then in beta, they've added the ability to buy the product right in the perplexity interface without ever leaving. So what we would call native checkout. And I'm not in the beta, so I haven't gotten to do it hands-on yet. But I've been watching a lot of videos from people that are in the beta. And not all, but a disproportionate amount of those links are to buy now from Amazon. So they very clearly have some kind of partnership with Amazon. And, you know, if the world were to move to these kind of AI searches instead of Google, the two major things would happen. It would totally break SEO and keyword research and all the things that are a core part of marketing today. And number two, you know, it would be super important to win that buy box and that pull position in these new search engines, this new shopping surface that didn't exist for most of the world a month ago. So this is fascinating. I feel like this is just the first evolution of a battle we're going to see play out, at least for the next year.

Jason:
[40:37] Couple of years, but if you're a retailer and you weren't thinking about, you know, what happens when all this, this search traffic moves off of Google and onto these new, new surfaces, you know, it's, it's, it's time to start putting some contingency plans in place and at least think about how you're going to participate. And if you're a product or a content provider, you need to start thinking about how, you know, what your monetization strategy is and how you're going to optimize, you know, so your products show up at, you know, for their fair share of voice or better and all those sorts of things so it's.

Scot:
[41:08] Yeah it's called the aeo so the ceo of perplexity he's a fun interview i've watched a lot of his interviews now and he calls it an answer engine instead of searching in which is really appropriate that's why i like it because it just like gives you an answer and then so instead today google gives you like some things you have to figure out you go to 10 sites you open up 10 tabs three of them are garbage seven are okay then you kind of get to an answer after a lot of work this gives you the answer and then says well here's the supporting stuff if you want to dig in further so yeah so then to optimize it he calls it aeo and they're actually seeing people do this and they're they're really tweaking you know the sites to make sure that it's more llm friendly and and whatnot which is fascinating i wonder how the the pay on perplexity works because where are your payment credentials being stored is something i'd really want to understand so that's why i'm desperate to get.

Jason:
[42:01] In the beta because those are all.

Scot:
[42:02] That Like.

Jason:
[42:03] Normally when companies that aren't in commerce space first launch a native search, There's a bunch of deficiencies.

Scot:
[42:12] Yeah.

Jason:
[42:13] When will I get it? And what are the return policies? And how do I bundle multiple products? And what about, can I use my digital wallet? And all these things. There are now people that have figured it out. TikTok Shops has a pretty decent experience for native checkout. And so, yeah, I'm super interested to dive in all that with perplexity. I have not.

Scot:
[42:35] That's apples and oranges. They're like using it up at their lair, though. like you're actually selling on TikTok. Like it's the, it's like a marketplace. But this one, they're like sending the order down into Amazon or wherever. Like that's, they've got to be doing that. You know, how, is it Anthropic? Yeah, Claude can now take over your screen. I wonder if they're doing that. Like they're storing your credentials and then insert them, like crawling it in.

Jason:
[42:55] I doubt it. Could be, I kind of doubt it.

Scot:
[42:58] Super not PCI compliant.

Jason:
[42:59] No, and to be honest, the Anthropic demo is cool because it can do it at all. Like it doesn't do it well enough to solve a real world problem yet. And so I'm kind of assuming all the examples of checkouts I've seen are retailers that I know syndicate APIs, right? And so I actually think this isn't using TikTok Shops native checkout, but TikTok has a native checkout in TikTok ads where they already have a Amazon API integration. And it seems most likely that that's what they're leveraging is that they're, they've gone out and said, what retailers are, you know, enabling checkout in, in native ad formats? And we'll, we'll, you know, position ourselves as another ad platform for those, those checkout engines. Yeah, I'm with you. It's to me, the analogy I like to use is perplexity gives you a meal, whereas Google gives you a recipe.

Scot:
[44:00] Yep. True.

Jason:
[44:01] And I feel like, you know, the world has expanded from 10,000 SKUs to 800 million SKUs, like the recipes are now too complicated.

Scot:
[44:11] Yeah. Cool. I agree. It is. And there's even worse than that. There's bad ingredients, right? Like the, there's so much spam inside of Google now that it's just like really hard to find anything good a lot of times.

Jason:
[44:22] Yeah. I will admit like you've just hit my, my greatest fear about all of this. I feel like the perplexity search experience is so awesome right now, but they're not monetizing it. I mean, I, I pay 20 bucks a month, but you really don't need to. And I think back to every other cool technology that you and I have adopted, and they all started before monetization and they were all cool. And over time, the owner of that technology has turned up the dial more and more on monetization to the point where it really arose the experience, right? So, search, social, all these things were great pre-monetization. And, you know, now, you know, there's no organic content on social. There's no organic product listings that you're going to see on the first page of Amazon. Like, they've all been overwhelmed by the monetization. And so my fear is, as great as perplexity is right now, that when they really land on their, you know, that it's kind of the first hit of crack for free. And that when they eventually land on their monetization model, it'll be inferior and more noisy, as has happened in the past.

Scot:
[45:33] Yeah, we'll see.

Jason:
[45:34] Yeah. And one last side note on that. I'll tell you who wins here is Jeff Bezos because he has a lot of Amazon stock. He has perplexity stock and Amazon has a big investment in Anthropic. So it kind of feels like, you know, whoever wins here, Jeff Bezos is going to do okay.

Scot:
[45:53] Jeff would not cry to see Google taken down. A lot of people in tech would not be upset to keep Google taken down a peg.

Jason:
[46:00] I know you know this. Like many of our listeners may not know that Jeff made billions of dollars on his initial investment in Google. He was one of the angel investors in Google.

Scot:
[46:11] Yeah, he famously identified him as a threat early on and wouldn't let anyone at Amazon talk to them or share any kind of – they never installed the Pixel or anything. They wouldn't tell them what – they wouldn't buy ads on there for a long time.

Jason:
[46:25] Yeah, now they're the largest advertiser, $18 billion.

Scot:
[46:28] Yeah.

Jason:
[46:29] It's a crazy world, Scott. But that seems like a great recap for this week. Hopefully you found value in it. And if you did so, there is still room for more reviews on our iTunes page. So Apple has called us. They've said, hey, you're an enormously popular podcast. You have so many great reviews that we're expanding the capacity so that more listeners can jump on iTunes and leave us a five-star review.

Scot:
[46:55] Thanks for joining us, everyone. Hope you enjoyed the show.

Jason:
[46:58] And until next time, happy commercing.

EP312 - Amazon Q3 2023 Earnings

Amazon reported another strong quarter across the board for Q3, soundly exceeding analyst profit expectations and retail industry averages. In this episode we break down the AWS AI, Ads, and retail performance.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Transcript

Jason:
[0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 312 being recorded on Monday October 30th right before Halloween I'm Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo.

Scot:
[0:38] Hey Jason and welcome back to Jason and Scot show listeners Jason it's a Halloween Eve hallow Eve but also we just watch the Mac live presentation from Apple or live presented recorded earlier presentation from Apple about new Macs, so I don't know I think I'm going to ask you about Max first are you going to get a new Mac are you sitting out this upgrade cycle.

Jason:
[1:07] I am on the fence guy of course I want one I have scheduled a meeting with my family CFO to see if I can, I can justify it so so we'll see I did not order one tonight I'm actually.
Still super happy with my M1 MacBook Pro so so I know M3 is at least three times better so so of course I want one but we'll see when I pull the trigger what about you is yours already on the way.

Scot:
[1:38] I have been a while without an upgrade and running a little long on the tooth on this guy so yes I have a new machine coming they were actually pretty generous on the trade-ins you should just do an experiment before you talk to the CFO plug-in that trade in and see if it.

Jason:
[1:56] That could be the.

Scot:
[1:58] You a better presentation also if you have an Apple credit card which I'm sure you do they have a really compelling offer there.

Jason:
[2:07] All right lots of lots of good good things to consider my nine-year-old has made it clear that we're not allowed to trade anything in it.

Scot:
[2:17] It's got dibs on.

Jason:
[2:20] He's very he's very aware of the technology trickle down.

Scot:
[2:24] Oh man well you can somewhere down the stream there's going to be one that you could trade in but I don't think it may have as much impact as your courage.

Jason:
[2:32] I I don't know if he's ever going to own a computer device with a keyboard will see but yeah he's actually not that interested in my laptop.

Scot:
[2:40] Speaking of baby geek or I guess now he's I don't know kindergarten geek.

Jason:
[2:46] Third grade geek.

Scot:
[2:47] Third grade geek what's he thinking about Halloween I hear he's kind of outgrown Star Wars which makes me casa.

Jason:
[2:56] He still like Star Wars but he yeah he is not doing a Star Wars character last year he did a Pokemon character he did Pikachu and this year he's stepped up to Charizard so that.

Scot:
[3:09] Very rare.

Jason:
[3:11] Enables well I think it depends on which Charizard butt.
That steps up the whole opportunity to build pyrotechnics into the costume.

Scot:
[3:21] All right watch out for some evil Pokemon people that try to capture.

Jason:
[3:26] Yeah I think the big debate in our house which isn't hasn't fully happened yet is who's trick-or-treating with Stephen and who's staying behind to try to scare the bejesus out of neighborhood kids.

Scot:
[3:36] I'm thinking you and a gorilla suit or you could be in the last year's Pokemon suit or Pikachu suit that could be a fun combo.

Jason:
[3:45] Yeah last year I actually had knee surgery only a few days before Halloween so I won by default because I couldn't really walk but this year I feel like I have no good excuse.

Scot:
[3:56] Right as the title shows the purpose of this as we have some Amazon news to report on.

Jason:
[4:02] Amazon news your margin is there opportunity.

Scot:
[4:15] Well Jason it was a kind of interesting setup coming into Earth earning season this quarter the whole world was focused not on e-commerce not on marketplaces not on omni-channel not on payments some of our favorite topics but also not on ads one of your favorite topics but everyone is now obsessed with AI thanks to the success of chat Juju GPT so coming into the quarter Amazon was kind of on the backside of a lot of the other big companies so we had Microsoft come out and they did really well with AI the their partnership with open a.i. / chat gbt is bringing tons of workloads to azure.
How much is their cloud computing platform and then Google really underwhelmed everyone with what they're doing there you know they're they're kind of tiptoeing it's very clear that they don't want to kill the Golden Goose that is Google search by putting too much AI to that so allow their experiments are in Bard which is kind of way off to the side I've tried barred three times I can never get it to have the features that they say it should because my corporate Google account you know either won't have access or it says that feature is not here yet.
Um and I think people are really starting to worry about Google on this one.
So then that teed it up where all eyes were on AWS to see how are they doing and I think we've covered this but.

[5:44] The Amazons approach to this is to be kind of agnostic for lack of a better word so they're kind of like hey if you want to use.
Any of these different models we're going to basically let you run them on AWS compute and we're going to have all kinds of different graphic Processing Unit or GPU tears available from you know their own chip set to older Nvidia chip sets to the new ones and kind of be y 0, LM bring your own large language model.

[6:18] And then oh yeah also Facebook did pretty well and you know they're definitely through the worst of the Privacy changes that Apple put out and they have an approach to AI that is an open source one so they're basically saying hey we're going to integrate this in our products and what we build we're going to put out there kind of almost scorched Earth in a way saying why don't we just open source this thing and maybe that will slow down our competitors who are going to use this to to generate their own revenue and because they don't have a cloud piece they don't and they're pure advertising it doesn't really, Concord hurt them to do this so they're not making Cloud Revenue off of it but it's become a popular one and it's called llama in case anyone is it from there then, okay so just not to leave everyone in suspense because we usually talk about AWS kind of later in the Amazon update we're going to cover it first so the ended up having a really good ADB is showing so I would say people got kind of panicky and we're expecting it to be down and it kind of came in line.

[7:22] But what that people excited was part of the talk track on the conference call Co jassy said that they're winning some big AI workloads they talked about some big deals had close towards the end of the quarter that we're pretty significant and what's happening is as you know what's what a i chat gbt is trained on the broader internet and anything that they can throw into there.

[7:49] And that's interesting but what's happening is corporations and.
Both big corporations for internal use but then also other corporations they're wanting to train a large language model on their data and they also don't want that data to kind of leak into the broader ecosystem so that's that's really benefiting Amazon because it turns out a lot of the data that companies want to train these lme's are are already in AWS so instead of paying all this money to pull the data out of AWS and then synchronize it back into your LM as as Amazon anticipated with this kind of open bring by0 LM model.
People are bringing the LMS to them and using the data because it's already in AWS and it's easier for the llm to just kind of go right there and grab it versus moving the data around.

[8:44] That may not make a lot of sense so let me give you kind of a random example let's say you're a big added see like I'll pick up, this one called publicist they're out of France and most people haven't heard of them and let's say that that French Ad Agency wanted to save a bunch of money they could take like.
Let's say 3:00 of content from like a podcast transcript or something like that.
And they could use that content let's say someone of their company like a detailed digital retail payment strategy vice president general manager type person with a big crazy title like that.
They could put that data out there and run an llm on day ws and train that data on it.
The llm on that data and then they could have for example just picking something random they could have a retailgeek bye.
That was basically as good as the human probably ninety percent so good enough but you know this thing could run 24/7 you could actually you could have as many of them you could clone it on two different processors after you get through the training mode and you were in D quote-unquote inference mode and it also doesn't take breaks it doesn't need, Starbucks vanilla lattes constantly it doesn't have expense reports it just.
Does its job and doesn't complain and doesn't ask for raises so that's that's a that's a use case that something like that would work did that make.

Jason:
[10:08] Specific hypothetical there Scott.

Scot:
[10:11] Is randomly chosen just kind of picked it out of the are there.

Jason:
[10:14] It almost sounds like the more words in your title the more vulnerable you would be to AI disruption.

Scot:
[10:20] I thought about that but it is does make sense because that's essentially more tokens for the AI to learn just like right there in your title you're basically asking for it if you're a robot Overlord you're kind of picking on who to go for a first I would look for large titles person.
I don't know I don't know how their training these things.

Jason:
[10:37] There I know you're the investment guy in our podcast but there's this investment theory that you don't you don't, be the little guy chasing the big Trend that way you want to do is identify the secondary Trend and so in this scenario as soon as it seems like a i is ready to replace the the blowhard Talking Heads everyone should short Starbucks seems like the.

Scot:
[10:59] Mmm that's a good point yeah I hadn't thought about that.

Jason:
[11:02] Yeah because when I lose my job and can't afford those lattes I feel like something I would like I'll take some solace in knowing that you made some money on that.

Scot:
[11:14] Yeah they'll be like on their conference call we're still working on the data but we've isolated it to this to block window in Chicago and we're pretty sure we have an idea what's going on.

Jason:
[11:26] I feel like my Starbucks footprint is a lot bigger than Chicago.

Scot:
[11:29] Well you know the the core of your Bullseye answers is going around.
Okay but in all seriousness this is a really interesting blurb from the call where they talked about their strategy gaining traction and they said there's multiple businesses are using their gen AI That's short for gender of a i.
Apps on AWS including Adidas people in our European list listeners I think they call it a deed us but I'm here in America we call, here in South the southeast caught Adidas booking.com and United Airlines.
And while Jenny eyes Revenue contribution remains small management suggested Revenue quote compares favorably.
To some of the other leading providers and this is this is interesting because Amazon's always mum's on revealing anything until the SEC forces them to break out stuff like, for the longest time we didn't know at AWS was then we didn't know what ads were and then they became material enough they had to break them out so so Amazon under Bezos would never have said those words I've like even hinting about what's going on.

[12:35] But kind of is interesting because there's a new sheriff in town and also it shows you how important it is that they let everyone know that they are not falling behind and that their room new quote-unquote compares favorably with other other Cloud providers obviously they're talking about Azure once Wall Street analyst I did it is back of the napkin and he kind of said all right I think that they're telling us this is always funny because it's like six degrees of.
You know separation so who knows but they basically inferred what they were trying to say reading the tea leaves was that it's about a 400 million-dollar business and already two percentage points of AWS Revenue.
Which was basically zero six months ago so that's that that is kind of an interesting thing that came out of nowhere and is already a 400 million quarterly business so that means it's a 1.6 billion annualized run rate business.

[13:29] If they're reading the tea leaves right on that so that was the AI part so I thought I'd be important for us to get that out because that was kind of like the new cycle really centered around that, and it is interesting you know you and I are watching this very closely there are e-commerce ramifications you know there's all kinds of, The Innovation here is so rapid it's hard to keep up with there's all kinds of a eyes for creating product detail pages and you know all kinds of, e-commerce oriented support Bots and it's just like amazing a lot of AI applications for optimizing warehouses it's just like overwhelming how much is out there we're definitely in the, tippy top of the hype curve and you know a lot of businesses are still sorting through all this but that was the that was the.

[14:16] Dean on e-commerce retail side of things and non ads with that behind us the other big win for the quarter I thought you'd want to kind of fill us in on was the advertising part what did you see there.

Jason:
[14:30] Yeah yeah I want to jump into ads I do want to just say quickly it's interesting on the AWS because they posted solid numbers they posted 12 percent growth for AWS and they announced that they won the whole dialogue was about all these AI workloads that you just covered but they haven't recognized much of the revenue from all of these new AI workload wins yet so the this 12% growth feels like.
Kind of a win based on the Legacy Cloud business even before you start to factor in all this new traction they're getting, I'm AI workload so so that does seem interesting but I just want to reiterate what you started out by saying which is, the the bed at Amazon is that you're going to want to bring the llm to your data and not that you're going to want to bring your data to the llm and that, intuitively.

[15:24] Makes a lot of sense so it seems like investors were always pretty happy with their the AI Cloud case that they made.
Um so that being said.
As far as I'm concerned an even bigger win for them was the ad business so so they generated 12 billion dollars in ad revenue for the quarter that's up 26 percent versus Q3 of last year.
Year-to-date that means they're had businesses up 23% from the year before so you know we're comparing that to like the 11 or 12 percent growth they get on AWS.
Um

[16:02] The ad business grew 21 percent last year so it's grown 23 percent this year that impugns depending on how you factor in seasonality like a 46 to 50 billion dollar run rate for the ad business right now, so if you take a conservative estimate for the the the, margin rate on that business that's generating 2728 billion dollars worth of ibadah for Amazon which is a huge.
Huge business and much more profitable than a WS by the way.
So the ad business was very robust and a couple of injured interesting takeaways.
Amazon is adding more and more video properties they have Thursday Night Football you know they announced that they're going to start embedding ads and Amazon Prime and they'll have a premium offering to bypass Those ads.
So there's a lot of opportunity for.
Kind of top of the funnel linear programming ads at Amazon none of that is in this.

[17:09] 12 billion dollar number right now or very little like all of the potential they've they talked about for this for these non Commerce ads.
Is all sort of incremental the weather getting right now.
At the moment the vast majority of all Amazon's ads are bottom of the funnel the the sponsored product listing is by far the most.
Popular ad that that's growing particularly well and with the particular mix of economic headwinds we have at the moment, a lot of advertising is Shifting to bottom of the funnel people are less interested in investing in awareness and more interested in investing in sales and Amazon turns out to be, the best destination to take that that those dollars to put them into digital ads that generate.
Bottom of the funnel results so this quarter everyone was really interested to hear from the advertising companies, to see if advertisers were going to be cutting back right and so you know you mentioned meta had their their earnings call Google had their earnings call Facebook I'm sorry.

[18:17] Snap had their their earnings call and ads were uniformly up across everyone's earning so metas ads were up 23%, Google's ads were up 11% Google broke out YouTube ads which were up 12% snap ads were at 5%.
But nobody's ads were up as much the 26% that Amazon's were and nobody has had the consistently rapid add growth that Amazon's had the last three quarters.
Um so the economic headwinds like do not appear to be.
Putting a huge crimp in the the digital advertising business and they appear to be disproportionately benefiting, Amazon and so then you go wait next quarter they're going to be selling ads on all of their video programming and that could easily add another 5 billion dollars just for in to this this annual run rate so.
A lot of green lights in the Amazon ad business.

Scot:
[19:21] The I'm not a huge Sports person but you mentioned Thursday night football and have you seen and kind of marrying this back today I think if you seem Prime Vision have you played with them.

Jason:
[19:31] I have yeah.

Scot:
[19:33] So for listeners what they do is on Thursday Night Football if you watch from actually I do it on my Apple TV and I'm in the Prime video app.
And then you can it takes you to the standard broadcast just like every other thing but you can go in and then you hit down arrow and you can select a different broadcast which is, Prime vision and what it does they've added feature since they did it they started it they've added all these new AI features that are really amazing so during a pass play they'll show you the most likely Target they put like a Madden asked Circle in real time under the player and, he'll flash like green or something if he's a possible Target on the defense though they'll show a potential Blitzer.
They'll show you fourth-down probabilities in real time you know and it's just amazing they've added tons of features of that since I've been watching it and I find it like really adds a ton to the game too.
Kind of see you can see the strategy in real time mostly broadcasters you know they'll talk about it like Tony Rome or something but it's way after the play after they've had time to put together animation this is doing it all in real time it's just mind-blowing the amount of compute it must be thrown at that and you know I think it's a it could change the way you think about sports and in a really interesting way.

Jason:
[20:49] Oh yeah increasingly it's a better experience watching the game at home then you can get in the stadium.

Scot:
[20:54] Yeah the stadium doesn't do that.

Jason:
[20:56] They side note for soccer at the World Cup they actually did but you have to watch the whole game like through a are on your phone.

Scot:
[21:05] Let's see you at the stadium watching the game on your phone.

Jason:
[21:09] Yeah I mean and it was cool right like saying same sort of thing like it's overlaying all this real-time stats and probability was amazing.
Like it's not a very good experience to like hold your phone up and have your camera on the whole time to sort of get all these stats and so.
Yeah yeah side no Thursday Night Football is the bane of my existence because I do play Fantasy Football and I never have my act together to have my lineups all set before Thursday night so, usually the game starts and I have to pray that I don't have any super important players that I fail the start and then I can enjoy the game.

Scot:
[21:46] Okay understood anything else on Dad's.

Jason:
[21:53] No I think that covers it pretty well on ads you know just.
We've we've talked about a lot on the show but the overwhelming success Amazon's having with ads has this of course trickle-down effect that every other player and commerce paste is trying to figure out how to monetize their their traffic and get their share and at the moment nobody's getting, anything like Amazon's add, Commerce ratio and of course the audience eyes is start dropping off really quick after Amazon right you know you get a lot less eyeballs at Walmart then you have it on Amazon and a lot less eyeballs it Target then you have it Walmart and you know once you get smarter than that it starts getting real fragmented real fast.

Scot:
[22:39] Yeah how do you were still there still even though that's a big number they're still like way far away from Facebook right so so number one is Google by a really big margin and number two is Facebook and then it's Amazon and they're like way ahead of everyone else but they have to even though they're outpacing them, a little bit it would be like decades before they caught up in my own remembering that right.

Jason:
[23:00] I'm not no I'm not going to say decades it's an order of magnitude it's like 102 million 100 to 200 billion dollar annual run rates for those other guys and.

Scot:
[23:13] But they're kind of getting to half right.

Jason:
[23:15] Yeah yeah they are like they there with like within 50 percent of Striking Distance of number two.

Scot:
[23:23] Yeah if you had said that to us five years ago we would not have believed it I would I would not have seen how I've been.

Jason:
[23:30] Yeah I've been playing that what would you have thought five years ago game a lot and you you know you talked about who all the winners are in AI if you said five years ago the AI is going to become a huge thing what company is going to win like you we would have all been on Google.

Scot:
[23:43] Yeah yeah or apple or it would not have been startup called open air that was nonprofit that flip to profit no one saw that coming including Elon Musk yeah.

Jason:
[23:55] And by opening I you mean Nvidia but yeah.

Scot:
[23:59] One tidbit I saw on ads I love the leak read the Wall Street reports and they largely talked about the same data but a lot of them are good at very good at modeling and they can when Amazon doesn't tell them something like they don't break out they break out the revenue for ads but they don't break out the profit so it kind of gets swept up into this larger number but then they give you enough pieces you can kind of back into it so one of my favorite analyst he's a friend of the show Scott Devitt he modeled back through there and to your point he basically said that the ad business has a 60%, EB de margin so net margin of 60 percent which is basically like just money raining at this like Google's business model which I guess makes sense because Bass.

Jason:
[24:46] Is it is good.

Scot:
[24:48] Yeah because it is Google's business model and this ties into you know you know more about this government stuff than I do but Google's in a pretty nasty fight with the FTC, or the DJ I can't remember some government Bureau important entity that that is claiming they have a monopoly on search and they're basically pointing over here and saying look at these Amazon guys they're closing in on us pretty quick and they always reference those stats that show you know like more than half the people start product searches and those online.

Jason:
[25:19] Yeah no it's super interesting I Scott Devin is way better at Financial models than me but I actually think he might be under estimating the profitability and part of it is.
It's.
There's a lot of room for gray area like if you think about the the Amazon business it's super fascinating you know the number one digital Advertiser in the United States of America is you know who buys more ads than anyone else.
Amazon.
18 billion dollars a year of ads they buy just from Google so they buy 18 billion dollars worth of eyeballs from Google they use those eyeballs to sell a bunch of stuff that they make money on and then they sell 50 billion dollars are the pants to those eyeballs.

Scot:
[26:05] Ticket Arbitrage.

Jason:
[26:06] It's amazing eyeball Arbitrage and you know it's.
So how much of that acquisition cost are you factoring into the profitability of the ad business versus the like I would argue that these are not separated bubble businesses as much as ever wants to talk about ads as a separate business to me it only exists because you have all this traffic for Commerce and it's it's a core part of the the Commerce math at this point but we shall.

Scot:
[26:39] Yeah when we did our instacart coverage of this one now instacart been public for a while and you look at their numbers they're basically only being the whole instacart business is being valued a zero except for that so they're basically trading like an ad company so all of Wall Street said okay that grocery part is kind of like that yeah is there we'll put it in like you know.

[27:02] A hundred million dollars and then the ad business is like worth date hundred million dollar ad businesses where they gave it a really nice multiple of like 5x so that's interesting I'm sure, you're going to spoiler alert you're going to see a lot more ads on Insta guard the yeah a lot of people there is a negative and you know no one ever talks about this but a lot of people and this usually comes from a Amazon sellers and they always have kind of a love hate hate hate hate hate relationship with Amazon you know a lot of them would say and I hear this from consumers that the customer experience is the user experience is degraded on Amazon because there's just so many darn ads now you know the and I see it too if I'm looking for a specific thing I'm kind of like a dad at okay that's what I was looking for at some point there is cannibalization there and you know what we don't know is what did they lose from yeah doing this like was their product they didn't sell because people couldn't find it or we'll never really know that but you know kind of hope they're smart enough to figure that calculus Alden make it a huge net positive versus the cannibalization getting close to the ebitda contribution.

Jason:
[28:10] Oh yeah no I think two things like there definitely is an impact on customer experience and every retailer that gets into this space has a different philosophy about that and Amazon's appears to be the monetization is just worth it but you know you think about everyone other retailers that are not waiting and quite so hard, are trying to balance that and then the new interesting thing is if you're any retailer other than Amazon where all your eyeballs really are is not on your website it's in your store right and but you go we'll wait a minute, the these disruptions that people might tolerate as digital disruptions on a website they may not top you know nobody wants to junk a fi, um a physical store experience with a bunch of you know make it feel like you walked into Times Square every time you walk into, retail store so there's all this interesting calculus on where everyone should land on that the other interesting thing to me is for a while there was a.

[29:13] An opportunity for the best practitioners to get outside return so there was a subset of all those Amazon sellers that were really good at the Amazon ad, execution right and they did their smart about where they put their bids they were smarter about the attributes they put in their ad there are smarter about the creative they made for their ad and they could get outside Returns versus other sellers on Amazon but the first Trends you mentioned the AI affectation of this whole business.

[29:43] Has sort of made the best practices, dummy proof right and so now you know you just hand a product shot to Amazon and it makes the ad for you and you turn over the bidding strategy to Amazon and it optimizes your bidding for you and so it's squeezing more of the potential profit like out of all of these these other businesses that are built on top of Amazon because it's, kind of.
Normalizing the the ad business to everyone and it just becomes a pure pay to pay like who's going to be the most for this eyeball.

Scot:
[30:21] Yeah kind of supports your theory that maybe the Madonna's higher because they don't have a lot of people sitting there at adding images or something like would they used to do back in the olden days.

Jason:
[30:31] Is that you used to need this thing called what is it called Ad Agency.

Scot:
[30:35] Yeah good cut the if you can just get one of those Bots I discussed or just like you have a some a I do it for him.

Jason:
[30:40] Yeah yeah that was a funny example a few minutes ago.

Scot:
[30:44] Unrelated news Jason is brushing up to c v so hit him up the so just to zoom out to the big picture so so we kind of dove into the to topical things A to B Us / Ai and adds, those together really causing Amazon to beat Revenue that they came in about one percent higher than Revenue so it was kind of like a slight beat / meat but where they really exceeded oh and revenue came in at 143 billion were they really crushed it was operating income and these two contributed to it but also retail did some interesting things that also yeah I think dramatically helped beat expectations operating income came in at eleven point two billion and expectations which is Wall Street consensus is what they say was seven point seven billion you know so that's like what let's like.
Five per billion beat you know like a huge be compared to whatever.

Jason:
[31:49] 35%.

Scot:
[31:51] Yeah so that push the stock up 10% and then also we'll talk about guidance and that was positive so, it's been interesting Amazon stock has been kind of in a you know.
Funk for lack of better words has been con rallying around at the same level and literally for quite a while like 18 months and this was the first Catalyst to cause a big move and that it's market cap a 10% move at Amazon Lester look we'll get one of our researchers here one of the interns I look okay.
So you know they were like 1.2 trillion and now they're like 1.4 trillion so that's you know a move like that takes a lot of dollars when you're bigger than a trillion dollar business to move things it's like a lot of.
A lot of value creation can happen in a 1.2 trillion dollar company when it shoots up ten percent in five trading days.

Jason:
[32:44] 10% 0 by a lot of rocket fuel.

Scot:
[32:46] It will yes a lot of dates with helicopter Pilots as well and a lot of cool new clothes, so there were some really interesting things you know we spend the bulk of our time here on the Pod talking about retail and e-commerce to our favorite topics so Jason there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on in there as well you want to fill us in on that.

Jason:
[33:08] Yeah everyone just wants to talk about ads and AI but it turns out that Amazon is actually a pretty good retailer.
And so the the retail business also had a good quarter and to kind of set the table, every every listener the show knows I love my US Department of Commerce data so that came out last week 4.

[33:31] September which gives us Q3 data for the industry so us retail data in September this was up one point year-to-date sales in the United States January through September we're at one point nine percent this year versus last year.
It's a 35 percent versus before the pandemic in 2019 so 1.9% is not very good growth by historical standards we would normally expect about 4% growth.
So if we just look at Q3 growth the industry was up 2% which again half of what you would typically expect.
So Amazon's growth for Q3 is 11 percent versus that that industry number of 2% so 11% growth, is very robust the if you kind of, look at Amazon's growth since the pandemic that Q3 number means they're up 85 percent versus Q3 2019 and their year-to-date number is up 111 percent versus 2019.

[34:33] So Amazon is a very large retailer arguably number one or number two retailer in the US now, and they're growing way faster than the industry average, and again depending on how you count Walmart would be the number two retailer which is also growing significantly faster than the industry average so that actually, tells you everything you need to know about the rest of the retail industry is that where you know we're having a significant bifurcation and with winners and losers in the space.

[35:07] The other side of the retail business for Amazon is international and historically North America has been a very mature Market that has grown and generated profits, International has not made money for Amazon and I would say it was a mixed bag in terms of their International performance, on a constant currency basis International sales were up 11% which it's a smaller less mature business so you'd like to see it growing faster than the, the mature North American Market, um but they're operating loss is way smaller so last year this quarter they lost 2.5 billion dollars this year they only lost a hundred million dollars so nearly break it even for the quarter.
Um the this did not come up in their their earnings and no one asked them about this but Marketplace pulse reported earlier this month.
That appears Amazon has.
Meaningfully curtailed their International expansion and a lot of markets they had announced they were expanding into they seem to have delayed.
Postponed or canceled a lot of international market openings, so International definitely is not the start of the show it is also true of a lot of the other markets that say that Amazon's in still have more.

[36:26] Just general macroeconomic headwinds than the United States does at the moment a lot of the world has a more severe version of the same macroeconomic problems that we have.
In the US so a couple interesting tidbits.

[36:44] But in the discussion about the retail business that you know the CFO Bryant.

[36:54] Scot I always pronounce his name wrong alsop ski, um brett-brett else got a soft ski talked about how despite the fact that their they had nice growth in retail that they are seeing a cautious consumer who's generally trading down and more Deal seeking, then usual and that's consistent with, cautions that we've heard from other retailers that actually gives me some significant pause for Holiday which we'll talk about later, the the thing that that Amazon was really touting in the retail business is that they dramatically improve their cost to serve, and their speed of delivery in Q3 and that largely was thanks to an initiative they started a couple of quarters ago, this transition from a single National fulfillment Network.
To a regional fulfillment Network where they have eight distinct District regions in the United States, that each sort of operate independently in the goal is to have all the the inventory that that Scot Wingo wants to buy, in his region so the goods have to travel less far are less expensive to get to him, and get to him faster and what they announced in the earnings was that the transition to this this.

[38:19] Regional model has gone better and exceeded their expectations they're getting more.
Incremental profit and faster speed of delivery than they even projected, um out of transitioning to that so this is.

[38:37] I know we talked a lot about how big and what a huge moat Amazon would just accept our but I still feel like this is under appreciated by most Amazon's competitors and their there.
They're just opening a bigger Gap in speed of service and one of the things they mentioned is that they see a direct correlation between consumable sales and speed of service when they promised that they can get them there faster they sell more paper towels, so I think it's very clear that that consumers want speed of service, and Amazon has a huge advantage and it appears to be getting even bigger so that's interesting another thing I talk about a lot.

[39:20] Um is there's a few new retailers that are also stealing significant share, um very quickly and they're primarily Chinese companies so it's she in and most notably Tim oh, and so well like they certainly didn't come up in the Amazon earnings a lot of the analysts started looking at the the, rapid growth that Tim is getting and trying to figure out if they're stealing share from Amazon and evercore did a big consumer survey, and the results of their survey was that Tim ooh is mostly not stealing share from Amazon that most of its shares coming from, other retailers and in many cases coming from brick-and-mortar value retailers in the US so the dollar stores and it appears that that Amazon is more insulated from the.
The growth and profit that they're getting so all of that you know rolls up to be a pretty impressive.
Quarter I you've talked about it a lot but it kind of feels like Amazon's got a bunch of knobs that they can turn whenever they want to improve profitability and it feels like, they both added more knobs that can turn this quarter and they turn some of them.

Scot:
[40:37] Yeah the other thing that's really interesting is if you look at.
Amazon and you can't really read because they have so many employees in the Fulfillment centers you can't really tell their employee growth and it's surging right now is they prefer prepare for holiday but another really interesting trend is Google meta and there's one of the other ones Microsoft their revenue per employee is surging so they're they're actually not hiring many people right now and, the assumption is these companies are leveraging AI internally and becoming exceedingly efficient and you kind of wonder.
Is Amazon doing the same thing I hear inklings we have kids that are not so far out of college they don't know folks looking for jobs and things I hear inklings that Amazon is not really hiring that much as they kind of were at one point so I kind of wonder, are they also hiding behind that that have like a million employees and it surges like 200,000 for holiday so it doesn't look like they're being more productive but what they don't do is put out corporate versus fulfillment center.
Have to have an idea that if we looked at corporate there also.

[41:48] One dial they've turned its new is I think they're not hiring as me folk because people are getting a lot of efficiencies from these AI.
Systems that these companies are dogfooding internally.
And because they're they're a little bit further ahead than kind of like what we see out of the lme's I think they're doing some really interesting things that they will productized and we will we will see what they're doing in a lot of it can be this like really focused you know create an ad you know a lot of the stuff that used to be, kind of out sourced or you would have to throw a bunch of bodies at it I think there's LMS doing a lot of that you know customer support Bots think things like that that you know I think there's a lot of efficiencies going on inside of their that's helping these guys really beat their earnings numbers.

Jason:
[42:38] Yeah I do think that's true it's not lost on me that just as the retailgeek bought is gonna replace me at poobah says all the other places that might have hired me are also not so my fallback is that I may be washing cars at spiffy so we'll see how that.
That all plays out but I promise to work hard of it if it comes to that Scott.

Scot:
[42:58] Absolutely it also we could just turn this podcast into the entire ads so that could be could be here our second asked yeah.

Jason:
[43:04] We can monetize the podcast I'm not I'm not doing that to the listeners they advertisers would make us make a shorter podcast Scott.

Scot:
[43:13] Yeah yeah.

Jason:
[43:14] I'm not down for that I'm not down for it.
Even if I have to wash cars the I think you're certainly right like a lot of these companies and Amazon very overtly has has put some more barriers and in place in terms of corporate hires.
The one notable exception being the AI space they're hiring pretty rapidly.
Um but I also think in addition anything you mentioned that Amazon's actually finally like really leaning into the Fulfillment center automation so while they've always.
Been a leader in in having fulfillment center, not all their fulfillment centers in a big chunk of their fulfillment centers were not highly automated and so I think they're now automating all of them and they're rapidly moving to sort of next-gen automation.
Um you know where everyone else is kind of putting their first robots and you know moving things around the warehouse more efficiently.
Amazon is like rolling out new technology that's a lot more.
Seamless in how the people and the automation work together in a in a safe cohesive way so I do think one of the levers Amazon has is.
You know to really add more Automation in those in those fulfillment centers and in that cost to serve.

Scot:
[44:39] Absolutely it's kind of interesting because we started spiffy, which is my on-demand car care company where you're going to come wash cars people are like AI is you know they'll be a robot that can do this in five years I was like I don't know like you know the Boston Dynamics robots are cool but they're not.
Let's just programmed well I don't think it's like that you know it's not thinking and who would have guessed that a I would replace you know the digital retail Talking Heads first and and not.
Not the physical things I think the physical stuff is going to take a lot longer but who knows once these a eyes you have there's Tesla has that that demonstration of theirs was The Optimist that you know it kind of is learning things as it goes and making inference in real time so that is kind of you know we who knows where all this is going to go.
If we back to it now and not science fiction but your term science fiction so.

[45:37] Looking forward for fourth quarter they put guidance out that they're going to see growth in the fourth quarter of 7 to 12% the midpoint of that range which let's see would be 9 and change itself was five and a half percent above the consensus midpoint so this is what we would call A Classic.
Meet Top Line Crush bottom line on the current quarter and then raised the next quarter both top and bottom line pretty substantially so that you know.
This is an important data point when we kind of swirl it together with your Department of Commerce data it does seem like Amazon signaling they're feeling pretty good about the fourth quarter and everyone felt like this was kind of conservative given I didn't put the bottom line number but they felt like that was pretty conservative given what they just did and you know they felt like dad a lot of room to kind of beat that number and maybe it's going to be more like 14 15 percent growth which would be you have a new post covid reversion hi I guess you would look at it where do you did you leave this feeling more optimistic about Q4 or we are your classic Jason curmudgeon myself.

Jason:
[46:54] Yeah no I think I'm mostly curmudgeon e not for Amazon I actually I think their guidance seems realistic to me.

[47:06] On the top line I think the bottom line is just totally up to their whims like if they want to blow away the bottom line they can if they want to invest at all in you know new.

[47:18] New AI capabilities and and keep the bottom line constrain they can do that too but the that, Top Line I think they're likely to hit their guidance and again you know one or two other big retailers might you know have a pretty robust holiday as well but I actually think that that sucks all the, the potential growth out of the market for holiday and so I actually think.
That sort of signifies potentially Bleak holiday season for a lot of other traditional retailers so I guess it's a.
Little bifurcated it's good news for Amazon will see what a Walmart's Q3 earnings look like they announced on November 16th, but I do feel like endemic lie Amazon and Walmart have some, some inherent advantages that are insulating them from some of the economic headwinds and I think that that really just makes things, that much more difficult for the the rest of retail and so I desperately want to be wrong but I think it's going to be, I kind of disappointing holiday for a bunch of folks there also was sort of some if you really listen to the Q&A portion of the investor call, there.

[48:45] The the CFO in particular had some concerns about capacity around Q4 and one of the things he called that was carrier capacity which is interesting because Amazon does so much.
Of their own fulfillment now that they're just way less dependent on third-party carriers but if he's worried about carrier capacity for Q4 you can bet that means that every other retailer ought to be really concerned, about carrier capacity for cube Q4, and so we you know we feel like we talked about that every holiday season but Amazon's got a lot of.
New fulfillment center capacity that's coming online in Q3 of this year and will even in Q4 and so I guess.
If there's one thing that could glitch it Amazon if there's not enough delivery capacity if some of these new fulfillment centers have any, any sort of glitches or delays and coming online that you know that that could be the constraining factor for their Q4 growth.

Scot:
[49:50] There's so sprinkle of curmudgeon e speaking of holiday where can listeners go if they want to get the best holiday news even though we haven't been potting as much as we want to because our day jobs have been absorbing a fair amount of time this year we are going to have some killer content around this holiday and kicking it off we have our very own jacent live not an AI and you're going to do a little webinar for Commerce next what's that all about and when is it.

Jason:
[50:22] Yeah yeah so on Monday November 6 which I think is a week from now if I'm not mistaken we're doing a Commerce next webinar where we'll sort of preview the holiday season so you heard the very early preview just now but we'll go into more detail share some of the third-party forecast for Holiday Good News, all the other predictors are much more optimistic than I am so so we'll hit that on November 6 and then of course there will be all the good real time holiday news that will be will be hitting pretty hot and heavy here on the podcast so we'll we'll have some of the best data sources, right before and after the holiday to kind of talk about where things are going and what actually.

[51:15] And with that I think it is happen again we've used up all our allotted time as always if this deep dive in Amazon's earnings was valuable for you the way you can repay that value is to jump on iTunes and give us that five-star review.

Scot:
[51:31] Thanks everyone and Jason until next time.

Jason:
[51:34] Happy conversing.

EP223 - Covid-19 Deep Dive

Episode 223 is deep dive into the retail impact of Covid-19 pandemic over the next 18-24 months.

COVID-19 TIME MACHINE

Covid-19 is a time machine, propelling commerce five years into the future.

• New Behaviors:
  • Shift to Digital
  • Brand Agnostic
  • Pantry Stocking
  • Nesting
  • Health & Safety
• Recession
• Changing Retail Landscape
• How Will it End

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 223 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Thursday, June 18th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP222 - RBC Mark Mahaney on Amazon

Episode 222 is an interview with Mark Mahaney, Managing Director at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). RBC is Canada’s biggest bank, and one of the largest in the world based on market capitalization. Mark is one of the top internet analysts in the world, being ranked #1 by Institutional Investor Magazine numerous times. His research on the e-commerce space are all must reads.

In this interview, we discuss his new research note on Amazon, raising their price target to a Street-high $3,300 based on the impact of Covid-19 on it's business. In this broad ranging interview, we discuss Covid-19, Amazon's retail business, it's ad business, amazon web services, logistics, as well as competitors, Shopify, eBay, Etsy, and Chewy.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP221 - E-Commerce Logistics Crunch

Episode 221 covers recent news including logistics moves from UPS, FedEx, and Amazon.

Past Events

• Jason NRF Interview
• Leaders of Change Interview

Upcoming Events

• NRF Global Trends from the Reopening of Stores June 8th, 11am ET.
  Hear from retail industry leaders Jason Goldberg, chief commerce officer of Publicis, and Sucharita Kodali, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, on what retailers are seeing as their global stores reopen post-COVID-19

Amazon News

• Amazon adds 12 new planes (now has 80 on it’s way to 200).
• Prime day moved to September, Summer Sales June 22nd.
• Amazon Grocery Store coming to Chicago
• Lowes- Same store sales up 11.2%, e-commerce up 80%

Other News

• Gucci – Personalized Video Shopper
• UPS/FedEx – Surcharges
• Kylie Jenner – Inflated revenue ($177 million last year)
• Instacart Media Network
• Target Instagram Checkout
• Shopify Marketcap $90B, IBM $114B
• Lickable Screen – Norimaki Synthesizer

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 221 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Wednesday, June 3rd, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP220 - Retail Earnings News

Episode 220 covers a variety of retail earnings reports and news.

Retail Earnings

• Walmart – Same store sales up 10%, e-commerce up 74%
• Target – Same store sales up 10.8%, e-commerce up 141% (curbside up 278%)
• Home Depot- Same store sales up 7.1%, e-commerce up 79%
• Lowes- Same store sales up 11.2%, e-commerce up 80%

Race to $1.5T Market Cap (as of 5/20/2020) Apple Inc. $1,383,649,809,668 Microsoft Corporation $1,407,941,498,171 Amazon.com, Inc. $1,245,912,492,214 Other News

• Amazon News – JCP and AMC rumors
• Facebook – New e-commerce option
• Fritolay Direct to Consumer Launch

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 220 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Wednesday, May 20th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP219- Live Listener Questions

Episode 219 is a live show featuring live audience questions. Jason & Scot get to interact with listeners live. It's also a rare chance to watch the podcast, as the episode was recorded with video, watch it on YouTube. 

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 219 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Wednesday, May 7th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP218 - Amazon Q1 2020 Earnings and Covid News 

Episode 218 covers some Covid-19 related e-commerce news, and provides an analysis of Amazon’s Q1 2020 Earnings.

Announcement

Next weeks show will be a live listener question show. Join our Zoom webinar on May 6th at 9pm ET, and you can watch us make a show, and ask your own questions.

• https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89837125650?pwd=QTM2QWZKRDlSNFFIU0xnRmZ2VWowQT09
• Password: 877145
• Webinar ID: 898 3712 5650
• International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kuutcaEJm

News

• Shopify becoming a marketplace? 
• Google shopping is now free
• Covid impact
  • 630,000 retail businesses have been closed since mid-March (about 61% of sf sq)
  • Forrester 16% E-Com -> 25% in april (70% digital influence)
  • 3% digital grocery -> 10% digital Grocery
  • Goldman Sachs: Retail Chain down 20.9% 
  • ShopperTrack: Traffic down 48%
  • Bankruptcies – JCREW, Neiman, JCP, Tuesday Morning, Lord & Taylor
  •  Gordon Brothers 25,000 stores and 100,000 restaurants could end up closing permanently this year 
  • UBS 100,000 retailers close by 2025 (15% -> 25% e-com penetration)
  • Everyone making PPE
  • Happy Story: Pets (“adopt a pet” surged about 335% in volume)

Simon Properties Opening Plans

Amazon Q1 2020 Earnings

• Earnings Release (PDF)
• Presentation

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 218 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Thursday, April 30th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP217 - OfferUp CEO Nick Huzar

Episode 217 is an interview with Nick Huzar (@nickhuzar), the Founder and CEO of OfferUp (@OfferUp). OfferUp is the largest mobile marketplace in the U.S, facilitating consumer to consumer sales of second-hand goods.

In this interview, we discuss OfferUp’s recent fund raise, the acquisition of LetGo, and the state of C2C Marketplaces during Covid-19.

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 217 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Thursday, April 23rd, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Transcript

Jason:
[0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 217 being recorded on Thursday April 23rd 2020 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo.

Scot:
[0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners we are still recording during this fun pandemic shelter at home period and
because we normally when we’re not she’ll bring it home have day jobs record the podcast late late at night it really restricts people that are crazy enough to come on the podcast so we’re using this opportunity to go through what I would call our Marketplace bucket list.
So today on the podcast we have another bucket list guess this is pretty exciting.
One of the biggest Trends in US market places that’s kind of under the radar and if you go to like a lot of trade shows and stuff
but it is if you look at traffic data you realize there’s a really big movement here,
is what I would call a new family a new innovation around smartphone app based consumer to consumer or some people say person-to-person marketplaces.
So today on the show we are really excited to have the CEO of what I believed to be the largest one of these these new kind of mobile market places we,
the CEO of offer up Nick who’s are welcome to the show Nick.

Nick:
[1:43] Thanks for having me it’s great to be here.

Scot:
[1:45] Do you prefer person-to-person consumer-to-consumer or do you use some other lingo.

Nick:
[1:50] I think it’s I think it’s all the same that the the main idea is you know leveraging this technology that’s in all of our pockets to kind of reimagine local Commerce as we know it.

Jason:
[2:05] Awesome and Nick we may be the only ones in the planet that have a Marketplace bucket list but we’re we’re.

Nick:
[2:14] Everyone needs one.

Jason:
[2:15] Yeah everyone should have one but I feel like we’re the only ones that are cool enough to actually have one so thanks for helping us check one one off but before we jump into OfferUp in marketplaces
we always like to give listeners a little bit of color about your background so can you tell us what you’re doing and how you came to OfferUp.

Nick:
[2:35] Yeah happy to so I’ve always been in the I’d say the Internet space pretty much since I graduated college.

[2:42] Kind of dating myself now but I used to I remember coming out of school I had to explain to people on companies why they needed a database connected to their website so that’s kind of gives you an idea of when I graduated college.
But I’ve always been fascinated by I think the the endless possibilities with the internet so in some way shape or form of.
I’ve been in at various startups you know throughout most of my career I did some briefs tents at T-Mobile.
Spend a little bit of time at Microsoft you know I’ve done a few different companies my previous company too,
OfferUp was called connects most people have no idea who the heck we were I’m not surprised but we started.

[3:26] Connects pre Friendster and so sometimes I’ll server after remind people what the heck was Friendster or Friendster came before my space and my space came before Facebook so we were very early I think I’d like to say I learned a lot of a.
Mistakes kind of how to build a company and a startup.
And you know ultimately I had no plans on doing another startup there a lot of work but I had a daughter on the way and I was so excited I went into this room full of stuff.
That I had in my house and I was going to turn it into her nursery and that became the spark,
and that ultimately turned into OfferUp and you know for me would you know I had I didn’t jump on it right away I mean clearly you know I think there’s a long as a graveyard of companies that have tried to.

[4:15] Compete locally but.
I think what what what drew me to this opportunity was this device that is now in all of our pockets but back when we started off her up you know very few people had smartphones in fact there was no Android phone.
So you know what I what I could imagine at the time was like look I just wanted to make these.
I just wanted to clear out this room like quickly and there was no easy way to do that so,
again looking at this device that had was now in my pocket I just kept wondering to myself can we is it time to reimagine what local can be.
You know through these devices so that’s what ultimately you know created this spark for me to want to you know pursue this this this opportunity.

Jason:
[5:07] That that’s awesome and it’s it’s probably a coincidence I feel like I probably shouldn’t even lump the two of you together but
there’s a prolific track record of entrepreneurs coming from T-Mobile and being very successful at raising funds and I know this because,
the the guy I’m thinking of has the same name as me Jason Goldberg fab.com so.
That may not be good news for you but you’re following in his footsteps.

Scot:
[5:37] So what year did you found OfferUp is this like 2010.

Nick:
[5:43] I lose track of time and to be honest I thought like.

Jason:
[5:46] We’re all doing that now.

Nick:
[5:47] I’ve years ago I think 90 now yeah.

Scot:
[5:50] Okay so yeah right when the iPhone one came out so I was good timing
talk us through the funding history I looked up on crunchbase and they were very specific they said you’ve raised 381 million that was funny they couldn’t round up anyway congrats on that that’s that’s always you know,
fundraising isn’t the best measure of success but it is one so congrats on all the fundraising walk us through kind of the funding history there.

Nick:
[6:17] Yeah well I mean you know going back again to that that moment in my doorway in a room I wanted to clear out I think like like any entrepreneur
you have this big aha moment and then reality hits that you have to actually go build it and that’s when it gets hard and so.
You know again just you know why and I like to remind a lot of people that it people kind of tend to put us in this bucket of oh it’s mobile classifieds and I think.
That’s a fine public perception today but
that’s not to be clear not at all what I set out to build what we set out to build was you know to become the largest local Marketplace period
and that’s you know we what I saw as an opportunity was just unlocking local value and what I mean by that is you know 25% of.
Us households with the two-car garage it can’t park in the garage you know our homes are 30% larger than the 50s but we’re having less kids and so,
just so much stuff stuck in in our homes if you look at storage you know 10% of our population our at storage units but even beyond that and especially now
what about local retail what is what is in these stores like you can never you can’t visualize those things today and I think
the opportunity that I saw was you know again how do you.
Unlock all this value and my belief was it’s locked up because there’s a lot of friction in that experience and so.

[7:43] Anyhow that’s my long way of saying it took us a while to raise funds like the first year we only had a hundred thousand dollars raised,
and we just you know luckily I can code and design and my co-founder could you know set up AWS and set up the back end so between the two of us we pay ourselves literally nothing.
And just coded for basically a year straight.
Um and then year to we had to figure out how to get scale and I’ll spare all the details because I could go on for hours and all the failed experiments that we tried but that was very hard I was a very very hard time so ultimately.

Scot:
[8:23] Scale from a technology standpoint or scale from a user buyer-seller son.

Nick:
[8:27] Yeah buyers and sellers and so you know I used to show up to people who pretend you attend to your.
You posted your couch and OfferUp I used to show up and I’d buy it from you,
because we had very few post back then and I wouldn’t tell you that I worked at OfferUp I just wanted you to believe it worked and then I’d bring it back ultimately we had a small office I’d stick it in her office so you can imagine Five Guys coating it a few desks but just junk everywhere that’s what it looked like for a while,
you know it’s one of those fake it till you make it moments but it took us almost two years before we raised our series A,
and I think that was you know I think it was it was very hard I think a lot of people thought we were just trying to replicate,
and what had been done on the desktop you know I think,
you know we are all so early that was another lesson like you know we started really early and so there was no Android phones for a while and so I think that was another.

[9:24] You know I think it was one of those things where we just had to see smartphone adoption take off and then clearly we had to prove to investors that
we actually could get the flywheel to move in a Marketplace we could get buyers to potap by and sellers to post and just continue to get that final to work and so you know and when we raised our series a we were only in Seattle it was very very intentional
there was a handful of competitors at the time and I think they were probably really smart folks but,
on the technical side that I don’t think they were met you know really measuring and thinking about what is success and success is like its liquidity that’s everything and so,
we stayed in one ZIP code until we got that flywheel to Mu conversely we had competitors that were then launching,
they launched an app and so you can use it anywhere in the country and I you know I thought that was disastrous I thought that you know they were not going to.
Have success on liquidity so I didn’t worry too much about them so.
You know where as we raise more Capital over the years a lot of the focus has been early in the early days we just launching
new markets you know we stayed in Seattle for a year you’re so and then register a and with that Capital we wanted to prove that,
we could then roll into numerous other.

Scot:
[10:38] Yeah so you’re very knowledgeable out Marketplace is to just grind this out yourself or did you know how did you learn so much about marketplaces.

Nick:
[10:47] Yeah I have I have zero history in marketplaces that and so I actually think.

Scot:
[10:51] Scar tissue.

Nick:
[10:54] Benefit you know I remember hearing a podcast once with Reid Hoffman talking about.
Why PayPal was such a success and he said like look I didn’t come from banking like I didn’t know any better I just and I think that was the same.
The way I looked at this like I literally I can’t think of any time where we ever pulled up any desktop websites and marketplaces,
as an example of how to design OfferUp,
it was all just what what was the experience we wanted to create and let’s just design what that is a good example would be,
you know if you open up OfferUp today it’s going to show you items nearby you with some personalization.
And just like this infinite list of pictures when we launched nobody was doing that I mean this was pretty Instagram right so
it was a it was kind of a novel idea at the time and you know we wanted to kind of simulate this treasure hunt right we wanted to have this I just want to visualize
what’s in my neighbor’s garage or what’s in a business down the street so you know I think we’ve taken a lot of just approaches completely different and.
And back to your question I think that’s it’s probably just because we didn’t know any different.

Scot:
[12:11] Um so I noticed on the crunchbase list there you had some of the some of the late-stage guys some of the mutual funds that have kind of gone early that’s interesting and then I saw Max election so he’s a co-founder of a firm and then also part of the PayPal Mafia has that has he been a good
good addition to the team.

Nick:
[12:29] Oh yeah Max I’ve known Max just you know over the years and he’s always been very generous with his time and thoughts and.
Clearly very knowledgeable about payments and you know.
So I leaned on him periodically just to kind of pick his brain on what’s happening in the world and how he thinks about.
Your transactions and payments overall.

Jason:
[12:56] That is terrific Nick for listeners then might not be totally familiar with OfferUp can you kind of walk us through the basic buying and selling flow and kind of what pieces you you help facilitate.

Nick:
[13:11] Yeah for sure so I think on the buyers you know as I mentioned just briefly a moment ago our our view has been,
you know we want to you know we want to build the simplest largest and most,
trusted local Marketplace and that’s that shows up a lot in the product so you know when you open up the product think of it like walking into a retail store.
And we wanted to make it a very visual you know visual experience and luckily over the years one of our our.
Our beliefs was the cameras would constantly get better and we could you know really show these beautiful pictures you know it within OfferUp and that that has been true and so
you know that’s the first thing I think you notice is a buyer that it is a very different experience than going to a lot of traditional say desktop.
Marketplaces and that’s very intentional we wanted it to be kind of the treasure hunt we wanted it to,
be some elements of serendipity where you maybe are looking for a car and you end up buying a pair of shoes that that happens quite a bit you know on OfferUp,
and so you know our our average buyer you know is on OfferUp like three times a day they engage in OfferUp more like they engage in social media than they do in the traditional.

[14:32] Commerce and so yeah so if you’re a buyer and say for example you’re looking for,
I don’t know what’s popular right now like a lot of things are like like fitness equipment is on fire right now and think a lot of people are stuck at home and they can’t go to the gym,
let’s so let’s say you’re looking for some weights you scroll through you find something there by you then can then you can then read the profile about the cellar like how many radians do they have how far away do they live
do you have trusted connection through friends to that Cellar and you can read through just some overall profile information to make sure
that there’s somebody that you trust and her wanting to do business with and then the process of engaging on you know say those weights is actually very straightforward you can
if it is a shipping item you can just hit a button and have it shipped to you if it’s a local item you can just send them a message and say hey can we meet up tomorrow and,
you know the whole idea from the buyer standpoint was to make it you know a really simple experience but also back to this trust element having a profile and understanding who you’re interacting with,
not giving out your phone number like you know I think in a lot of traditional local market places you have to get your phone number to close the transaction,
um you know OfferUp is really Commerce wrapped around chat so you can communicate all the way to the point of cell without having to give it out personal information.

[16:00] And then on the seller side it’s literally as easy as taking and sharing a photo so like this chair that I’m sitting on right now if I wanted to sell this on OfferUp I would just pop my phone I would take a picture I would give it.
You know a price and maybe a short description and hit post and and less than 30 seconds my chair is now available for the local community to discover and we tend to find that,
people get engagement extremely quickly you know we’ve heard people that you know taking pictures and within a minute you know they get a whole bunch of Engagement.
And you know itself things very quickly so you know like I said that’s that’s a big focus of the product and will continue to be which will be removing,
friction and in the experience and so I think we’re far better today than I think the desktop players just because we’re leveraging.
The power and the smartphone but I still think there’s plenty of plenty of ways we can reduce friction for buyers and sellers.

Jason:
[17:03] Awesome so so your to set the marketplace buyers sellers can list items buyers can find items they negotiate amongst themselves on pricing,
do you offer an option to facilitate the transaction or do you get into the payment element at all.

Nick:
[17:25] We do if you enable your item for shipping so when you post an item as a seller there’s a toggle on there to enable shipping or only do local
that is a very fast growing part of our business we launched that in 2018 especially right now with,
with the people stuck at home it’s growing very very fast so you know and that case we take a small percentage,
of the transaction to be able to facilitate payments between buyers and sellers.

Jason:
[17:55] Gotcha and by the way you made me super nostalgic in the beginning when you said imagine walking into a store because that
we haven’t been able to do that in a few months and it’s like you know it seems trite now I know it was like a much bigger bet in 2010 when you jumped on it but like the the Insight that,
The Experience on the mobile phone would be dramatically different and lower friction than than the traditional desktop one is kind of big and I feel like.
Your.
Optimism around the camera I like it keeps paying dividends because I know the new Apple phones that have lidar enem I could imagine you’re gonna be able to get the dimensions of that that desk or chair that you’re selling.
Now or in the in the near future up those kinds of devices.

Nick:
[18:46] Oh yeah I like I said I think there’s.
We will continue its I always say that we’re kind of Reinventing herself every year so we’re going back and we’re going yep we can make this process better we have let’s save some time here so they’re just so much more we can continue to layer on the marketplace that we have but
back to the point.
You know it’s just these devices continue to get more and more powerful and we can leverage that to make it a better better experience for our customers.

Scot:
[19:17] Wrinkle so you guys recently announced with your last round that you’re acquiring one of your competitors called let go tell us about that and how that’s going and why you’re doing it and.
It’s always imagine you’re in the midst of integration that’s always fun.

Nick:
[19:36] Yeah so I mean you know I think the there’s a huge opportunity in the US and I think any time you’re going after a large Market you’re going to have competitors so as I mentioned even when we started we had a handful of competitors,
but I think we were the first to really start to get meaningful scale in a pretty big way.
We tried to stay as quiet as we could for as long as you could we delay doing press for a number of years we just kind of.
Hung out in our office which is in the swamp in Bellevue Washington and didn’t really tell a lot of people what we’re doing but ultimately,
you know we saw that go enter the US and.
You know I think what became interesting over the years was just kind of how we approached you know the market we’ve gone very
deep into many of the top 30 dmas and the country,
as you know as OfferUp we have markets like Phoenix and La where over 17 18 percent of the adult population in those markets is using OfferUp every single month.

[20:41] Um and with let go they you know they are as I said have more of a presence and other parts of the country and then so I think that right there made it.
Pretty intriguing to explore working with them more as we think about how do we how do we grow in other parts of the country even more how do we kind of drive a local adoption where we’re already strong.
So we thought there were quite a few synergies and not a ton of overlap I think people tend to gravitate.
To the market places where they have the most success I don’t think most users are going to use you know a whole bunch of these I think they’re just really going to focus on the ones that,
is producing the best value for them so you know I think that right there was you know as we spent more time with them it became more intriguing that there was a good you know Synergy in our in our businesses.
And then on top of that you know as we wanted to come together we just have a lot of you know I think,
product development ahead of us and things we wanted to build so you know raising capital on top of that was was intriguing it as well and so we’re feel fortunate that their investors invested and,
you know we have I think some of the best investors on the planet and OfferUp and they also participated it in this financing to.

Scot:
[22:06] Are you going to there’s one strategy and mobile apps to have kind of two apps out there because it’s almost like more virtual shelf space are you guys going to have kind of two apps a little bit of different flavor are you going to consolidate them into one.

Nick:
[22:19] Yeah well we think there’s a lot of opportunity ultimately in having one experience but we are definitely going to,
tread lightly and into as we explore integration with them the best way to do it so we don’t want we really want to make sure that,
you know we’re taking care of the let-go users and taking care of the OfferUp users as best we can but we’re,
I guess the point is we’re not going to just flick a switch we’re going to spend quite a bit of time and making sure we’re being thoughtful about how we how we come together.

Jason:
[22:51] Yeah the mobile app stuff is always very tricky because obviously like it’s super hard to get customers to download an app and be and particularly its even way harder to get them to be a regular user of that app and so.
Fragmenting your audience amongst multiple apps you know comes with some baggage but first God’s Point like it also potentially.
Boost your visibility in that App Store.
A random side no just because it’s so sad it’s funny but one of my big clients is Walmart and they’ve had this.
This multi-year debate about if they should have two apps general merchandise and grocery or one and I’ve always strongly felt they should have won,
a few months ago they finally agreed to do that and then a month before they merge the two apps covid-19 pandemic hits and the way it 10x is downloads of their grocery out.

Nick:
[23:46] Yeah you can’t you can’t predict that.

Jason:
[23:49] No no so I briefly thought I finally won that argument and then the the community the world spoke.
But I do I noticed that you like to increase the level of difficulty you were just having a kid and you decided to throw in a start-up and like you decided to do a big round of funding and a merger in the middle of a pandemic so.
Props to you for that.
Um the you know to set of marketplaces are super interesting from a marketing standpoint like there’s a lot of debate one big debate is do you expand geographically or not and it sounds like you guys made a.
Intentional decision to get a concentration in some Geo’s before you expanded but the other big question is.
Can you know can you really lean into marketing to one side or the other right so are you no do you try to in hand.
Entice Sellers and then that will like pull in the buyers or do you and try to you know do you try to get buyers and that’ll pull in the sellers like has there been a.
A strategy that’s been particularly effective for you or how do you think about that.

Nick:
[24:58] Yeah so you know in the early days if I was to say what was one of the harder periods and.
It’s going OfferUp it was definitely getting the flywheel to move and I’ve heard a lot you know a number of people say building marketplaces are really hard and then they’re also really hard.
To kind of break down and you know I know that pain because not only did we figure that in Seattle but.
Every time we entered a new market essentially we were creating a brand new Marketplace so you know what
I used to know what we used to spend a bunch of time on was looking at kind of the overall metrics that really mattered and I used to always say hey we need to get neighborhood sick we need to create the zombie apocalypse
like how do we get you know how do we get you know how do we get the flywheel to move where the seller post something then the buyers there and the buyer has an amazing experience and then they tell their friends and family and it just kind of keeps going and going and going and you know,
what what are those attributes of those markets that are really material and what we found early on was.
Population density definitely matters to a certain degree.

[26:04] You know whether matters like do you really want to move a couch and in Chicago,
in the dead of winter we actually you know we’re thinking about that and then we said no like nobody wants to do that and,
and so luckily we found markets that that we thought you know just had the right attributes and we really over invested in those markets and Allah is a great example I mean I always had massive Market a lot of people have cars they can move Goods around
the weather’s nice most of the year it’s very viral most of OfferUp s’ growth is we spend dollars on marketing but to be clear most of it is word of mouth and I think that’s it goes back to the obsession over the product and,
created a really simple experience between buyers and sellers and and because of that you know most people I run into ask them how they heard about OfferUp and it’s usually friend friend or a family member.
So

[27:02] Yeah those were I think some of the harder learnings in the beginning you know today where I you know I really give kudos to my marketing team like a lot of the work they do I mean we do all of our marketing in-house a hundred percent,
um you know and that team.
All kind of works together external marketing internal Communications and we’re constantly call them day Traders they’re constantly
um you know looking at markets differently and sometimes they’ll try to drive more Supply and Target sellers more sometimes they’ll pull back but they are constantly iterating all throughout the country
sometimes at a national level but many times on a local level to kind of make sure that,
supply and demand balances is where it needs to be.

Jason:
[27:50] Awesome and then we talked earlier about like when they check that that available for shipping option that you potentially can facilitate payments,
I forgot to ask.
Right is that exclusively through I could traditional credit card processor or do you guys offer like I imagine consumers could do this outside of you but do you guys facilitate any kind of digital wallet like a PayPal or something along those lines.

Nick:
[28:18] We don’t today but again this is a big growth area for us and I think there’s a lot of opportunity.
To make a much better payment experience in the US.
Especially now if anyone’s gone shopping recently who the heck wants to carry cash around anymore who wants to touch these POS systems at now like the one at the store down the street from me has like a piece of Saran Wrap over it,
and then it and then it right next to it it has a bunch of hand sanitizer so an egg.

Jason:
[28:54] Was already unappetizing now it could kill you.

Nick:
[28:57] Yeah now I can kill you right and so.
If you look to the rest of the world I feel like we are so far behind in the US and you know I’ve had people ask me well why is that and my response is usually you’re asking the wrong question to be asking who what company.
You know is going to be the one that helps to drive this and and I think you know because of our local presence and how many millions of monthly meetups we have and.
You know we have more kind of merchants Now using OfferUp you know I think there’s a big area there in the US but I get I get more and more frustrated.
Week after week of trying to figure out you know another new POS system I could go in there well if I put the chip in all y’all do the chip and then you hit this button why did I gotta do this and I’m.
I just want to pull your hair out every time it’s not a great experience and it needs to needs to evolve.

Jason:
[29:49] Yeah I actually have an Instagram feed that is exclusively pictures of handwritten notes on POS terminals explaining how to use them.

Nick:
[29:58] I gotta I gotta I gotta follow you then because I hear hear.

Jason:
[30:00] It’s Saturday it’s not hard to find.

Nick:
[30:03] Yeah.

Jason:
[30:04] Now how to find material and yeah it’s funny because it’s like people forget but PayPal and the US and Ali pay in China they you know their original purpose was not necessary to digitize cash it was,
to you know create a more robust trust system for peer-to-peer transactions and so I could certainly see that playing out.

Nick:
[30:28] That’s and that’s a big part 2 I mean that is that is a big part is really,
bringing trust into local transactions you know and and online you know it’s,
it’s already there anyway if you’re shipping things it’s already you know that’s that path has been proven again and again so this is definitely an area where we’re pioneering and there’s still a lot to figure out but something I’m definitely passionate about.

Jason:
[30:53] Nice and then unfortunately is like it’s things start opening up from the pandemic we’re likely going to be in a.
Some flavor of recession and you know a lot of consumers could be tighter on credit so you know I could even imagine things like like the installment model and things having a.
Having a role but in addition to that the other thing that would.
Maybe fit at some point is do you guys think about ever helping to facilitate that shipping when that’s an option.

Nick:
[31:25] Yeah so so today we as I mentioned we introduced this in 2018 we have payments and
we’re presently enabling shipping for items under 20 pounds and under $500 so you know part of that was simply just to kind of get the foundation and get the Kinks figured out and there’s been a lot of work,
as you can imagine when we first launched that but over overtime like I envisioned that anything on OfferUp should be,
deliverable in some way shape or form so I think there’s a lot of work to figure out how to do that the right way,
so that will continue to explore different ways to do that.

Scot:
[32:09] So if you’re if you’re not in the payment flow then unlike a traditional Marketplace like an Amazon or Ebay then presumably you’re not taking at a crate
so explain to us what is the business model where are people paying the list or our walk us through kind of the different areas where you make money.

Nick:
[32:31] Yeah so there’s there’s two different I’d say kind of buckets for monetization today at OfferUp and the first one is promotions and the second one is paying so
you know when it comes to Promotions our Focus there simply to help sellers to be more successful.
So you know we have first party ads for example where you know you could come in as a seller and you know you can pay it increase your visibility on the platform
just helps you sell things quicker there’s also a reoccurring subscription model there where you could say okay
myself quite a bit you know I’m going to I’m going to pay a monthly fee and I’m just going to keep rotates a five items into that into the feed
and we and we help to that seller to sell those items faster,
we also have a Autos business where you know this this was
I’d say a vertical that just blew up on us that we had we had wasn’t like we were Geniuses I swear there was probably just a convention
one year and I think Vegas and I think somebody must have stood up and said hey I’m selling a lot of cars on OfferUp and all said and this vertical just beginning.

[33:46] Huge for us across the country and so in the last few years you started to spend more time
thinking about how we can help auto dealers to be more successful so that is another promotional tool where we integrate with their their dealer management system so they don’t always have to use the app you know if a car goes on the lot the magically goes on OfferUp.
We also give them advertising analytics they get a special badge on their profile there’s a handful of things we do to make sure that
this they stand out and so we have thousands and thousands of paying car dealers and that’s growing very rapidly,
and then on the payment side it’s you know today mostly shipping as I mentioned.
And that’s that’s why we’re taking a small percentage of transactions there.

Scot:
[34:36] I’ve also seen some ads like a big Star Wars fan I see game stock advertisers bunch of cool stuff in the Star Wars category is that is that if you guys built your own ad Network or is that pulled from like another ad network of some kind.

Nick:
[34:49] Yeah so we incorporated you know the third-party ads that you see in there are a number of years ago primarily because it was easy one and two it actually.
Helped buyers and it was one of those where I was saying we’re never going to put ads in there it’s going to ruin the feed.
But I found actually the opposite was true where buyers were finding that hey maybe if I couldn’t find that kids bike down the street that I wanted but maybe I could see one you know,
from a you know some local retail store and have it shipped to me or go go buy it.
The other thing that it did was also enabled people to do some pricing comparison right so they maybe they see that brand new bike and they see one very summer,
in the feed and they realize they’re getting a really good deal on that so we do do some third party advertising which you can kind of see through out the feet as well.

Scot:
[35:47] Yeah I think you guys do a great job at it there’s a price and it’s very clearly an ad where it’s not like you know someone named other marketplaces where you’re kind of like you know
Max why is this showing up and you’re targeting is really good to other ones you’re kind of like why am I seeing this random iPhone accessory when I’m over here looking for couches.
So so that’s super helpful you mentioned earlier a bunch of kpis to get the liquidity going give a give lister’s any metrics you can share and you know I don’t want you to
get it any uncomfortable space but anything you can give us about the scale of the business to help them understand I think that would be interesting.

Nick:
[36:26] Sure yeah so I think the you know what I would say you know going back to.
Be buying things from people in the beginning liquidity and my mind is everything you know the switching cost to join to try any marketplaces,
is not not that high so we wanted to make sure that we were we were the best Marketplace we could be for local buying and selling so,
you know what I could say around that is you know on a monthly basis we have billions of dollars in GMB,
from transactions happening on OfferUp and so it’s great to see that we’re providing that value and success for buyers and sellers.
You could also probably glean this from the App Store but you know the OfferUp app is now but installed over 90 million times we’re only focused on the US.
So we’ve been a top I’d say we’ve been a top-10 shopping app for many years now so I’m pretty proud of that considering.
You know we’re up there with giants you know multi billion dollar publicly-traded companies so it’s pretty happy to see that.
You know people have been telling others about OfferUp at such a high rate that it’s kind of.
You catapulted us to the top and we’ve been there for for such a long time.

[37:45] And I think I think the other thing again but I’d share is kind of what I said before is we have markets a lot of our special you know top markets where you know we’re close to 20% of the entire
adult population using Opera every month and I think that’s only going to get better as we continue to improve on the product experience and drive more,
you know adoption there.

[38:09] Let’s try to think again maybe something worth sharing with listeners around just what’s happening you know with the marketplace today and so,
you know if anything you know I really feel for.

[38:22] You know a lot of people and what they’re going through out there right now I think a lot of businesses are hurting not just for additional but also tech companies and.
Fortunately for us it’s the opposite like we are we have been growing so quick over the last number of,
months and the categories are really changed like I think part of the challenge is people can’t you know they can’t go to the store down the street so how are they going to get certain Goods,
and so our shipping business or seeing a lot more people shipping things electronic specially videogames I think video games are very you know trying to keep the kids busy.
You know locally we’re seeing a lot of what I call kind of porch pickups where people said hey let’s stay stay stay safe as socially distance but hey I’ll just leave the you know just leave the dresser out on the.

[39:17] On the on the on the patio or the door and just leave my knee or the matter.
Ring the doorbell and show me that you’re leaving the money there so I think there’s,
you know I think people are behaving differently but we’re definitely seeing a shift in categories where like I said like Fitness is way up household goods Electronics tools,
things around the yard so not I don’t think surprising for most people but definitely seeing it’s been great to see how OfferUp during this time is able to really you know help help people and how those categories have changed.

Scot:
[39:57] Sprinkle the so we saw such an advisor when I say we is interesting we saw the
the stimulus checks hit like starting on the 15th and it’s we saw this kind of overall lift this is all public from webinar we saw this overall lift and then like this really interesting kind of taking off into another gear around then,
did you guys see anything around that stimulus check time.

Nick:
[40:23] Yeah so the you know this is an interesting time of year for OfferUp heart of it is usually spring cleaning,
and that’s definitely happening quite a bit but we’ve also noticed
around stimulus and and tax time it definitely a lift you know you can you can tell when people are getting their taxes or tax refunds and stimulus check so by the day as you can see like this huge,
step up and overall engagement.

Jason:
[40:55] Yeah like on the flip side of that are you finding any extra challenge like you know a lot of your goods were we’re sort of handed off person a person and I imagine there’s extra trepidation about.
Social distancing and stuff like that are you having to take extra steps to make people comfortable with with person-to-person transactions right now.

Nick:
[41:19] So we you know we spent a lot of time just kind of thinking about this and we have a Blog where we posted kind of our overall points of view and guidance on that I think the challenge clearly is it say,
it’s a local city by City,
decision and it’s still shocking to me that there’s still a number of cities that haven’t really quarantined so you know I don’t think it’s our call to be specific.
On exactly what you should and shouldn’t do but we did have some overall high-level guidelines and encourage people to pay attention to what you know your city and officials are saying locally and try to adhere to those.
But I think it’s a definitely a kind of a,
get a thread the needle lightly because we want to be able to help people but we want people to be safe and especially when stores and resources are close like where can they get things right now and so,
I think in one level we’re providing a service to help people but we want them to be safe and adapt.

[42:26] You know we’ve seen auto dealers for example selling cars right now and you’re kind of like well how is that working and what you’ve seen them do.
You know the post an item on OfferUp and they’ll communicate around it and then they’ll jump on the phone with the the buyer and they’ll do title and they do all the paperwork and financing.
And they just bring the card I just bring the car to the buyers house and they just wave at him out the window here’s your car congrats and I’ll leave the key right here for you and.
So this you know you’re seeing people you know adapt during a time like this to figure out how to how to make it work.

Jason:
[43:05] Yeah that’s fascinating and you mention Auto which is a an interesting category to me like you you don’t necessarily think of that as a.
Peer-to-peer ton of play but it really is right like is that a category you guys entered intentionally or was that a pleasant surprise or how is that played out.

Nick:
[43:27] Yeah so as I mentioned a little bit earlier it was it was a pleasant surprise I would love to say we were Geniuses and really figured something out there but,
um I think it’s again back to,
trading this this very easy to use local experience I think a lot of dealers started jumping on our platform because it was so easy to list cars and attract a lot of buyers,
and so we just move clearly benefit benefited from that so you know I think I definitely think today we’re probably one of the top places in the country,
to buy a car I mean we sell.
Millions of millions of millions of cars on offer up every year and so you know it’s definitely a big vertical for us that will continue to invest in.

Jason:
[44:15] That that’s awesome the like another one that I’m just somewhat curious about so I try to follow the Platforms in China pretty closely and obviously you don’t taobao is,
is a huge consumer to Consumer platform there and one thing I’ve noticed over the last like four or five years is.
They have dramatically pivoted from being super product-centric like being a catalog of product to being very content set direct so they’re like really leaning into the microblogs and the short video and all those sorts of things,
like I haven’t seen that as much by anyone in the u.s. like do you think that could work in the US or do you think there’s just a different sensibility or.

Nick:
[44:58] And just to elaborate on what you’re saying are you are you talking about where people are showing off products and are these short videos.

Jason:
[45:07] Yeah yeah it gets it’s like a seller would you know now is likely to have their own page on you know I like think of it like a microsite on taobao and they’re they’re doing like HSN Style,
you know what a little 60-second product demo videos to sell their goods.

Nick:
[45:26] Yeah I mean I think that’s definitely interesting you know I think that’s something that we could continue to explore and play with overtime,
you know I think there is a time and place for that
especially if you’re a power sellers selling you know a lot of items and you want to build some Affinity around what you’re doing you know today at least you know the majority of OfferUp is really kind of overall,
you know peer-to-peer so.
I wouldn’t say your I could see your average seller doing that and depth but I could definitely see I think more powerseller spending the time to do that and then again like I said before these,
phones keep getting better right the quality is getting better all around and so I think it’s just a more engaging experience versus what,
you know what it may have been in the past.

Scot:
[46:18] That’s a good let’s let’s explore that so you obviously spend everyday kind of marinating and the e-commerce juice of marketplaces and transactions or anything where do you think things are going to go in the next three to five years or we’re going to have like.
AR VR or do you think it’s just going to be better kind of experiences along the lines of what we’re having here.

Nick:
[46:39] Well I mean I definitely think there’s a big there’s a big movement happening it’s already been happening but
I think because of covid it’s probably going to move quite a bit faster and that is just the overall again unlocking of local value in my mind you know
85% of Commerce,
it’s still not online today it’s local and I think for everyone that’s in Tech we’ve kind of scratch our heads and like Oh I thought we all used you know the big e-commerce players that are out there and,
um I think they will continue to evolve and probably grow and chip away at that number,
but I think there’s just a lot of Locked Up value all around us and you know part of our vision is how do we create the best experience and help.
You know sellers to bring those those things online so I think that that moment is going to happen,
at an accelerated Pace especially right now you know I think there’s a lot of struggling businesses that,
you know soon as covid hit and their physical store closed then the answer was like well now what do I do and so,
you know if they can bring product online we can help to facilitate those those transactions in the pretty meaningful way so.

[47:59] My vision for OfferUp has always been I just I just want you to open up the app and for almost anything you need locally we have it and we’re able to help you facilitate that in the easiest possible way that we can do that,
so you know again it’s great to see
that we already have you know huge percentage of the population using the product and buying and selling things you you know billions of dollars worth of goods every month but I still think we’re in the first inning I think there’s just a lot more we can do,
you know for our customers.

Jason:
[48:30] Cool nigga you know one thing that we haven’t talked about yet is,
our friends at Facebook like they obviously have this Marketplace platform is that a direct competitor is that like how do you think about Facebook Marketplace and is that getting any traction.

Nick:
[48:46] Yeah I mean to be clear Facebook has had some type of Commerce even before we started OfferUp I mean you know I think,
Facebook has definitely been,
you know a large Network and there’s there’s a zillion different things you can do on there including Commerce so you definitely have to take them seriously you know as a competitor.
You know I think the other thing that I think gives me you know some level of comfort is just how many different things they have to focus on as a company like it seems like.
For every competitor that comes out they immediately have a solution or they’re trying to create their own there so I think they have many different things they’re trying to do and we have one and we’re going to go very deep and do that thing.
The best that we possibly can and obsess over that but you know definitely a competitor and as I mentioned.
Anytime you’re going after a large Market you’re going to attract competitors so.
Yep they’re the out there and definitely definitely spending time on Commerce for sure.

Jason:
[49:55] Yeah it’s usually a bad sign if no one else on the planet ever wants to go after the same Market you see.

Nick:
[50:00] Yeah your idea is probably not a good one.

Jason:
[50:02] And Nick that’s actually going to be a great place to wrap it up because we’ve used up our allotted time but if listeners have any comments or questions
we encourage you to continue the conversation with us on Twitter or on our Facebook page and I really want to thank you for
taking time out from this crazy pandemic to talk with us about marketplaces.

Nick:
[50:26] Thanks for having me it was good to finally talk to someone else because I’ve been hunkered down in my Den now for seven weeks so thanks for getting me out of the office mentally.

Scot:
[50:39] So we really appreciate it and then if folks want to follow any of your thought leadership or anything do you are you a Twitter or you still on prinster you mentioned that was that earlier.

Nick:
[50:51] Yeah you can find me on Twitter at Nick huzar.

Jason:
[50:56] Awesome and we’ll put that in the show notes so everyone be safe and well out there and until next time happy commercing.

EP216 - Marketplace Pulse founder Juozas Kaziukenas 

Episode 216 is an interview with Juozas Kaziukenas aka “Joe” (@juokaz), the Founder and CEO of Marketplace Pulse (@marketplacepulse).

In this interview, we discuss the state of North American marketplaces, their trajectories, and current impacts of Covid-19.

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 216 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Thursday, April 17th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP215 - What to read during a pandemic

This episode is a list of suggested resources to read for those looking to do some professional development in the commerce space.  (all book links are amazon affiliate links)

The episode also features an interview with Rishad Tobaccowala (@Rishad) Rishad’s is the author of “Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data” published by Harper Collins. Additional writings can be found on the Re-Inventing blog. The interview starts at 15:50 of the podcast. Rishad also has an amazing photography feed on Instagram @RishadT.

Another book mentioned on this list is Remarkable Retail: How to Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Digital Disruption – Stephen Dennis. Stephen is hosting a virtual book launch party (including @retailgeek and some e-commerce celebrities) on Tues April 14 at 4:15pm ET, that will include myself and some commerce guest stars. Pre-register here.

Here are some always updated resources:

• A complete list of recommended books for commerce Pros (including a superset of the list provided here, is always available here: Recommended Books.
• A list of 250 commerce influencers to follow on twitter. That list includes 50 commerce journalists.
• A list of recommended commerce podcasts.
• A list of recommended commerce websites and newsletters.
• Finally, when the pandemic is over, here is a list of commerce events.

Here are all the specific resources mentioned on todays show: Personal Development

• How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life – Scott Adams
• Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter – Scott Adams
• Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America – Scott Adams
• The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind – Jonah Berger 
• Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data, Rishad Tobaccowala 

Startup / Entrepreneurship

• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t – Jim Collins
• Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great – Jim Collins
• The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail – Jim Collins
• Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers – Geoffrey A. Moore
• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future – Peter Thiel
• Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz
• What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture – Ben Horowitz
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses – Eric Ries
• The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right – Atul Gawande
• Think Like Amazon: 50 1/2 Ideas to Become a Digital Leader – John Rossman (John was a guest on Episode 181)
• Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win – Jocko Willink
• Future Is Faster Than You Think – Peter Diamandis

E-Commerce / Retail / Case Studies

• Sam Walton: Made in America: My Story – Sam Walton
• I Love Capitalism!: An American Story – Ken Langone
• The Perfect Store: Inside eBay – Adam Cohen
• In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives – Steven Levy
• The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World – David Kirkpatrick
• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon – Brad Stone
• Reengineering Retail: The Future of Selling in a Post-Digital World –
• Doug Stephens
• Remarkable Retail: How to Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Digital Disruption – Stephen Dennis
• Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy – Lawrence Ingrassia (Larry was on Episode 207)

Movies

• Glengarry Glenross
• Boiler Room
• The social network
• Girlboss –  Based on Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso’s autobiography #Girlboss
• Office Space
• Startup.com

TV shows

• Undercover Boss
• Shark Tank
• The Profit
• SiliconValley
• Halt & Catch Fire
• Mr Selfridge
• Succession
• Mr Robot
• Black Mirror

Non Conventional

• S1s – Casper, Chewy  (Retail Roadshow)
• Shareholder Letters (Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway)
• Company conference calls – (Amazon/eBay/Shopify/Etsy/Alibaba)
• Investor Relations

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 215 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Wednesday, April 8th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP214 - Stifel Managing Director Scott Devitt on Covid-19 

Episode 214 is an interview with Scott Devitt, Managing Director of Internet Equity Research at Stifel, in which we discuss the potential economic impacts of Covid-19.

In this interview, we discuss the travel, hospitality, and e-commerce industries, with a deep dive into some of the factors that will impact Amazon.

To receive Scotts research and analysis, send an email to him devitts@stifel.com and ask to be added to his distribution list.

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 214 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Thursday, April 2nd, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP311 - Video Commerce with Qurate's Brian Beitler

Brian Beitler is the Founder and General Manager of Live Shop Ventures, a video commerce initiative within the Qurate Retail Group, which is the parent company of HSN and QVC. Brian has also served as the CMO of Qurate Retail Group, in addition to many other interesting marketing roles in the retail world.

We met Brian at Etail Boston and arranged this interview. We cover video commerce, differences in adoption between Western and Eastern Markets. The role of livestreaming, and the benefits of being a "commerce platform with video" vs. "a video platform with commerce." We also explore the origin on Live ShopVentures, it's first video marketplace on a mobile app, Sune, and the benefits on incubating a start-up within an established company.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 311 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, August 31th.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Transcript

Jason:
[0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 311 being recorded on Thursday August 31st 2023 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo.

Scot:
[0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners Jason as you know one of the most common questions we get from our huge listing audience is about live streaming with e-commerce is it a big deal why is it seem to be growing faster in the East versus the west and how important is it to live live streaming so we thought we'd get a expert on the show as a guest that could help unpack that for us all and you better than someone who's LED marketing for numerous historic Brands and served as the CMO for the mother of all video shopping sites QVC / HSN and so that's exactly who we found, we're excited to welcome to the show Brian beitler he is the founder of mobile V Commerce app called soon and the general manager of live shop venters both part of the Keurig group.
And I'm not sure Jason but that's a lot of words in the title but I think it's maybe half of the words in your title but welcome to the show Brian we're excited to have you.

Brian:
[1:36] Grateful to be here and I'll work on trying to lengthen the title so I can keep up with Jason.

Jason:
[1:41] Set your set your goals higher Brian.

Brian:
[1:43] Thank you for having me.

Jason:
[1:48] Brian we are thrilled to have you and as our listeners will quickly figure out and we are eager to jump into all this video Commerce stuff but before we do we always like to give the listeners a little bit of perspective about our guests background and where they're coming from and in your case it's a super impressive retail / consumer background so can you can you give us the version that your mom would share with her friends in the elevator.

Brian:
[2:15] Happy to do so so I'll back up a decade or two but I started well where I consider I started my career was at Mattel that huge toy conglomerate in fact they're very popular right now coming off of a I think a major hit movie.
It's doing very well.
Yes I think so has the rest of the world at this point but I started my career there and fell in love with the toy industry and thought that's where I would really spend.
My entire career when I left Mattel.
In the early 2000s I at the time was leading the core part of the Hot Wheels brand a dream job as a father and a former young boy.

[2:56] But I thought I would give myself a taste of retail in the toy industry so I actually left metallic thought I would spend a couple of years on the retail side working with it.
A brand I knew we all knew and loved at some point in our childhood called Toys R Us and truthfully I the reason I'm here today is I fell in love with retail there, and what was different for me about retail versus consumer packaged Goods was just the speed of retail it felt like it moved at light speed compared to kind of course EPG brand management, and you know I often tell the story you know working in those days to change you know the package on a five car pack took a couple of years to get it to Market and.
I joined Toys R Us and we had this idea to launch a birthday club and.
At the time I went to the CEO of the company John I learned and it was how quickly could you get it in Market could you do it in a couple of months.
And that and I was often running and in love with retail and so spent a couple of years there and then just continued to be given these remarkable opportunities to work with, really amazing Brands and helping them reshape their narratives with their consumers or and or finding new Pathways new emerging ways, I could grow I was you know there at Bath and Body Works when we launched e-commerce we redesigned the site as a marketing site decided oh we might be able to sell something.
Through here and that's been my journey so from from Bath and Body Works to Kohl's department store.

[4:24] Then my hand in the bridal industry and private Equity with David's Bridal and then women's apparel and you know fast forward.
A few few years and here I am at curate Retail Group.
Working in what I think is an exciting future for digital Commerce.

[4:42] All of those roles you know usually leading the marketing you know the marketing or e-commerce function for those various Brands and learning a lot making a lot of mistakes a lot of mistakes I'm getting a few things right every now and then, and you know kind of Landing in a pretty exciting place here at grea where we think we're going to do something you know again interesting a new in the digital space.

Jason:
[5:04] Yeah and a couple of fun facts brand you've LED marketing for for a bunch of those Brands you just mentioned and while you were doing that I was nominally helpful in building a bunch of the the backend e-commerce functionality for those same Brands and so I think without knowing it you've hated me your entire life for all the the features you wanted and didn't get or the the the pace of evolution so I just wanted to apologize publicly for all of that.

Brian:
[5:34] I appreciate that.

Jason:
[5:35] But one of the things I particularly love about your career is is I have this theory that, you know though all of retailers has been profoundly disrupted by digital but not all at the same time and so there were there are industries that are disrupted a long time ago and there's you know if you're a grocer or a car dealer you're probably getting disrupted you know right now and I feel like you serendipitously or maybe intentionally have have been in a bunch of Industries.
Right at the peak of their disruption so your Toys R Us when when shopping online became a thing and then urine Beauty when that became a thing and then you are you are in the the the heat of the the apparel Wars online and now you're you're squarely in the v Commerce space and it's you know one of the things we talked about the most on the show so whether you did that on purpose or not congratulations on on surfing that digital disruption wave.

Brian:
[6:32] No I appreciate that I think much much of it was serendipitous I would say that the pieces that probably weren't was my desire to always work for, brands that were leaders in their respective category or industry and as I look back and reflect that's probably one of the things that has been the most rewarding and probably given me the best.
Growth is being able to work with you know brands that were at the Forefront Mattel at the time was the leader in in toy manufacturing still still are.
Toys R Us at the time was the leader in toy retail Bath & Body Works was the largest kind of.
Bath & Body brand at the time Cole's was it was a chaser of you know kind of the discount Department space and ran past JCPenney's and Sears and its competitors and so that for me has been exciting because you know I think being with those who build powerful platforms, let you learn from the best and you know here I said today with curate retailgeek which owns QVC and HSN.
You know the largest livestream platform on the globe by far the industry, leader having changed the landscape of how you could use television to shop you know some 35 years ago and continued it for nearly four decades now so that part of trying to work with brands that, I felt were really leaders in their space because I thought it would be a great place for me to learn has certainly been intentional and then this digital Crossroad just happened to kind of line up and almost all of those places at the time I was there.

Jason:
[7:56] That is awesome and today I sort of perceive you you are on the Leading Edge of the curate retailgeek Roop with your current responsibilities and I definitely want to talk about those but if I have the story right before you took on your current role you also had broader marketing responsibilities for the core QVC HSN Brands is that.

Brian:
[8:19] I did I did that's that's right I joined you know curate retailgeek rupe.
And 20/20 is the chief marketing officer for QVC and HSN are two largest video Commerce businesses, at the time and you know fast forward we obviously are in the midst of those businesses are in their own form of transformation and disruption right for.
In some ways you know you talk about a Crossroads, ask for businesses you know having come through retail when e-commerce was exploding and and Retail foot traffic was being affected as people.
Spent more time online and less time in stores if you look at where accurate retailgeek Roop you know is today right streaming has remade the way we View television and so we've had to remake our business, there as well primary our audience used to be almost entirely on.

[9:07] You know on cable or we reach over 100 million households in the US we used to reach all of those almost on cable and over the last several years is as people have migrated from cable to streaming services we've migrated our business we still reach 100 million households, but today we reach many of those through streaming services because they don't have cable subscriptions any longer and so, you know joining another business who was in the midst of transformation again was was somewhat serendipitous I was excited about the future video and video Commerce had use that, extensively at kind of my two preceding roles and so part of the excitement of joining curate was joining someone who is at The Cutting Edge of this but to your point that's been migrating, and then as we look at the future we said Gee what places do we really own, from an e-commerce perspective and we own the 10 foot screen the screen that you see in front of you from a living room perspective.

[9:58] We do really well on the laptop you know the desktop for for e-commerce shopping like most traditional e-commerce retailers but as we thought about the small screen that wasn't a place where we had really built, for the future yet we thought were really well positioned we could certainly see what was happening in in Asia and the explosion of Live And mobile driven Commerce.
And realize that that was going to happen here in the west as well.
And felt like we were in a position to innovate around that but we needed to put some real Focus around that so you know about a year ago I stepped out of my role as Chief marketing officer of QVC nhsn, to build live shop Ventures and ultimately to launch the soon platform that we're going to talk about today.

Jason:
[10:42] Amazing and and I for sure I'm going to get into that but I did think you could help us clear up a few just basic questions about the industry first a I now have some some Envy because your TV is 10 feet at home I'm kind of jealous but the.
You you call that V Commerce and I'm just curious like I hear all these different phrases all the time I hear people kind of talk about live streaming when they they don't necessarily mean live and video like is there a preferred label that you guys like to kind of describe this, this industry.

Brian:
[11:18] For sure we love the V e-commerce label in fact we think V Commerce will be the new e-commerce and what we mean by that largely is that, more and more consumers shopping experiences will be driven by video in fact if you look at today's youngest consumer right gen Z or the Next Generation Rising almost all of their Discovery happens in a video experience.
If you think about it and it could come from one of the well-known video players right who's in this space Instagram which has become largely video Tick-Tock who obviously has led the way there YouTube.
All of these places if I think about and I have so fun fact I have six kids, the youngest is squarely gen Z 12 years old the oldest is Millennial 29 years old and I watched their journey and most of their Discovery right the new trip they're going to take.
The next meal they're going to make the next product they're going to buy the next television show they're going to watch is all coming through their video feed.
Yet in the e-commerce space we're still largely dependent upon static images and or in the physical space on boxes and shelf talkers and that's just not the way that the rising generation discovers.
Anything new.

Scot:
[12:34] Yep ingredient it's interesting you have a built-in test bed is that was that part of your strategy.

Brian:
[12:40] I think that that if.

Scot:
[12:42] We need more kids I need to get another generation.

Brian:
[12:44] If you went back in math my career I did a pretty good job landing at the right Brands and price basis for my for my kids ages the only one they might say I got wrong was the bridal industry I was a bit premature on the bridal industry, but but you know as I look back so we do we talk a lot about be Commerce and that for us means live it also means pre-recorded, right it can mean you know things that are that are behind the scenes it's anything that really leverages video to help tell the product and Brand Story to a consumer in a way that helps them make better decisions and get to yes faster.
That's where we see the Innovation going that's where we see all brands needing to play we think it will look different in the west than it looks in the east.
And that's because different consumers and different markets and different level of kind of retail development but we think it'll be globally relevant over the course of the next you know five to ten years.

Scot:
[13:37] Brickell as the entrepreneur host on the program Jason's a big company guy he's a you can tell by his title.
He's corporate drone and he doesn't know who he works for half the time over there there's like he's like I think I have a boss but I don't know I don't know who approves my expense report Seymour, that's how big is a company and you know one of my favorite books is the innovators dilemma where and I'm sure you're familiar with it where you know most companies like tear you they were super Innovative and really did a ton in the category and you know a lot of them don't make it it's interesting to me that you're now working for a company that you know obviously.
Is working to not get caught in that in most companies don't kind of sounds like and I may be reading too much in this you you either put your hand up and said I want to do this or they said we need someone to incubate this and you volunteered I'd love to hear the story of how your kind of like starting this company inside of a bigger company that that's interact to excuse you know the extent you can share our what you want to do that that's always interesting to hear because a lot of a lot of big companies don't do that.

Brian:
[14:39] No I appreciate that you know we feel, you know we I feel honored to kind of be in an organization and part of a company that's trying to lead that way Forbes just named, secure it retail one of the you know the country's top three hundred Innovative companies right so we're recognized for having thought about this space and we've innovated over the course of the last, 35 plus years if you were to look at what QVC nhsn looked like 30 years ago they look very different than what you see today both in the way that we reach interact with customers and so you know the story here you know I'll keep it relatively 34 for time sake but we were looking at you know the future of curate and looking for where we think, you know girls could come from I was obviously looking at that in my core role as Chief marketing officer I let our you know our insights and analytics team and we were looking at the consumer and we're looking at the businesses and the ages of and cohorts of consumers where we did really well and where we felt like, there was opportunity for us and one of those that was clear was we had an opportunity with the younger consumer and unlike many many brands that will often make the decision to go how do we stretch our brand younger it's one of the hardest things to do our view was to say.

[15:49] We have a core customer we love our QVC and HSN customers 50-plus their affluent they have disposable income they love to engage with us and Us in this way as we think there is, potential for growth with still the 50-plus customer we have plenty of, consumers who can discover our experience who aren't you a shopping there and we think can fall in love with it but we did recognize hey there's a there's a rising generation that's that's embedded and videos embedded in the way that they operate, why aren't we doing anything there so I did raise my hand and talked a lot about you know that consumer and about the power of video and our expertise and, you know that with.
David Robinson who was a new CEO Who had who had joined us in you know late 21 had a knife or for growth and an eye for the digital landscape and.
You know started he started to think about where our future would would would lead and he knocked on my door.

[16:45] Early and 22 and and we started to talk about what the future could be and how we might do that and decided he decided to establish the e-commerce Ventures is a new unit inside the organization and I join that team to help, you know lead a component of our Innovative future and so it does take having.
A CEO that's got a mind for Innovation and you know the ability to say we're going to make the investment necessary to do that so.
You know this isn't one of those I feel you know grateful for the fact that I get to work in this call it an intrapreneur setting.
We're not chasing you no seed series a series B series C where we're going as a company we believe that we need to invest in the future and this is one of the ways that we can do that.

Scot:
[17:29] Yeah that's neat that you still sounds like you get the flavor of kind of a start-up within a big company but you can use infinite resources you guys have.

Brian:
[17:37] Yeah and that we think gives us an advantage and that that's true I we operate we don't have an operation in New York I soon is based in New York right are.
QVC is based in West Chester Pennsylvania HSN is based in st. Petersburg Florida.
Right so you know we set this up in a new location so that we could operate as an independent and entrepreneurial company but knowing that you know.
Just an hour train ride away I've got hands and resources and folks that can kind of help us get through some of the tougher things of getting something off the ground.

Scot:
[18:09] Yeah exactly now do you have a pretty wide aperture what you could do so you could you say hey we want to just try something real fast on Tick-Tock or is your mandate it kind of needs to run through one of the mother ships or tap into.

Brian:
[18:24] No not at all.

Scot:
[18:25] The mothership or something.

Brian:
[18:26] No we have a very a very wide mandate most of the team comes from Industries outside of kind of are.
Our CORE family fact most of the town I've hired has not been former or current QVC or HSN employees they have been, you know team and talent here based in New York City most of them which is where we found the talent pool that, looking forward to kind of build this future and we have a pretty wide aperture to test and try and that's we say we've been up for for several months now we're still we largely consider this the beta version because we are, finding the things that we think will be the best fit for the market and create the best experience for both consumers for Brands and ultimately for creators because we do the reason we refer to this as a platform is, we don't see this as just a one-dimensional or two-dimensional relationship you know brand to Consumer retailer to consumer, but we're also trying to build a place where creators can build a livelihood as well where Brands can create their own content to connect with consumers and where we've built kind of a new way for consumers, the kind of interact and discover new brands.

Jason:
[19:32] That is awesome and so it sounds like the soon mobile app is kind of the first public release from live shot Ventures am I thinking about that right.

Brian:
[19:42] Yeah it's the soonest kind of our first public facing you know component of the platform we have components that are that will face Brands and that will face creators to help round out this ecosystem that we think.
We'll create a new way for you know these different constituencies to meet one another in a pretty exciting and interesting.
Interesting way and they'll be more to share I'm not going to share a ton about those back-end Solutions at this point but there will be more to share in the future as we as we continue to round out the experience, we think it takes to really make this kind of new be Commerce mobile experience.

Jason:
[20:22] Awesome so maybe you can help it like paint us a picture like what is the unique value prop of soon like is it live is if e-commerce like is there a particular category focuses on or what's the.

Brian:
[20:35] Yeah to know it's appreciate you asking so look at the core of what we're trying to do is take the the style of video that is loved by a young consumer set column you know.
Gen Z too early young Millennials we can't digitally native consumers what we mean by that that's a buzzword everybody said but we simply mean people that seem to have been born with an iPhone implanted in their hand, or some sort of device and if you go back up to 2007 when the iPhone and these devices launched we're looking at people to kind of get there.
Hit their teens or younger in that view I look at you know the way that they navigate and that's kind of our core audience because they've grown up with this fat.
Device being their primary form of discovering the world so that's our Target so our goal was to build.

[21:23] An experience that would make sense to that to that audience so would be short would be fast could would be personalized.
I would include the kinds of voices that they're used to hearing from that they trust and that they find credible.
Would give Brands a place that are searching to find a pathway that are working so hard to build there.
Their products but are can get caught in the jungle that are the very very large marketplaces would give these younger Brands these Innovative brands of place to meet the consumer and to be discovered and to be seen and to have their whole story told.
You know it's one thing to just become a product listing on a.
On a massive platform like Amazon or Walmart it's another to be able to have someone who understands the consumer tell your brand story so the value prop is to really build what we think is this entertaining.

[22:13] Joyful serendipitous shopping moments where you can just discover Brands when you're when you're on the go we think.
In some ways part of what.
So wonderful about the e-commerce experience is also what's so difficult about the shopping experience and what I mean by that is e-commerce made it easier than ever to buy something.
It also made it very difficult to just go shopping and if you think about the experience we used to love as teenagers by the way that gen Z teenager still allowed which is the notion of wandering a physical location a mall or a Target or pick your brand or.
You know any of those physical experiences where you can just wander and things just inspire you and you you may have gone into by something you may have had an idea in mind you may have not had an idea in mind.
But it was fun and it was a Pastime and it was, enjoyable just to go shopping digital Works differently digital is great if you know I need I need luggage for my trip to Europe I'm getting a backpack I'm going to take a three months and traveling through Europe.

[23:18] You can go to the internet and I'll help you find the best backpack in the most array of choices at the price but if you just.
Want to sit back and shop and so our goal was to build a platform where the Serendipity of shopping could come up again you could just thumb if you're standing in line at the.
At the Starbucks or if you're standing in line at the store you're standing on the platform in the subway station, or you're sitting in class and you're done listening to the professor and you just want to see what might be in your feed that's relevant to you this could be as fun as opening Tick-Tock or opening Instagram.
This would be opening shopping for the joy of.

Jason:
[23:52] I love that there's a this entrepreneur Julie rain Wainwright who founded real real and I don't know if she actually said this but she's always attributed with his quote the internet solve buying but broke shopping it's I.

Brian:
[24:06] It's a great quote I've heard I've heard that quote I'm not sure if it's hers or not either but I fully subscribe to and that's and that's the reality and so this is a way to bring it back in a way that we think is relevant to you know this.
Young emerging audience who's up who's about to have a lot of spending power.

Jason:
[24:26] Yeah now I'm curious you've talked about this as a platform and it sounds like it's what I would think of as a sort of two-sided market place that you both have to you know recruit and keep happy a bunch of world-class creators that are creating content and you've got to recruit and keep happy in audience that consumes that content and buys stuff that shows up in the content and my am I thinking about it right in terms of it being a two-sided marketing challenge.

Brian:
[24:54] Yeah I think I think we've called three-sided because we think he have to keep the consumer happy you have to keep the brands and their Founders happy and then you have to, you know create something unique and special for creators who may or may not work directly for the brand that they're going to create content for, and so our thought process is thinking about all three of those audiences as we build and it's why you know we don't see this as a, you know as a Sprint but is building something that we think will be lasting because we're trying to build something that's going to be relevant and meaningful to all three of those participants in the platform.
Will you operate as a marketplace right so we're not buying retail we're not buying inventory in the traditional sense right we're building the destination we're working to drive consumers to the destination we're working to source and find great creative talent that we think can build the right kind of content and then we're looking, and reaching out into the.
You know into the Reit into the brand landscape to find Brands and products that we think would do well with this with this audience and so we got all three of those things kind of.
You know working at once if that's not easy but sometimes the most rewarding things are difficult.

Scot:
[26:04] Yeah absolutely the marketplaces are hard because you're kind of building to businesses at once you get kind of the consumer and thus the demand and the supply side it can be.
But once the network effects it going it's a great business but sometimes it's hard to kind of kick start them do you feel like you guys are at kind of like that product Market fit or you're still kind of.
Experimenting and figuring out or like.

Brian:
[26:25] Yeah we think you know what we're excited about today is the engagement from the number of brands that have come on our platform has gone much faster than we expected.
The consumer You Know download and engagement we're in that that nice stair-step each month each week of downloads, increasing on the platform so we feel that we're moving very strongly towards that you know that market fit place but that's why we say we're in beta right well when we're, one more there will declare that were there and we'll change the even the way that we go to market even more aggressively but we're excited about the early signs both the excitement from creators excitement from from Brands who come on board, and again the excitement from the early consumers who have engaged with us the early adopters and starting to experience the platform and so all of those things right now are very positive and.
Giving us a lot of optimism as we think about the future.

Scot:
[27:25] There's wear it sometimes, great to be in a big organization when you're ready you can say hey we need a little distribution and suddenly you know you can you can turn that funnel on you got to be going to make sure you're ready for it and it sounds like you probably haven't you know you should definitely get out of beta for you do that but then even you know even you know how do you do the shoots the right way and you know, inside the work there's tons of just knowledge around streaming and video quality and I'm sure there's some interesting craters that overlap that would be fun to tap into it even brands that you know I'm sure if you were looking for a brand it's much easier being part of the larger or more brands are going to take your call versus you know Joe's startup LLC.

Brian:
[28:11] Yeah yeah I would say one of our I think that's well that's well well said one of our advantages right is the reality that for you know, for decades we've been helping small Brands become household names become very large businesses because we understand the power of live we understand the power of video and using it to help.

[28:30] You know a Founder commercialize their their story and help it reach and reach an audience and so.
For sure that is valuable as we talked to Brands who go hey this isn't you know this isn't just somebody out of there, out of the corner of their garage going hey we've got an idea for the future of video shopping this is you know the the leader in video and live shopping who said hey we're going to build a new platform a new experience for a new audience and, we're going to bring our expertise to video shopping to that to that platform and we're going to help you learn how to do it as a brand we're going to help you learn how to do it as a Creator both of those things have been very important, add helping us you know get to yes as we don't get a lot of NOS as we have conversations with Brands right now we get a lot of people excited, even in this early Journey even recognizing that we're in the beta phase because they believe in the business where you know we're over 300 Brands already interested in on the platform, at this stage and you know we're early on we launched in March.
And so it's not been hard to get people excited about the potential here and I think part of that is because they can look to the parent of who's building this, and who's making the investment.

Scot:
[29:46] Yeah very cool would you say so that made me I'm a huge shark tank junkie and I always love when Laurie's on there because she always has that trump card of like, I can probably get you on HSN and everyone's like who so she could tend to get a good deal so then it made me think are you dealing with Challenger Brands kind of like you know things we people maybe haven't heard of or is this kind of like you know Kate Spade or whoever I don't want to go into details but like more long-term brands that are just kind of looking for a fresh new channel is there.
Resonating.

Brian:
[30:22] Yeah so we have a lot of what we call emerging Brands and we can define those in a couple of ways right so there you know I'm an emerging, might have been around for 10 years or 15 years but they're just very tightly, geographically located maybe they just had a couple of stores and a little direct consumer website but they weren't really propagating their brand through there, back in the emerging and we have several brands that look like that we also have Brands there.
Relatively young this could be year 1 year 2 year 3 right and they started as a direct consumer brand and they're looking for other points of distribution and other places to be able to tell their story.

[30:58] But we've not preclude ourselves from from other brands that are better known and more, National in nature because again at the end of the day you know where our Focus has been, I'm in the early days is and it's because this is this is an area that works really well and video right or proper products that are problem solution oriented products and, Kelly's are great Brands who innovate and develop some new products that solve a consumer problem those do really well in video right now and if you think about, all the you know Tik Tok made me buy it friends you know so many of those products are built around the idea of hey we've got a new solution, a problem that you have or we've got a new take on solving a problem that has been solved a bunch of other ways but never quite solved this way those are the kinds of products and brands that do really well and we find those both in this emerging space and we also find.
You'll also find it in some more established brands.
But the focus has really been can we bring consumers content that's interesting to watch because what the product does for a consumer is.
Have itself useful and highly valuable and that's if you spend some time on the app you'll see a lot of products, better focused in that in that regard and so you know we've not been exclusionary and by any stretch of the imagination but we do have a lot of young and fun emerging brands with some amazing Founders and some amazing founder stories behind them on plan.

Jason:
[32:23] That is awesome and Brian a fun fact about Scott like most people watch CNBC for Shark Tank and then they accidentally stay on for for Jim Cramer Scott's the one guy that watches CNBC for Jim Cramer and then accidentally.

Brian:
[32:37] Technics days I'm free.

Scot:
[32:38] I watched a shark fresh shark tanks on ABC come on.

Jason:
[32:41] Yeah.
Fair enough Earth but inside not I keep telling Scott Scott keep saying hey we need to get on On Cue be on Shark Tank to get into QVC and I keep telling him that curate retailgeek has great merchants and if you have awesome product you can get in regardless of what whether you know a shark or not.

Brian:
[33:00] And that you know what that's so true Jason that in the reality is is that again if you have a great product curate wants to hear from you and that's and that's the truth and you know we understand what works well for our audience and we understand what works really well.
For the video platform and if you bring it you can find your way there I will tell you we get a lot of submissions and for obvious reasons.
But yeah you absolutely could find your way there without getting on Shark Tank although a little bit of notoriety never hurts.

Jason:
[33:30] Know for sure so I'm curious about a tactical element of soon it seems like you made a conscious decision to natively be a nap and and on the one hand.
Like man you look at all the data and mobile apps are where it's at like that the overwhelming majority of all minutes spent on mobile devices are an app's you know the top apps have the best engagement and all this stuff but the flip side is, it's a brutally competitive space and it's like really hard to get people to download the app and then it's really hard to get them to to reuse it like I'm curious did you guys.
Like debate about a mobile web experience versus an app and and decide that that's where you needed to be or how is that played out for you.

Brian:
[34:15] Yeah so we absolutely did they say it was probably one of the one of the bigger conversations right as we thought about our future and our Direction working with my team and and.
Our partners to think about hey what's the best way to go forward and build a new shopping you know destination and we certainly researched all the hurdles.
As well but we saw all the things that you highlighted in the beginning right the notion that, more time is spent on apps particularly from from the target audience we were going after the engagement is much higher the commitment once you have it as much stronger all of those elements that.
This is going to be a heavier lift but it's going to be the right lift for us and.
And we have to be committed we know it's going to take time but this is going to be the right lift because inside that app also it just gives you the flexibility to do and create some experiential things that just aren't as as.

[35:12] They're just not as intuitive or as functional as they are in a mobile web app.
Right so you know I'll give you I'll give you one of the features that we love that's just really hard to do in mobile web but amazing an app so you know part of our vision was to be able to create this window, shopping experience again right to bring the joy back to shopping we're literally as you thumb through things consider each one of those swipes the window, write as if you were walking down your favorite shopping destination and you know there's an amazing product with an amazing Storyteller so instead of being on a mannequin in a fixed window it's by a voice that, you know has some credibility and authority and as they tell you about that but what if you want to see more from that brand well you just swipe left.
And you're into that brand store.
Or what if you want to love what if you love this soon said what if you love this Creator we call them soon satyrs that's telling you the product and you want to do you want to see more will you just you know tap the screen and up comes all the video content that that person is created, doing that in a mobile app mobile apps just don't have the same kind of tactical functionality that you can build inside of an app I'll be realized, part of this if we were going to build a new experience we needed.

[36:22] The flexibility in the capabilities to be able to use everything the mobile device gives to you you know ultimately we don't have haptics in our experience yet we will you know they're all those things that are that are native to the app experience that you know.
Is opened up an iPhone and ultimately Android which are not on yet but will be in the future.
That we wanted to be able to have access to to give it the richest experience even knowing we'd have some hurdles and getting apps downloaded keeping them on the device and getting people back to him.

Jason:
[36:52] I got it that totally makes sense another one that comes up a lot in a specially you mentioned it seems like adoptions a little earlier in China so I watched the Chinese Behavior a lot to sort of see a bit it predicts how things will evolve here and it's interesting there are amazing social platforms that had huge engagement that are all pivoting to become shopping platforms right so that's by dance that's we and then there are amazing Commerce platforms like Ali Baba and Team all that are kind of pivoting to become engagement platforms and so that's why you know ding dong live and Ali Baba live and all of these these things like I'm kind of curious do you have a position like in the long run what wins right being a a platform that has a lot of video engagement and adding Commerce to it which in the u.s. I guess that could be.
Tick tock on Instagram or is it a platform that really is good at Commerce and adds adds the video engagement and so you know maybe that's that's obviously but Amazon or Walmart and then I assume like The Perfect combo of both of those is of course you guys.

Brian:
[38:00] Yeah so I'm not trying to sidestep but here's what I'll say, video wins video ends and I'll come back to it and here's a here's why I say that so do I think you know Tick-Tock and Instagram and all those who are building you know shopping experiences into their platform, have an opportunity to win and do conversate for sure do in fact I'll give you an example I often share.
With you know Brands and others as I'm eating and it's a very simple question for both you Jason and Scott have you ever bought anything while you were in an airport.
From a retailer awesome have you ever gone to the airport have you ever gone to the airport to go shopping.

[38:36] Right so the reality is that airports have a purpose right which is they help you get from one place to another and it's a very valuable part of your life experience.
But what airports learned is have had a lot of people in my space I'll bet if I put some stores in here for you those people will buy something that is for sure going to be true with these social platforms they have a lot of people in their space.

[38:59] If they create opportunities for people to buy people will buy but the purpose for opening Tik-Tok is not to go shopping, and people are finding Pathways there because that's like that's a place where I'm at and I'm learning their shopping there so now I can do this so I know if I'm Atlanta I like Ferragamo I know in the Atlanta airport there's a Ferragamo so I can find my way there.
As a as a consumer and make it a point to go there when I'm in airports where I know the brands that I like are at, but that's very different than then going to your favorite neighborhood street or going to your favorite you know mall to go to go shopping and so we think those places exist on the other side you have right you have what's happened in the physical space that's taking place in the digital space right so malls have tried to figure out hey shopping isn't enough to get people here I need restaurants and entertain I need other things that are engaging, and team on everybody else is going to go down that pathway as well and go hey, if I want to keep people here I need I need things that are engaging because consumers are expecting more well-rounded experiences from all the places that they go and so our viewers to say listen if you know let's just build something, that recognizes that that's what the consumer needs and wants and create a place we're going shopping and being engaged and being entertained is, in and of itself the point the experience and we believe there will be space for that for an experience like that but I think I think Commerce is going to happen.

[40:25] In all of these spaces if you bring video to them I think it's going to happen on on you know brand own websites as they bring video that's the that's the core of it, and again if you step back and go well gee how much space is there you know retail such a fixed base well that's what we all said.
You know 20 years ago when e-commerce showed up like e-commerce can't grow the retail space there's a fixed space it's going to be you know give some take some.
At the end of the day retail is just larger as as the platforms and places, have continued to evolve and to explode if you think about the difference between where we are and you know where Asia is and where we see the Western markets I think part of this is understanding that I think Asia is unique in that there.
Retail ecosystem you know take China it's just very different.
From Mars when you consider the scale their population and how much of that is urbanized versus still you know in more agrarian spaces and so it's not exactly the bear to make the comparison between.

[41:25] Those two spaces and you know they have different tastes and different preferences and so I think for us in the u.s. I think part of the difficulty has been we've been trying to apply.
A formula from Asia to Western markets versus saying hey what's the formula that's right for Western markets and video.
And let's let's take stock of understanding what the Retail Landscape looks like here what the consumer behavior and preference for shopping looks like here and then how do you build something that's around that I think brands are starting to figure that out I think we're, you know we're just at the corner we're probably today where e-commerce was in 2001-2002, right so we're on the verge of exploding but if you remember back in those days there were a lot of brands that we're saying yeah we're not going to need any Commerce site.
And and then five years later everybody in the country headed e-commerce site.

Scot:
[42:17] Yeah that first of all you should have qualified your question I'm pretty sure Jason is gone to airports just to go to the Starbucks.
That much of a Starbucks not or are you just like is muscle memory for him he's like I want to Starbucks he just ends up at O'Hare and he's like oh oh I don't have a flight but man this this latte is delicious.
The so I started a company Channel advisor andqvc was an early customer of ours and I got to go on that behind the scenes tour where you can watch the production room and it blew my mind as an e-commerce person because it was like this pure intersection of data meet Stevie because you know the talent on are would have a may be mic'd up, and the producers say when you talked about you know how the vest feels they watch this I think it was like orders per second some velocity.
And they would tell him to talk more about that and if a product didn't make a certain velocity there like next so it's really so I'm kind of thinking you know can you guys because you're you've got both sides of the marketplace are you giving your creators some really interesting kind of youqvc any HSN informed data on on you know.
How how to make a better video and sell more product and that kind of thing or you may be too early in your journey but it seems like you guys Doug be like right in your strike zone.

Brian:
[43:40] No that's the you know that's part of the secret sauce that's why we're so excited about this space it's taking that learning and absolutely the analytics right that we're putting in place and ultimately the.
That algorithms that will drive right the personalization feed and the coaching that's given not just to creators but then ultimately to Brands is all built around enabling their ability to be as effective as possible at producing a video and what works depending on the category so.
That's core to what we are doing at Stone is using data to drive decisions around content to drive decisions around.
The speeds that ultimately will be will be you know shared with consumers right to create as much likelihood or much potential for success as possible and you know you you hit on the head Scott right part of this and part of what's made.
You know curate successful for so long is that what seems very soft.
Is very data-intensive and using data to make those decisions and we see that as being one of our core attributes in our core advantages is a boat as we build.

Jason:
[44:51] That certainly makes sense Brian I'm sad because I know we're running up on time and I have one more topic I want to make sure I get in which is this whole debate of video versus live video and I know you do you think about QVC and there's a lot of scarcity built-in which makes the the live model make a lot of sense and in China a lot of it has scarcity of deals and things in the u.s. I hear a lot of people calling things live that aren't even live and so I'm just curious like what you know do you think it needs to be live or is it a place for both like what how do you guys feel think about the live versus store and play video Commerce.

Brian:
[45:32] Yeah so we use both at soon so we think live live has a role in the sense of creating excitement creating a bit of scarcity also creating the the Serendipity the moment and the authenticity and organic and credibility of the content most of the content.
In our mind is shot or created live meaning we're not trying to do a bunch of takes and a bunch of edits of the work in fact I tell people all the time I said it's part of the magic of one of the longest running show Saturday Night Live it's one of my favorite shows maybe maybe part of your audience loves that show as well as right it's taped in front of a live studio audience and part of what makes that show so engaging.
Right is that reality and the fact that there's room for errors or groom for mistakes you know you may see one or two but it just feels so, in the moment we think that matters a lot in the experience but today.
I don't know I don't know the facts but I suspect a lot of SNL is watched after the fact.

[46:29] But the fact that it was shot in front of a live studio audience is what makes it so engaging so what we think about video we talk about it live here we often mean look what we want this to feel is live like meaning it should feel like you're having a fantastic conversation sometimes it will actually be live.
But the vast majority of the content is going to be consumed post life because let's be honest gen Z doesn't really meet anybody for an appointment anymore from a from a watch perspective right they watch things on their own time when it makes sense for them, and it fits into their their life that doesn't take away from the fact that if the offer is big enough, for the products right right they'll show up in force for a live moment and so we believe that you need both in order to.

[47:15] To create something that's compelling but for us you know largely what we think matters is creating content that is done by people who really know how to speak, can do it in one take right because you know they're good at what they what they do and can bring that level of Candor to the.
To the content and that's that's what we think really will resonate candidly with people of all ages we don't think this is that's just specific to young people that's specific to everybody, we love candidness, we love I think you open the podcast here saying Hey listen if you make a mistake or two we're not going to stop and rerecord and all those things right and you're going to listen part of what makes this so natural is when it's.
Captured in the moment we think that's true for video Commerce as well.

Jason:
[48:00] That I love that that that's a perfect way to sort of describe that the approach it makes perfect sense to me side note the reason we do that on the podcast is because Scott makes so many mistakes that we couldn't possibly go back and fix them all.

Scot:
[48:15] Hey I think Brian was saying we're influent we're popular influencers that's how I.

Jason:
[48:19] I feel like he's like as an l and the Jason and Scot show are the two.
The two top top tier entertainment vehicles I think that's very fair but Brian I'm super sad to report that we've used up our allotted time this has been a great conversation and we sure appreciate you taking time to talk with us.

Brian:
[48:39] I appreciate you having me on the show thank you so much guys.

Scot:
[48:42] Brian if folks want to learn more about your online thoughts or you are you an influencer yourself do you publish somewhere or you just want to encourage them to check out that.

Brian:
[48:54] No you so you can absolutely follow me on LinkedIn for sure I do Post.
On occasion I'm not an avid poster right now because my head has been down here but please do that and then again I would encourage you to download soon if you have an iPhone you can visit us at soon dot live too.
Hear more about this if you're a brand and you want to be a part of it part of what we're doing here please go to soon dot live you can fill out a form and and someone from our our merchandising team will reach back out to you for fairly quickly and get you connected but.
Yeah thank you again for the time.

Jason:
[49:30] Brian we will put all those links in the show notes for anyone that wants to follow up with soon and until next time happy Commercing!

EP213 - Deloitte's Kasey Lobaugh Recessions and the Future of Retail

Episode 213 is an interview with Kasey Lobaugh, Principal and Chief Retail Innovation Officer for Deloitte. This time we discuss a report Deloitte published last year "Boom, gloom, or doom? What the next recession might mean for consumer companies" which is suddenly very relevant to retailers facing the Covid-19 epidemic.

Kasey also gives a sneak preview of new report exploring the history of predictions around "The Future of Retail". Look for announcement about that research on Kasey's twitter feed @klobaugh

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP212- Jason & Scot Show Live Listener Questions About Covid-19 Impact On Commerce

Episode 212 is a live show featuring audience questions about Covid-19 and it's potential long term impact on retail. Jason & Scot get to interact with listeners live. It's also a rare chance to watch the podcast, as the episode was recorded with video, watch it on YouTube. 

Subscribe to the audio version of the podcast at: http://jasonandscot.com. (or wherever you listen to podcasts)

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP211 - ThirdLove Co-Founder David Spector 

David Spector is the Co-Founder of ThirdLove, a digitally native direct to consumer women's intimates brand. Dave founded the company with his wife Heidi Zak.

In this interview with Dave, we discuss the origin of the company, their data driven approach to designing products, the challenges with scaling a DTC company, and the potential role of omni-channel. We also discuss their public feud with Victoria Secret.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 211 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live from the Etail West tradeshow in Palm Desert on Wednesday, February 26th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP210 - Amazon Grocery and News

Episode 210 is a recap of the weeks news, including eTailWest recap, Amazon Go Grocery,  Walmart new programs, impact of Coronavirus, and retailer earnings reports.

eTail West recap

Amazon

• Amazon Go Grocery
• Amazon Grocery Micro Fulfillment
• Amazon Basics Bedding Pop-Up
• Jason's Forbes article on digital grocery: The Race To Reinvent Grocery: How Amazon, Walmart And More Are Trying To Conquer The Space

Coronavirus 

• US malls ‘will be hit hard’ if coronavirus worsens, study finds

Walmart

• Walmart+
• Walmart Fulfillment Service (WFS)
• Merchandising Reorg

Other

• Saks - CEO Helena Foulkes to step down 
• Nordstrom - Erik Nordstrom named sole CEO
• L Brands - Sells Victoria Secret, Les Wexler steps down

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 210 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, March 4th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP209 - Moosejaw CEO Eoin Comerford

Eoin Comerford is the CEO of MooseJaw. An omni-channel outdoor retailer, acquired by Walmart in 2017.

In this interview with Eoin we discuss Moosejaw's unique positioning as "The most fun outdoor retailer on the planet" and some of the innovative marketing campaigns Moosejaw has developed. We also explore their omni-channel strategy, rewards program, owned products, and some of the systemic headwinds facing the apparel industry.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 209 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live from the Etail West tradeshow in Palm Desert on Tuesday, February 25th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP208 - Elliot CEO and Founder, Sergio Villasenor 

Sergio Villasenor (@sir_gee_ohhhhh) is the CEO and Founder of Elliot. Elliot is a modern, mobile first e-commerce platform that describes itself as: "The easiest way to sell there, there, there too, yes there & yes all the way over there. No-code e-commerce platform for every there & where you want to sell."

In this interview with Sergio, we get a great overview of Elliot's features, what sets it apart, and what their vision for the first is. Sergio also breaks some news about the platform. As of April 1st, they will offer a free SaaS version (except for payment processing fees), and will open source the entire platform.

You can join Elliots WhatsApp group by sending a message to 347-715-0728, and get early access to new features.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 208 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, February 20th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP207 - "Billion Dollar Brand Club" author Lawrence Ingrassia h

Lawrence Ingrassia (ingrassia.larry@gmail.com) is the author of "Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy". (Amazon Affiliate Link)

In this interview with Larry, we discuss many of the brands covered in the book including Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, eSalon, Mohawk, Anker and Tuft & Needle, as well as many of the ecosystem companies that developed to enable the DTC movement including Facebook, Quiet Logistics and Locus Robotics.

We discuss the trends of DTC companies turning to brick and mortar.  New ways to leverage data to identify product niche (what Larry called the "money-balling of DTC), and what the future may hold for DTC.

We also cover events that happened after the book was published, including the FTC's blocking the Harry's acquisition, Caspers IPO, management challenges at Away.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 207 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, February 11th, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP206 - Amazon Q4 2019 Earnings Deep Dive 

Amazon released their Q4 2020 earnings on Thursday Jan 30th.  In a holiday quarter that has proved to be challenging for many retailers, Amazon soundly beat analyst expectations, and raised their governance for Q1 2020, driving their stock up.  Amazon's market cap is currently larger than the next six largest retailers combined, and their competitive advantage may be even greater.

In this weeks episode we do a deep dive into all the details of the earning report. We look at top line results, AWS, ads, physical retail, and Logistics. We break down what it all means, and leave you with our conclusions.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 206 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Friday, January 31st, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP205 - CES and NRF 2020 Recap

CES 2020 was in Las Vegas Jan 7th - Jan 10th.

NRF Big Show 2020 was in New York Jan 11-14th.

Scott Galloway (ProfG) hosting a 2020 Tech Prediction lecture the evening of Jan 14th.

PSFK Future of Retail 2020 event on January 15th.

We recap them all with a lens on what's relevant to retailers and digital shopper marketers.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 205 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, January 23nd, 2020.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Google Automated Transcription of the show

Transcript

Jason:
[0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is Episode 205 being recorded on Wednesday January 22nd 2020 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo.

Scot:
[0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners well those of you that are regular listeners have probably realized we has been a little while since we put out a show
and the reason why is my colleague Jason here has been traveling like a crazy man.

Jason:
[0:55] This is true I have my annual fun start to the year with the whole CES in RF Marathon which I just got back from.

Scot:
[1:06] I thought this year you weren't doing CS what what what happened we had a client call and Russia.

Jason:
[1:11] Did end up yes having to go for a shorter than usual stay at CES but I did end up having to make an appearance.

Scot:
[1:18] What happens when you're the chief digital retail e-commerce strategist goes goes that way.

Jason:
[1:25] Yes when you yes it's true when you have that many words in your title like unplanned trips are part of the bargain.

Scot:
[1:33] Coco we thought would use most the show to kind of catch up on that and then try to work some news in there too let's start at CES in the first of all big question did you get any new gadgets.

Jason:
[1:45] You know a disappointing year for me personally and part of that may be because it was a shorter trip the,
the stuff like the stuff I tend to discover that like I personally want is maybe deeper in the CES catalog and I maybe didn't get to all of those booths this year I kind of had to hit the main.
Main Milestone booths so yeah nothing super excited I got I maybe have a little.
Personal problem hoarding Chargers and cables and so there are some nice new,
um third-party chargers for the Macbook so I did get a new anchor and the new hyper juice hundred watt charging systems.
Yeah no no super important purpose but yes I have some new Chargers that I have to hide from my wife I don't think she even cares about the spending I think she just cares about all the space that the unused.
Chargers take up in our life.

Scot:
[2:50] Yeah there's a drawer there where they all could live.

Jason:
[2:52] Yeah in my workshop it's more of a a system of drawers for.

Scot:
[3:01] They buy hcf like the 1985.

Jason:
[3:05] I mean people people laugh at me but then we need to find a 30 pin Mac charger for iPhone 3 I have one.

Scot:
[3:14] Boom I got it yeah.

Jason:
[3:18] Yeah so yeah got some new Chargers and I did this is kind of CES adjacent but I did get all new
networking hardware for my home office so I think you and I both did internet connection upgrades.
For the holidays and I added a fancy new firewall router access point and switch.

Scot:
[3:44] Furcal are you gigabit.

Jason:
[3:46] I am so so Comcast just add a gigabit in my neighborhood so we upgraded to gigabit and then I'm using,
this cool new device called the unify dream machine,
which is from I want to say it's a Ubiquiti networks and they do a lot of.
Commercial Wi-Fi equipment for like schools and institutions and things and so this is a a.
A Wi-Fi access point a firewall and and said a managed switches that are all controlled from their commercial software.
Way overkill for a home network but fun for tinkering.

Scot:
[4:35] Yeah I think I've seen one of those is it a it looks like a little cylinder.

Jason:
[4:39] It exactly so historically like they met they mostly make rack-mounted equipment and this is the first time they've,
they've made an all-in-one that that is supported by their sort of,
business level software and it looks like a cylinder and in fact it reminds people a lot of,
discontinued Apple Wi-Fi access point and so there's some people from that we're big fans of that,
that I forget what that was called like they are.

Scot:
[5:11] I had one I can't remember it's called him.

Jason:
[5:16] So yeah so people people think it's the spiritual successor to the Apple.

Scot:
[5:23] Cool what else any interesting Commerce news is he yes.

Jason:
[5:27] Yeah I actually thought it was a reasonably important year for Commerce,
like the Super Readers Digest version on this show it's the consumer electronic show I personally have been attending for 32 years it's the largest trade show in the u.s. like 200,000 people,
attend,
many years ago it was a buying show where people from retailers would go to figure out what they're going to carry for the year now it's mainly a PR show where they try to generate Buzz for new products to,
sell more new technologies but it's where a lot of consumer Technologies where watch for the first time so like the DVD player and the if you go back far enough the VHS.

[6:10] Tape system in the whole VHS beta War played out at CES,
and stuff like that in the Apple the Apple iPhone was famously launched during CES but not at CES as a Steve Jobs sort of did some clever counter-programming,
so people go,
both to like sort of do trend-spotting and see if there's any major new consumer electronics platforms that are coming down the path and from that standpoint I would like there's one big one that had the buzz I'll save for the end,
but there was a lot of smaller more tactical stuff that I think is going to have a meaningful impact on,
retail in particular digital merchandising it retailgeek.
So most of the listeners of this show are probably familiar with e-ink if you ever had a currently have a Kindle book reader it uses e-ink,
and it's a it's an important digital display technology because it's Dynamic you can change the image that's on it,
it's reflective so it works in super bright sunlight and it basically takes no power to display an image so you need electricity to change the image but once the image has changed.
It literally is moving ink around on the display and then you could turn off the power in the ink stays where.

[7:26] Where it was and so it's great for for not using a lot of power in an electronic book reader it,
great for having high visibility even in bright sunlight but a very common retail use case is it's the main display technology that used for all the digital fact tags that I talk about all the time.

[7:45] And one of the big drawbacks of e ink has historically been that it's only black and white or only black red and white or only black yellow and white so very limited,
color palette and so you couldn't do really pretty,
just blaze you couldn't use it for really pretty signs and this was the first year that they were showing full color E Ink that look very vibrant and High Fidelity and so.
You know we'll see you that.
You know maybe we'll have some color book readers in the near future and I suspect we'll see it trickled down to a new generation of electronic.
Price labels and fact tags for retail stores.
So that was an interesting technology and a way cooler display technology was released by Delta Airlines of all people.
And and so this is a new technology to sort of replace a.
Video monitor in a public area and it's called parallel reality and so Delta Airlines found this technology and invested in the company and they've announced that the first commercial deployment will be.
In the Delta lounges at the Detroit airport later this year.
And what this technology does is it lets a hundred people stand in front of a TV screen and have each of them get a different Custom Image that they see.

[9:13] So
so very precisely depending on where you stand you see a completely different image so the use case for Delta in this Lounge is all the customers stare at the flight status display and they all,
see a display that only has their flight information or prominently highlights their flight information.

Scot:
[9:32] Okay how does it know who's looking and we're there.

Jason:
[9:36] So first of all as soon as you describe this to someone they're like this sounds like it's going to be some kludgy gimmick and I was super skeptical so two halves of this problem the first half is,
can you really display an image that that is high fidelity and looks like discrete for each person,
and I went in with very low expectations and I was kind of Blown Away like it it totally works,
the the demo they had their like there's like the pixels weren't tiny so you could kind of see the pixels and,
the display is made up of a bunch of.
Of multiple smaller displays so you could kind of see the frame the internal frames so I'd say it wasn't,
but they were super open to saying yeah we know those are the visual flaws like we already have more advanced prototypes that solve those problems and what we deploy in Detroit later this year is going to.
Not have any of those those visual artifacts but basically what it's using is,
beamforming where they're essentially like each pixel is a projector and they can fire different color lights at different angles so by knowing exactly where your eyeballs are relative to the screen,
they can send you an image that's different from everyone else so that's the display technology as it's kind of like a projector inside of a television or.

[10:57] Thousands of projectors inside of a television and it works remarkably well and then you're very,
pertinent question how do they know who and where those eyeballs are to decide what to show each person and the answer to that is,
a combination of Wi-Fi RFID and your mobile phone so this is not,
this won't work for an anonymous use case in the Delta model the reason they're doing it in the lounge is everyone has to check into the lounge and show that they're a member so when you walk into the front desk,
you scan your mobile app they're using cameras similar to an Amazon go set up to track where you are in the lounge,
and they know who you are because you were holding a mobile phone with your unique ID on it to check in and then they're able to deliver your your unique flight information to you so it.
It's a kind of a combination of Amazon go for the identifying the person and their location and this new parallel reality display technology for,
for beaming the different messages and so it.

[12:07] It works better than I expected it seems pretty darn close to real we'll see if they're really able to get this in a while,
lateral out in an airport this year but like if it all works it's pretty easy to imagine a number of use cases for public displays and checkout systems and things like that and retailgeek,
what it would be really handy to be able to show different images to different customers on the same monitor.

Scot:
[12:30] Very cool was this the big one we're waiting for or know there's more to come.

Jason:
[12:36] No no more to come so the another interesting technology that like was kind of spooky as Samsung was showing this.
These avatars did they call neon life into these artificial humans,
and so you walk up to all these five or six foot tall monitors and if there's like a person in each Monitor and they can talk to you interact you with you and they look like.

[13:04] Completely real people like in so you would assume this was a video but these are computer generated people that are extremely lifelike,
and so the idea is that you could potentially walk into a retail store and you know there might be a artificial intelligence help agent.
That looks like a real sales associate that you're basically looking at through a glass window that can talk to you in,
and be more human that was the kind of use case that Samsung was pitching the the more interesting use case to me is like an you,
render different shapes and sizes of people and put apparel on them so you know could you could this be kind of like,
a digital mannequin scenario for retail stores and.
It was scary life like in the one thing I would say is they would call this an advanced science project so these avatars apparently took a super long time to build and they say that this technology is still three or four years away from being completely.

Scot:
[14:09] They have natural language parsing like kids or talk to them and.

Jason:
[14:12] They did but that wasn't part of the the magic so they were using that were using other Samsung artificial intelligence like in fact Bigsby is their artificial intelligent agent too
like decide what the Avatar was saying and to interpret what you were saying and so they weren't claiming any like.
You know new new Evolution there what was new about this neon life,
technology was how lifelike they could make the visual representation of a person and essentially you know it's,
it's like the next step to like not paying actors to be in the movie and instead having these these digital avatars that.
That will be acting in all the movies and stuff.
But I you know if it gets commercialized I can imagine a retail use case for that the next product that really caught my eye in this got a lot of Buzz at the show and I think this was a,
a darn impressive product came from L'Oreal and it's called perso,
Scot you may have followed this because I know you try to stay close to the beauty and cosmetics base.

Scot:
[15:24] I do.

Jason:
[15:25] But so the idea here is,
personalized beauty and cosmetic products that are formulated at home,
so so they initial concept has three different products there's a liquid lipstick product there's a,
liquid foundation product and there's a moisturizer so each of these is kind of a.
A metal cylinder like like one of those Yeti mug type things a metal cylinder and using an app you say I want this color lipstick,
and you know out of a set of holes in the top of this mug,
that exact shade of lipstick or several lipsticks come out that when you then blend them together with a in applicator or your finger like mixed to the particular color that you ordered.
And so the foundation comes out in a color custom color that you ordered the lipstick comes out in a custom color that you ordered and the moisturizer comes out in custom formulation that you ordered so it may be has.

[16:34] You know more moisturizing or sunscreen depending on the environment you're in or the the weather and a particular day and so the
to me the one that made the most sense in the kind of you know coolest use case is the lipstick they do things like you can point your camera at your outfit,
and it will recommend shades of lipstick that go well with your particular outfit and then it can produce,
that lipstick for you and so the reason I thought this was pretty impressive as it seemed to work really well people that tried it were seem to think it was,
not a gimmick that it was you know that they were quality products and they were totally legitimate and you know I've spoken to lots of women that think that the,
the custom shade of lipstick on demand would be,
total useful and I've smoked I've spoke to some women that think the custom foundations would be useful and I just think we're at this inflection point when more and more products are going to be customized for each individual user so whether that means
they're fabricated custom at a factory and quickly shipped to you or they have the ability to be customized in your own home this is essentially a
3D printer for Cosmetics or an inkjet printer for cosmetics and so I it to me it seemed like one of the first viable,
custom products in this category and one little Nuance that I thought was really clever about the whole thing.

[18:01] That the cylinder like could totally sit on your makeup counter at home and it seems like it would fit just fine but what happens when you want to take your lipstick with you and put it in your purse like that wouldn't work very well so it turns out the top of all of these cylinders,
is removable and it's magnetically attached to the cylinder so after you specify a color and it mixes some of that color up
you can just take the top of the cylinder off which is kind of the size of a makeup compact throw it in your purse and take your custom color with you so,
pretty clever and then you buy refill cartridges just like you'd buy refill ink for an inkjet printer.

Scot:
[18:39] That's where all the money is.

Jason:
[18:40] Yeah oh for sure but so I thought that was super interesting when you get into the Health Pavilion,
there were a number of players like one that caught my eyes was called DNA nudge and these guys are essentially doing a DNA test
and then they're helping you select,
Foods diet nutrition that match your unique DNA so again going back to this notion of customization that like,
you know the diet you select the foods you buy should all be predicated based on your your underlying DNA that they help you help you find.

Scot:
[19:20] Did you just come back and say error you are 99% an espresso beverage.

Jason:
[19:26] That is funny so I have.
Carefully avoided doing any of these DNA because I actually think there's some like significant privacy concerns and I like I don't know maybe I'm I'm.
Overly cautious but like I haven't wanted to just give my DNA to one of these for-profit companies with like dubious privacy policies.

Scot:
[19:53] Cool.

Jason:
[19:55] I don't know what about you Scott are you totally in on 23andMe do you do it like every month to see if your DNA is changing.

Scot:
[20:01] I've done both yeah it's pretty interesting.

Jason:
[20:03] Okay yeah I will be honest I would be totally.

Scot:
[20:06] Hi I don't have any murders out there I'm worried about.

Jason:
[20:09] Yeah well I read too much of a boring life to be very worried but I but here's the thing you could have an interesting relative that you're throwing under the bus by doing this.

Scot:
[20:18] Yeah they shouldn't do their crimes.

Jason:
[20:20] My fair enough,
yeah so again I can see it I might be being a little silly on that but I haven't wanted to do that so then you know it's the car thing is a big thing here they are,
like the car car tech now tends to get launched at CES not at the auto show.
So you know there's there's you know some interesting electronic prototype cars that may or may not ever see the light of day.
The huge thing I noticed this year in the car Pavilion is that every car seemed to have an Alexa integration like that seemed like that was.
Taking over as the like.
New cabin Tech that everybody was marketing and so I think Amazon announced that they're now over a hundred thousand consumer electronic devices that have Alexa embedded.
From more than 9,500 unique Brands and of course the new device with Alexa in it that I imagine you're going to need is the Lamborghini.

Scot:
[21:28] Yes absolutely.

Jason:
[21:29] I think that will round.

Scot:
[21:31] Finally took me over the edge.

Jason:
[21:33] Yeah that around out your stable just fine
they're like speaking of am Amazon Integrations I Amazon has a couple booths at the show they have a booth that's primarily focused on the Alexa and a lot of third party you know,
demos with that they have a booth in the home automation section dedicated to key and all the last mile Solutions and things but in the Amazon Booth one of the interesting ones was.
This this cpg company Reckitt beckon sir.
Commonly called RB they make a bunch of products like baby formula and finish is their big brand of dishwashing detergent.
And so they have upgraded all of their packaging to have Dash replenishment built in.
So when you get low on baby formula the box that you bought your baby formula in just recognizes that and automatically reorders more baby formula and when you get low on those.
Those PODS of finished dishwashing liquid the package automatically orders more for you.

Scot:
[22:47] The saw the Lamborghini thing in the it was funny there was like a poster which had like some amazingly handsome Brad Pitt of time looking dude and he said Alexa I'm hot,
and then she said she she knew to turn on the air conditioner.

Jason:
[23:05] Yeah yeah context.

Scot:
[23:07] So maybe wonder how often is Jason uttering Alexa I'm hot to his devices.

Jason:
[23:13] Yeah I feel like that's not even the most concerning thing you need to worry about me saying to Alexa.
I mentioned Samsung Bigsby earlier computer vision was a big thing I felt like half the booths were doing facial recognition for some nefarious purpose but Samsung built it in a refrigerators so,
in the past they've had these smart fridges that for example had a webcam in them so you could kind of like when you're in the grocery store and couldn't remember if you had eggs you could turn on a webcam and see the inside of your refrigerator.
Which I was like to point out probably wouldn't help you because your eggs are probably in a in an opaque car turn it Carton and you can't see how many are in there,
but that pesky detail aside they're now using Bigsby to do image recognition and take an inventory of your refrigerator so the smart refrigerator knows like,
that you have a quart of milk and how many times you've taken it out and likely how much milk is left in that core.

[24:16] So that was interesting there were a thousand Last Mile solutions that at CES so lots of people like with,
clever approaches and not clever approaches to porch piracy to delivering to your refrigerator to delivering to your garage to your car trunk drones and robots,
um
Kind of improved efficiency for for bow pass orders for store pick up orders and a lot of technology for like building mail rooms,
notify residents when they have packages all sorts of stuff like that so this is not really a retail show and so it's just interesting to me how,
booths were there like specifically solving a Commerce problem around the last mile.
Um so all those were interesting tactical things that I saw at CES that I think May,
may I make an appearance in the future of retail but by far the biggest platform that that you know was
the most strategically important that really had his coming out party at CES this year is the new wireless technology 5G.
So they've been talking about it CES for a number of years they've had prototype product but this is the first year that they have.

[25:38] Mass-produced products that meet all the certifications and work on networks that are deployed in the real world so this is kind of the
the first time that 5G was truly commercialized at CES and you know I I suspect in in the show's heart of hearts,
like if there's you know one news cycle that they want to win it's the you know the wave of coming 5G products and that everyone needs to throw out all their wireless devices and by shiny new,
new 5G devices and then it's going to magically change the world and there are crazy stats that they you know site about how much faster 5G is than 4G so,
you know hundreds to thousands of times faster bandwidth
way lower latency way more devices that can hang on the same networks and you listen all this and you go man 5 G's going to change the world it's the most important technology of all times and that's mostly.
The articles that are getting written about it but as I talked to more engineers and kind of you know.
Really started to understand what was going on I actually am now somewhat bearish on on 5G I think it's overhyped.

Scot:
[26:56] Yeah yeah they always the one I see that for his hearse like some remote surgery over 5G and you're like I don't think five G's going to solve the dead spots in fact up I have more dead spots because I won't be honest meat hours.

Jason:
[27:08] I'm not sure I'm going to be an early adopter of remote Robo surgery but if I am
I'm gonna insist that they have a wired connection to the robot and if for some reason they can't have a wired connection I would way rather have a Wi-Fi connection to the robot then a 5G connection to the robot.

Scot:
[27:25] Yeah we're going to belt and suspenders that puppy yeah if we're not yeah.

Jason:
[27:28] Yeah so it's going to be a long time before you ever going to do surgery on me with 5G but like here's here's the,
the huge Wrinkle In 5G that makes it kind of a mess technology for me is.
You know all these Wireless signals are over particular parts of the spectrum right and so like cellular signals and most of what we call LTE or 4G is,
in the 600 megahertz to 6 gigahertz range depending on which company and what what bandwidth they own and so 5G uses that same bandwidth,
and it uses some new band with that the government just sold the carriers that's at a much higher frequency and so it's what they're calling this millimeter wave frequencies and so this is,
20 gigahertz 295 gigahertz a way higher frequencies than the traditional Four G's and all of the,
dramatic improvements in bandwidth that they're talking about only happen on those new millimeter-wave frequencies.

[28:34] So the the 5G technology works on the 4G frequencies and it is faster but it's kind of incrementally faster in the same way that 4G was faster than 3G,
it's so call it
twenty to a hundred percent faster and then you get this you know hundreds to thousands of times faster when you get on millimeter wave and
so couple problems with millimeter wave number one it's mostly not built out and unavailable like there it's,
there are rumors that the the iPhone that comes out this year that will be the first 5G iPhone,
may or may not even support millimeter-wave but there's very limited coverage of millimeter wave in the United States like like when you don't company says they have coverage in a city that's probably one block that they cover
when this millimeter wave technology and then much bigger deal is that high frequency wave.
Is blocked by virtually any kind of structure so not only will it not go through walls it won't go through windows,
um so you won't ever get millimeter wave signal inside of a building for example.

Scot:
[29:45] Think you're gonna have to do your surgery in a tent.

Jason:
[29:48] Yeah exactly so a legitimate use case is
hey T-Mobile can compete with Comcast for internet bandwidth for Scott's home and if you buy it from T-Mobile what they're going to do is put a millimeter wave antenna on the roof of your building and run a cable inside of your house and convert it to a Wi-Fi signal inside of your house
and because the millimeter wave can be really fast to that antenna on your roof like they can legitimately compete with your,
your cable modem but you are not going to have a phone that you walk around in your office that's you know downloading movies in a second.

Scot:
[30:32] Nursing so a lot of infrastructure to be built to solve this millimeter wave from.

Jason:
[30:37] Yeah yeah and those those
like they need many more antennas and the antennas need much quote to be much closer together to really build out coverage for millimeter wave so it's a huge National infrastructure problem
and it doesn't seem like any of the carriers have really committed to like saturate their Market with millimeter wave yet so again you know most of what the carriers are talking about when they say 5G
is 5G over the existing 4G bands and,
it's a little better like I'm sure we'll all enjoy it but it it's by no means game-changing so that's that was kind of my,
my CES recap I think most people would say oh the big thing that's going to change the face of retails 5G I'm pretty convinced it's actually not but I do think a bunch of these display Technologies are,
potentially interesting and I really think that that this trend of more personalized products is super interesting for Commerce.

Scot:
[31:36] Cool so then you shot straight from Vegas Rider to New York and would a would you see it enough.

Jason:
[31:42] I did so yeah I got to do a prolonged my New York trip this year so I got there a little earlier,
as you know you and I were nominated for an award for best retail media and we were one of the finalists so I actually went to the awards ceremony on Friday night.
And I'm sorry to report that we did not win yeah so not a very credible award obviously I'm teasing.
Is actually the first year of this particular.
In our Enterprise and what they're trying to do is recognize suppliers for the retail Commerce industry because most of the awards are targeted at the retailer so that's kind of appreciate that and that's interesting and it was.
Very well-attended event for the first year but that sucked me into New York early so then I did the whole show I got to walk all the show floors,
and my limited time recap on all the show floors was,
that it was a very incremental year so rather than,
dramatically new stuff and new technology that you know didn't exist at the show asked year most of the booths in the main exhibit Halls were.
Here's our 10% better version of what we showed you last year.

[33:04] And a surprising amount of it was really oriented towards cost reduction and,
operations optimization so I would say like,
the it was rare to see customer-facing stories and improving customer experiences at retail it was mostly about taking costs out of supply chain and taking costs out of operations and Staffing and.
And increase Automation and that you know it things that are important to retail but frankly things I would argue like that's been a play in retail for the last five years and most of the good retailers today have.
Taking most of the COS out and you know so now I feel like to really move the needle you need to be thinking about your customer experience and improving,
that and I did not see a lot of great solutions for that on the inner F floor this year,
the one kind of new use case that showed up in a bunch of booths is what I'll call a smart shelf so this is like Amazon go like technology it's like a shelf that.

[34:12] Either using cameras or sensors or cameras and sensors,
knows what's on the shelf and it knows what you take off the shelf and it can probably recognize you and so sometimes this is used for self-checkout but way more often it was just used for inventory management,
for knowing when something was out of stock or helping navigate customers to the right product or or knowing when a products on the wrong shelf for all these kinds of use cases,
so I like frankly didn't think the juice was worth the squeeze walking the two main trade show floors at in RF,
the the floor I had the most fun on is this Innovation Pavilion that they've had for the last couple of years but it was much bigger this year
and to me like all the exciting interesting stuff was was definitely in this Innovation Pavilion and so this is smaller companies tend to be,
startup companies a bunch of companies,
from other countries like Israel was particularly well represented and you know here you are seeing a lot of Last Mile Solutions you are seeing a lot of.
Like using cameras to solve fitment and returns and things like that so I just I felt like there was a lot more interesting.
New approaches to customer experience in The Innovation Pavilion than on the main main interest rate show floors.

Scot:
[35:39] What was the strangest thing you saw.

Jason:
[35:42] Strangest thing I saw I probably should have come to rehearsal and gotten that question ahead of time so I could have thought about it.

[35:50] Yeah well I'll tell you an odd experience I had so you know I have this weird Affinity / fetish for these digital fact eggs.
And I keep predicting that they're going to be a big thing and they never are.
So of course I had to visit all of the exhibitors at this boot at the show and there's like six or seven.
Big manufacturers and then probably 20 little manufacturers of these things and then RF and so one of the companies I'm not even going to name them,
they're noted in my mind because they were the first tags that Amazon used in the four-star store in Amazon has changed vendors and they now use a different vendor but this first vendor
um had a lot of interesting tags and some new new technology in their booth in the way I remember what I what I see at the booth in order to kind of type up my show notes is I
take a picture of the booth and then I type my notes below the picture in Evernote so I tried to take a picture of this booth and they
tackled me and told me that no photos were allowed and I'm like,
okay do you have like a brochure something I could take no no we don't have a brochure.
So I'm like so wait you have a giant 30 by 30 booth at the show and you paid a bunch of money to come here and like.
You don't in any way want anyone to remember who the heck you are or be able to contact you after the show.

Scot:
[37:13] We were never here.

Jason:
[37:15] Yes I.

Scot:
[37:16] They make you delete the picture.

Jason:
[37:19] No and I mean I could have but I mean I just didn't even want to take a picture at that point I was I just thought that was so funny like
ten years ago that was about get super common thing and people are worried you're going to steal their intellectual property but I feel like if you have intellectual property that you don't want anyone to know about
don't buy a trade show booth.

Scot:
[37:38] Weird that is weird see I knew you had one in.

Jason:
[37:43] So that stuff was all interesting I went to most of the Keynotes and I feel like this is going to be a Captain Obvious comment to you but
I mostly went all the key notes which are all these big retail CEOs
and I've mostly decided that it's a complete waste of time going to any of these shows and sitting in on the on the CEO Keynotes.
Nobody ever said like they're all perfectly media prepped and they mostly Play commercials about their businesses and no you know nobody says anything very like informative or,
you know that isn't already on the public record at these things so I don't know why I always get excited to hear you know some retail CEO speak when.
Like in reality like it's not bad it's just it's just not valuable or super interesting.

Scot:
[38:32] Yeah yeah it's tough there at some point their public companies to so they're in their quiet period by the time this show comes out so they can't even really talked about you know anything that's.

Jason:
[38:43] Oh yeah no I don't even.

Scot:
[38:44] Air and yeah.

Jason:
[38:45] I don't even fault them but I just tough right and so you had like Kevin plank who's you know the founder of Under Armour and you know he recently stepped down as CEO but he's like.
Like Chief brand evangelists or something.
One that got like a little heat Michelle gas is the CEO of coals we'll talk about this later but like you know Cole's kind of underperformed a little bit for holiday and,
and so that's that's interesting but she also won the,
the internet Gala award as the person of the year and there are people that are pointing out like what's the state of our industry of like the.
Person of the year is like a CEO that's like let a company for five years that mostly has been in sales and market cap decline over that entire five-year period.

Scot:
[39:32] Emma close a bunch of stores they've closed Less stores than a lot of other retailers.

Jason:
[39:36] No I would say they have performed better than most of their peers and their Peril I think that's true and that's why it's kind of news that their their performances starting to,
to soften the the one thing that maybe was newsworthy about her Kina like obviously they get a bunch of Buzz for
being the first ones that were all in on like allowing Amazon returns and their store.
Um and I don't know why this gets so much coverage I mean it's an interesting tactic but to me it's not a game-changing thing.
But you know a big question has been like how valuable is that to Cole's like is it working and and she gave a full-throated defense of the tactic and said that it's working.
Quite well and that we're happy we're doing it and that we've expanded it to all stores but then she said like two sentences that didn't like,
and I'm like.

Scot:
[40:38] It was very vague yeah.

Jason:
[40:39] Yeah so so I don't know so that was a little interesting.

Scot:
[40:43] It was interesting there's a lot of pictures on social media accompanying that article and they showed Kohl's store and had a tiny little coal sign and it was just surrounded by Amazon promotional materials all throughout the front of the store and then inside the store.

Jason:
[40:56] Yeah and I think one of the things that's happening is you know Cole's is always been heavily promotional.
Like I think when you return something to Amazon you get like a fifty percent off of a Cole's item certificate that you know they're trying to juice you too.
To buy something presumably it's super little margins when you're on that visit,
so that stuff got a lot of Buzz as you know but listeners may not know a lot of my time as in RF gets booked up with,
these these various committee and Council meetings that are going on and so you know we're members of the digital Council which is a big group of.
Of people that are primarily focused on digital Shopper marketing.
And so you know they have a long meeting at the show and you know I'm still on the board of what used to be called shop dot-org now called the digital Advisory Board.
And we have a long meeting during the show and there's usually some interesting content at those meetings so I would say both of those meetings were good and I'm probably biased because I was the speaker the digital council meeting.
And I gave a presentation about like what western Brands can learn from China so sharing a bunch of,
interesting tactics that are going on in China that my hypothesis is you know that people ought to be trying in in the west and.

Scot:
[42:22] Is this the salty wait for you tried to get your your prediction of QR codes out there.

Jason:
[42:28] Potentially I'll do anything I can.

Scot:
[42:29] Talk about it the Ulta.

Jason:
[42:30] I'll do anything I can to win the forecasting battle against you just got so yeah.
No I did not I did not hit that hard but I got good feedback and I enjoyed doing it it's a scary audience because you know I talk to people all the time but this is like.
50 of my closest work friends that are all like smarter and more digitally savvy than me so like if you say something wrong.
They're pretty likely to call you out on it so which is not necessarily as true in my day job.

[43:04] So I was pleased that that went well and then in a rare treat for me I stayed for a couple days after an RF this year,
and there are a lot of events that other people program to take advantage of everyone being in town for an RF,
so PS FK is a research company that does a lot of great retail content they do a bunch of retail tours in New York the week of in our.
And they had kind of a direct-to-consumer day where they had a bunch of leaders from direct-to-consumer companies come in and talk and so,
I got to send it on that and that was kind of interesting content I think I inadvertently got some Buzz cuz,
unlike some of these really polish CEOs for the big retail companies like the CEOs for some of these startups probably share more information than they should and so one of the founders of neighborhood Goods was there there there.

[44:00] Kind of new retail concept there are like a retail Marketplace so vendors paid rent space in their store they open one store and,
Texas in Dallas there now they just opened a second store in Manhattan and they're about to open a third store in Austin and in our industry via all the Talking Heads I would say they get a ton of Buzz,
and,
you know the one thing they don't do is disclosed like any sales data so you know you never know how meaningful their sales are but the CEO at one point mentioned that their best-selling skew by volume,
by number of units and dollar volume is a t-shirt with their logo on it.

[44:42] And so I you know in my mind thinking like that probably says all you need to know about you know how much of the vendors products they're selling that are paying for space in those stores if they're evil logo t-shirts their best.

Scot:
[44:55] Ouch then he went Savage on social media.

Jason:
[44:58] I did not mean it to be super- but I just thought that was an interesting data point and then I went into the belly of the Beast,
our friend Scott Galloway who loves his predictions as you'll know.
He had an event he's a professor at NYU and he gave a lecture at NYU,
kind of a couple hours sharing his recap of his 2019 predictions and doing his 2020 predictions so I sat in on that and.
I don't think any of the predictions were very new to those of us that follow him regularly like you know he tends to be pretty repetitive and and so these were mostly repetitive,
predictions but there was a question and answer session afterwards and I thought the question-and-answer session was really interesting and people people asked him good questions and he had you know insightful answer so that would that part was fun.

Scot:
[45:56] Yeah he's a very anti Sheryl Sandberg Casper and then he's he's been antitussive for a long time and he's gotten his like face ripped off by Tesla this.

Jason:
[46:06] Yeah so it's funny.

Scot:
[46:08] Predicting it will go bankrupt and you know there's crazy and it's fraud and.

Jason:
[46:13] Yeah yeah he thinks it's way overvalued and he
it's kind of funny because he talks about he like he openly talks about this he's like people that agree with me tend to agree with me on most things I got like he's you know philosophically aligned on most things but he's like most of the people that follow me,
like Tesla way more than me
and they have way more digital privacy concerns than I have so he's like whenever I share my position on those two things I tend to get creamed and so like it almost became a joke like people standing up there were like challenging him on his,
Tesla predictions and like you know people came up and like made an argument for the Tesla evaluation and why it was reasonable and stuff and so there were some,
pretty funny back and forth on that stuff and he was making fun of the fact that like that's most likely what he'll get murdered for,
and then he did a podcast after this event where him and Kara Swisher who generally agree on most things on their podcast like got in a pretty heated argument,
on the whole should Apple unlock the terrorists phones and and Scott comes down heavily on absolutely Apple like should,
should immediately unlock the terrorists phones in the privacy concerns are kind of,
BS in Scott's mind and so and he recognizes that like,
that's the other thing he gets a lot of heat for is that most people that follow him don't agree with that position.

Scot:
[47:43] Wasn't swisher and RF like interviewing the politician or something.

Jason:
[47:46] She was I don't remember who she interviewed because that was during one of my meeting so I missed it.

Scot:
[47:53] I think it was Paul Ryan I didn't understand what the heck that had to do with retailgeek.

Jason:
[47:57] Yeah so there's kind of a tradition that interrupts like a big part of interests job is Lobby is federal lobbying and it that's particularly relevant right now because why.
These privacy laws that all the states pass are passing have.
Potential major intended and unintended ramifications on retailers like a lot of them like arguably make it illegal to run a loyalty program for example,
um so so the lobbying is a big deal in RF it's a lot of their energy as in lobbying and so if you look at the keynote speakers over the last several years in RF
they had Bill Clinton shortly after he went out of office they had George Bush Senior shortly after he went out of office and so they tend to have a
a big name politician and this year it was Paul Ryan but I didn't get to see it
I didn't hear any particularly newsworthy things come out of it but I can't speak to it firsthand.

Scot:
[48:53] Furcal anything else we need to know about NRF.

Jason:
[48:56] So that was my in a referee cap that kind of match up with what you followed on social media in the news or did I give you.

Scot:
[49:03] Was it seemed like kind of the the timing was interesting because you know at the same time you had the Casper S1 filing drop in this kind of,
pivoting to General news but kind of overlapped with an RF a fair amount then you had a fair amount of bad news from Q4
some of this it's hard to tell if it was just kind of there's a bunch of retailers that are kind of in that Molly gedan bucket that held on through Q4 is it's kind of crazy to once you make it to August you might as well not close any stores until
until January so it's hard to know how much is kind of an overhang kind of a holiday overhang and how much is kind of.
The holiday actually wasn't as good as we thought were those some of the topics that NRF.

Jason:
[49:47] Yeah so not in the formal presentations but in the sort of hallway conversations this this was a big point right and,
you know you and I have talked about on the show we were talking about it in December that I sort of felt like it was going to be a soft holiday that you know they were going to be
profitability challenges in talking to people at this show one of the interesting things that kind of reaffirms that it was a soft holiday is
there is apparently like a ton of excess product in the market which has not been the case the last several holidays and so retailers are getting asked to take a bunch of.
You know deeply discounted inventory from manufacturers and what we would call distressed inventory,
that there's a glut of that on the market this year and so that's a bad sign it means retailers didn't sell through all their inventory the manufacturer didn't move as many units as they expected and now they're going to liquidate all that inventory at low cost which.
You know means consumers closets are going to fill up with with cheap clothes and you know it's going to be longer before they can they can sell new stuff and you know a bunch of more of this like.
You know desirable Brands will show up in TJ Maxx and,
places like that so there's a bunch of negative ramifications and you know it's.

[51:06] The my theory is like it's for two reasons like,
that we just did have a soft holiday and people didn't sell as much as they wanted but the last several holidays I feel like retailers have been super careful about constraining their inventory and being really smart and using a lot of,
new modern tools to predict demand better and so they actually,
we're in really good inventory positions the last couple of years and what's different this year is potential fear of tariffs,
and so my my theory which I have no way to validate but my theory is that a lot of manufacturer is particular know they're getting their goods from China.
Made more stuff before tariffs kicked in as a hedge against potential tariffs and so they just ended up with higher inventory positions and they've been you know trying to sell that through to retailers,
and so as you know we have a glut of product and that that actually bodes,
poorly you know for the end of Q4 but also for q1 sales across much of a bunch of retail categories.

Scot:
[52:12] Yeah.

Jason:
[52:14] So I during the show or around the show you know there are bunt you know holiday earnings announcement started to come in.
Before this show MasterCard released there.
Sort of holiday recap and MasterCard has this product called spending pulse where they Aggregate and anonymize all the,
the spending behaviors of everyone that carries a MasterCard branded card.
And they said holiday retail sales were up 3.4 percent from November 1st to December 24th and the online sales were up almost nineteen percent and so those are decent numbers,
that would calm pretty you know favorably with last year I think those are very similar to last year's numbers.
And that would imply that everyone had a decent holiday but then the individual retailer started announcing their earnings and nobody has earnings.
That seems like they jive with that Master card number right so so not shocking the JCPenney was down but they were down you know lower than expectations so they were down seven and a half percent which is huge,
we alluded to this earlier but Cole's was down point two percent and they've been one of the,
the you know better performers in the apparel category for a while so the fact that they're down was was alarming and surprising.

[53:32] L Brands was down 3% Macy's was down,
point seven percent which they had been up the previous quarter so that was a big holiday Miss and then I think to me the one that was most surprising and alarming and kind of triggered some,
some stock alarm Bells was Target and their same-store sales were only up 1.4 percent versus,
5.7 percent last year so that was a big mix against their guidance and you know you,
you listen to that bloodbath of retailers like almost nobody you know performing above their comps and you try to reconcile that with the whole industry being up 3.4 percent and it just doesn't make sense to me I think,
I think that Master Gardener is just wrong or or like there there's something unique about MasterCard carrying people that you know is different than other spending.

Scot:
[54:27] Yeah yeah the.
Jury's out I think until we see how Amazon and they report on the 30th and will be here on the Jason Scott show recapping that for everybody that's going to be really really important and then the second most important going to be Walmart and I'm not sure,
you there in Feb 18 kids are in that off-cycle yeah.
So it's going to be awesome to see how that goes because if they both didn't do well then it really is a head-scratcher but even if they you know let's say Amazon grew like 25% or something.
It's kind of makes the,
you can get the e-commerce number to 19 percent but like what the heck happened to the rest of retail who actually grew everyone that we know that reporting didn't it would have to be Walmart or you know.
Someone else I don't know,
Costco yeah maybe it's the dollar stores there's there has been a bunch of strength and kind of like what we call the value plays the dollar stores the Wholesale Club's the T.J.Maxx has maybe those are the guys that kind of saved the day and there's haven't reported yet.

Jason:
[55:47] Yeah but I think no matter how you slice it like this is another version of bifurcation that like you know if holiday sales are robust like they were not,
robust for everyone that there were you know huge winners and losers and you know if that was the case which it certainly seems like it was
you know you're going to see that play out in you know future store closures and bankruptcies and all the other things that you know retailers have to do when they start to get into distressed.
Situations and you know along those lines I think we have already seen a bunch of announcements now that they've gone through holiday,
the upcoming store closures.

Scot:
[56:30] Any other news you want to cover.

Jason:
[56:33] I mean those are the big things like just to recap the store closures real quick like that was like expresses closing a hundred stores JCPenney's closing 6 more stores
Pier 1 is closing half their stores Bed Bath & Beyond closing 40 stores,
a slightly surprising one of me is bows which had a chain of company-owned stores.
Is closing all of their bricks and mortar they're going to be you know a pure brand and Direct online sales only so you know a significant amount of store closures to start the year,
so it's kind of falling into your whole you know Mama gettin story that you like to always talk about.
And then I guess just a couple of small little news items that are like you know pretty interesting in the Commerce base Google made an acquisition of this company called pointy.

[57:25] And I wouldn't expect people to necessarily recognize pointy but pointy is a,
a data company that makes it super easy for particularly small retailers to upload their store inventory to Google.
So that lets you do local inventory ads where we're like you know you do a search for a coat and Google says oh that coats in stock in this store that's a block from you.
And it also you know facilitates the sort of instant purchasing Google and a lot of other things and so it's it was interesting that Google's acquiring this capability to help retailers on board.
Their inventory to Google much easier that you know could be the first of a bunch of steps we see in Google trying to get more serious about Commerce,
and then you know the Gap had previously announced that they were going to split Old Navy off from the rest of the company,
and they kind of had assigned CEOs and then this month announced that they're actually not going to do that they fired that CEO in the,
the son of the founder I came back to run the company so so a lot of drama going on at the Gap right now.

[58:44] Yeah well I think they were another example like I,
I don't know I think it's a high level the story was a bunch of the Gap brands are underperforming the one Gap brand had been performing strongly was Old Navy and you know so there's an argument that like.
Old Navy wasn't getting full credit in the public markets because they're being dragged down by these other brands so you split up.
The strong brand Old Navy from the weaker brands,
and you know maybe you can carve out more value that of course ignores the fact that,
like all of these Brands share a shared infrastructure the same it stuff the same e-commerce stuff the same supply chain stuff when you split them up you got to spend a minimum shh money to rebuild that you know.
For both companies and and I think the thing that made this untenable was.
Old Navy didn't have a great holiday either and so you know they were left with the prospect of potentially splitting up and having two distressed Brands neither one performing very well and.
You know they just spent a bunch of money and and you know their employees Focus was all put on this this.
Split instead of focusing on on customers and in the right product in the right right brand positioning for that stuff so so I think it became scary and they pulled back.

Scot:
[1:00:08] Must be frustrating imagine if you were on that team and you probably had to separate all the point-of-sale systems and the customer databases and.

Jason:
[1:00:18] Yo and I'm.

Scot:
[1:00:18] Pretty far down the path.

Jason:
[1:00:19] Like I'll be honest I'm sure there were people that were far down that path and the whole time they were doing it we're saying this is stupid we shouldn't be doing this and now they're pissed that they wasted all that.
Because it's yeah it's not going to see the light of day but you know sometimes those are unavoidable things like you know there,
there are storied brand I hope they find their way through it.
But Scott that's probably going to play be a good place to wrap it up because we have hit our usual 1 hour mark so we've used up more than our allotted listener time,
as always if people have a comment or question feel free to drop us a note on Twitter or Facebook
and for sure we need to get those iTunes reviews going for the 2020 year fresh reviews are super important so if you haven't written a review for a podcast yet we'd love it if you jump over to iTunes and write us that review.

Scot:
[1:01:15] And make them five stars thanks everybody.

Jason:
[1:01:17] Yeah until next time happy commercing.

EP204 - 2020 Annual Predictions

2019 Recap - Predictions made on episode 159

Scot

1. At least 5k more store closures in 2019. Yes.  9,300 US store closures per Coresight.
2. Amazon – Prof Galloway is big on Amazon having to create a AWS spinoff and has moderated that to tracking stock. I’m going to predict Amazon doesn’t do either of those things. But this WILL be the year they break ads out. Yes. Galloway was wrong.
3. eBay/Alibaba – I think this is the year when they both need to do something big and the stars are aligning for a combination there. Nope.
4.  Shopify gets acquired by one of the big ad-based companies (facebook/google most likely) Nope.
5. Walmart stumbles in e-commerce. Nope

Score 2/5

Jason

1. Amazon store count exceeds 1000 stores Nope.  571 Amazon Stores
   • 22 Book
   • 15 4-Star
   • 8 Pop-ups
   • 25 Go
   • 2 liquor
   • 499 Whole Foods
2. Walmart buys a last mile firm Nope
3. Another big  bankruptcy (going to be a tougher than expected year, JCP, category killers Office, BBBY, Neiman). Yep (Payless ShoeSource, Destination Maternity Shopko,Forever 21, ShopKo, Gymboree, Things Remembered, Charlotte Russe, Diesel, Z Gallerie, Charming Charlie, Barneys, Sugarfina, etc ...)
4. Mobile commerce revenue passes Desktop – Aided by PWA’s, and payment API’s we see mobile gap narrow. Nope.  60/35/5 Desktop/Mobile/Tablet Nov-Dec via Adobe.
5. Fads (Voice Commerce, Customer facing AI, SocialCommerce, VR BlockChain). Yes

BONUS: Amazon breaks out prime revenue (No)

Score 2/5

An epic fail for Jason & Scot! It turns out the future is difficult to see (and our case the timing is also tough).

2020 Predictions

Scot

1. Shopify wilts a bit - new competition comes out with different angles (marketcap stays static)
2. Fedex does something drastic - buy eBay? Merge with Alibaba?
3. The year of returns - “happy returns” - a startup raises $100M+ in space.
4. Mallageddon continues At least another 8k stores
5. Google gets aggressive in ecommerce
   • 10% traffic to ‘shopping actions’
   • buy ebay/fedex

Jason

1. Walmart - growth slows due to completion of grocery build out. Marc Lore leaves Walmart.
2. Amazon - Opens affordable grocery concept. Digital grocery wars heat up.
3. Owned brands continue to grow. 5% of retail in 2019, could be 8-10% in 2020 (as measured by IRI, for CPG private label).
4. Installment Payments heat up - At least one company is acquired (Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, QuadPay, Sizzle)
5. Digital in-store heats up, QR codes make a comeback

Bonus:  Cashier-less stores (Amazon Go), blockchain, 5G, big data, and personalization won’t have a significant impact on retail. No DNVB will break out. No major retail anti-trust actions in US. Brick & Mortar Marketplaces won’t take off (Showfields, Neighborhood Goods, B8ta). Shopify won’t compete with Amazon.  

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 204 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, January 2nd, 2020.

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

http://jasonandscot.com

Google Automated Transcription of the show

Transcript

Jason:
[0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode at 204 being recorded on Thursday January 2nd
2020 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo.

Scot:
[0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners will Jason happy New Year happy new decade hope you had a really good last decade and I hope you had a good holiday.

Jason:
[0:53] I did Happy New Year to you. I'm with you on that new decade but they're you know there's some controversy about whether it is a new decade or not.

Scot:
[1:01] Yeah I don't believe that it's a it's a 10 plus one problem we'll just to sweep sweep past.

Jason:
[1:07] Yeah it's the twenties as far as I'm concerned so.
Yes but it has already happened I nailed our intro despite the fact that we typed 2019 in the show notes.

Scot:
[1:22] Azle Easter I got them there for you you found it.

Jason:
[1:25] Yeah I was I felt I felt special about myself that I was able to fix that on the Fly.

Scot:
[1:32] Who said the most important question is have you been able to see the new Star Wars movie.

Jason:
[1:36] Oh my God Scott I've been thinking about you nonstop because yes I got to see the new Star Wars movie and obviously we'll will be spoiler-free but I I was totally happy with it and enjoyed it.

Scot:
[1:48] Yeah yeah me too weird thing happen to me where I've gotten to where I kind of like the Mandalorian almost better than the movies so I don't know.

Jason:
[1:57] So here's why I've been thinking about you nonstop my 4 year old is now both feet in on Star Wars everything.

Scot:
[2:06] Good quality parenting right there.

Jason:
[2:08] So we wouldn't want some of the movies there's a ton of like kid-friendly Star Wars content you probably knew all about this but there's like the Lego movies and cartoons and all this different stuff,
and like for Hanukkah he got a lightsaber which he has not been separated from since and.

Scot:
[2:27] Nice.

Jason:
[2:27] We got a bunch of Star Wars books including I got him,
like a graphic novel version of episodes for 5 and 6 and so now every night as part of our bedtime ritual he's his down with me and we we you know read us a segment from the book.

Scot:
[2:46] Give us your Darth Vader voice.

Jason:
[2:48] Yeah I'm not doing any voices on the podcast sorry.

Scot:
[2:53] Baby geek I am your father.

Jason:
[2:55] Exactly I have said that exact phrase tan.
The what's super funny is my wife and I like you have enjoyed Mandalorian and we were watching it one night and Stephen King in like you should have been asleep and it came in and saw I like.
30 seconds of Mandalorian which we have not let him watch Mandalorian but Steven is totally 100% fixated on Mandalorian.
So he's already convinced that mandalorians are way better than Jedis.
Like the only character he likes from all of the previous Star Wars work is now Boba Fett and he like he brings them up and every contact and we're like.
You seen 32nd.

Scot:
[3:44] Team Honda.

Jason:
[3:47] Anything he's like he's like four and he's asking like.
Like when he sees Yoda in like Clone Wars he's asking like how is he only a baby in Mandalorian.

Scot:
[3:59] You have time like it's really confusing.

Jason:
[4:05] Star Wars is super confusing to explain to a four year old white guy because you start with the premise that like the bad guys have red lightsabers in the good guys have other colors and then like,
it's only Don's I knew that all the bad guys used to be good guys and then become good guys again and so I.
It's super like that Santa can that it yeah yeah it's a very convoluted but suffice it to say there's a bunch of Mandalorian and baby Yoda posters up in his room and he's like we're leaving in a Mandalorian World which just makes me think of you.

Scot:
[4:37] Regal Walden toys are coming out so that it's going to be exciting in the next couple of weeks are all the they held them because they didn't want to spoil some of the plot elements of Mandalorian soon there's a big wave of toys coming so it's good time.

Jason:
[4:50] I know and in fact a bunch of entrepreneurial people because they did not release baby Yoda toys during the show because they were trying to prove your point keep him Secret.
So everybody and their brother started making baby Yoda toys and like there's been like you know a huge intellectual property Crackdown and there's like you know hundreds of people from Etsy that have been.
Don the cease-and-desist orders over that.

Scot:
[5:17] Speaking of toys I saw on Twitter that you were going to try to hit one of the new Toys R Us did you make it to him.

Jason:
[5:24] I did I am wearing a button right now that says I don't want to grow up I'm a Toys R Us kid.
Because I went to the Houston store a few days after it open so there's,
Tyreke and for our listeners like Toys R Us went bankrupt or done at super sad huge disruption in the toy industry,
a company bought the the intellectual property of Toys R Us and they did a partnership with beta who's been on the show a couple times,
the open initially to Toys R Us stores so there's one in New Jersey and there's one in Houston Texas.
So I got to go to the Houston Texas one and it was fun it was fun to see the brand,
back alive and reimagined then it was a you know it's very different than a Toys R Us a traditional Toys R Us store because these are.
Kind of 20,000 square foot Mall base toy stores versus.
80000 square foot big box toy stores but it was a fun immersive retail environment with a bunch of toys and,
this mall which is a a mall Scott like a week before Christmas felt like a ghost town to me like it was.
Tragically empty but I would argue the Toys R Us with the second busiest store in the in the whole mall and.

[6:49] Behind Apple you're exactly right side note people are only in the Apple store to get tech support but still.
But this one was really busy and people like had made a special trip just to go in like the brand is so strong so it looks like these first two stores are doing pretty well and I know there's a plan to open more so
kudos to them for saving the brand and beta for doing a pretty good toy execution.

Scot:
[7:16] Nice the so
thanks for the trip report this is our annual recap and he's always run long so I think we should just jump right on into it so being the first show of the decade and the year
it is our custom I guess we've done this for fact,
to do an annual prediction and then Square ourselves so way back in episode 159 we had our predictions,
or 2019 so I think what we'll do is score each other to start out with and then we'll put out our predictions so why don't you go to my last year predictions.

Jason:
[7:58] And before you jump and let me just say I despise this show I've had red
leading up to the show in the reason is is I've never done very well
that however will I have done I've gotten progressively worse every year and last year while I did quite poorly you did stupendous wave and so,
it's like I've dreaded even seen what my predictions were last year and hearing about them so I'm just going to rip the Band-Aid off and we'll get through the show
but your first prediction for for 2019 was that at least 5K more stores would close in 2019
and let's get this out of the way you blew away that prediction coresite which is the
company we most often use for kind of tracking Us store closures had like 9300 stores closing this year
IHL did a study in the world even more store closures than that in their in their study Dope by any measure way more than 5,000 stores closed and you know in hindsight I should have let you get away with that prediction because that's why,
it was too easy.

Scot:
[9:12] Well no I don't know if there's a lot of people saying but that was kind of going to be the worst.

Jason:
[9:19] That no so if you had said there is going to be worse than last year that would have been a slightly more predict like.
Tempstar 5000 was less than last year or this year but yeah I agree,
most people thought there be fewer closures this year than last year in that bike by depending on how you count did not prove to be the case that much more controversial thing on the whole store closures is it more
open and closed if you go by the course I track her a lot more closed than open but if you go by other studies,
that are the feel more comprehensive like they're actually were more swords that open then close so.

Scot:
[9:58] Yeah and I know the size Matters right to some of these are mattress stores which are pretty big.

Jason:
[10:04] And I whoop all a lot of the people that say way more stores open then close are also counting like restaurants and stores for example and the end restaurants have a lot of charm and so,
a lot of controversy but bottom line you started out of the gate strong you're one for one and.
Your second prediction,
you just you just jumped right into the gutter because your second prediction was that Professor Scott Galloway would basically be wrong.
Which I like as a general principle but more specifically what you're talking about is the,
an inner 9 people the climate a year ago he had just published a book about the the for one of which was Amazon so he was
he was publicly speaking about Amazon a ton and he you know was really beating a drum around having to split up Amazon and they're potentially Amazon would voluntarily spin off some of their businesses because they're so lucrative and so you know the talk to usually about 8 if you ask until your prediction was kind of
to go negative and say
you always wrong and Amazon isn't going to be split up and isn't going to voluntarily split up in any parts of their business and,
you were certainly correct none of those things happens.

Scot:
[11:28] What have I learned from this anti Galloway bet is that he throws out so many things he gets one right and then looks like a genius show his we work one with hit.
The bus was other ones didn't put the he's ridden the we work one for a good six months.

Jason:
[11:43] Yep yeah I feel like he the first one that hit for him that really like you know he made a lot of hay en was predicting Whole Foods would be acquired by Amazon and then yeah he was instrumental in that kind of picking the,
he was an early picker of the we were demise the pressure point
he also predicted Amazon would acquire a bunch of other people besides Whole Foods that they didn't in my favorite prediction is about 3 years ago he said that Amazon had peaked in that you should short the stock.

Scot:
[12:14] I would not have been good.

Jason:
[12:16] Side note yeah that would turned out not to be good investment advice.
So yeah for your point like anyone in this predictions face like the whole key is to throw a bunch out and just remind people of the ones you got right and not bring up all the ones you got wrong.
But you're doing great you're two for two yeah so third prediction that.
Either or eBay and Alibaba would need to do something big in 2019,
and so you use you propose that potentially they might do some sort of joint venture or some sort of combination.
And I have to say he's got as far as I'm aware that did not happen.

Scot:
[13:03] Yeah but itself StubHub when you said that's pretty big.

Jason:
[13:09] No not relative to their socks.

Scot:
[13:11] It was Lucy 4 billion of 30 billion market cap that's more than materiality.

Jason:
[13:23] Again I'm dreading my own predictions so I'm grading you very very strictly enough so I'm going to say you're two for three right now.

Scot:
[13:35] Another thing just point out is the eBay CEO just got up and left one day if that was kind of surprised I don't know if we count that as something big happening or not there's this line with the Borden peace out.

Jason:
[13:49] Yeah need to do something big.

Scot:
[13:50] That's kind of a shot.

Jason:
[13:52] Sell the property will parts of your company and then watch the Executive Suite I don't think that was the spirit of I think you were more proposing they would do something that would help them reacquired growth.

Scot:
[14:05] Yeah but another thing I didn't anticipate us this anti-china thing that we have going on here right now so the tariffs were one thing but there's just.
A lot of anti-china going on right now that I think is going to make this murderer and possible I don't think the US government would let app.

Jason:
[14:24] Yeah I think there's there are some number of entanglements there that that would be challenges there aren't there were some little Partnerships there some interesting things we like,
well I guess it's more JD and the Walmart in the US but.
Back on track your two for three and your fourth prediction was that Shopify gets Acquired and you said potentially by one of the big add bass companies like Facebook or Google +,
once again to my knowledge that did not happen are you agree or do you have a argument there as well.

Scot:
[15:03] I agree and
you know what's really amazing is if you look at kind of your your Shopify when I made this production was their stock is like at 1:44 and they were attending. Nick on all the stuff like 3x so
weather like a 1012 blade on a company now they're $47 company
they're pretty much on acquirable I think at that price and then the valuation multiple is extremely lucky so if you look at all the different
soccer the service companies yet uses range of like 8 to 10 x there's something like 15 to 20 x is just crazy,
good as those guys they essentially don't they will be at choir and not not a choir.

Jason:
[15:53] Totally agree there they're killing it both in terms of their their financial success and valuations but also their they're just winning in the marketplace and they're like you have continuing to capture more Greyhound away from the Enterprise guys and they're doing a bunch of interesting things
so we'll talk more about them in the future I'm sure but yeah they're a bunch of people that would like to acquire them but for your point like
there is not that's not really economically viable at this point and then number 5,
Walmart stumbles in e-commerce and I took that to mean.
That they're the rate of e-commerce growth would slow over 2018 which was pretty solid gross at like 40%.
And they actually were exactly at 40% again in 2020 so there,
they're growing very quickly they're growing faster than Amazon certainly much faster than the,
the market overall and their growth rate in 2020 or 2019 was basically the same as 2018
so like by that measure I'm not giving them a stumble in 2019 but do you you agree or was you think it was some other dimension they stumbled in.

Scot:
[17:15] Agree I probably underestimated how long they had to kind of Wind by converting grocery over but I think this year probably will give you the.

Jason:
[17:29] I feel like that's a common theme in all of our predictions ynm that I've noticed both you and I are sort of afraid to double down and be like wrong one year and then say say it again the next year but many of our predictions come true a year after we predicted.

Scot:
[17:43] Lyrics the Alexa are pause airpods I did like 2 years and then it came up here I didn't God darn it.

Jason:
[17:49] Exactly which is frustrating yes so being super brutal you ended up 245 which is way off your your historic average.

Scot:
[18:02] Yeah I usually bat 500 but it wasn't wasn't there this year I mean on the stuff I feel like e-commerce slow down a little bit.

Jason:
[18:13] Oh no I for sure feel like it has and I do think.

Scot:
[18:16] But the pace of innovation is really slowing which is makes up makes it harder to throw out big predictions.

Jason:
[18:21] Yeah I also feel like
it is this point like it's the timing of many things is tougher to predict than the actual events themselves and the Horizon is now longer than a year for your point so that's
that's that another challenge with this whole predictions thing but I'm not remotely confident that I didn't any better so so
with no further Ado let's let's see how I did.

Scot:
[18:51] Yes yes so your prediction so let's jump into this the first one is you were very giddy you probably had just visited three or four of the Amazon stores and you said look
I am sure this can be over a thousand Amazon physical stores by the end of the year
so I think.
Whole Foods helps a lot here in this is there were there were a bunch of Articles out there that Amazon was going to because Wall Street Journal that they're going to have,
thousands of Stories the right now we're sitting in about five to six hundred so you got Whole Foods
500 Whole Foods there's some pop upstairs for Stars book stores throw all that together you get sky like 555 75
so that's a pretty big Miss 57% is f on any grading scale so sorry I did not get that.

Jason:
[19:53] Yeah no I'll be honest I thought,
perhaps Amazon go with scale and much more you were generous that they were actually a lot more pop-up stores the last year they closed most of the pop-up store so it's possible there's fewer Stars this year than they were last year of you
if you included those so yeah I wildly miss that in the only like slightly interesting thing in that in that whole thing is I feel like the one concept that has scales slightly More Than People realizes the 4-star store
so there now 15 for Star stores which is like coming up on on you know the number of bookstore so pretty soon we might have more,
more 4-star stores that we have book stores but nowhere close to a thousand I was wildly wrong.

Scot:
[20:38] What are the clothes the popups cuz I've kept an eye on them in our malls and they're pretty popular MMOs price at the.

Jason:
[20:46] Yeah yeah well you know for a while they had a ton of them in Whole Food stores,
and yeah I feel like they opened a lot of them in places where they could get real estate rather than in places where.
Where there was a like strategic audience need a few pop-up stores their main are some kind of interesting Concepts so that yeah I don't I don't know.

Scot:
[21:12] So that's 0 4 5 4
for those homegamers keeping track of the score then your second one and this was one where I think the timing probably is going to be what
this was on the heels of Target buying ships and here we are a year later that's gone really well you have Target,
Ecommerce accelerated they're constantly talking about how should you store is doing well and all those initiatives that if they can anchor on ship,
so your prediction was that in 2019 Walmart would buy a last-mile firm and that did not happen I think the big
idea and last-mile will there be a couple one was going to
just kind of Associates kind of on their way home free stuff and then the second one is this whole body camera thing where they're going to
pop Associates right in your house to deliver stuff I don't think that is really caught on either.

Jason:
[22:10] Yeah I know II do I agree I think they I made that prediction cuz I felt like,
that honey how stuff is really growing for them and they would need more Last Mile capacity and I still think that it is true,
I didn't foresee that last year but you know
like as whole food as a FedEx has kind of gone push the last run away from Amazon
that the company they're running to is Walmart and so we we've seen some like bigger strategic Partnerships between Walmart and FedEx and now that you know they're starting to be some some economic weakness at FedEx,
I do not want to talk about this year's predictions but that
you could almost imagine at one point that that could be an acquisition or some kind of deeper strategic partnership but nevertheless
did not happen last year.

Scot:
[23:03] So that says 045 stole your third one and I think you made a comment last year that you need to be less specific to this one's kind of interesting.
And they said there could be another big bankruptcy but then you said such as JCPenney
one of the office guys Bed Bath Beyond need and Marcus so you kind of had an ore in there or are you know we could have took her to this again.
Being generous since we're sitting here at over to there were a lot of bankruptcies so we had the seat jabri we had Forever 21.
What's rue21 was that a result 2018.

Jason:
[23:49] That might have been 18 or not sure.

Scot:
[23:51] One of the maternity stores Payless shoes and we'll see we had there was one of the mattress stores.
So there were there were some pretty high-profile bankruptcies.

Jason:
[24:07] I'm taking the win but in hindsight like that was a lame prediction like of course somebody's going to go bankrupt every year so if you're not specific at Tulane prediction and if you are specific the names I mentioned.
I still am taking the win and I would point out like the one that gets talked about the most which is actually one of the smaller ones is Barney's was like the,
start a story brand that went bankrupt and I know the one that almost doesn't get talked about but was most crushing and near and dear to your heart is sugarfina.

Scot:
[24:37] Yeah. Steer.
Okay so your fourth prediction.

Jason:
[24:44] Wait wait let's recap the score I'm now one of the three.
Infinitely improved over over the previous two.

Scot:
[24:50] Yeah yeah
you're all on at are two more to make up some some room here so your fourth prediction was that mobile Commerce Revenue would pass desktop and lessors of the show know you are a big fan of pwa
which is not a rap band it's some kind of a technology for mobile stuff and also the new payment apis and some of the other stuff you thought we're going to close the mobile,
I'll defer to you since you're the guru on this didn't did you.

Jason:
[25:21] Yeah did we mention that that e-commerce is slowing down a lot,
none of those things happened at near the scale that I thought they would end so for sure no
mobile Revenue did not pass desktop revenue and I I thought I could like save face and say well that didn't happen
it did happen on the big shopping days
bright like so you know you could kind of make try to make an argument that oh I totally happened on December Monday or things like that but the reality is even over the holiday. If you'll get November through December,
60% of all revenue happened on desktop 35% of Revenue on mobile and 5% on tablet so bottom line I wasn't even close.
Sad.

Scot:
[26:12] Yep sorry dude so let's see that gives us one out of four,
all right last chance on number 5 on this one,
Scot of one of your anti predictions you said following things are going to be fads and not take off voice Commerce AI That's customer-facing social commerce virtual reality and boxing.

Jason:
[26:38] Yeah and again not a very awesome prediction but I'm going to take the win on that and say that those things are all we're all basically feds at least in 2019,
the one that feels like it's trying to get some traction and some some aspects of social commerce but but I would still argue they weren't like.
Meaningful in 2019.

Scot:
[27:02] If I give you that one.

Jason:
[27:03] Yeah I'm desperate for I'm desperate for a win that would give me the 22052 at least IU.

Scot:
[27:08] Yeah yeah and then you threw out because you're you're Jason you just couldn't stop at 5
got a Bonus and you said Amazon is going to breakout Prime Revenue you're really specific I had to go back and listen.
Cuz I had a feeling you're kind of get a little slippery on it so Amazon has not broken out that's that's a no.

Jason:
[27:31] Yeah what really happened is I misspoke what I meant to say is that callonwood breakout primary.
For Amazon and I yeah I said it wrong.

Scot:
[27:43] Yeah but since I was a bonus will you know we won't
we won't count it so it's practically a tie this year so which is to me that's a loss cuz over the over the The Arc typically beat me by three or four answers.

Jason:
[27:59] And so it would be a win for me but since you basically came down to my level it doesn't I don't think it feels good for either of us but at least.

Scot:
[28:06] What are you get better.

Jason:
[28:07] At least we've established our credibility now so I'm sure it was on the edge of their seats to hear our wise predictions for next year now that we've shown how I'm nipotent we are.

Scot:
[28:17] We're going to rebound to I can feel it go do you want to join to do yours first.

Jason:
[28:22] No I want to hear you're so I can potentially use them.

Scot:
[28:27] Yep so here's my five predictions so I mentioned earlier that Shopify is kind of gone up 3x in a year that just feels you know,
very nose bleeding to me and there's a lot of new competition coming out so I think whenever you have a value creation event like that where they've essentially created 45 billion dollars out of town are there could be a lot of money chasing Shopify,
I don't know what their weaknesses but every company always has one so it's going to be interesting to see,
what comes after them what angles they come after and all that good stuff so that's that's my prediction is that they're going to wilt a bit and you know I'll put a.

[29:14] I need to put something more specific there I'll say they did kind of stay at this market cap or go down
10% somewhere between kind of here in temperature I don't think there's going to be another kind of like huge run up type your and it's going to be largely
your folks waking up to say wait there is competition out there for this business model.
But you don't think that doesn't get talked about this to turn just has to be like through the roof right so just on a unit turn to have to just be turning tons of customers and now in a cohort,
it probably is its revenue for the cohort pipe the GMB for the cohort crime makes up and then that's what drives the revenue,
overtime it just feels like there's going to be sup Rider light shown on part of their business model that isn't,
this kind of perfect kind of price for protection company.

Jason:
[30:09] No I would agree with that I do think that maybe the one thing that that mitigates that a little bit is they are starting to successfully go upmarket a bit and get like some slightly more.
Stables lower turn customers with higher gym be so so maybe that balance is out in the long run.

Scot:
[30:29] Yeah it's like a million at the base of the pyramid though and it takes a lot at the top of the pyramid.

Jason:
[30:35] It just takes one Kylie Jenner.

Scot:
[30:37] That last.
That's my first prediction my second one and another prediction we would kind of I can't remember which was did that for a long time is part of me just like the earpods I was saying,
Amazon will get into delivery that is,
that would be a double a man because it sucks such an obvious once and for the longest time FedEx UPS said no no no there are partner or not our competitor
the bloom is totally off that one right now where was like okay this is bad in fact you mentioned earlier FedEx is like getting hammered over this
and so did Amazon kind of dug the knife in further where they won't even let seller fulfilled Prime sellers use FedEx because they say the service level isn't good enough.

Jason:
[31:32] Yeah you talk about throwing some holiday shade.

Scot:
[31:34] Ouch ouch so as a result of FedEx is under a lot of pressure right now and I think it's going to cause some kind of interesting thing to happen
you know you got eBay out there kind of rudderless right now you could see FedEx eBay you could see you mention Walmart I think there's going to be some interesting,
kind of marriage that happens with FedEx in and it's can be driven from the world of e-commerce.

Jason:
[32:04] Get I like that one.

Scot:
[32:06] Predictions for 3 this is not my forte but there's just a lot of Buzz around returns so there's several startups you could probably write them better than I can save Mall.
BCS contact me about this which means it must be like just kind of,
yeah they're all trying to solve returns problems and there's all kinds of clever ways of doing this of no Consolidated return centers different ways of managing the supply chain that kind of thing so I'm going to say 2020 will be the year where
you know they're just probably be some kind of a winner that emerges from that and they'll be kind of like ShopRunner has try to do and not to successfully the offer a prime and
a network of retailers that form an alternative prime one of these startups will be successful and I guess I'll Define it as.
Raising over a hundred million something like that something that's like pretty pretty.
Obvious that their leader they'll be pretty successful in in kind of taking a run at offering an on Amazon,
multi retailer multi-brand approached returns.

Jason:
[33:25] So that's funny I wrote a similar prediction I didn't end up using it because I thought it was two wonky but I
totally agree with the sentiment it does like I think it's returns it become a huge acute problem and so you know we're seeing lots of new investments in the hole
reverse Logistics base to try to solve it so it that that seems reasonable although somebody raising a hundred million dollars is not peanuts so the so I like your.
You're taking a stance.

Scot:
[33:58] That's my third and fourth one is a keeping with my mall again which has been a winner for for two years in a row I'm going to say you know what you call 9000 store closures in 2019
it's a good start. So I think we're going to have many more store closures I'm going to say at least eight thousand so continuing to keep,
about the same as last year if not more I think we are going to see,
I just feels like we're still over stored in a lot of different categories like drug stores that kind of stuff so I put that one out there.

[34:34] And then this one this is one of these I've made a long time and I'm always wrong but I've some reason I'm back to it this year I just finally believe
Google has is waking up to the Amazon Fred and and starting ticket much more seriously now they're there,
terrible branding job at it but I think execution wise there is something there they have this Marketplace which is essentially called shopping Google shopping.
Actions and you know the sink,
they're getting pretty serious about it and I think this year they're going to get really really serious about it so what's that mean so I think I think.
Overall I think I could see them actually in the hunt to buy an eBay or FedEx or something like that that could be interesting
and then you know another one is the shopping actions is it's always just been this kind of on the edge like well a little Beyond 2% of
Android latest Android lollipop popsicle
Twix and yes it is a being like percent of a percent of a percent and not Material so so I'm thinking they get pretty serious about it meaning it's going to get a lot of exposure I'm on
not only just some fraction of Android but across all Google properties.

Jason:
[35:59] So I like it how like what were you cancel BC to know that that that happened like you expect them to be like I'd top 100 retailer like what would what's the.

Scot:
[36:11] I think yeah I think 10% of shopping traffic going through it would be material so I would come start there.

Jason:
[36:20] Oh wow yeah that's quite mature okay.

Scot:
[36:22] And I would look at like search marketing as someone like the referee on this search marketing.
Was that search engine land or one of those.

Jason:
[36:31] Ya SE land.com.
At least to get the ball rolling you know the last month they announced Bill ready who is that executive PayPal is the new,
like VP of Commerce a Google so they like they haven't a new person to sort of weed that initiative so that maybe bodes well for your prediction.

Scot:
[36:53] Yeah I worry about it because these payments guys want you when you've been in the payments world everything looks like a nail so so I worry we're going to get Google pay 8.0 embossing.

Jason:
[37:07] So yeah supposedly and I I don't know but I think he's got some non-competes and supposably like is being hired explicitly not to get involved in pain.

Scot:
[37:17] I did not know that.

Jason:
[37:19] So maybe that will benefit you.

Scot:
[37:23] Let's we can only hope.

Jason:
[37:24] Yes yes I like it though.

Scot:
[37:27] All right those are my five what are your five.

Jason:
[37:29] Awesome duck so my first one is I'm just going to take yours from last year and protect them for this year.
Thinking of you just missed the timing and given all the ones that that have happened the past that's my new strategy so last year you predicted it Walmart,
would would have a hiccup in 2019 so I'm going to say in 2020 is the year that the Walmart rate of growth slows down and I don't,
actually mean that that,
is a distressing anyway I just think sometime this year they're going to finish rolling out online grocery pick-up to all of their stores and they're going to have to comp against,
stores that were opened last year where has for the last few years they've had this benefit of opening a bunch of stores and going from zero to some,
some big number of digital grocery so I think it's going to be much tougher to maintain that 40% growth rate so I expect that growth rate to go down,
which is enough kind of natural and then I'll throw out a wacky one and say I also actually think that this might be the year that Mark Laurie exits from Walmart.

[38:43] Just think like,
that he's probably been there awhile like we weave you know started to see some of hit a lot of the jet people have,
kind of transitioned out now Andy Dunn has transitioned out that the guy has basically unlimited funds in the bank like I think he may just be like he's accomplished with what he can accomplish it at Walmart and we we might see a Changing of the Guard.

Scot:
[39:08] Did Nadal Ray say that he had like four years to make a trillion dollars but so it feels like they're being expensive choice.

Jason:
[39:18] Yeah I think it will be a I think he could afford an expensive choice I don't know how that would all work out like I could imagine him to go shooting some sort of payout,
it made sense for both parties will see.

Scot:
[39:35] Is that a nand or nor.

Jason:
[39:37] Yeah so I want my official prediction to be that the rate of growth slows but if Mark Lori does away this year I want permission to go. Galloway and just like launch a website that's called Jason predicted that Mark would we.

Scot:
[39:52] Got it so it's amore with the Galloway Asterix.

Jason:
[39:56] It's the color its color exactly.
So then my next permit prediction again following the trend that I like to always you always make some Amazon prediction so I'm going to steal that and.
How to be honest like part of me feels like this is too easy and not a very controversial prediction but so many things don't happen that that like I do think it's fair
I think this is the year that Amazon finally opens its own grocery concept bike separate from Whole Foods and I think it's going to be
targeted at a more affordable price points and I think it's going to dramatically heat up the sort of digital grocery Wars and most notably,
the Walmart Amazon Kroger battles.

Scot:
[40:44] Cool.

Jason:
[40:46] So number three is that I think we're going to see a lot more emphasis and talk about
owned Brands this year and that's going to significantly grow as a part of retail so last year about 5% of all retail goods were,
like private label type products and I think it could be dramatically bigger in 2020 I think it could be sort of in that 8 to 10% range.
Which would be a huge disruption in the retail Marketplace.

Scot:
[41:19] What's your data source.

Jason:
[41:21] The 5% is actually 4.6%
and I will have to I do have to get my intern to pull it out
but that's predominantly focused on like the cpg and grocery
space so it's one of those those Data Tracking companies but I'll find it for you.

Scot:
[41:47] So it's not Jason Goldberg go to himself.

Jason:
[41:49] No no no I we need a credible we need a credible external.

Scot:
[41:53] Is a data point out there were on the lam purses.

Jason:
[42:00] Yeah I like that one we just put it in the Echo chamber and and it'll become real.

Scot:
[42:06] That'll be interesting so that does that include digital native recall brands or this is more just like Target spending up.

Jason:
[42:17] Yeah,
so I'm primary thinking about omnichannel retailers like Shifting the focus to Brands they own rather than so like to be it's more of the the,
Captain Jack's of the world like I think Walmart's going to make a major effort to grow their own Brands Target you know me
is is putting a huge effort into their new grocery brand and I I just think,
the big macro Trend in in retailers we're going to see a couple retailers really try to can compete on,
sort of Assortment and being the everything store and then in North America to me that's Walmart and Amazon and every other retailers going to try to win by selling stuff that no one else has and so I just think that's going to result in a lot bigger,
Pechanga retail selling their own stuff instead of other people stuff.

[43:12] We shall see ya.
My fourth prediction is you know you you have on the area that there's a lot of momentum at the moment and returns and reverse Logistics another one for me is the installment payment space so I said installment payments are going to dramatically heat up
and I think that's going to result in at least one major acquisition in that space so I think like,
when I talk about installment payments I'm talking about a lot of these companies that are sort of alternative credit means a lot of them are kind of like,
Finance your purchase in for for monthly payments that kind of thing and cities are friends like affirm and afterpay and Karma and I I just think that
you know next year you see one of those acquired Maybe by a major credit card company or Bank
you know I think some of the big traditional Financial folks are going to want to own a piece of that hot space And so there's going to be some good acquisitions.

Scot:
[44:15] Who who do you think this is an addiction but I'm curious who you think the buyers are going to be like traditional like Financial folks like City or or is.

Jason:
[44:26] Yeah so I think I think the big the big Banks participating banks that have a retail credit Division if you are receiving retail credit services so you do private label credit cards for like Best Buy,
these guys are now taking a chunk of that space and and they've accomplished something that you've always wanted to do which is their built into the checkout flow
which is super valuable to these credit card issuers and so I could easily like imagine
one of those credit card firms wanting to acquire one of these guys I also think you could,
you know it could be a PayPal or,
square or you don't even like one of the big credit networks like Visa.

Scot:
[45:15] Singing payments do you have plans to move to Africa this year.

Jason:
[45:20] I was going to but I've been told that I only have one job and so I'm not qualified to to like move to Africa and remotely do my two CDL jobs.
Who would you be referring to buy a by chance.

Scot:
[45:36] So Jack Dorsey CEO of Twitter and and square
it's just kind of randomly said he's going to move to Africa for some. Of time if she can get Scott Galloway it really angered him he's very upset about.

Jason:
[45:52] Yeah but In fairness like I think of you a shit like Square in particular you're like,
why is my guys been in a lot of his time on this Twitter thing and then now he's going to do it from Africa like that that would seems like,
that would be a legitimate reason to have some concern.

Scot:
[46:12] Yeah yeah yeah.

Jason:
[46:14] Yep I would love to visit Africa but I think it would be on vacation and then my V prediction.
Is one that I feel like I used to do all the time and then you know I skipped a year,
so what will try it again I think this is going to be a year that digital in-store really heats up and the surprising piece of that is
this much-maligned a technology that people in our industry like to make jokes about the the ugly QR code I think is going to make a
a major comeback at retail and we'll see a bunch of of a Retailer's deployed QR codes for various forms of mobile wallets and particularly for like,
letting you scan products and read reviews and things like that ends in retail stores.
So those are my five and then.

Scot:
[47:08] DuckTales risky people hate QR you want a visceral hatred of York.

Jason:
[47:12] Yeah I feel like it's it's a bit of sneaky success I feel like there's a lot of people but they're pregnant primarily pendants that like have all this negativity around the QR code but didn't secretly you know.
There there's a bunch of of use cases where the QR codes have been like Paramount like it's,
it's you know a huge chunk of all payments at Starbucks and it's Walmart pay which is secretly been a success and it's you know it's it's Snapchat and if you go to China it's everywhere is WeChat so,
so hopefully we'll see you by usually I am dead wrong in these things so I am not overly confident about any of them but.
But I'm at least throwing it out there and again because the bonus is always treated me so well I thought I would throw a bonus in this year.

Scot:
[48:03] What do you have for this year.

Jason:
[48:06] So my bonus is I'm just going straight negative because I'll be honest when I first read these forecasts all five of my forecasts are things that we're not going to happen and then I realized
that I can't I can't be that guy right so so I tried to make more optimistic reasonable forecast but then I reserve the right to point out all of the Ebenezer Scrooge bah humbug,
moments so here's my long list of things that are not going to happen this year cashierless retail stores like Amazon go blockchain
5G big data and personalization none of those those Technologies are going to have a major impact on retail Talking Heads are going to go crazy about them and write stories about how you know if you don't do it immediately you're going to go out of business,
but I think they're going to be the examples of success are going to be few and far between I don't think,
everyone loves to talk about DJ need a vertical Brands but I don't think any of those are going to break out in a be particularly successful in 2020,
I for sure don't think we're going to see any major retail antitrust actions in the US.

[49:11] So that would be my negative Scott Galloway prediction I also don't think the the brick-and-mortar marketplace stores
so that's beta showfields neighborhood Goods I don't think they're going to have a huge success or break out in 2020 and Shop of eyes getting a lot of Buzz right now but the the,
thing I hear most about Shopify is that they're going to become a viable competitor for Amazon and I actually don't think they're going to compete with Amazon at all in 2020.

Scot:
[49:42] Yeah that the people that say they can compete feel like they think it Shopify would have some front door kind of marketplace Tech experience that kind of what you think people are looking.

Jason:
[49:54] There's people that talk about maybe they aggregate traffic and have some kind of marketplace experience where you could shop across multiple vendors you know they they bought a logistics company this year in the rapidly building out there with just aches and on paper that looks like,
fulfillment by Amazon and some people are like oh that's competing with a fulfillment by Amazon but as I as we said earlier in the show I admire Shopify think they're making a bunch of the right decisions and they're doing really well.
None of the services they provide to a client in my mind.
Replace or compete with any of the services Amazon provides in anyway and like,
I think they're for the most part synergistic in there they're going to have a lot of customer overlap but it's the end of the day
Amazon is in the business of generating a huge amount of traffic and monetizing that traffic and they sell that traffic to their customers
and that's exactly the opposite of what Shopify does Shopify does everything for you but get you any traffic whatsoever and you are totally responsible for bringing your own traffic and so I just think,
that's a that's a,
both sides of that strategy makes sense for both companies but I just I think all the pendants that are like oh you know the secret competitor for Amazon's going to turn out to be Shopify I just don't see it.

Scot:
[51:15] Any other bonuses you want though there.

Jason:
[51:21] No no no no I think I press my luck enough
hopefully that you know there's some nuggets in their our listeners will be able to use they shake their 2020 and that will be able to redeem ourselves when we unquestionably
I enter the new decade next January.

Scot:
[51:43] Yeah you know what
maybe it would be fun as if listeners I'm just doing this off-the-cuff so what if listeners wanted to add some and we could kind of like aggregate
some of the better ones in and talk about them on the next show but then also when we do the recap see what had a third competitor which of these listeners and see how they do against you.

Jason:
[52:05] Yeah that's a great idea because I it's it's kind of boring coming in second so I feel like third would be that's why I've been to just.

Scot:
[52:14] Looks like it would feel better if it smells cancer.

Jason:
[52:17] Fair enough. So maybe I try to take only the worst products that be funny I try to cherry-pick the worst predictions and then it still be me
so yeah I'm totally in on that if listeners want to
jump on to Facebook and we leave any of their own predictions or hit us up on Twitter will be happy to aggregate them put them in the show notes and include them in our recap next year
and that's going to be a great final call to action because it's happen again we've used up our a lot of time so definitely love to hear all of our listeners predictions and also feel free if you just think,
Scott and I are crazy
and you want to refute any of our predictions we'd love to hear your thinking behind that and as always the beginning of the year before you get really busy at work is a perfect time to jump on iTunes and finally give us that five star review.

Scot:
[53:10] Things are running Jason congrats on salvaging a tie out this year.

Jason:
[53:15] Thanks very much it it it it feels good to be West behind than I usually am thanks everyone for listening and until next time happy commercing.

EP310 - Sam's Club VP E-Commerce, Sabrina Callahan

Sabrina Callahan is the VP of E-Commerce at Sam's Club. She participated on a panel at E-Tail Boston entitled "Humanizing your brand through effective storytelling".

After her panel, she sat down with Jason to discuss all things digital commerce at Sam's Club. This broad ranging discussion included:

• Mobile's impact on shopping
• Challenges and opportunities of membership clubs (and their unique access to data)
• Role of omni channel
• Connecting digital marketing channels to digital experience
• Building a brand for Sam’s Club in the digital era

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 310 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on live from e-Tail Boston on Tuesday, August 22, 2023.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Transcript

Jason:
[0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this episode is being recorded live from e-tail Boston Trade Show on Tuesday August 22nd 20:23 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and unfortunately Scott wasn't able to join us so you're getting twice the Jason for the same great price which if you think about it is double the value.
And while I know it's disappointing to miss Scott we're making up for it by having a way better guest I'd like to welcome to the show Sabrina Callahan who's the VP of e-commerce at Sam's Club.
Sabrina just completed a panel here at retail and titled humanizing your brand through effective storytelling Sabrina welcome to the show.

Sabrina:
[1:04] Thanks for having me Jason.

Jason:
[1:06] We are so excited and I'm hoping this ends up being a permanent replacement for Scott.

Sabrina:
[1:09] I think I'm up for it I've heard him so I think I could do it.

Jason:
[1:12] I feel like in the first five minutes you're way more interesting and pleasant than he then he he's kind of a curmudgeon.

Sabrina:
[1:18] I'm not I'm just not even going to say anything but just know that I'm ready.

Jason:
[1:20] Smart so before we get into all the meaty topics I always like to let listeners kind of get to know the background of the guests a little bit so did you work for Sam's Club straight out of the Cradle how did you come to Sam's Club.

Sabrina:
[1:34] Surprisingly no not right out of the Cradle.
I've been here for the last four and a half years and Jamie rule mark my five year so I'll get the coveted 5-year badge but kind of backing up all the way to, my background I was born and raised on a small farm in Kansas.

Jason:
[1:53] And in Kansas a small farm is like 100 acres right.

Sabrina:
[1:57] Yeah exactly so I grew up on the farm grew out in the field by somebody dad does all of the crops and my uncle has the dairy so I was out on the tractors driving the semis trying to not get myself.
Killed you know all of the fun things that come along with Farm life and left went to University of Kansas.
Chuck that's exactly right that's Rock Chalk.
And then graduated in journalism and then made my way down to Dallas so as much as I love Kansas and small-town farm and and everything I wanted to kind of experience, bigger city and been in Dallas ever since and we love it there so worked at a start-up in the beginning my entire career has been in digital and marketing and brand and social media and everything that goes kind of along with that storytelling and driving digital performance so I was a star but at startup and then I went over to Hilton corporate and was there for about seven years loved it there I think I.

Jason:
[3:00] Are you okay this event is a tan on Hilton property.

Sabrina:
[3:03] I know listen you're not supposed to say it don't say it.

Jason:
[3:07] To our loyal Hilton listeners were sorry.

Sabrina:
[3:10] But what if he found out I was staying at the Hilton and walking all the way over.
True loyalty rate my shoes weren't word up for it today but no I was at Hilton for about seven years I loved it there and really grew up there and they took a they took a lot of.

[3:28] You know bets on me and allowed me to thrive I was there in the e-commerce space really when they launched the pilot of e-commerce, and and got to work with some of the biggest hotels, in the world with them and a lot of great opportunity got to start managing people you know they kept growing me and investing in Me And It ultimately LED I was in the e-commerce space for the majority of the time and then It ultimately LED to driving and leading the social media strategy and Innovation for Hilton so it was across all 15 Brands and at the time.
There was a lot of opportunity to kind of pull it together and say what's the role of social media, for a for a big company right not just hey we're going to go post but how do we think about the tech stack how do we think about the member feedback to drive business impact how do we think about, content and how do you think about influencers in the role of influencers in the partnership and understanding the rules of the Ft c-- all of the fun things that come along with that and then how do you make sure that, the Brand's all understand the value of it and lean in the right way so I got to present Hilton's first Evers social center of excellence and then that led to, a lot of opportunity that opened me up in the social space and I was on maternity leave with my third baby, when Walmart came knocking.

Jason:
[4:50] Wow congratulations on that by the way.

Sabrina:
[4:52] Yeah three babies is a lot especially we're in August right now and school starting so it's slightly chaotic around my house but still good so.
No so then Walmart and Sam's Club came knocking and I didn't think I would leave Helton but I really had some fantastic conversations during my interview day and a lot one of the last ones with was with mr. Tony Rogers and have you met him before he's.
Yes so you know you know.

Jason:
[5:26] Put my life in his hands on an airplane before.

Sabrina:
[5:29] Oh yes good luck yeah.
That's good you're here to talk about it so that's good no and so we.
We hit it off and they offered me the job and and four and a half years later it was a big giant move in a bet for me but it was obviously well worth.

Jason:
[5:49] Very cool and you've actually had some really interesting responsibilities at Sam's waiting up to your your turn responsibilities briefly talk about some of the projects you've been in.

Sabrina:
[6:00] Absolutely so his pitch if he will at the time was come build a 60 billion dollar brand with me.
Now how can you say no to that so that was a fantastic first start and so coming in really we built the brand together I learned I think about 10 years worth of information from him about Brandon, three short years but we developed the brand so the look and feel the tone of voice the target audience we revamped all of the marketing channels including you know site email everything digitally and then really launched social media right so Facebook Instagram Pinterest, YouTube you name it all the things that have to do with social media including the influencer strategy again and and moderation and care so.
We did some really fun things I think it was a bit of a whirlwind so our first brand campaigns got to do you know the Super Bowl with Kevin Hart all of the the fun things that come along with leading you know a pretty awesome brand.

Jason:
[7:09] That is very cool and for listeners that might not be familiar Tony was the former CMO at Walmart and Sam's and the next time he calls you I have a feeling free jewelry is going to be part of the offer because he.

Sabrina:
[7:21] Yeah I should make a list of things that I want.

Jason:
[7:26] It should be a long list but be my suggestion that he's at signature Georgia.
Shout out to tell me I know he listens every week very willingly and so in the current role you are responsible for All Digital at Sam's Club and is that a thing is digital a fad at Sam's Club or.

Sabrina:
[7:44] We just a Fab yeah who probably probably gone.
Yeah no big deal yeah is super super fat yeah so I along with two of my peers we lead the e-commerce business and so I'm basically the upper funnel piece, so working really closely on the traffic strategy so what types of traffic re driving in and then how are we actually moving that traffic down the funnel so you can think about that of all of the Cross category, you know Stories the homepage anything that really allows us to show the breadth of what Sam's club offers so not just the categories and Merchandising but also the membership the Sam's cash that we offer the Travel and entertainment all of the things that come along with an actual full membership not just retail only.

Jason:
[8:32] Yeah and there's all kinds of interesting Dynamics to me it seems about marketing em in a membership environment versus a.
Traditional, wide open and retail business so I assume you're trying to get people in the funnel for membership and at the same time you're trying to get members in the funnel for individual transactions.

Sabrina:
[8:54] Absolutely right the bigger the base the more sales you can expect so it's a balancing act right in terms of we need them to be purchasing things but ultimately we need more members and we need them to renew right so at the end of the year would it becomes renewal time we want them to see have seen the value throughout the year that they say oh this is a no-brainer when we're on the brand side or I was on the brand side a lot of it was we're trying to build brand Advocates because there's nothing more powerful than someone saying you've got to join Sam's Club I joined and I love it, so that was the the sole purpose of we're building Advocates we're building brand passion we're getting them excited and every piece that we're pushing you should be pushing our value prop of the overall membership.

Jason:
[9:35] Awesome so before we dive any deeper in that I need to know what your favorite Members Mark product is.

Sabrina:
[9:39] Oh okay it's really hard to just pick one so I think I'm actually gonna pick two.
One of them because one of them is very seasonally relevant and one of them something we do all year long so the seasonally relevant one I'm going to say.
There's so many things I would say probably the members Mark beach towels and or pool towels I've had some of the same ones.
For since I started working there they are thick their giant and big and they have a fantastic value to Market and we just keep I keep adding every year this year they didn't kid towels to with awesome designs on them so I'm a big fan of mild that's you know anything about you're advocating for something I advocate for a lot of things there and not because I work there but because I genuinely like them and then the other one that I love that I try to get everyone to do is we have these Members Mark southern style chicken bites.
And you just pop them in the airfryer and sad sad to say is good and bad it's sad to say I give my kids then like once a week but they're addicting some always like well they're just for the kids and then I end up eating them all for dinner to they're just really good.

Jason:
[10:43] I'm well familiar with all those phenomenons and I'm going through an airfryer phase right.

Sabrina:
[10:48] Few are so easy.

Jason:
[10:49] I'm I gotcha yeah it seems and I thought you were going to go with salty snacks I mean that's the easy answer and then you curveball Benny with the beach towels which as a parent I have learned you need way more beach towel.

Sabrina:
[11:03] It's important we've got a pool and we always have kids coming over and using all the beach towels so it feels like it becomes a full-time job and then you can't find them all and I don't want to go spend a ton of money to replace them, and so we either have them on hand or they're not that expensive to go by Exo.

Jason:
[11:19] Now I don't know if you checked with the home this week but your pool has probably evaporated it is hot in Dallas.

Sabrina:
[11:23] Oh my gosh it is hot I think it was like 109 on Sunday.

Jason:
[11:28] Yeah good call to come to Boston.

Sabrina:
[11:29] Yeah yeah I walked around this morning it was so nice you Dallas is brutal yeah I did you ever see the thing that went viral with the guy who he was pointing out the temperatures and then he showed McKenney and it was like a hundred thousand degrees he's like everyone in McKinney's dead.
That's how it really feels.

Jason:
[11:46] It does and pro tip is someone that does a lot of business travel we probably don't want to mention to our family that it's more comfortable here than it is at home.

Sabrina:
[11:55] I already texted them like sorry.

Jason:
[11:58] Just saying be careful so I have a new and it's so Members Mark is a of course the famous owned brand for Sam's Club.
And I won't put you on the spot with any proprietary information but it's a on its own a very large brand I think Walmart in the past has disclosed that it's over a 10 billion dollar a year brand so so remarkable the Walmart, there's a number of own Brands but of course the one most associated with Walmart in my mind is great value, and so I'm now in a murdered with a new Great Value product that's only available in Canada.

Sabrina:
[12:32] And it'll only available in Canada what is it.

Jason:
[12:34] And I just imported two cases of them to my home in Chicago Great Value ketchup flavored potato chips.

Sabrina:
[12:43] Oh my gosh things are off we got two cases.

Jason:
[12:48] Do not recommend you you try them but here's the thing there was you guys just had your earnings call congratulations it was a very very successful quarter.
And Doug mcmillon to see ya.
I don't know if he did it on purpose or on accident but in the investor car he talked about a trip to Canada where they made him try catch, potato chips and he kind of said it's the only Walmart owned brand products that he doesn't want so now my thing is I show up at every meeting.
With a bag of these potato chips.

Sabrina:
[13:22] I don't see him in here.

Jason:
[13:24] I did not I didn't think about bringing him to Boston and you have to like it's a pain too.

Sabrina:
[13:28] Okay packing with potato chips in an airplane.

Jason:
[13:32] Chick early well.

Sabrina:
[13:33] Get interesting yeah well now I'm intrigued yeah so I'm gonna have to drive it.

Jason:
[13:37] Procure some.

Sabrina:
[13:37] Yeah I can't wait to try them yeah.

Jason:
[13:40] Come away if Doug comes for a visit just saying.

Sabrina:
[13:42] Yeah perfect you don't as much as I'd like to be picking my kids will probably even like two.

Jason:
[13:46] Oh my God my son my son would definitely the more like something's unappealing to my palate the more likely.

Sabrina:
[13:53] I'm a to be fair I've seen my kids dip potato chips in ketchup.

Jason:
[13:56] Yeah of course.

Sabrina:
[13:57] So it seems to actually make a little bit of sense yeah.

Jason:
[14:01] Um so zooming into Sam's a little bit like obviously in this last decade one of the huge changes is this whole mobile, um and I imagine it's fundamentally changed how people shop, the you know you hear a lot of stats about even how much people are using mobile in the store in the club so like I'm somewhat curious I don't think please don't be offended, don't think of Club as the earliest adopter of digital not saying specifically but all club like.
Hilton was impacted by digital before Club was right and Circuit City was probably impacted by a digital a little before.

Sabrina:
[14:44] Sir.

Jason:
[14:45] Of our club was so that being said like, is like how has the Advent of mobile changed how you think about marketing and customer experience at Sam's today.

Sabrina:
[14:55] I mean it's extremely important so you're absolutely right at Sam's Club when we look at that the performance and understand where people are headed that's where we focus our time and energy Ray where do they want to be where they going how do we get ahead of it and provide a good experience which requires us to know where they're spending their time and we've seen a pretty significant shift.
Into Mobile and app experience specifically and so what we've what we've done is try to get a better understanding of what's the data and the behavior that they're taking within the app so let's just focus on specifically app right because there's desktop there's mobile web and then there's a and if you think about it there's trial barriers to downloading an app on your phone right you don't just immediately say yes I'm going to put the app on my phone so there has to be a reason and a journey to move them from mobile web into actually you know committing and putting the app on their phone.

[15:51] So I think there's different ways to say well what's a trigger to get them to download but we know one of those giant triggers is this can I go I so everyone loves scan ago if you've done it you know and and you have to download the app and actually.
You know use it in the club to be able to make the purchase through scan and go what's interesting that you might not know is if you hope if you've got scan and go and overall digital and you're looking at it the numbers are pretty strong if you take out scan ago and you just look at online digital penetration only about a third of our members or shopping online so so to me I'm like well hang on a minute they have the app on their phone so we broke through a massive barrier already of loyalty they're purchasing with us but they don't see the value of shopping online.

[16:41] Unless they are shopping on the app in the club so the opportunity becomes massive I got two thirds of our own member base for good acquisition and new members coming in if I just even start with our member base how can I give them a reason to see the value of pulling up the phone and building a relationship through digital when they're not in our clubs and I think that's what we've been trying to focus on and get to so really then it becomes the traffic drivers.

[17:07] Right so how are they coming and how do we get them to ultimately make that decision to move from Google to the app or to mobile web to add to cart and ultimately ultimately make that conversion and we're really taking a lot of time and focus around the data so for instance they come in on the homepage did they come in on a category shelf page that has a bunch of items did they come in on a specific product page did they come in because they wanted to check their Sam's cash total what drove them in how much time are they spending did they bounce or did they stay did they look at things what was their scroll rate did they spend a lot of time we really focus on what it is they're doing what types of things are finding worth adding to their carts and then we start figuring out okay how can we drive bigger baskets your category penetration or introduce new member benefits like we were talking about earlier rate so if I've seen that you know Jason's come in and he comes every five weeks and he buys the same 15 things to stock up as house well how do I show him the amount of Sam's cash he's earned.

[18:15] In between that five to six weeks to get in to come in and then give them things to potentially you know get them excited to purchase through digital using that hands cash or whatever it is that that you can create those triggers using the data so ultimately focus on on driving more app frequency and.

[18:33] Also say as we continue to see the shift to mobile and to app I think members are at the center of everything we do so remember obsessed and as we see what's working and not working with what's working we can lean in, great okay they love it keep doing it if it's not working we know about it so every week we start off the week of one of the members saying what do they not like about us last week right so we look at not only the MPS but we look specifically at the word for word feedback so through member surveys the customer call center the social media I mean we're all pulling it up looking at the Facebook groups and looking at the comments and saying hey we could have done better here and so as you think about that and you put that lens of app and digital this is working this is not working how do we think about our roadmap and our prioritization to provide a better experience to remove, the things that are giving them reasons to not want to shop online with us and pick the big ones and and start to move the needle which ultimately is part of the reason we saw an 18% complex you too.

Jason:
[19:37] That's amazing and I do I want to double click on the data but before I do I just want to stay in the app thing for one more SEC because I couldn't agree more, people way underestimate the difficulty of getting customers just to download the stupid app.
And in many cases I have a lot of clients that like don't have quite the, Market awareness of Sam's and they'll ask about building an app in before I let any of my clients build an app I take them to an Apple store and we sit down and Apple Store and.
Talking thing you'll notice about half the people in an Apple Store are men and women that are my age or older and they're in line at the Genius Bar because they do not know their iTunes password.
And guess what you can't do if you don't know your iTunes password and download an app.
And so there is just this this huge barrier and the.
For normal retailers the mortality of apps is huge two people download it only use it once like the abandonment rates are super depressing so for a lot of people like you go like.
Explicitly focusing on app downloads is often a mistake.
Um I don't actually see Sam's heavily promoting the act of downloading the app what I see you guys promoting are the.
Benefits and the problems that are solved with the app is that I'm assuming that's an intentional decision.

Sabrina:
[21:00] 100% right because I think if you go into the club which I think is again, the true power and value of a true end-to-end Omni retailer right and and that's our challenge always is when you go into the club you feel the club, right the the first experience coming in like you're like this is awesome and where do I start right and it's a full brand experience and you feel the I feel you see you touch you experience the items.
And digital you don't necessarily have the ability to do that so the challenge becomes how do you bring your brand to life, through digital and you have to know those touch points and I would say.
You're exactly right is is it's really hard to do say go download our app it's another thing to say hey do you want to get out the door quicker.

Jason:
[21:47] Get this line.

Sabrina:
[21:48] And I would tell you I would say 10 out of 10 people are like yeah they're not going to say no I'd like to stay in touch in line the waste my time no they want out and it's actually really yeah.

Jason:
[21:57] Desert home with the with their their their significant other.

Sabrina:
[22:01] That's very true like listen okay we'll say nine out of ten, 10th person's a sad sad person but either way the the opportunity becomes okay we'll give them a reason valuable enough for their time and attention that it's worth downloading that app on their phone I think what's been interesting to is navigating the conversations rate because when you see the value of app and you see the growth and app me like yes app app and everything is focused on app you tend to forget the actual member journey to get to the app right so they may have started on desktop, when you know they were sitting at work and me and they were trying to figure out where to start for dinner that night that desktop Behavior may have said okay actually I was looking at something at work today and now I'm pull it up on my phone and they went through mobile web and then ultimately they shop with us a couple times and now all of a sudden oh I didn't realize they had an app that app would be easier right so there's a journey and you can't forget everyone else that that is experiencing it before they made the decision to put that app on their phone and so you it's hard to prioritize and forget about about everyone else you have to understand there's a journey in between.

Jason:
[23:08] No I couldn't agree more in before I go on I do want to just one shout out to scan and go because it's amongst my favorite digital experiences because unfortunate truth of many digital experiences is, they're awesome and members our customers love them but they often are problematic for us as retailers IE often, it's taking something that the customer used to do and shifting it to something we have to do right so you think about online grocery, the customer used to get the bananas now we're getting the bananas right if those are home delivery the customer used to drive those home now we're driving those home scan and go is one of those rare things where it both increases customer satisfaction or NPS score, and the member is doing something that we used to have to do for them so I feel like that just amazing, on the data side like obviously one reason a lot of people like to get people in the digital echo system and using the app is because you do get all that wonderful data that, describe activating that's one of the areas where I feel like clubs have an unfair advantage because of the membership structure right like most of my retail clients they talked about this capture rate and what they mean is what percentage of my customers do I have any idea what they bought.

[24:25] Right right because a lot of people buy with cash or they shop anonymously or, they pre-shop digital and then they you know paid on a different credit card and there's this whole, you know family amalgamation all these complications which is why if you walk out of this room right now there's 47 CD P vendors all trying to help retailers, solve this data Quagmire and I'm not saying it's not still hard at membership-based retailers but you do kind of have an unfair built-in Advantage like you pretty much know.
What and how much each members fans and on what.

Sabrina:
[25:00] And I know they're out there I might just stay in this room and close the door.
No but there's a reason why they're booming right because it's a it's a lot of work to figure out I would say yes coming into the membership space I was, very excited and shocked by how much data we really truly had every time you know member makes a purchase we see it so it allows you to kind of.
Really understand what it is that's driving their trips how often they're coming where they're shopping what are they buying you can also start to understand their typical journey and behavior, so I'll give you two examples of the way we're kind of leveraging data I know I already talked about app but let me kind of put it into real life for a second.

[25:46] One of those is and I'm talking specifically to like end-to-end experience so one of those I'll start with on, specific promotion or sales or event right what gets exciting is you can put this money into Market you can understand where they're coming in so first of all to drive the traffic and you're looking at a year-over-year confer a marketing campaign okay great so the traffic was there and hit the pages you needed it to hit well now you can say okay what they do next right and you can start to say all right did they move from that page to the next page and so you can see the analytics team has done fantastic jobs not only of having the data but making the data.

[26:30] Readable digestible and actionable is a completely separate, right so there's a lot of work that happens behind the scenes of late great I'm looking at a table of a massive amount of data but what am I supposed to do with this to make a business decision and what they can do is they can take that and they can build it out for me across the funnel so they'll say okay traffic was up well and then it moved to the next page to it so it actually moved from let's say the home page or landing page we built to the Shelf page with all of the categories and then it moved from that category page to the product page and you can see all the product pages that were tagged with in that event in that campaign, then you can and it has your year-over-year growth of each so you can see the continued strength in growth throughout the funnel and then it moved to check out and ultimately her to cart and ultimately to check out and so you can see okay but you can also see when it's off right what happened okay so something's off you can say oh well that's because X percent of our items ran out of inventory in the first two hours because maybe we didn't estimate, demand properly right and so now all of a sudden okay we'll stop marketing that so go back up to your upper funnel and stop talking about those because you're making some angry members because they're falling off here and not because there's not strength in the funnel, it's because it's not actually available when they tried to go add it to their car so we got them all the way to the PDP and then something breaks.
Right so it makes it makes it really easy to be able to do that in a way that allows us to actually pinpoint the issue.

Jason:
[27:57] Side note that used to be way harder to do in the store circular let's hard to erase the printing when you run out of.

Sabrina:
[28:04] Yeah it's not it's not exactly it's not exactly possible okay so and then other than the the funnel I think the other thing is understanding kind of their behavior on the pages, so if you think about let's just take the types of traffic coming in where they going and is it working raise so if they're coming in through paid marketing or if they're coming in through CRM or they're coming in through SEO where are they going and is it actually doing its job, right and then once it lands how to use the data up to optimize the right message you're putting in front of them at the right time so, not only just on personalization right so let's take our home page you have, frequently ordered items you have no inspired by a recent views things like that but you also think about well where is it they're clicking on that page the most and how do you take that that, that knowledge and that data and say okay here are the things we need to be putting in front of them based on that traffic driver that came in so we can connect the message, and make sure that we're taking advantage of that quality traffic so that we can actually move them down that funnel.

Jason:
[29:08] Yeah that's amazing and hearing those two examples it makes me think and hope that we both have kids in school hopefully they become data analysts because.
Seems like there's an ever-increasing problem with processing all this data I heard a rumor that Walmart has like seven petrol bytes of data and I don't actually know what a petrol B is, but my seven-year-old tells me it's a big number.

Sabrina:
[29:33] I don't know what that is either but I'm not doubting it.
And you're absolutely right like I think it becomes a if you have so much data right at your hands how do you make sense of it how do you organize it and again make it actionable because otherwise it's just a bunch of days that you're just sitting on and you're not actually doing anything with it to improve the experience, Sokka.

Jason:
[29:53] Compounding that data problem even longer we have the whole omni-channel, right and you know we used to talk about what percentage of our sales were digital and you know try to get that digital percentage up but increasingly, every customer using digital tools somewhere on the path to purchase and very often they're using physical stuff so how do you guys think about that at Sam's eye.
That seems like it makes that whole analytics problem even more.

Sabrina:
[30:18] Of those it does but it's good right like you don't want them necessarily only shopping in the cupboard only shopping online you want them to think about it and we try to put ourselves, through this Member First mindset.
Approach right so what is it that's driving that that needs data that purchase intent so are they just looking for inspiration right they're building their patio where there's getting ready for tailgating so they need a full solution or you know is it they just needed their paper towels or their bananas or their bottled water and on top of that you think about what what's the most convenient way for them to shop at the moment maybe they're on their way home from work and Sam's Club is right there five minutes from their house will they can.

[31:00] Hop in because they know that they had a list of they can't remember what was on their list and they're already here so they're just going to do it maybe while they're in there they don't want to deal with the line so we give them another convenient option of scan ago okay well maybe they head home and then all of a sudden that night after Sam's Club is closed they realize they forgot all of the Lunchables for school tomorrow, bummer yeah been there multiple times and also big bummer or you're out of milk and you know your kids are going to cry because they have cereal every morning and now you've got an issue or whatever it is and I think based on whatever situation there and we want to make it convenient for them to be able to choose Sam's Club so you've given them the two options in the club will now you've got multiple options from an online purchase perspective you've got curbside so I'm going to put in my curbside order and I'm going to be able to go get it in the morning when it's ready and it'll be ready just in time or you're going to go you know put in a same-day delivery the next morning and you know you're going to get it really quickly or you can order on you no shipping and get it there in 23 days and you can wait a little bit because you can get free shipping as a plus member so you kind of see the opportunities for us to build around you you remember us have told us was most important to you and what you need so you know what the quality you want a great value you want it conveniently we know that about you so how do we think about all of the different scenarios you might be in and make it as easy as possible for you to choose Sam's.

Jason:
[32:26] Yeah and I'm assuming those successes and near-misses come up a lot and all that qualitative data on your.

Sabrina:
[32:34] They tell us yes they tell us they're like you know know but also a lot of times yes it worked.

Jason:
[32:39] Yeah I worked with a retard once they said there's two outcomes successes and learnings.

Sabrina:
[32:43] That's exactly right that's exactly right.

Jason:
[32:46] If that were true I would be a lot smarter than I am so.

Sabrina:
[32:48] So yeah it's a it's interesting because you see you know from one member of might have been a great experience and the same exact experience didn't work for the next member and it's because it's like well how do we put how do we let them know of all the options that they actually have to shop with us and let them choose the right Journey for them so a lot of it also is an opportunity around awareness right so do they know we have a curbside we just launched delivery not that long ago right so do they even know we have same day delivery I think you then get to the point of in the funnel again is this a conversion issue or is it just an adoption issue or is this an actual awareness issue, right so being able to kind of pinpoint where those opportunities are and the funnel I think is just just as equally important.

Jason:
[33:31] You know at the beginning of the show you mentioned that earlier in your exams career one of the projects you worked on was the actual Sam's brand which a would be terrifying to me because it's I mean.
Is always Gary but then when the blank brand quite literally is the name of an American icon is kind of more.

Sabrina:
[33:51] Little bit little intimidating.

Jason:
[33:53] You don't want to screw that one up but when I think of, the sort of original Sam's brand right it was a lot about the store experience right and we've just spent 45 minutes talking about, all the cool new paths to Sam's and a lot of them are digital like do you guys have to think about.
What the Sam's Club brand even means to members today in a different way than maybe you you were able to five years ago or ten years ago.

Sabrina:
[34:23] A hundred percent and I think you know we have continued to evolve with the members to to be able to say hey these are the most important things for them so let's continue to evolve the brand I would say yeah like starting out in the beginning it was really clear and again we used the member feedback to say like if we look at our brand passion index well here are the things that they're talking about and it's not driving a ton of volume and they don't really like it or they're rather neutral okay well when they are talking what are they talking about right both negative and positive and when you've got the - address it and when you've got the positive lean in right and the way you can lean in is on digital, so they not only from all of the marketing channels whether we know we talked about earlier marketing the social media all of those things but it's also on digital in the experience so if you know they like something how do you make it easy for them and bring the brand to life and tell the story so it's not just about again items are merchandising but it's the full membership experience and the ability to say hey like welcome to the club, right I think when we we've identified some of those opportunities when we think about their full Journey so the first year is extremely important to us they become a member.

[35:31] If they didn't join in the club how do you make them feel like they're part of the club if they didn't come to a membership desk and say Hey I want to be part of this you might have gotten them through something a non-digital, well we also know that that first 90 days is extremely important and how do you get in front of them and say okay this is awesome welcome to the club and you should be shopping with us digital did you know our Omni proposition did you know the value and convenience that we provide and the team looks at those ways I think one of the things we did was build.

[36:03] A digital membership booklet that's like okay we don't really talk about anywhere all of the things that the membership has to offer any more digitally we usually relied on the Associates at the membership desk to do that for us as they're like hey now welcome to the club here's everything you have well when you join digitally you're kind of Flying Blind right so okay I'm here now what do I do right what do I even get and if they don't want to spend a ton of time looking around and or it's not easy for them to find it then how do you introduce the journey that says welcome, look at all this stuff that you now have access to as a member of our club and and really kind of bring that brand to life and feel it even if you can't have your foot in the club so there's opportunities like that where we look for for bringing it to life and I think there's probably many more to go but we use the data and the members to say hey this feels like a gap let's figure out how to address it.

Jason:
[36:55] I'm in is that the big filter because I.
Follow-up question is going to be what are the things that we could expect to see evolve over the next five years and you know we're at a trade show where there's a bunch of vendors that each have a interesting widget that.
They want to sell and you every one of them you could imagine use case where that would be really cool and I imagine for someone in your shoes one of the challenges is which of these three hundred things is actually.
Going to add the most value to to our members lives right and.

Sabrina:
[37:27] You're a hundred percent right and which way is the right path and I would say when I talk about Sam's something that I love is that it feels like we run, like an 84 billion dollar startup, and it truly feels that way and one of the reasons it feels that way is because of how quickly we test and learn and you know we work really closely with product and Tech and Engineering with a problem what's the problem we're trying to solve for the number that's what everything starts with right so again back to the member Obsession hey they're saying this is an issue and I think if we could solve it for them it could be really impactful so we give that problem to the product Tech and Engineering teams and they come back with like I think this could be it let's go test, we don't know it might crash and burn but we think this could be a potential path and they do a lot of customer surveys research to say, feels like it's down the right path and could solve for this problem and then they go out and they if it does well great let's try to scale a little bit more maybe move it across some of the platforms and see if it works across desktop mobile web and app maybe IOS and Android different behaviors right and then once they say oh okay no this is actually going to work and they're telling us they really like it we run, and I think that's the way we've done we've always done it is what the members tell us their problems in their pain points it's our job to go solve them for them and then run as quickly as possible and let them tell us whether we figured it out or not.

Jason:
[38:49] That sounds like a totally sound approach and I know I can't put my thumb on the scale but I hope one of those problems ends up being that I never have to run out of Lunchables again.

Sabrina:
[38:59] Yeah me too that could be really nice.

Jason:
[39:02] Significant quality of life.

Sabrina:
[39:04] My kids would appreciate it.

Jason:
[39:05] Exactly and sadly Sabrina that is going to be a great place to end it because it's happened again we've used up all our allotted time there are 45 CDP vendors waiting outside this podcasting studio and I've promised them all the time.

Sabrina:
[39:15] So excited yeah I'll thank you I appreciate it yeah nice of you.

Jason:
[39:21] But it's been a real Joy chatting with you and we appreciate you sharing a peek inside the covers with all our listeners I hope you'll come back.

Sabrina:
[39:29] Thank you guys for having me this has been awesome and I've Loved listening to your podcast you guys are extremely entertaining and I'm excited and honored that you guys had me here today.

Jason:
[39:38] Scot and I both agree that one of us is funny we just don't agree on.

Sabrina:
[39:41] It's clearly you because I'm replacing him so it's obvious who it is but we won't tell him he'll have to just hear it let he'll have to listen to the his own podcast so he decided not to come to ya.

Jason:
[39:51] Yeah he definitely does not listen to the show he's like the one person in e-commerce that doesn't listen.

Sabrina:
[39:54] Perfect yeah oh great.

Jason:
[39:58] It's been great thanks again and until next time happy commercing!

EP203 - Shopper insights from NPD Checkout

NPD Checkout is a product from NPD that scan physical and digital receipts from a panel of more than 100,000 users to get a unique look into consumer purchase patterns in a variety of product categories.

Jeremy Allen, Group President of Checkout, and Patty Altman, SVP Client and Business Development at Checkout join us to discuss what we can learn about the holiday from their dataset.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 203 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday November 16th, 2019.

Support the Show:

The Jason & Scot Show as been nominated for "Best Retail Media Resource" by the VIP awards.  We'd appreciate your support, if you could take a minute to vote for us.

Adobe Recap

Taylor Schreiner is the Director of Adobe Digital Insights. He uses Adobe's data to give us a recap of the Cyber 5 (the five shopping days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, this year Nov 29 - Dec 2).

Adobe Holiday Dashboard

• Thanksgiving  11/28 - $4.2B (up 14.5% YoY) below forecast of $4.4B
• Black Friday 11/29 - $7.4B (up 19.6% YoY) below forecast of $7.5B
• Saturday - 11/30 - $3.6B (Up 18% YoY) at forecast
• Sunday - 12/1 - $3.8B
• Monday - 12/2 - $9.4B (up 19.7% YoY) at forecast

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 202 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday December 4th, 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Support the Show:

The Jason & Scot Show as been nominated for "Best Retail Media Resource" by the VIP awards.  We'd appreciate your support, if you could take a minute to vote for us.

Adobe Recap

Taylor Schreiner is the Director of Adobe Digital Insights. He uses Adobe's data to give us a recap of the Cyber 5 (the five shopping days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, this year Nov 29 - Dec 2).

Adobe Holiday Dashboard

• Thanksgiving  11/28 - $4.2B (up 14.5% YoY) below forecast of $4.4B
• Black Friday 11/29 - $7.4B (up 19.6% YoY) below forecast of $7.5B
• Saturday - 11/30 - $3.6B (Up 18% YoY) at forecast
• Sunday - 12/1 - $3.8B
• Monday - 12/2 - $9.4B (up 19.7% YoY) at forecast

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 202 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday December 4th, 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP201 - Cyber5 2019 Hot Take

Cyber 5 is the five shopping days from Black Friday through Cyber Monday (this year Nov 29 - Dec 2).  

Adobe Recap

Adobe Holiday Dashboard
(note: numbers updated after show was recorded)

• Thanksgiving  11/28 - $4.2B (up 14.5% YoY) below forecast of $4.4B
• Black Friday 11/29 - $7.4B (up 19.6% YoY) below forecast of $7.5B
• Saturday - 11/30 - $3.6B (Up 18% YoY) at forecast
• Sunday - 12/1 - Not reported
• Monday - 12/2 - $9.4B (up 19.7% YoY) at forecast

We'll have an Adobe analyst on next week to break down results.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 201 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday December 2nd, 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP200 - Walmart Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside 

Episode 200 is our 4 year anniversary, featuring an interview with Janey Whiteside, EVP and Chief Customer Officer at Walmart.

Anniversary Recap

• First Show November 13, 2015 (11.11 recap)
• 176 hours (over 7 days of straight content)
• First Guest: Peter Cobb (Episode 15, 2/24/16)
• Jason Company Names:
  • 4 (Razorfish, Sapient.Razorfish, Publicis.Sapient, Publicis Group)
• Most Popular Guest Show: Ken Worzel, Nordstrom
• Most Popular News Show: Amazon acquires Whole Foods
• Most Popular Deep Dive: Artificial Intelligence
• Most Frequent Guests:
  • Samir Bhavnani (1010 Data now Commerce IQ)
  • EP 103: Amazon Private Label Deep Dive
  • EP 125 Johnson & Johnson
  • EP 151 Tyson Food e-Commerce
• Tamara Gaffney (Adobe)
  • EP 60 Holiday Preview  2016
  • EP 109 Cyber 5 Recap 2017
  • EP 155 Cyber 5 Recap 2018
• Special Mention:
  • Melissa Dooley 2x and Jamie Dooley 2X

Janey Whiteside Interview 
(Timecode 6:34)

In this wide-ranging interview, we cover many topics, including:

• Janey's background at Amex
• The role of Chief Customer Officer at Walmart
• Doing things at Walmart Scale
• What does digital mean at Walmart
• Private Label
• Amazon
• Challenges and opportunities of value focus
• Innovation
• The future of retail

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 200 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday October 9th, 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP199 - Dreamforce and Retail Earnings

Episode 199 covers the 2019 Dreamforce Conference as well as this weeks news including Walmart and Target earnings reports..

Dreamforce

Salesforce held their annual Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco this week.  They launched a major new functionality "Customer 360 Truth" a universal customer data platform.

Singles Day - 11.11 Day - $38.38 billion US (up 26% YoY)

• Amazon News
• Nike leaves Amazon
• Amazon Grocery Concept in LA won't have Amazon-Go
• Amazon is internally testing Amazon-Go in grocery sized space in Seattle

Earnings Reports

• Walmart - US up 6.6%, E-commerce up 41% (mostly grocery)
• Target - Retail up 4.5%, E-Commerce up 31% (mostly store pickup/fulfillment)

Other News

• PayPal acquired Honey for $4b. 20X their $200M Revenue
  Kylie Jenner sold 51% of her business to Coty for $600m
  
  

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Episode 199 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday November 21st, 2019.

EP198 - Holiday Forecasts

 

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 198 covers the 2019 holiday forecasts, store visits, and news.

Reviews

Jason & Scot both received the new Apple AirPods Pro and the Amazon Echo Buds.  Both liked the Apple product better.  Echo buds had better noise cancelation, but an inferior fit/design, poor microphone, and a case that’s too big for a pocket.

Trip Reports

• Nordstrom NYC Flagship
• Amazon Bookstore remodels and FourStar
• Showfields
• Macy’s new Story display 
• Starbucks Pickup Only location

News

• Gap CEO, Art Peck steps down 
• Sears Closing 96 more stores, leaving 182 Sears and Kmart stores 
• Barneys Liquidation
  • Assets – Great American Group and Tiger Capital Group
  • IP – Authentic Brands, will be licensed to Saks Fifth Ave
• Profitero Price Study (Amazon is price leader)
• Shopify – Adds an Email ESP
• First Insight Study “Amazon Past it’s Prime” – Pretty silly methodology (stated preferences of 1000 people), don’t put too much stock in it.

Holiday Forecasts

NRF

Nov-Dec excludes automobile dealers, gasoline stations and restaurant

3.8% – 4.2% over 2018 to a total of between $727.9 billion and $730.7 billion (vs 2.1% last year, or 3.7% last 5 years).

AlixPartners

November-January

Total Retail increase of 4.4% to 5.3% 

Deloitte:

November – January

Total sales are expected to exceed $1.1 trillion 

Total Retail 4.5% to 5% rise in 2019 (vs. 3.1% last year)

Digital $144-$149B 14-18% growth (up from 11.2% in 2018)

Kantar

Oct-Dec

Total Retail 3.8% (vs. 3.1% last year)

Online 14% vs 10.8% last year

Salesforce

November 1 to December 31

Digital revenue growth this holiday season at 13% YoY to 4136B

Hub: https://www.salesforce.com/solutions/industries/retail/holiday-insights

Adobe

Nov-Dec

14.1% increase online (totaling $143.7B)

MetaForecast (summary of the forecasts):

14.25% Online  (range is 13-18%) 

4.35% Total Retail (range is 3.7% – 5.3%) – last yr was 2.1%

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 196 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday November 7th, 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP197 - Personalization Deep Dive

This episode is a deep dive into Personalization.

• Definition and Level Setting
• Best Commerce Practices
• Future Opportunities
• Conclusion and Recommendations

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 197 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, September 30. 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP196 - Apple Flagship, News, and Listener Questions

 

A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 1946 covers a visit to Apple's new flagship on 5th Ave in NYC, recent industry news, and listener questions.

Apple 5th Ave Flagship Reopens

News

• 2019 Holiday season has 6 fewer days between Thanksgiving and Christmas
• Credit card companies release new e-commerce payment flow EMV SRC 
• Best Buy moves to one-day delivery
• Nordstrom opens New York Flagship
• Barneys Bankruptcy
• eBay, Nike, and Underarmour get new CEO's
• Google Shopping flash sale and ‘buy on google’

Listener Questions

Q1: Michelle Grant - Amazon and Walmart have patents around predictive shipping. Could you speculate on what impact predictive shipping will have on commerce? You mentioned it in episode 187, but it would be great to get more details.

Q2: Holly Marie Pfeifer What’s the future look like for personalization with ITP cracking down on Safari and talks about Google being close behind in restricting third party cookies?

Q3: Jeff Vogl I saw Jason’s question to Tobi about performance and PWAs, do you see them actually sticking? I know they “hot” right now, but how many PWAs do either of you have on your phone? Of those, besides Amazon, how many do you really use? Seems like something that works for the Amazons and Nordstrom’s of the world, but do you see it as a mid market reality?

Q4: Karri Koivuniemi Any new info regarding what Adobe is doing with the Magento? What's your brief take on the current ecom platform landscape?

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 196 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday October 24th, 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP195 - Coca-Cola VP of Shopper Marketing April Carlisle

April Carlisle, VP of Shopper Marketing National Retail Sales, The Coca-Cola Company. In this broad-ranging interview, we discuss Coca-Cola's digital footprint and strategy, digital shopper marketing, the evolution of e-commerce for consumables and grocery, and the future of shopper marketing.

April was inducted into the P2PI’s 26th Hall of Fame this year.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 195 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, September 16th, 2019, live from the Grocery Shop trade show in Las Vegas, NV.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP309 - Instacart IPO Filing 

Warning: Given the complexity and breadth of topics, this is a longer than usual episode with a runtime of 90 minutes (if we had more time, we'd produce a shorter podcast).

Update: In this episode Jason mentioned that he didn't think Instacart accepted SNAP payments. It turns out that Instacart did start accepting SNAP earlier this month.

On Friday, August 25th 2023 Instacart filled its S-1 IPO form with the SEC, in advance of its intention to make an initial public offering. The complete filing is almost 400 pages. In this episode we summarize all the key points, including a number of surprises, in the filing.

If you want to follow along with the actual S-1, you can download it here. Scot suggests you focus on pages 101-124.

Topics Covered:

1. Cover Page and Entry Level Items
2. Overall Growth Trends 25:50
3. Unit economics 42:90
4. Cohort Analysis 48:10
5. Instacart Ads 56:30
6. The Big Risk/Concern 1:00:11
7. Other observations (Instacart+, Carrot Services, Generative AI) 1:22:50

Other episodes mentioned: Episode 255 - Instacart Chief Revenue Officer Seth Dallaire and Episode 224 Customer Cohort Analysis and CLV with Dr. Daniel McCarthy.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 309 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, August 29, 2023.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Jason:
[0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 309 being recorded on Tuesday August 29th I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo.

Scot:
[0:38] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners.
We are going to jump into the talk tonight because one of our most popular shows as you know Jason the format is a deep dive and we have got a great Deep dive for you guys this episode.
Last Friday August 25th there was a very big event not only in our favorite world's grocery which is Jason's favorite world and my favorite world of e-commerce and then Jason's favorite world of.
But also in my favorite world of startups so this is this is a pretty big event and we wanted to dedicate a complete episode to it.
I mean it is the filing of the S14 instacart.

[1:24] And just to set it up the you know in my world of start-up land it has been very hard to get an IPO done so there's been a couple post coated and like late 2020.
And then summon 21 and then there's been a dry spell there's been something called a dese back so you have this spec which is this.

[1:44] Special-purpose acquisition thing and you can kind of go public through this kind of complicated convoluted thing.
Tends not to go very well so there's been some of that like in My World Mobility there is one called get around and there's been a couple others and those typically have not.
Gone so well they're down like 95% bird the scooter company did this as well.
So it's been a very dry IPO market for startups and thus of interior backed investors.
So there has been a lot of anticipation around when is that a PO when they're going to open who's going to be brave enough to kind of stick their foot out there first.
And you know a lot of people have been rooming that instacart would be out there there's a couple other companies in this kind of unicorn Stratosphere stripe is another one that we cover a lot on the show from the payments world.
There's also the others you can think of Jason there's this one.
There's a software one that is just doing really well in AI that's been mentioned a lot not not open AI it'll come to me in a minute.
So you know so this is kind of the real.
Bang the Big Bang of here's a company that is being brave enough they're gonna go first and we're going to see what happens so it's going to be really interesting and we thought because it hits this Venn diagram of all of our favorite things that we would spend a fair amount of time on.

[3:10] So first of all this is a 400 page document so our value add to the listeners is we have distilled it down into what we think are the most interesting little tidbits and some of the things we've learned from instacart it is nice because there's been a lot of rumors about how instacart Economics work and Jason has been tracking their ad piece which is you know cpgs have really seen some really nice results from that so we know that's been active and the areas we picked apart we thought we would cover tonight is I wanted to kind of give you a quick and dirty Scott's guide to reading an s-1 and we'll start at the cover page that's there's actually a lot that happens on the cover page so I want to spend a little time there and kind of give you a little I haven't taken a company poet behind the scenes of what's going on on there and then we're going to talk about some of the overall growth things that just kind of help you understand.

[4:07] How to think about instacart how they're growing and what they do and what role they play and then unit economics one of the things that is happening more and more in these s1's is they're doing a more comprehensive cohort analysis and this is basically showing hey if if I car to a customer in a certain period how are they doing now and what are those Trends so that this this had a lot going on there of course we want to talk about the ad business and then little bit of a catch-all for other observations, Jason anything I missed before we jump into the cover page.

Jason:
[4:42] No I think you mostly covered it just one slight correction it's four of our five favorite things for those listeners that tuned in to hear us talk about Ahsoka we're going to do that on an upcoming episode so that Star Wars would be our fifth.

Scot:
[4:56] Yes sadly there was no Star Wars in this one so it's that one little part of the over the Venn diagram was left is its own little circle out in space.

Jason:
[5:06] That's a we call that a teaser for a future episode.

Scot:
[5:09] Yeah yeah we're we're Pros were 300-plus episodes into this thing and this is the kind of you know Pro level that we deliver on the pod.
So you guys missed it Jason forgot to plug in his microphone earlier so that's a yeah we're still still learning every day, so when you open an s-1 the first thing you see is the cover page and it you know a lot of people just Breeze by it because it's a cover page but it has a lot of really valuable information so first of all the first thing that I noticed is I was searching for this on Edgar and I kept typing in instacart and it wouldn't show up and I was like WTH I know this s1's out there why can I not find it and then I saw an article and it said oh the company's real name is maple bear so that's the first thing you see on the cover is the company we all refer to as instacart its actual Corporation name is maple bear and it does business as instacart so I thought I did not know that prior so that was the first thing I learned right there on the cover so that's interesting so if you do go to the will put a link to the s-1 in the show notes but if you do Brave the Edgar SEC database yourself throwing a little Maple bear there and not instacart.

Jason:
[6:22] Not to be confused with Amazon's house brand Mama Bear.

Scot:
[6:26] Yeah yeah and I'm sure there's a honey bear and brown bears there's a there's a lot of a lot of bear things going on.
The other thing that I was like to see is what symbol are they using I think it's fun to kind of you know as an entrepreneur to kind of think about what symbol you're going to use that best personifies your brand Channel Bowser we had ecom's so that was an exciting one so we captured e-commerce Shopify go.

Jason:
[6:52] The best ticker symbol of all times by the way.

Scot:
[6:55] Thank you thanks thanks I appreciate it.
Shopify head shop and that was a good one and instacart / Maple bear is going with cart so I think that's a that's a that's a pretty nice one you know it kind of there a multi grocer chart cart and we all think about instacart I'm sure they hate being called Instagram so this kind of like really punches on the cart so maybe they get away from everyone mistakenly calm Instagram.

Jason:
[7:19] I think it's solid.

Scot:
[7:20] Yeah A-Plus on the symbol and then in the you'll notice that a lot of the evaluations and how many shares they're selling are blank and that's you know in this draft of this one which is the first kind of public one that they're dropping out there they'll they'll iterate a couple more times they'll do their Roadshow and then write one that, it prices they'll update the S12 include all that information so they'll make kind of literally a game day decision the night before IPO of how much based on the order book how much they want to sell and at what price so that, that's going to be blank through probably several more iterations as we go on then this is did you want to do something in.

Jason:
[8:04] No I was just I was just thinking that they I assume they left it blank because the underwriters were out of practice.

Scot:
[8:10] Yeah no no they they are there waiting and that's a good point because when you go public the the companies that take you public in this context they're all investment banks on Wall Street.
But they they filled this role of Underwriters and basically what they're doing is they're acting as market makers they're going to cover your stock when it's public and they're also going to be basically pounding the pavement to sell your stock to buy side by side analysts and firms on Wall Street.
Which there's two buckets of there's mutual funds and hedge funds there's also retail that I guess there's three buckets, retail would be you log into Schwab or Robin Hood and the diet of the IPO you try to buy some chairs that's retail and they all allocate a little bit of that for the IPO so they like retail to come in and get a little taste.

[9:04] A lot of folks that if you're an accredited investor at an institution and you have a wealth manager, sometimes you can get a little bit of access to an IPO before it prices you don't get a special price or anything but you can if you're really excited and you're a retail customer you and you're in this kind of wealthy bucket then you can you can get some allocated shares I think is what they call it these call this friends and family they don't call that, that anymore that's called a allocated shares but what's important about the underwriters is there's actually a signal there several signals here and I didn't know this time went through the process.
First of all they have lined up a who's who of investors so even before you get to Underwriters they have this really interesting note right before right underneath before they get in the underwriters and they say oh by the way we have lined up these investors already that have committed to buying and they have committed Asterix and then they kind of like take away the committed but.

[10:05] I think that's a legality I think I think it's a pretty hard commitment is my reading of them and they basically say these guys are already these guys have lined up to buy at least 400 million in this offering.
Regardless of the price and there's some big names in there there what I would call.
Public-private so they have invested in instacart already as a private entity and then they have another side of there.
Firm that invest in public entities and they have said that side is going to support the private side and that's nor just Bank tcv.

[10:38] Sequoia and a couple others this is very unusual but I think it's an interesting play because it basically says to the market.
Hey you don't have to worry about this thing you know taking on the first day because we're going to were signaling to you we're going to place a chunk of this with these folks that are long-term holders and they're going to backstop this thing I think of it as a adding a floor to the IPO basically saying we know it's been a while we know there's risk out there we're going to have a floor on this so so there's built-in demand for this IPO so that's quite unusual and this is the first time I've ever seen anything like that sometimes you'll see tiro price is a big one a big mutual fund that likes to do this or they'll have a private-public and they'll say you know they'll kind of suggests that, they're interested in buying more and they'll come out and say they don't plan to sell or they've accepted a lock up for a year or something like that I've never seen such a strong message as this one so I thought that was interesting.
Okay then we move to the bottom of the cover and that's where you have the list of the underwriters and what's really interesting is the way this works is the bigger your font the bigger a role you play in the IPO so on this one the biggest font is Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan and you know they have I don't know what would you say Jason like a 40 Point font.
Your.

Jason:
[12:03] Yeah I had to read it with my my PDF zoomed way up so I feel like I yeah but it was a big font.

Scot:
[12:11] Yeah yeah so those guys get like a you know they're kind of really big and then what's also interesting is where you show up on the page is important so your importance starts at the left and goes down to the right so the most important what we would call the vernacular is the lead left which is the biggest font on the left side of the cover is the lead Investment Bank and as Goldman Sachs and they're they're The Bluest of Blue Chips everyone wants Goldman Sachs if they come out.

[12:37] And then usually you want either JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley now JPMorgan has increased greatly and stature over the last three years because they have weathered coded and they have basically absorbed most of Silicon Valley Bank's deposits and a lot of these other riskier Banks and their CEO is pretty famous Jamie dimon so they've this is kind of you know two blue tips on the top of the book here which is pretty interesting and then, then you kind of go down a bit and you end up with 18 more Underwriters and there's like three levels of them there's like the font gets smaller so you go from 40 point to 20 point then you go to like kind of like 15 point and you go to seven point and you know what's interesting is I have never seen this many Underwriters either so they basically have said we want everyone on Wall Street lined to go and help us sell this we will turn no Rock no Rock will be unturned looking for buyers of instacart stock with the institutional investors.
There's some International Players so they've basically if you kind of said if you if you.

[13:53] Few War Room doubt what are some things a company could do 2D risk an IPO they have done things I've never seen before times like three and then the last thing that's interesting is the economics each of these Banks gets kind of depends on where they are on the page so you know if it all this gets him to like, there's all this Machinery but these guys do it because they make money so Goldman will make their kind of highest percentage and then JPMorgan and so on and so on based on how much they contribute to the book and all this kind of calculus that goes on behind the scenes so I thought that was kind of a really interesting just on the cover some things that were very unusual from other IPOs I've seen Jason anything that you found on the cover that was riveting.

Jason:
[14:43] We'll know I did.
I have a question for you though I got I guess I when I saw all of those Underwriters I kind of and perhaps erroneously assumed that part of what was going on here is, it's been a while since there were in any IPOs that went through an underwriter and that all of the underwriters are out there.
Desperate for four deals and that therefore.
Instacart had more more leverage to get more Underwriters like is it.
Is it literally instacart just agreed to pay more for these two more Underwriters 2D risk the IPO is that.

Scot:
[15:23] Yeah I think.
So human nature is that the lead laughed and Lead right want to absorb a lot of the deal and don't want to share too much so so typically there's some friction there right so they'll be like yeah you could add a couple and they use this tearing language I don't you know this is just kind of how I don't know who how they know what who's what dear, but tier one is Goldman Morgan and JP Morgan Morgan Stanley and then tier 2 is you get kind of Stiefel, a couple others in there then you go tier 3 and then you kind of have like an international kind of tearing as well so usually you get like two from Tier 1 Maybe two or three from tier 2 and then that's kind of it and then if you've if the company feels strongly like another consideration is when you go public one of the things that helps you long term is to have analysts that follow your stock and we've had many of these analysts on our show Mark mahaney Collin Sebastian these are and then Scott Devitt he was at stifel and he's moved on to another shop these are these are famous people in the internet marketing world so you want take Mark sets, I wasn't even as Fern was he ever green but that's not it.

[16:40] Ever Quorum so so you as the company can say the Goldman hey I know you guys want to keep a lot of Economics but I want mahaney on this and we got to get ever Cora so some of those on the bottom are probably International distribution retail or something the company wanted kind of specific to add them on and you know that was all pre-negotiated with Goldman getting lead left they had they kind of had to acquiesce to having a bit of a large number of Underwriters on there so I don't yeah I don't think I'm sure they all wanted to be to your point like there certainly wasn't even saying no to being invited to this and they probably you know you just bake off in this was I came to imagine if they ended up with 18 like, mr. started with 80 I don't know it's crazy that was probably like a.
Six week bake off just to hear from all the bankers so yes I think there's more around the analyst going on with with the large number on some of those.

Jason:
[17:39] Got it and then I want to hear your speculation about where the price might come in but I'm trying to remember the details there's been a lot of interesting things going on with the private placements before we got to this point right so I think the some of the valuations of the private placements were at some point disclosed and then I want to say instacart reset there.
Their valuation at a lower number while they were still private like presumably to make the equity appealing for employees.

Scot:
[18:17] Yeah the sequence of events and this is all you know they don't disclose all this in this one because it's kind of like.

Jason:
[18:25] Sure I'm just trying to get the the Run.

Scot:
[18:27] The Whispers And if you read some of these you know I subscribe to a lot of things that talk about some of this kind of rumors and so take it with a grain of salt but there was some sequins like they were chugging along and then Covent hit and it was like Off to the Races vertical and I think the wheels kind of came off the bus and they started to lose money because the unit economics weren't weren't ready for for like a surge like that and then right around 21 they replace the CEO and they had to kind of emergency raise some Capital which is kind of like one of the worst times to do it because even though their revenue was surging the rest of the market was in the toilet basically so I think they had to do a Down Round And what I've heard is their bed raised money as high as 39 billion and then they took this haircut at with this new CEO in this kind of re leaning down the company at about 13 billion so.

[19:19] So I think that's kind of like the watermark is kind of where they've last raised money and if you look at their revenue that's actually not that's a very reasonable Place given where you know they've grown since then but now what's the revenue like four billion ish yeah so they're like 3 billion and 22 in revs so that's like a four times Revenue which is pretty reasonable for a company growing the way they are with with good profitability so I would be I would not be surprised we don't we won't know this per share price until we see the denominator and they didn't have the denominator which is market cap divided by number of shares equals share price we don't know the number of shares so I would I would suspect.
I'll guess, four billion I'm gonna guess 20 billion would be a low like I think it will price they're on the low end and it could go as high as 25 30 depends on you know.
Retail and how much momentum it gets with with buyers.

Jason:
[20:26] And part of the art here is you don't you don't want to price it too low because that means you you have money on the table when you sold your Equity but you also don't want to price too high and have the, the stock like go down from the offering price and get below water right away right so.

Scot:
[20:49] Yeah it's very common we kind of had this situation at Channel visor we went public right after you know cortical right after in a longer time window of 08 09 and you know they strongly we had golden lead left and they strongly encouraged us to think long-term and not get obsessed about that pricing and leave a little bit of money on the table and yeah and then over time you could do a secondary at a higher price and you really want to you don't want to tank especially in a tepid market so I'm sure this was all part of the um you know Goldman would counter negotiate this to be lead left and say look we we need your commitment that your yep part of the pitch is they give you what they think it's worth and how it's going to price and they also discuss the strategy and that's part of the selection processes and you would think it would be.
Okay whoever says they're gonna give me the highest price but you actually kind of they really stand out a lot because the Goldman people can talk about Dave, they've got like a lot of data to back up their strategy and you know there's like Watson there that that are.
It would make your head spin and so they do a really good job of talking about why it makes sense to price the way they think and how how they see it over a longer Arc of time.

Jason:
[22:12] Gotcha so the guys with all the money have really good justification for why you shouldn't worry so much about the money.

Scot:
[22:18] And then the other thing to know though is what typically happens is you are not sharing you're not selling any one shares so the company so as part of this IPO the company will issue new shares so so you as the founder and the other investors you still have your shares you're not actually selling them at this moment so you know in a way now you get diluted right so the flip of that is your percent ownership goes down but you know it's kind of the would you take a little bit smaller.
Of that and long term when you can sell your shares as the investor and the founder and the team and the people that bet on you now you know can you execute and deliver and then earn your way into a higher price and then that's when you can kind of like get some equipment sir.

Jason:
[23:08] Do you want a little bit of a grapefruit or all of a grape.

Scot:
[23:11] Yes exactly yep that is a good description.

[23:17] Okay so here's here's the other part of the quick and dirty guide to reading the S1 you can take so that's cover is really good and then you take the literally the next let's see what is it.
100 pages and you can toss them so this is where the lawyers come in and they love to make sure you understand all the risk factors you know a meteor could hit the Earth people could stop needing groceries cybersecurity I could be no one wants to shop for them it could be they'll compete with a bunch of people Amazon is always a risk factor Google Microsoft.
So all that really doesn't add value and then there's a little bit of financial stuff but it's it's pretty dry and it's kind of like from the Auditors almost so it's like super drive so it always do is you skip to the part of this one we're finally the lawyers have earned their large fees and they vomited forth 100 pages of risk you know stuff.
And then you get to write your story and that's called the Management's discussion and Analysis in the industry it's called the md&a.

[24:27] It's confusing I thought for a long time it was md&a because Aaron says mdna really fast and they're saying the word A and D and it sounds like an end to me and I kept saying what the heck does md&a stand for they're like what do you mean what's up what are you saying.
It's like a who's I first got a thing but it's md&a so Management's discussion and Analysis and this is where you.

Jason:
[24:49] Because I read all 100 pages and and I'm super depressed and one of the risk factors is the way I could become sentient and take over the Earth.

Scot:
[25:00] Mmm yep that is a risk factor and then it will bring our groceries to us I guess as we are batteries for its consumption.

Jason:
[25:08] The computers won't eat.

Scot:
[25:10] So if you really want you know so what you can do is you can get the gist of 95% of this by printing out the s-1 pages 1012 124 that's it's only 23 pages and it's really dense but it is actually this is actually a very good read they did a very good job of making this so you know.
It's very approachable and they go into a level of detail that's really handy into problem so we're going to give you some of the highlights from that but if you want to go deep on your own we will give you all you need to go to the next level just by looking at those 23 pages.
Okay so what did you see and them DNA and that got your attention.

Jason:
[25:55] Well I mean a number of things so maybe just super high level what's exciting to me like obviously a lot of this information about the business was not, publicly available so in the process of going public in issuing S1 they suddenly reveal a lot of things and they reveal things about.
Their own business but they also have to paint a pretty good picture of what they think is happening and could happen in the digital grocery business so it's kind of like getting a whole class of really smart people to sort of, write a thesis about the the digital grocery business that we get to read and interpret and you know we they reveal things that we didn't know like how valuable customers are over time and how much consumers spend on a given order at instacart and what percent share of wallet they think digital gets versus brick and mortar and all these sorts of things and we'll get into a bunch of them in the in the individual sessions but my my takeaway from the beginning of that management discussion was that it's a.

[27:08] A pretty robust business that the aggregate amount of.
GTV that they that they have is pretty significant its twenty eight point eight billion dollars in groceries that they sold in 2022.

Scot:
[27:27] Yeah and GTV is gross transaction volume so instacart it's basically a Marketplace like eBay or Amazon where parts of parts of Amazon all of you back where you have in the marketplace of product Marketplace use GMB a lot of payment systems like PayPal use tpv gross merchandising value total payment volume they have chosen to use this term for the gross figure of GTV and at first I thought it was going to be groceries to do but it's gross transaction value I thought for sure it was like grocery, I was trying to decode it without looking it up and I was like that can't be grocery because then I don't know what a TV is doing there and you know so then their revenue is a derivative of that meaning of some percentage then of that big number Falls to them as Revenue after they pay the grocer The Shopper and then instacart the business has the leftovers and which ends up, we'll go through the unique and I'll mix it ends up being being pretty small because the grocery business does not have huge merchants.

Jason:
[28:26] Yeah so kind of looking at those business fundamentals that you know in 2022 they sold 28.8, billion dollars worth of stuff which for them generated 2.5 billion dollars in revenue and they were profitable on that Revenue they they net 428.
Million dollars which like back in the a couple years ago when there were more IPOs happening there were there were IPOs in the space they were happening with companies that still weren't profitable so so that was interesting that they they were meaningfully profitable and then the, you know you're super interested in what the growth trajectory is and.

[29:13] 20:19 was a very small year so going from 2019 to 2020 you know and then the pandemic app in the middle 2020 and urban was ordering groceries from, from instacart so the growth in 2020 was astronomical like 300% or something like that.
But then the growth in 2021 over 2020 was 24%.
On revenue and the growth in 2022 over 2021 was 39% in Revenue so.
The revenue growth is Meaningful and accelerating.
Which would be exciting they were not profitable in 2020 or 2021 so 2022 is the First full year that they were profitable.
The GTD is a little different though they had significant growth three hundred percent in 2020 20 percent in 20 21 and 16 percent in 2022 so, well they have a track record of growth it's the top on GTV growth is decelerating.
And then of course we're halfway through 2023 so they have to disclose.

[30:23] How the well they've done in the first six months of this year and they compared to that to last year and the revenue and GTV are both essentially flat in the first six months of this year.
Versus last year so I don't know you'll have to tell me but I look at that and you go man there's some robust stuff here there's a great growth story.
I should have mentioned that that's on an annual basis on a quarterly basis they have five consecutive quarters of profitability which also seems.
Impressive him pretty favorable but it's probably a slight worry that the.
A lot of that growth seems like it's it's leveling off in 2023 I don't know if.
That the most recent performance gets gets over weighted or underweighted and sort of evaluating the the prospects for the company.

Scot:
[31:19] Yeah the buyers will you know what every everyone has a different way they value things and they they're going to build their own models and the company will give them some guidance that's some of the stuff we did it we're not going to go over and but you have to be careful because you don't want to make forward-looking statements so this is this weird dance you do of you.
You try to get people excited by not saying anything about the future which is which is a little tricky so you know what I imagine instacart s' just reading the tea leaves again they talked a lot about how they don't really do much sales and marketing which I kind of read to say, look we really hunkered down on our unique economic sand we've got it dialed in right now and spoiler will get to adds a lot of a lot of that has come from this ad piece.
And I think now.

[32:07] Because investor and I was the bullish scenario is you know they're going to raise at least 400 million they'll probably raise a lot of money from this they could start doing some advertising and you pick up some new customers that again I'm going to kind of hope they look at the cohorts those cohorts look like with what this in the here and they have at least the same unique anomic so if not better and I'm going to look at this growth accelerating wow what Wall Street loves their favorite favorite favorite kind of the top quadrant is accelerating Revenue growth an accelerating profitability and you know I could see a scenario the light has to go their way but I could see a scenario where that works here you know if they could if they could start spending some really careful sales and marketing dollars building the brand where they've been kind of under the radar for the most part and then.
That works those cohorts stick and then they can work on the economics because that's gonna bring more advertisers per order because the more average more orders and more.
GTV is going to bring more cpgs in that want to advertise against that then you could argue accelerating Revenue growth accelerating profitable unit economics.
So I think that's the bull case the bear case is they've hit saturation they've got all the stores.
4% is anemic and nowhere to go but down.
So that's the end of it is it is going to be interesting to see there's a little bit of A Tale of Two Cities in those possible outcomes.

Jason:
[33:36] Yeah what else jumped out at you in the management discussion.

Scot:
[33:43] They made a big point of talking about they have 7.7 million monthly active users which is a good number but they point out that in the u.s. there's 330 million consumers or I guess population so they use that and this is kind of one of those hints I was talking about the basically said hey we're.
We've done good to get here but these are like the early adopters we still have a long way to go there's a lot of people you know I don't think they'll get all of them and I'll talk about that in a second but there's a lot more people that you should be using our service that aren't is so they kind of paint that 7.7 million and say that's teeny tiny compared to where we should be.
And then you know the other thing they talked about that I thought was interesting I wanted to get your opinion on is they talk about, per user per month they get three hundred and Seventeen dollars and I was wondering I know you probably know this off the top of your head.
What is if you look at the average US consumer and you probably look at the.
Population of the convenience store that's like a kind of probably like that 100K and up household you know what is their monthly and is this like half of it a quarter what is your spidey sense tells you on that.

Jason:
[35:00] Yeah so real rough numbers the average American family and you know people shop for groceries in households versus people so it's almost better to talk in household so there's like 131 million households in the US and sin they've got.
Seven million of them as customers the average household shops for groceries 1.6 times a week and they spend a hundred dollars per visit so you kind of you know rough that up and you get.
Get what is that I'll have the intern do in turn do the math one point six times.
100 times, 4.5 is 720 total grocery spin which I don't have the census numbers in front of me but but that passes the smell test that so.
Households are spending six seven hundred bucks a month and instacart saying that they're getting less than half of that.

Scot:
[36:12] Yeah and I saw some people speculate on this that, what their inferring is Davin they have an average order of 110 so this is like 2.6 instacart some month instacart orders per user per month that's another kind of interesting metric and then people are speculating in the saying the pattern is probably people are doing a big shop once a month and they're kind of going and getting you know, a lot of like maybe canned goods and things like that and then they supplement it with two or three instacart has to bring maybe a refresh of the the replenishable is like the cheese the milk the veggies and the fruits kind of thing.
Again this is everyone just kind of like taking data and kind of going out for data point so the cone of uncertainty is pretty big out there but it kind of passed my sniff test that's how we've used it before, at our house with exception of wizard a lot at work to fill our snack area at work and we're probably like we're probably like top one quartile of this whole thing that's the number of snacks we get from Instagram.
There's a deep does that that analysis of the one big shop yourself and then supplement does that.

Jason:
[37:26] No exact yeah I mean I think the Grocer's talk and I hesitate to bring this up because I don't think I remember I'll for off the top my head but there's like four typical types of shopping missions right so there is that like Pantry stocking shop there's like a weekly shop there's a.
Occasion Bay shop where your your it's date night or it's Christmas or whatever and you make a special shop and then there's those, top off shops and I think it's generally agreed like there's not a big cohort of consumers that have just said I'm never using a grocery store again then I'm exclusive we gonna, I have all of my my calories show up at my doorstep so digital grocery ends up being one of the tools in the family's tool kit for, procuring their their calories and so it makes.
Total sense that they would have a share that one of the ways they could grow is to increase that share presumably by.
Being the best choice for more of those different kinds of missions.

Scot:
[38:34] Yeah and then the md&a they talk a lot about how they have these new offerings where you can get a weekly Monday thing and they're definitely poking around at this experimenting on how to grow the sand again they're kind of signaling we think we've got some room to go on this we can get that.

[38:51] Bridge order up and we can get the ma use way up the second thing I noticed was you know they use this they use this phrase, several times you can tell it's kind of like must be tied to company values and they talk about we believe people want selection quality value and convenience if that sounds familiar to you the this is infamously brought up in the Amazon Jeff Bezos first shareholder letter in 1997 where he talks about the mark you know what Amazon believes and they believe that a multi-decade trend is people will not get tired of selection quality value and when value he uses kind of free shipping like versus product value is pretty specific on it and then convenience and then what got me thinking about this is.

[39:38] Value inconvenience her you know they're often in conflict and this is the whole point of we've had, Casey on the show from the Lloyd there bifurcation kind of model which shows this was this I think a lot about this because this is the whole one of the whole reasons I started spiffy and we decided early on if we're going to be convenient we can't be the cheapest and I don't think people look at instacart as the cheapest you know whenever we use it it's kind of like, holy cow this is this is a pretty expensive treat in you know I really kind of need to be able to justify this to myself that I can't just pop over the grocery store and do this myself it needs to be yeah some some reason I'm going to miss a kid event or something that I'm getting a really good bang for the buck here so I thought that was interesting that at some point I wonder do they value part kind of struggle with you know how.

Jason:
[40:31] I think they have to have a.
A more liberal definition of value because I think you're exactly right right and obviously you know value means different things to different people like they disclosed later in the S1 that they not surprisingly that they skew disproportionately to households that make over 100,000 a year compared to a traditional retail and particularly a traditional grocer like give I've no idea what it looked like when they actually did it but when Kroger went public or certainly when Walmart went public they would have talked about the top of their tree that we think the consumer really values price and and Walmart probably said price not value and you know they built a business around very aggressively maintaining those low prices because they thought that was the beginning of their flywheel and and you know Amazon talked about value but they when they said value a lot of what they meant was and we're going to you know have the very competitive or the lowest price on a lot of these goods and, the the business model of instacart makes it unlikely that that can be their positioning so they have to kind of, find a a valid but alternative definition of value to hang their hat on.

Scot:
[41:50] Yeah and I thought was interesting they put convenience a lot you know last you may say oh you're reading too much into it but you know I've been in rooms you spend so much time on every word there's a purpose to this order of selection quality value and convenience and and they mentioned this exact phrase like several times so this is a this seems to be an yeah a pretty important phrase in their their world to I just thought that was I want to get your take on you know at some point they may cross this road where they have to pick a lane and it'll be if it ain't going to be the value late you know I don't see a path there but you know maybe they think they can and you know they also talked about selling to the grocer some software so maybe that's kind of like how they're squeaking that in I don't know.

Jason:
[42:36] Yeah yeah and there's I think we'll talk about this and in our final conclusion but the there's multiple ways you could see this going over time and depending on which path it took like value could mean something different.
So what will come back to that.
I heard you like dissected all of the the disclose data and put together unit economic model for for instacart.

Scot:
[43:07] Yeah so it starts at the top so the GTV per order so every order that comes in they get the GTV as $110 and then there here's how they slice the onion so the biggest chunk goes to the grocer for the groceries and they get 83 percent which is $91 so right off the top we're left with $19 but now the grocer they have to go make all their money so instacart is that's what you would basically get I think if you and I went to the grocery store you know maybe they're getting a little bit of a discount but they're they're taking that $91 and they're adding $19 on top of it and this is all X tip there's a there's there is a delivery fee and what not so then the Shopper gets 8.2% or nine dollars in order and that's in that delivery fee and then they get the tips.

Jason:
[43:58] Clarification on shopper because like in most contact Shopper would mean the consumer that's buying the goods The Shopper in this case is is a instacart gig worker that goes to the store and gets Aggregates the order for the customer.

Scot:
[44:14] Exactly the gig worker is the Shopper so they get nine dollars and they get 100% of the tip so whenever you you know whenever you what what they don't say some of these gay places in this bothers me because we fell out on this they say the gig worker gets 100% but then they take a transaction fee of 3%, now I can't find they say 100% I can't see any little asterisks that says there's going to skim 3% or something so.

[44:44] So to the hopefully they're being super up front and they the gig worker does get 100% of the tips but the tips aren't in the economic the kind of sit over on the side to go to kind of bypass instacart all together and they go straight to the shopper.
Who also gets nine dollars from instacart so if you gave a 20 dollar tip the the Shoppers going to get 20 plus 9 or 22, then at this point we are finally at instacart Revenue which is ten dollars and that's into pieces seven dollars is the transaction revenue and three is ads.
So almost half their margin you know so 30% I guess yeah.
I say half because the line is going so fast it will become half probably by 2024 you know half the.
Profit the margin the revenue that they get and probably disproportionate part of margin is from the ad piece which we're going to talk about in detail so that is.
That's pretty important to this whole enchilada and until they figure that out this didn't really work I do.

[45:48] So they get so 110 dollar order $91 goes the grocer that leaves us with 19 Shopper gets nine we're left with 10 7 of that, is the transaction Revenue three is ADS then their costs come out they have three dollars of cost per order.
And this is this is things like you know their entire some allocation of all their website hosting the engineering team developed the app.
I don't know if they would put sales and marketing in there and they weren't very specific about what they do and don't put in cogs so that was a question mark.
And they're left with seven dollars of gross profit for that order.
My bet is marketing is not in there and they kind of take that up later but again the didn't really.
Disclose that I saw what all was and not in Cox so basically that 110 boils down to seven dollars a profit from them and if we looked at it you know.
I bet that three of that seven is basically from the ads and you know because there's almost no cost to serve an ad and so so I thought that was pretty interesting that like you know around half of the Prophet basically is from the ad system.

Jason:
[47:00] Yeah I think I think it's for sure interesting and like you know two possibilities there there there, average value of an order is 110 bucks traditional brick-and-mortar grocer is a hundred bucks and so one question like did instacart wasn't totally clear I mean they tried to take credit for having a higher order value but it wasn't clear like do we think.
There's something unique about our experience that causes people to spend more or.
Is our service just more expensive and so therefore you know if I got the same 60 items from from Walmart it would cost me $100 but if I got it from instacart Cassandra and ten dollars.
But if it's the latter and I'm sure the real answer somewhere in between but but if it's the latter then you go you know all of the, The Profit that instacart is potentially taking is kind of from the.
The convenient spread where they're you know getting consumers to pay more for the extra convenience of this grocery delivery.

Scot:
[48:08] So that was the unique nanak's what did you discover from the cohorts.

Jason:
[48:12] Yeah well I think we both we both noticed that they had a pretty detailed cohort analysis in the s-1 and by cohort analysis what we mean is they.
They break down all the revenue they get from every.
Group of customers on the first year they acquire those customers and then they track the spending for that group of customers in each, subsequent year and so you have a cohort that you acquired in 2017 you have a cohort you acquired in 2018, so on and so forth through this 20:22 cohort and there's.
Other dimensions you could do Court analysis on but this this tenure cohort is most common and loyal listeners of the show will know we've certainly talked about it before no most notably with a guest Professor Dan McCarthy.
From Emory University who spends a lot of time.

[49:13] Talking about and thinking about cohort analysis so I my first thought when I saw this cohort analysis is I'll bet you Dan McCarthy's really happy right now and is probably.
Deep deep into these numbers and he has a phrase that he calls a super annuities which is for the circumstances.
The older cohorts get more valuable over time and keep contributing more Revenue to your business which is, you know that if you think about it that's that's the ideal state right you want those kind of six-year-old cohorts to be.

[49:51] Growing and be your most valuable and if they're you know significantly tailing off over time then like you know you start to question the core value proposition of the business like maybe customers get fatigued with your business or decide it's not a good value in the long run or something else so um the the big takeaway for me of the cohort analysis is the cohorts grow over time the if you look at like the year one value of this cohort it averages $226 and then it goes up 33 percent in year two to three hundred dollars and then up 16%, to 350 dollars in year three and then another up another 16% to 4:00 in your for and then up 10% $445 in year 5 and up another 8% to 480 dollars in year 6 and so like fundamentally.
That is a very good picture of.
The value of the cohorts and I'm certain why they chose to include the cohort analysis in there as one because I don't believe there's any.
Any filing requirement to do that and certainly lots of companies don't include any cohort cohort analysis but then my kind of secondary take is.

[51:12] You know not every year is the same and so some of those cohorts like started before Cove it and then they're their behavior, was slightly impacted by their maturity but also impacted by covet and some of these cohorts started after Cove ID and so one of the things you would look for in that cohort analysis is did these guys just get a big spike from Cova da, when people are afraid to go to grocery stores and you know has that worn off right and that's kind of a comment common narrative out there like I argue.

[51:45] It's mostly misunderstood when people give that narrative about digital but it's.
It's even more likely that is misunderstood if you have that narrative and grocery because grocery appears like on the surface to be the one category where hey we're at three percent e-commerce penetration before covet and now we're 12% e-commerce penetration and so this, these cohort analysis if if there was a spike that dip back down you would expect to see some of the later cohorts underperforming versus the the precoded cohorts and we don't see that right that like all the cohorts grow and they grow over time the rate of growth slows down over time which is like I think pretty pretty typical and not surprising um so all that was super favorable the one thing and one will have to have Dan on the show but the one thing that I think wasn't in here that you'd really want to understand how valuable the customer bases and and again guys like Dan kind of pioneered this idea of how you value a company based on their customer base.

[52:53] And kind of set the price based on on this type of data but I think they would also want to see some churn data and understand.
How many people are each in each of these cohorts and whether there's the same people or lots of defectors and new people coming and all those sorts of things and none of that was was disclosed and assess.

Scot:
[53:22] Yeah you're right the I think they're making the argument that the swamps turn but because they don't disclose it you kind of.
You have to trust him and he would he would want that data because you know the whole Begin Again the the bull case here is all right if you got super annuities than spending ad dollars to bring super annuities in this smart right because everyone you bring in the door is going to follow this cohort and start of it you know you and I looking at a table that the says you're one they start at 2:26 and then by year 60 at 500 bucks so they they double over their life cycle in their GTV so over six years so if you know if you can go buy them for a hundred bucks a pop then you would just go and, and spend all that money in it should be we have a super annuity on one side you can spend a lot of money acquiring customers on the other.

Jason:
[54:15] For sure true what.

Scot:
[54:17] You turn there's something that they could hide in there.

Jason:
[54:19] Yeah so you have to worry about that you also side note like a thing that drives CFOs crazy about marketers is you also have to have this argument about correlation and causation right that like if I went out and bought a bunch of customers would they maintain this the same level of performance or with those those.
Purchase customers through higher advertising and through greater sales and marketing a activities be less oil less valuable customers by.
The answer varies depending on the business.

Scot:
[54:53] Yeah that's where I this kind of come back to that bifurcation thinks I think would you say 120 million households.

Jason:
[54:59] Yeah 131.

Scot:
[55:00] Yeah so there's probably I think it's probably a pretty evenly split between convenience and value so call it 60 and they've got 7.7 so there's actually good I think they've got a 10% share of, what does the actual dress for Market because I don't think they're going to get any of the value or in a consumers because yeah the valuing consumer does not pay for convenience they'll just go to grocery store.

Jason:
[55:23] Yeah and again in the bottom quartile a lot of people are shopping for for groceries with government assistance and I don't actually think instacart should double-check this but I don't believe instacart has a way to accept Snap payments.

Scot:
[55:36] Yeah I don't think the government is going to subsidize the food delivered.

Jason:
[55:39] Well they just you know they do in other great white white guy like you can order groceries online from Walmart and pay with SNAP but I don't think you can with instacart.

Scot:
[55:49] Yes that's another factor and then at some point yeah I'm sure you'll bring this up but the.
The if you're if you're a grocer you know a lot of ours opt out of the sand to themselves and they like we have a Harris Teeter that they don't accept instacart yeah they're not on there and they want to do their own they want to own the customer themselves.

Jason:
[56:12] Yeah I save that discussion for other but I think that's a super important one.

Scot:
[56:16] Forget I said that that's a teaser that's it's a teaser was what we call a tease.

Jason:
[56:19] Excellent teaser yeah because I feel like we've gone to the add segment of the breakdown of is there anything else you wanted to cover before that Scott.

Scot:
[56:28] No I'm on the edge of my seat to hear what you thought about that specific.

Jason:
[56:31] Yeah so it turns out instacart sanad Essence and probably shouldn't surprise anyone you know Scott you alluded to the change in CEO the the current CEO for this IPO is fidge Asuma Seema who formerly was VP of advertising at Facebook so they brought in a Facebook.
Exact to run this business and shoot I should have looked up what episode he was on but Seth Dallaire was a past guest on this show when he was the chief Revenue officer.
For instacart which was right around the time that that fidget joined.

[57:19] Instacart so we actually had a discussion about their aspirations to become an advertising business and spoiler alert, it worked at instacart which we're going to break into and that guess set the layer subsequently was hired as the chief Revenue officer at Walmart where he's.
Building Walmart connect which is also working so turns out ads are becoming an increasingly important part of the ecosystem for retailers but the basic ad math at instacart is that in 2022 the last full year of data instacart generated 470 million dollars in ads so 470 million on 28 billion in GTV, means that that's about 2.6 percent of the spin.
That went to ads it's thirty percent of their revenue today and.

[58:20] It's growing at 29 percent so it went up 29% from 2022 to from 21 to 20 22.
Um it's grown another twenty four percent in the first months of six months of 2023 so, a lot of the unit economics of their transactions have kind of stabilized and are flat the one thing that's still growing at a very fast double-digit pace, is the ad business and at seven and twenty million dollars it's already reasonably robust and they don't.
Ads are not a line item on the income statement that they included like you know and presumably like it's not.
You could argue it's not Material against the three billion in in Revenue.
But the so we don't we don't really know exactly how profitable, Those ads are but in general we would call these ads or retail media Network and the you know people argue about how profitable these retail media networks are people particularly argue about Amazon's but kind of the middle of the range when people estimate how what how profitable these things are is that they're about 75 percent gross right so in theory they should be near 99% gross margin because like you don't have to make anything to sell an ad.

[59:46] You know you do need some technology you need an ad server you need Administration and salespeople you need brand safety people you know there is.
Some infrastructure some of which has to scale with the ad business and so the the kind of.
Most common estimate that that I see out there is like 75% of that revenue from ad business is profit.
So that implies that the ad business contributed seven 555 million to the.
To the income statement for 2022.
Um and they were only profitable 428 million in 2022 so that the ad business contribute like by that sort of slice the ad business contributed.

[1:00:33] You know covered all of their losses and and was essentially all of their their profit.
In in 2022 and it's growing faster than anything else so it's very clear that the ad business is a key.
Tenant of this instacart model and they in the management can section they it was kind of funny working for a big, advertising agency because they had to spend a fair amount of time like justifying that ads are valuable good thing and that people are spending money on ads so they kind of you know paint paint this picture that consumer packaged Goods companies which are you know most of the goods that instacart cells that.

[1:01:20] Cpgs in the u.s. spend about 200 billion dollars a year on advertising and currently about a quarter of that is digital.
And so the.
The you know a typical cpg spends like about thirty percent of their gross sales on advertising and you know at the moment instacart is collecting about less than three percent of its sales in advertising so I think they're saying like hey.
Advertising is super effective it's an important part of our economic model and there's a ton of.
Of potential growth for us in this market and that cpgs need us and they amongst their claims about the size of their business, there are 50 500 brands that are advertising on instacart today and those are.
At the moment all brands that sell.

[1:02:18] Whose Goods get sold on instacart so we call that endemic advertisers right so it's it's Mondelez selling cookies and folks like that a lot of advertising companies.
Sell ads to people that aren't necessarily selling through the.
The the platform we call those non-endemic advertisers and we I don't think there are any non-endemic advertisers on instacart as of yet.
But so at the Top Line like these are these are solid fundamentals for an ad business you like.

[1:02:54] From my perspective retail media networks are super important evolution in the space they are very important I actually think for a lot of smaller retailers they get overhyped and that there's a problem with scale with a lot of these but instacart appears to be one of the companies.
That has enough scale to build a real.
A real business around this there is a unique problem that instacart has with ads that you know I think they've only been partially able to remediate so far who's paying for the ads.

[1:03:25] Right so they talked about the brands paying for the ad right it's Procter & Gamble about the ad but there's a lot of stakeholders with budgets at Procter & Gamble, there's Mark Pritchard that buys Super Bowl ads and tries to build the brand and make people love tied but there are also account teams, that are trying to Goose the sales at their account so there's a Walmart account team and a Kroger account team and an Albertsons account team and all of those guys have an ad budget, that they want to use to sell more stuff at Walmart Kroger and Albertsons respectively.
And so the big problem you have with instacart is you spend that ad dollar with instacart and you don't actually know.
Which retailer it's going to impact.
Right and so it's kind of like it has to come out of the top of funnel ad budget but it's bottom of the funnel Performance Marketing, type ads mostly search ads and so not saying that model can't work but it's.

[1:04:33] The the guys with budgets that are used to buying ads are used to a slightly different structure so I will say that at the moment instacart causes a lot of consternation because it's a it's an unusual Beast that people don't exactly know how to budget for or how to spend their money on and you know I would assume if instacart wants to grow a lot they have to make that, easier for for the brands to do.

Scot:
[1:05:00] Yeah so what do you think.
They're so this is a relatively good chunk of Revenue where do you think they're getting it from is it online going offline I mean offline going online are they taking it from Google are they taking it from couponing or.
Two Brands even do like newspaper inserts are still a thing like I know that back in the day.

Jason:
[1:05:22] So I know I yeah I think.
Brands are pretty pretty rapidly shifting their their dollars to digital vehicles and so two things like there's you know traditional kind of, newspaper magazine advertising that's atrophying and and the brands are replacing that with digital there's a slight misnomer the whole privacy thing and Facebook is a real thing but you know who wasn't buying a huge amounts of Facebook ads are like National cpgs with huge brand recall so so you know those tended to be smaller Brands and longer tail things so it's less like oh.

[1:06:05] The these guys are shifting from Facebook it's more they're shifting from old-school marketing and over are television to to these digital vehicles but a big chunk of it is still coming out of these trade budgets right and so there may have been a pool of money that was allocated to spend at Kroger and it used to get spend on newspaper circulars that were like Kroger ads that fell out of the newspaper and that's an increasingly ineffective vehicle or maybe they even got spent on floor decals in the aisle at Kroger right you know like Shopper marketing tactics or trade tactics and so increasingly the retail media networks are getting a chunk of those trade dollars and I do think instacart is getting some of those even though it's trickier to do because you know it's not allocated exactly 21 specific retailer at the moment.

Scot:
[1:07:07] Yeah the so what did the ad formats I've seen is I always get this one that's like you through some Quaker Oats granola bars in there if you add these six things will give you a five bucks or something I've seen a coupon and I've seen a you know an upsell hey you've previously bought this or you may like this are there those are the three main add units or am I missing something.

Jason:
[1:07:33] Yeah so I am not going to speak specifically about the variation in ad units but as a general rule like probably I'm assuming the most predominant ads on the platform are search ads right so people search for products like always and you know above all the organic results are a bunch of sponsored ads right and so off very often those don't have a special offer in them they're just premium.

[1:08:00] And so a big chunk is probably those those search ads you know then they're there are like Banner type ads that that land either on like the homepage of a particular retailer or on a category page or subcategory page and more often those are likely to have some call-to-action offer in them so they might have a promotion or a discount of some kind and then in the digital space um there's a lot of what we call like top off and impulse ads which are what you were just talking about right and you know one of the big problems we have with digital grocery is when you go shopping at the grocery store your wife sends you to the store with a list of 10 items and you buy all those 10 items but then you walk by the ice cream aisle on your way to the cash wrap and you add ice cream even though you didn't plan to buy ice cream and then when you're standing in the cash wrap, you're sneering at that Snickers bar or that Wrigley gum and you add that to the car and maybe a cold Coke to drink on the way home from the grocery store so a big chunk of a traditional grocer sales are all these unplanned impulse purchases and that.

[1:09:16] By default happens a lot less in digital Grocery and so a lot of these ad formats are kind of are, our Industries early efforts to try to reinvent digital impulse and I would I would call it pretty imperfect at the moment.

Scot:
[1:09:35] Don't you get a nursing inside about gum or something like because self-checkout smelled the gum that serendipity.

Jason:
[1:09:42] Yeah the the that that cash wrap used to be the most valuable real estate in a grocery store like the most Revenue per square foot was that what we call the cash wrap which is the.
The conveyor belt that you stand in line and actually the first thing that killed the cash wrap was not any of this digital shopping or any of these things it was.
Facebook and the mobile phone and simply because you now had something else to do when you are standing in line so you were paying attention to your phone and back then you are on Facebook today you'd probably be on tick tock but you're doing that instead of being forced to stare at the gum or the the coke with a suspiciously intentional you know Sheen of dew on it.
And so just impulse buys went down just because the darn phones were distracting people that were standing in line and now that you don't even walk in the store or stand in line you know of course we lose.
A lot of our our impulse juice so I think you know if we we went from three percent online sales to 12 percent online sales if we get in those twenty or thirty percent it's it's.
Like the economics are only going to work if Grocers figure out how to replace those lost Sample Sales.

Scot:
[1:10:55] At some point does this create channel conflict if I'm Kroger I want to these a dollars in their kind of happening.
Or the order gets to me and your skin you're skimming them away from me like do you think Grocers wake up and say sorry if this is something on discuss later.

Jason:
[1:11:12] No let's pivot to that because I think that was the end of my ads section is there anything that you want to ask her missed about her noticed about ads that.

Scot:
[1:11:21] No I already said it just kind of reminds me Amazon so I did you know.

Jason:
[1:11:25] Yeah.

Scot:
[1:11:26] So Channel conflict what's going to happen there.

Jason:
[1:11:28] Yeah so there's some other interesting tidbits that will come to but like the the big concern about this whole thing is this is a Marketplace to me that has some unique characteristics that are distinct from most other marketplaces so you're obviously the marketplace Guru on our show if you think about a Marketplace like Amazon there's nearly an.
In endless supply of potential sellers that could sell on Amazon right so you know Amazon treats them well enough, but if they have some churn and sellers if people feel like they're not making enough money selling Goods on Amazon Amazon doesn't sweat that too much because if they leave the platform some other seller is likely right behind them to win that by box there that is not the case in grocery because these Goods aren't coming from a warehouse they're not coming from a factory in China most of these goods are coming from the perishable shelves of a local grocer and there's only a finite number of those grocers in the United States of America so we're you know you could have kind of all these.

[1:12:35] Arbitrageurs like becoming sellers on Amazon and you know any college kid could decide to start selling on Amazon tomorrow.
You kind of have to already be a traditional grocer to become a seller on instacart and so the the pool of potential sellers is way more constrained and.
Um I would argue that many of those sellers should not be on the instacart marketplace right because.
In the early days of digital grocery you go oh man this is just a distraction we don't have a queer a good grocer but we don't have expertise in digital now we've got a few eating customers that want to order online but just Outsource this whole thing to instacart, and see if customers even want it and that that was a perfectly reasonable strategy and a lot of Grocers have obviously done that.
But once you start seeing that oh my God customers really do want this and now it's 12 percent of our sales and it's trending towards twenty percent of our sales and it's more than half of their their total visits to our brand are now happening on that platform.

[1:13:42] Do you want that to be a platform you out sourced that also any of your competitors can Outsource or do you want that to be some sort of.
Owned competitive Advantage right and, I tell the story all the time so people are their eyes are probably rolling in the back of their head but this all played out in e-commerce right when, bookstores first started hearing about the people on to buy books online they said that's a distraction we should Outsource it what about that company in Seattle that's outsourced it to them.

[1:14:11] And when they suddenly realize oh Outsourcing our book business dams on probably doesn't make a lot of sense.
Which if you're a younger listener that really did happen toys Toys R Us and and Borders books like.
Gave gave their their e-commerce businesses to Amazon, when you realize Amazon was a direct competitor then you found another service provider to Outsource it to and the outsourced provider that everyone found in the e-commerce industry was this company called GSI Commerce and they became.
A very high valued fast running business founded by this guy Mark Rubin and you've probably heard of him because.
He owns the Philadelphia 76ers on with the money he made from from GSI and he started in another very successful business fanatics but GSI was a tremendously.
Successful business that kind of doesn't exist today because over time Toys R Us said you know we better learn how to, run our own e-commerce site and Dick's Sporting Goods said we need to learn how to run our own e-commerce site and targets that we need to learn how to run her own e-commerce site and so as that market matured, all those people that were happy to Outsource this nascent business to GSI fire GSI and brought that that.
Function in-house and to me instacart feels a lot like the grocery version of GSI now.

[1:15:39] One reason this isn't necessarily a doom story is GSI actually does still exist they've rebranded and they're called the radial and what they do today is they provide a lot of the backend services.
That businesses use for e-commerce but they no longer provide the front end and they no longer provided under their own brand so they're sort of a white label service provider.
And we haven't talked about it yet but but instacart actually has an extra Revenue stream that they talk about in their S1 that just isn't economically material yet which is, they're selling a bunch of services to retailers that want to do some or all of this, themselves and they white label a lot of the services and instacart is, trying to invest in making good versions of those services that they might be able to sell to a retailer that does decide, to bring the website in house or the picking in fulfillment in house.
But so to me when I look at this business I go the number one risk is.

[1:16:39] In the long run can they maintain the sellers that they have and if they can't it's not like there's an unlimited Supply to replace the current ones which is a very different Dynamic than.
Then like the Amazon Marketplace and so one of the things you see that you know they claim they're very proud of in there.
There s one is and I should have found this but what's the count of retailers they say.

Scot:
[1:17:09] 5700 it's just kind of pop that's the number two spot.

Jason:
[1:17:12] We'll call that the right number unless I find that number but that but that number of that's the number of resellers and those resellers have 80,000 stores in the US and represent 85% of all Grocers right so you look at that and go oh good news bad news.
They've saturated the market they are they already have 85% of all grocers on their platform so they're not going to add a bunch of sellers but the seller but all the sellers will love them right that would be the.
The favorable interpretation but the wrinkle here is.
A bunch of the sellers that they're claiming have kind of already moved away from instacart right so included in the list of sellers on this Marketplace our Walmart.
Kroger and Albertsons which cumulatively are the top three grocers in the market and I think together the three of them are over 50 percent of the market the.
It's 1,400 retail banners.

Scot:
[1:18:14] For 200 yeah 5500 advertisers house I've got those.

Jason:
[1:18:17] That's what I was worried about yeah so so 1400 retail banners representing 80 thousand stores representing 85% of the US grocery Market but again today Walmart Kroger and Albertsons are in that.
That list and those are all grocers that are investing huge amounts of money in building their own capability and today, that capability sits beside instacart or maybe in front of instacart and they're only using instacart as kind of overflow.
But it's it's way less certain to me and there was not a lot of like.

[1:18:54] You know confidence and stealing information in the s-1 to say oh we're going to be able to retain Kroger as a customer or we're going to be able to retain Albertsons as a customer and to me it's a big risk for their current business model.
If they can't and a huge percent of those of the a huge portion of the eighty-five percent of the market share they're saying they have.
Is those three companies and then after those three companies which have already expressed like clear intent to invest in their own capability there are other giant Grocers.
That haven't expressed an interest but they need to write and so you and I'm specifically thinking of like all the in Costco are two huge grocers in the US.
You know are not very digitally mature and have not seem to want to invest a lot of there.
Their own resources in digital but if they're going to be around in 20 years I'm pretty confident that they're going to have to figure it out and it's not just going to be Outsourcing it to instacart so I look at a big chunk of those.
Marketplace sellers on instacart and I go.
Um that that is a little risky and you know a lot of their volume is probably concentrated in those sellers that are at risk and you go, is there a business if all the big guys leave and it's just all the Independent Grocers there might be but the economics probably look a lot different than this.

Scot:
[1:20:19] Very cool so you're going to are you going to be a buyer.

Jason:
[1:20:23] I am.

[1:20:26] Yeah yeah yeah if I could have gotten in her like I would love to be at the 76 or games with my driven but I'm not sure that the retail price like has some risk cooked into it because of that that problem now again you know radials a decent little business and could could you know carrot services for instacart be a decent little business one day sure you know the counter argument if I'm trying to be fair here is.
What I think in instacart exec would say is hey Jason like we had two things we're the Outsource capability for some of these retailers that don't have that capability but we're also.
Marketplace with a bunch of loyal customers and we're bringing customers and visits to Kroger which is why Kroger isn't gonna fire us.

[1:21:20] Right but prettier Point like.
Really where are they getting those customers right like they're not you know they're not making huge investment in sales and marketing they haven't like you know demonstrated some magical top of funnel capability to acquire, in consumers like I would argue they're acquiring most of their primary acquisition strategy is to acquire great sellers that already have consumers and take over the that business for those those, those banners so that that to me puts this this whole thing at risk like is there something I'm missing about that Scott or does that at least.

Scot:
[1:21:56] It's a risk you know they would probably argue they have data that says they're largely in criminal and my guess is the Grocer's aren't sophisticated enough to be able to run an analysis on that so yeah, Walmart certainly is but not yeah you know gross has been right.

Jason:
[1:22:14] The long tail of.
Pretty pretty pretty thin and pretty like grocery is a super hard business that requires a lot of unique capabilities and the people that you know, acquired those capabilities over 60 years are not necessarily the people you're going to expect to be the first fastest digital adopters and like side note in favor of all the hard-working Grocers out there I mean.
It's the one business that Amazon has invested billions in and can't figure out how to do properly right so so it is what gentlemanly hard.
I do, I did have a couple other tidbits on the if we're done talking about the giant elephant in the room that is their their seller concentration there were a couple other tidbits that jumped out at me in the ass one do you want to should we run down those real quick.

Scot:
[1:23:04] Yeah far away.

Jason:
[1:23:06] Yeah so there is another interesting part of the thing that I was surprised by which is instacart membership program so instacart has a membership program called instacart + and it turns out all this revenue is coming from members.
Which again is another favorable Trend we saw that the cohort analysis was pretty favorable but.
57% of instacart Revenue comes from people that pay a monthly or annual fee to get free.
Shipping from instacart so that are members of this instacart plus program and 5.1 million of the 7.7 million active Shoppers are in the program.

[1:23:46] And those those members spend disproportionately more like over 6X more than non-members spend so this is like.
You spend your your monthly fee or I think it's like a hundred dollars annually and for that you get unlimited Fleet free delivery.
You get reduced service fees you get credit back on eligible pick up orders like if you if you do curbside pickup and you get some other exclusive benefits so.
They have kind of monetized a membership program so you could think of this as a very baby Costco but that.
If this all scales that's another potential interesting Revenue scheme.
I did mention I was pretty excited they had to kind of make the pitch for digital Grocery and so.
You know they do talk a lot about a groceries accelerated to 12%.
Digital groceries accelerated 12 percent penetration that.

[1:24:44] That has accelerated a lot in the last three years as a result of Cove Ed and they spend a lot of time talking about the distinction between.
Delivery of groceries and pick up of groceries and instacart plays in both but here's kind of an interesting thing.

[1:25:01] About it's a it's near 50/50 split right now the.
Grab the delivery orders instacart is primarily competing with other digitally native digital Grocers so they're competing with.
Um shipped which is owned by Target they're competing with doordash and ubereats which if you haven't been following it both have pivoted into grocery they're competing with go Puff.
And so these are other like digitally native companies that kind of didn't exist in the space until until digital came along but the other half of the business is pick up.
And 95% of all the pickup business is getting fulfilled by a traditional brick-and-mortar Grocery Store where the parking lot.
And so like there is you know there are these like interesting bifurcated segments where.
You know some of instacart Revenue they're competing against you know Amazon Uber and doordash and other parts of their business there.
They're competing for customers against Walmart Kroger and Albertsons so I found that kind of a interesting evaluation.

[1:26:13] You know again I think a lot of people might have been surprised and asked someone to see that they're competing with with Uber and doordash.

[1:26:22] And then the other thing that I found interesting and this might be obligatory now but I think in instacart is case is kind of true they spent a fair amount of time talking about how they're leaning into a.
And so they both you know we're very early adopters of like.
Licensing open a eyes large language model to have a.
In a i chat assistant on instacart app and website they were one of the they were launched partner that had a plug-in on opening eyes website to let you order order groceries from Chad CPT and they've done at least like for Acquisitions in the like AI in ableman space so they've acquired companies.
Like Rosie which is AI pricing and dynamic pricing they acquired ever site which is a promotion engine the Caper food storm is a software company that.
Doesn't like kiosk software that they can sell to retailers as part of their carrot services so.
That I don't know you tell me why like I suspect that every S1 we do see for the next 18 months is going to have to have an AI section and it was interesting to read about like what they've done in the AI space.

Scot:
[1:27:47] Oh yeah everyone like yeah salesforce's spending all their time with this giant Matrix of how AI is getting integrated into every product everyone is trying to ride the wave but video is making all the money it's a they is off topic but they printed just incredible quarter of just nothing but.

Jason:
[1:28:04] Yeah way more valuable than Intel.

Scot:
[1:28:06] Billion of profit that just showed up at the door is crazy.

Jason:
[1:28:11] Yeah yeah that's a great story for another episode but Scott anything else that we want to cover in this first look at instacart S1.

Scot:
[1:28:22] Know our brand promise is to bring the heat on these and a deep dive this I lost track when we started but this is a very deep dive so we appreciate you guys sticking with us to the end there there was a lot of good stuff on here and we really only got to the tip of the iceberg.
I do encourage you to print out the those relevant pages of this one we talked about 10 12 12 24 or 25 that's the really good stuff and it's worth a read if you're in the space into this Market as we are which I I'm going to guess a lot of you are also pretty geeky about this stuff.

Jason:
[1:28:57] Yeah yeah and so I will definitely put a link to the s-1 in there and until next time happy commercing.

EP194 - Amazon Q3 2019Earnings and News

 

Amazon Q3 Earnings

Revenue accelerated in the US and intl due to 1-day prime juicing demand

• US - 24%  (Q1 - 17%, Q2 - 20%, Q3 - 24%)
• Intl 21% (Q1 - 16%, Q2 - 17%, Q3 - 21%)
• Unit growth (items sold) accelerated to 22% - 4% acceleration (18%) - fastest in 2yrs.

This came at a cost - profits were down 26% y/y and TODO wall st estimates because shipping costs grew 46%

 Specifically GAAP operating income of $3.16b came in 2% below street consensus of $3.22b  EPS was $4.31 vs street $4.56.

This caused the stock to soften by 7-9% in after-hours trading and articles are already out that bezos no longer richest man.

Amazon’s Q4 midpoint revenue was $4b below Wall St. estimates and they projected lower margins than wall st expected.

Specifically, guidance is $80b-<->$86.5b with midpoint of $83.25b - implies 15% growth, 5% below Wall St.

Amazon’s Ads biz which grew 45% y/y and represented $3.6B in the Quarter.  Brian T. Olsavsky - CFO:  “So other revenue, which is principally advertising grew 45% this quarter, up from 37% last quarter. And the biggest thing in there is advertising and advertising grew at a rate higher than that 45%.”

Amazon News

• Amazon Ad Conference - 400 people “AdCon 2019” 10/2 & 3
• Cutting back on apparel Brands 
• Free shipping on $1 items, no more CRaP, No more Add-On
• Amazon Counter Expansion
• Amazon acquires digital health start-up Health Navigator 
• Amazon Launches Premium Gin “Tovess” 
• Amazon charges brands for slots in holiday catalog 
• Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan by Franklin Foer of  The Atlantic
• Is Amazon Unstoppable? New Yorker Charles Duhigg

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 194 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday October 25th, 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP193 - Hershey's CDO Doug Straton

 

Doug Straton, Chief Digital Officer at The Hershey Company.  In this broad-ranging interview, we discuss Hershey's digital footprint, the challenges of temperature-sensitive products, incumbents versus challenger brands, Amazon, Hershey's data strategy, and the future of digital grocery.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 193 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday September 17th, 2019, live from the Grocery Shop trade show in Las Vegas, NV.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP192 - Macy's VP of Innovation Parinda Muley 

Parinda Muley (@parinda), the VP of Innovation and Business Development at Macy’s.  In this broad-ranging interview, we discuss a number of Macy’s innovation initiatives including ThredUp, Macy’s Market @ Macy’s, B8ta, Story, and Style Crew.  We also talk about the strategies for fostering innovation, and how retail innovation is likely to evolve in the future.

Don’t forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 192 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, August 21st, 2019. live from the eTail East trade show in Boston, MA.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP191 - UNTUCKit Chief Digital Officer Lockie Andrews

Lockie Andrews is the Chief Digital Officer of UNTUCKit (@untuckit).  In this broad-ranging interview, we discuss UNTUCKit origin, Omni-Channel strategy, customer acquisition, Amazon, and challenges and opportunities of scaling a direct to consumer business.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 191 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, August 21st, 2019. live from the eTail East trade show in Boston, MA.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP190 - Marketplaces Deep Dive

 

This episode is a deep dive into Marketplaces.

• Background
• Product Marketplaces Today
• Trends in Product Marketplaces
• Trends in Non-Product Marketplaces
• Recommended Resources
  • Jeff Jordan a16z Blog Page (@JEFF_JORDAN)
  • Andrew Chen a16z Blog Page (@ANDREWCHEN) 

• Action Items

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 190 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, September 30. 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP189 - Code Commerce and Grocery Shop

This episode was recorded right after Jason & Scot received their iPhone 11 Pro Max's.  Jason mentioned a new iOS feature to take full page screenshots.  Here is how to take full page screenshots in iOS 13.

Event Recaps:

• Code Commerce - Sept 9 and 10 in New York City
• Groceryshop - Sept 15-18 In Las Vegas

Amazon News

• Amazon orders 100,000 electric vans from Rivian
• Amazon Changed Search Algorithm in Ways That Boost Its Own Products

Other News

• BDO reports more than 7k stores already closed in 2019, which is already more than any other year
  
  
• Some contreversy over store closure numbers. IHL disagreed with Coresight methodology and findings. 
  • Coresight store closure tracker
  • IHL score closure study

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 189 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Sunday, September 22nd, 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP188 - CarMax CMO Jim Lyski

Jim Lyski is the CMO of CarMax. In this broad-ranging interview, we discuss the keynote Jim delivered at EtailEast, "CarMax Goes All-In On Omni-Channel: Building, Scaling And Deploying With Speed", as well as discussing the digital disruption of the automobile business, and where it might all be going.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 188 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, August 21st, 2019. live from the eTail East trade show in Boston, MA.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Updated 9/23: Fixed editing mistake in audio file (sorry!)

EP187 - Euromonitor Michelle Evans - Commerce 2040

 

Michelle Evans (@mevans14) is the Senior Head of Global Digital Consumer Research at Euromonitor Intl. She recently published a new report, "Commerce 2040: Revolutionary Tech Will Boost Consumer Engagement."

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 187 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, September 4. 2019.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

 

EP186 - BottleKeeper CEO Adam Callinan

 

Adam Callinan is the co-founder and CEO of Bottlekeeper (@thebottlekeeper).  In this broad-ranging interview we discuss Bottlekeepers origin, their experience on Shark Tank, Amazon strategy, protecting intellectual property, and challenges and opportunities of scaling a direct to consumer business.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 186 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, August 20th, 2019. live from the eTail East trade show in Boston, MA.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Amanda Tolleson, the Chief Customer Officer at Birchbox.  In this broad-ranging interview, we discuss Birchbox's core business, their price increase, their personalization strategy, and their new partnership with Walgreens.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 185 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, August 20th, 2019. live from the eTail East trade show in Boston, MA.

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP308 - Amazon Q2 Earnings

http://jasonandscot.com

Amazon reported a strong quarter across the board for Q2, soundly exceeding analyst expectations and retail industry averages. In this episode we break down the 1p and 3p retail performance, AWS, and the Ads. We go into depth around Amazon disruption reorganization (to a regional model), Amazon's newest efforts in grocery, and health care.

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 308 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, August 4, 2023.

Transcript

Jason:
[0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode a 308 being recorded on Thursday August 3rd 2023 that's a lot of Threes I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo.

Scot:
[0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scott showed listeners well Jason today is one of my four favorite days of the year it is Amazon earnings day.

Jason:
[0:51] I was going to guess it's the 4th Halloween okay.

Scot:
[0:54] Nope good guess and today was a real doozy so we have a lot to talk about and of course it wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show without.

Jason:
[1:05] Amazon news your margin is there opportunity.

Scot:
[1:18] That's right sometimes I hear from listeners why do you guys spend so much time talking about Amazon well my rationale is a it's one of my favorite subjects did be not only is Amazon the biggest retailer but it represents over half of e-commerce and for our listeners I think their data is pretty much the standard compared to even anything like comscore or adobe, just by definition of them having so much data that it is the basically the best source for what's going on and then given our macro environment we're at the tail end of the last show you were talking about how it's setting up for kind of a bad holiday so we're heading into this it's a critical quarter and for me Q to see what Amazon is done really sets us up for the back half of the year.
And especially holiday.
So kind of a canary in the coal mine and right now there's all this confusing data coming out about the consumer you see things that sentiment is down travel to starting to tip over housing is slowing so there's some negative but yet credit card spend is going pretty well and so this is probably the best read we're going to get on the consumer heading into holiday.

[2:39] So I think of it as Scott foreshadowing the whole industry that's why we like to spend a lot of time on it, so the other thing I'll point out is it's been kind of a rough period for Amazon the last, probably 6/4 a day that things have slowed down post covid they've struggled they've done some layoffs but having watched Amazon if we zoom zoom out having followed them since 97 they're really good at reading the room and if the market and the externalities are saying you're free to invest they will invest like crazy and you know and by saying that I mean they'll focus on Revenue growth implementing infrastructure but then when the macro turns - and they can move to harvest pretty quickly so, a lot of that kind of goes as good as Wall Street so Wall Street will love them and give them a lot of rope and they'll invest invest invest and then while she starts to worry they're like oh my gosh this is scary your spending so much things are doing this and then they will turn very quickly and can then get into Harvest mode and produce results that's a really a big theme for this quarter so that's part of the set of the other part of the setup is we have some eCommerce data coming into this what is that, what are those tea leaves tell us before we jump into Amazon.

Jason:
[4:00] Yeah so we have data from the US Department of Commerce through June and it is a really complicated story so that the top line is a little bit of a worrisome sign so year-to-date January through June of this year retail sales are 1.9 percent higher than they were during that same period last year so time now to put that in perspective in the 10 years leading up to covid we average retail growth of 4% a year so so far this year the growth is less than half of the industry average and then the last three years of growth the last 3 years of Cook post covid were the biggest three years of retail growth in the history of retail so we had these three monster years and now for the first time we have a six month period That's, well off the average and, Q2 was worse than q1 now you know people always say well what about inflation in these numbers if you adjust all these numbers back to 2019 dollars to sort of take inflation out of it, retail sales this year are actually down 2.8 percent from last year so so.

[5:15] All of the Mir growth we have this year is really due to its unusually high inflation now big caveat there, the information news is actually pretty solid in inflation in June is only up three percent year over year which.

[5:32] You know before all this inflation stuff started the Fed was always trying to keep inflation between two point two and three percent so.

[5:39] Information down and three percent if it if it stays down there is pretty encouraging but from a retail standpoint, you have this weird thing you have the macroeconomics getting better there's a lot more economists saying we're not going into a recession we somehow managed a soft Landing you've got the inflation numbers coming way down all the wages and employment numbers have continued to be robust so you're all these favorable macroeconomics and now the consumer has stopped spending and you hear every retail are talking about how, consumers are trading down a cheaper Goods they're buying more needs and less wants and all of these sorts of things and so.
If you if you kind of look at the retail industry average.
There are two retailers that have hit consistently been outperforming the industry average and those two retailers are Walmart and Amazon which are the two, largest retailers in the United States of America.
Um there's some controversy over who's actually bigger but we'll leave that for another show if the bottom line is if the two biggest retailers in the market are both outperforming the industry average.
That's a bad sign for the rest of the retailers.

Scot:
[6:54] Someone's losing share.

Jason:
[6:55] Exactly exactly and I would note we don't talk about it a ton on the show but then there's two Chinese companies that are.
Dramatically grabbing share really quick so she and and and Tim ooh so you know outside of those four.
It's not looking super up to Mystic for, for retail so I was super curious to hear not only how Amazon did but what they're what guidance they gave for Q3 and what they were seeing in terms of consumer spending because we do have this weird paradox.
Macroeconomics getting better, but retail spending getting worse so that being said like what what did Amazon report Scott.

Scot:
[7:40] Well it's an interesting quarter because again for like the last six quarters are 18 months it's been kind of using Wall Street language Wall Street always comes in with expectations and then you either meet those beat them or miss them and or sometimes I'll call it in line if you meet their expectations well this was this was pretty much an unprecedented four-way beat with a raise and that's that last part is what about next quarter so the current quarter is did you how did you do and then did you for future Revenue expectations did you stay in line with those or did you raise them so this was kind of like one of the best quarters you can have using all the Wall Street language and I say a four way beat so number one is earnings per share, while she was expecting 35 cents and they handily beat that at 65 cents so that's the first one the second one is revenue revenue came in at 134 billion versus 131a clear beat.

[8:41] AWS Revenue there was a lot of worry around this because Microsoft was really showing their first of all Microsoft had to break out as your separately for the first time and it used to be all clumped in together in this kind of cloud bucket, where they could kind of have office they're hiding what was going on with Azure so now that Microsoft had to call, carve out Azure it has been slowing down very dramatically so everyone was very worried about that a WS beat the expectation was 21.8 and they came in at 22.
I will talk a little bit more about the growth things and some other color there third-party exceeded expectation the only thing that was really kind of in line is online store Revenue but the margin improvements if you can't go back to that EPS were so dramatic that everyone was fine with Alan being I think it was like.

[9:30] Point two percent miss or something it was like basically in line so that was the only piece that didn't beat and everyone was fine with that because all these other things really swamped the outcome there and then to cap that off the midpoint we'll talk about it but this represents about 11% growth all in for this quarter and the next quarter they guide for growth for 11 to 13 so they're basically saying hey we beat your expectations this quarter and things are accelerating into Q3 so and then they also on the bottom line that guided up for next quarter as well so that went really really well um and that was a pretty amazing so let's peel the onion and see what we can learn you want to take us through the retail business.

Jason:
[10:18] Yeah for sure so the the retail business globally grew 11% so that last year this in this quarter they grew nine percent so accelerated growth, North America grew 11 per sent an international grew ten percent International really struggle this time last year they actually had a 12% decline last year and so so in general pretty robust growth now, these are the revenue numbers which returned mine everyone Amazons and Marketplace they don't report all of their sales as Revenue they only report, one piece sales and then the fees they earn on 3-piece sales so it's not it's not a perfect.

[11:09] Now match to to the sort of Industry retail data I said but it's a close approximation so, on average retail grows four percent a quarter the last two quarters retails grown you know less than half of that and Amazon comes in at 10 or 11 percent growth.
So that's you know a pretty healthy outperforming that the industry average is and, you're essentially taking share from the rest of retail now often just a side note.
Obviously the vast majority of Amazon sales are online traditionally online grows much faster than.

[11:48] Brick and mortar so historically we would see ten to fifteen percent online sales but post pandemic that's actually slowed down quite a bit and so, online sales this year are probably averaging around.
Seven and a half our eight percent and so Amazon's growth not only did it beat brick-and-mortar it actually beat the industry average, even for e-commerce so that that is very robust, they spent a lot of time both in their their press release and also in their earnings call talking about their focus on efficiencies, and you know the all the work and efficiencies reorganization of their supply chain you know changing of Labor models, that those others efficiencies are starting to bear fruit because, the profitability was significantly up for.

[12:52] For the retail business for this segment so I want to say no for North America they ended up earning like 3.2 billion and earn income.
So you know some quarters they don't learn any so 3.2 is a healthy number.

[13:10] For their growth and for people that aren't following it.
Part of these efficiencies is a super interesting story essentially what Amazon has decided and what they now seem to have successfully executed is that having a national Supply.

[13:27] Chain and a national order fulfillment network is not the right way to structure themselves so in the old world they had one order fulfillment system that covered the whole nation you could really want some, delicious Green Tea Oreos you know that are only in the warehouse in California and you order those and Amazon figures out had a, get those Oreos to you in 2 days from the warehouse in California, and increasingly what Amazon said is you know customers really want speed we have to get faster in most cases where promising next day or same day to day is.
Is you know a promise from 10 years ago and in order to do that efficiency efficiently and save money, we have to have those Green Tea Oreos really close to Scott to start things off and so we're going to drop a bomb on our own industry-leading fulfillment Network and we're going to redesign it as a set of regional networks so that the vast majority of good Scott orders come from a much shorter distance and so one of the, the impressive results of that effort today is this quarter Amazon said that like despite all this growth and increasing order volumes that they actually drove 20% less miles than they did this quarter last year.

[14:42] So they're very successfully getting the goods, closer to the consumer and to put you in put it in perspective how many Goods that is they announced that they now have over 300 million, items that are eligible for Amazon Prime and over fifty percent of those items get delivered same day or next day.

Scot:
[15:07] Yeah I thought that part was pretty amazing and what they've done is they've split the country into eight regions they actually were pretty and the call to get into some pretty interesting detail on this end and I thought that was interesting because I usually pretty pretty tight-lipped on this so then so they've taken their National optimization you talked about and they're almost running each region has its own country so they're doing more of the load balancing inside of there so in addition to the 20 percent fewer miles there touching the packages 20% less and you now get 76 percent of the units are in the union are in the region and just a while ago it was 66.

[15:50] And then what he's what he's basically saying is that's a big efficiency and then within there another efficiency is they're leveraging the same day where houses so things used to go from these really big distribution centers to the smaller ones and now we're going to these much smaller ones and they can now inject things in there and he said those are streamlined and they can get an item from the order coming in to delivery in as little as 11 minutes and those are even closer to the consumer so that it's almost he didn't say this but I kind of envisioned as eight regions are split up into eight more regions almost with these tiny you know within points being some of these other ones they basically said this is working so well we're going to double the number of these small last-mile fulfillment centers so that was I don't think Wall Street heard that because that's you know whenever Amazon says double that's a big number because they have like 200 ish of the big fulfillment centers I don't know how many small ones are but Amazon doubling anything is Nan.

[16:55] Trivial number of dollars they're going to invest you didn't say over what time period you want your when ordering covid they said they were double and they went from like 120 fulfillment centers took to actually literally doubled those pretty quickly so it's going to be interesting to watch that build-out I haven't seen one of those I've seen them Beck's I haven't been in one of been on the back end of one to watch the flex drivers that that's kind of what they used to do for Flex drivers so be interesting to see how they scale that and I would like to go got a visit one I don't I don't know if any of the dsps which spend a lot of time with dsps here at spiffy so I've got to see this side of the world a lot more than I did in the software e-commerce world and there at the big fulfillment centers at these delivery stations that are called bolted on the side haven't seen how they pick up from some of these but I'm making it a mission.
Learn more about this.

Jason:
[17:48] Dsps are the third party delivery services that Amazon uses yeah.

Scot:
[17:52] Delivery service professionals yeah so that was interesting.

Jason:
[17:57] And a reminder for the big fulfillment centers Amazon actually offers tours you can sign up and get a tour I don't think they haven't seen them ever offer tours on any of the other formats but there are some bootleg videos out on the internet if you know where to look I'll see if I can find some for the show notes that that show like like one of the general contractors that builds these facilities put some videos on their website of, of the finished facilities before they open.

Scot:
[18:28] Yep so that's kind of the retail business let's mix it up usually I cover third party but let's kick it over you to run through them.

Jason:
[18:37] Yeah are you okay with me talking about marketplaces I feel like as a Hall of Fame member you you this is like when mess a wet the other guy take the penalty kick.

Scot:
[18:45] I'm an auto guy now I don't know what this what is a 3 P3 what are the three p's.

Jason:
[18:51] Yeah so another milestone for Amazon's Marketplace.
They hit a new high for the percentage of their total sales that came from third parties so the mix is now 60% third parties 40% first party so that that's continuing along long-standing trend.
The third party is continuing to grow and being the most important part of the.
The assortment makes at Amazon I don't have the number in front of me but my memory is that the.
The growth in 3p Services was actually faster than the retail growth as well so sort of implies that the volume went up but also Amazons.
Doing even better at collecting more fees from all those three p providers so that the marketplace continues to be robust and important.
You know one that always gets a lot of the energy on these earnings calls is a WS and there's kind of an interesting story going going on so so first of all, the the Wall Street expectation was for AWS to grow eight percent this quarter and they announced that a WS grew 12% so.
Massive beat from that perspective.
Um and so then you go well is 12% good growth well a year ago they were growing at like 33 percent so twelve percent doesn't sound all that impressive compared to 33 percent.
But what you have to remember is.

[20:20] The rate of growth has been significantly slowing down quarter after quarter and last quarter q1.

[20:27] That growth was 16 percent and when they announced that growth was 16%, they really put dosed a bunch of cold water on investors because they said and we already have a month of data since the end of that quarter and it's slowed down more since then so I think that really is what spooked.
The the investor community and that's where that sort of 8% expectation came from so 12 percent growth is kind of an indication that the growth rate although you know swelling down is stabilizing.
Um and I think they're they don't give guidance on these individual segments but they.
Made a nod to the fact that we're probably not going to see the growth rate slowed down dramatically from this, they do pay a lot of lip service to the fact that, it's a very big number and you can't grow in double digits anymore by just getting organic growth that like in order to, continue to grow double digits you need to acquire a lot of net new customers and you need to acquire a lot of net new workloads, but the good news is you know they have a very robust narrative about why there are a lot of customers and additional workloads to acquire and spoiler alert.
You know a huge amount of them are related to generative Ai and a large language models where.

[21:54] Amazon is investing a lot in things a lot of the future is going to be in these these three hosted layers of AI services that companies use to build AI Solutions on top.

[22:06] So so you know I think their sales focus is going to be is less about getting more money from existing customers and more about getting.
New customers and new workloads on a go-forward basis for a WS, um I do want to say you add up the numbers for AWS and it's 88 billion dollar a year business that's the Run rate right now.
And they make about 25 percent gross margin on that business so that that 88 billion dollar business is spinning off 21 billion dollars a year in profit.
And everyone always talks about how AWS is by far the most profitable business at Amazon so keep that 21 billion dollar number in the back of your head because the next segment that Amazon talked about is ads, and while AWS is growing at 12% they announced that the ad business is growing at 22 percent.
Um so that puts, the the ad business at like a 41 42 billion dollar run rate.
And that the speculation is that the ad business is about a 75% gross margin.
Business and so if they're at a 41 billion dollar run rate that means they're spinning off 30 billion dollars in profit.

[23:25] For the ads business so Thirty 1 billion dollars in earning come from ads versus 22 billion dollars in.
Or 21 billion dollars in profit from AWS so.
Quit talking about a WS being the most profitable business than Amazon ads is the most profitable business and is growing almost twice as fast.
And there's another of my favorite facts about that ad business is.
You know so again they're selling 44 billion dollars worth of ads you know where they get all the eyeballs that they they have to sell those ads.

[24:03] Buy them from Google for 20 billion dollars.
So so here's like an awesome business, the Amazon is one of the largest advertisers in the world they spend twenty billion dollars I'm sorry 22 billion dollars on ads to get people to come to all their services, and consume them for profit right so, so you run ads and you get people to buy stuff on Amazon you run ads and you get people to sign up for AWS you run ads and you get people to sign up for Amazon Prime Those ads do all this heavy lifting for all these different business units and then after you've monetize that, that a dollar you then sell that ad dollar back for a profit through this ad business so you want to talk about the network effect and how powerful it is this to me is just an an awesome example of business engineering and you know I think.
Often misunderstood aspect of the Amazon profit machine.

Scot:
[25:01] Yes pretty amazing quarter for ads the they're just really Trout's snap used to be in the conversation and Twitter and it's really just Facebook Google and it was on it.

Jason:
[25:11] I mean Amazon's a much bigger ad business than Microsoft and Bing.

Scot:
[25:15] Absolutely another tidbit from the call we had talked about this and if you remember we had we had a guest on from Guardian baseball and he was talking about this was right one by with prime came out and you were super skeptical that anyone would adopt.

Jason:
[25:35] Yeah and what should you do anytime I'm skeptical about a new idea.

Scot:
[25:39] Go long on it go.

Jason:
[25:40] Invest in it.

Scot:
[25:41] Yeah.
So first of all I saw a tweet earlier and this is from everyone's favorite follow bearded egg F ba and a couple other people had similar tweets but he actually had used the software that scrapes all these websites, and he reported there's over 2,200 sites that now have by with Prime and then jassi's comments he said quote, merchants in early trials use by both Prime saw their Shopper conversion increased 25% on average which makes a real difference in their business Merchants who participated in Prime Day activities, experience 10x increase in Daily by with prime orders, so there was a knock on effect that if you had by the Prime on your website then people found you and and rattled over and you saw a really nice kind of ripple effect from the prime day efforts I thought that was an interesting tidbit so they're like like everything Amazon and I haven't followed the features but I'm sure if you remember Matt was complaining that you couldn't turn it on and off for certain excuse there was some feedback he had and maybe it didn't work with attributes like a parent-child skews I'm sure they fix all that or else it wouldn't be on this mini website so it sounds like that's really getting some some traction.

Jason:
[27:00] Yeah I do I still think.
To cite Lira but my double down on my earlier skepticism there still are some rough edges to the customer experience right so it still is a purse Q experience which is a little weird like you know some products on the on the website you can get fast shipping for and some, some products you can't and it's hard to know what they are until you put them in your cart so that's kind of the the old shop Runner.

[27:32] For if you will but I do want to say two things both Amazon and Shopify are leaning into these, conversion rates way better when you have by with Prime on your website or when you have shop pay on your website and you know you have to ask yourself what they're comparing that to write because, it should surprise no one that conversion rate when the customer has stored payment information available is much higher than when they don't have stored payment information so the magic question is if you already had shop, pay and PayPal on your site and then you added by with prime did by with prime perform 25% better than PayPal.
Um or are they only saying by with prime prefer performs better than nothing because performing better than nothing isn't, quite as impressive in my book and I do want to say well well they are making progress with by with Prime and the 2500, Merchants is impressive just a reminder there's 2.5 million merchants on Amazon so the fact that 2,500 of them are using it you know does not exactly mean it's caught fire.

Scot:
[28:44] So still skeptical.

Jason:
[28:46] Yes so again what should you do go double down on the go along.

Scot:
[28:49] Short Amazon Jason you short Amazon I'll go alone.

Jason:
[28:54] Yeah that.

Scot:
[28:55] Prime is not going to work thesis and I'll go on.

Jason:
[28:58] Yes I don't I don't think you're giving me helpful investment advice.
So that was all the main stuff I saw in the earnings calls was there anything else you wanted to cover because I think there is a few other tidbits of Amazon news.

Scot:
[29:15] I saw Grocery and I had a feeling that your ears were too perked up I I fell asleep during that part so I'll kick it over to you.

Jason:
[29:21] Oh my god do you not eat.

Scot:
[29:23] I do but groceries is everyone's least favorite chore.

Jason:
[29:28] Scot doesn't want to say it but he has people that get his groceries for him that's what's going on here he hasn't been to a grocery store in like 10 years.

Scot:
[29:35] Every every meal is from Chick-fil-A so I don't have to go through.

Jason:
[29:37] That seems like it would be a pretty fun for a little while but I have a feeling that the there would wear off, so yes Scott you are right I'm super interested in grocery groceries 25 percent of all retail spending it's the biggest category of spending that Amazon hasn't won, I think it was about 40 years ago that they acquired Whole Foods do I have that right was it 40 years ago.

Scot:
[30:03] 49

Jason:
[30:05] I'm exaggerating I was over 10 years ago now though.
That they bought at Whole Foods and hopefully just kind of flat since they acquired them it really hasn't you know turned in anything a reminder Whole Foods is very niche in the grocery space like Whole Foods doesn't sell Coke they don't sell Fritos, um and they're only in a handful of big cities so there the the industry leader in organic produce but they're not a mainstream.
And one of the things so Amazon made a bunch of announcements that they were retooling their grocery experience and changing some of their offerings.
Two days before the earnings call.
And I'll come back to what those announcements were but on the earnings call Andy answered some questions about Grocery and he kind of admitted something interesting, Amazon is doing very well at what Amazon usually calls everyday essentials.
And I think the Brian the CFO call that non-climate controlled Goods right so all these shelf-stable things that you tend to buy from a grocery store but you don't actually eat.
Um Amazon's pretty good at selling and growing fast and they have a big chunk of that business they are not good at selling.

[31:21] Perishables they're not good at Selling climate-controlled Stuff they're not good at selling fresh food online.
Um and what Andy said in answer to one of the analysts questions was, to really meaningfully capture sharing grocery you have to have a broad offering in all the areas of grocery not just the everyday essentials and we don't believe you can win.
With a broad assortment of groceries without a national footprint of stores.

[31:53] So you know he kind of conceded that the Fulfillment center model and the multi-tiered regional Warehouse model that Amazon is building out.
Is not particularly well suited for the grocery mix and so he said so you know we need to figure out a grocery, and we kind of concluded what we've rolled out over the last few years at Amazon Fresh is not a winning grocery concept so we put we put a hold on growth, we went back to the drawing board we invented a bunch of new experiences and now we're testing those new experiences to see if they are, more appealing to Consumers so the First Market to get these new experiences is Chicago so they just remodeled the the Amazon Fresh stores here in Chicago I'm going to go visit one soon.
But they've essentially they've changed the assortment quite a bit they've added more private label and they've added more National brands for a grocery store Amazon Fresh doors were really kind of a limited assortment grocery store and so it sounds like.

[32:56] They're moving they didn't say numbers but in my mind, they were like a twelve thousand SQ grocer and Kroger is like a 20,000 SQ grocer so they're there it sounds like they're moving up to that 20,000 skus.

[33:10] And they're testing a bunch of new amenities, and one of the big problems you have in grocery especially when consumers are being really cost-conscious is consumers walk into a grocery store with a budget and they want to make sure they don't overspend that budget.
And just walk out grocery stores you actually don't find out how much you spent until 15 minutes after you've left the store.

[33:35] Which is an awful experience if you're trying to make sure you stay under 100 dollars.
And so one of the amenities they've rolled out is on these Dash cards these digital cards that they let you use in the store they now have a real time running total of what's in your cart so for the first time you can see.

[33:53] You know how much you spent so there's a bunch of experiences like that I'll get a better feel for what the new ones are.
When I go visit but they're starting to Pilot new grocery Concepts and they're you know they've kind of conceded that they need to scale one of these brick-and-mortar Concepts nationally before they can really be a.
A meaningful winner in the digital grocery space.
But they made a couple other big changes in grocery to one of the biggest complaints and one of the stupidest things about Amazon's grocery is before you shop for groceries in Amazon you need to get an org chart and understand how Amazon's organized because, you have to decide in advance if you're shopping online at Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh and guess what most customers don't understand the distinction between those two things, and so they had separate carts you actually have three cards on the Amazon website you have a general merchandise Encarta gross Amazon Fresh cart and a Whole Foods car, and it can be really confusing because you just click add to cart on a bunch of stuff and then you go look at your cart and it's not there because it's in one of the other car.
So they announced that they're moving to a universal cart.
I haven't seen it yet so I can't speak to exactly what it looks like I have a few a name mean a universal grocery cart I don't think they're actually going to mix it in with general merchandise but.

[35:11] Will be eager to see that and then the other announcement they made that is I'm not I mean I just don't think it's as big a deal is, um they have opened up grocery delivery from Amazon Fresh to non-prime members so so prior to this week you had to be a prompt Amazon prime number to order from from Amazon Fresh.
And this is kind of interesting because this is a further erosion of Amazon Prime benefits you used to get free delivery, um with Amazon Prime for groceries and about a year ago Amazon caved to try to get more profit, and they added a delivery fee even if you're a Prime member but they said you can only get delivery of your Prime member now they're they're taking that benefit off the scale and I just point that out because.
Amazon's ordinarily so good at adding new benefits to Prime is kind of rare to see them taking benefits away from Prime so I think that's interesting in the.
The grocery space anything else that I missed or the jumped out at you about grocery Scott.

Scot:
[36:13] No I thought it was you know.
A lot of people would expect him to throw in the towel because they've closed some of these physical store experiments and Jesse did that but they still seem committed to grocery at least the four star or what was that start.

Jason:
[36:30] Yeah five star.

Scot:
[36:31] Faster that is the closed all those right.
And the trimming back the just walk out stores so it's interesting to see that there they they see something in grocery or it's just such a big tan they feel like they have to obviously they have Whole Foods but.

Jason:
[36:50] Yeah I do think it's one of one of their big bets and it was interesting like in some of the narrative Andy kind of he threw something at the grocery teams under the bus.
You know like a lot of his complaints about the Amazon Fresh stores is he's like we just weren't good grocery operators that like are.
Our inputs as he called it just weren't good like the the inventory turns the, you know the inventory waste the labor cost that you know all those things weren't where they needed to be to be a competitive grocery store and there's I'm sure a lot of traditional grocers that were listening to this call going amen Andy we told you groceries are really brutal, difficult Cutthroat business and you won't find it as easy as some of the other businesses you've dominated so, I still want to bet against Amazon I still think they're ultimately going to be a big player in grocery but.

[37:53] And then one other to me really interesting tidbit is Healthcare that Amazon announced last week a new National Healthcare offering which is telemedicine.
Um service and that's attached to Amazon Pharmacy.
Um so this used to be an in-house experiment that they use to provide health benefits to a bunch of Amazon employees but and then they started offering it to.
You know a few other employers that they had Healthcare agreements with, but now they've made it a national authoring that's available to everyone so you know if you if you need some prescription or you need some some medical advice and you don't want to go in and see a doctor you can't get an appointment.
You can you do now use this Amazon Health Service to get a fast and easy.
Um Health Care visit so you know we know Amazon has been kind of.
Kicking the tires on the healthcare industry and they've had a couple initiatives they had some Partnerships that they walked away from, but there's another one where it seems like they haven't given up on the space and they're still you know rolling out and trying new things.

Scot:
[39:08] Yeah and I hope they nail this because my my experience with the physical drugstores always terrible.

Jason:
[39:17] Yeah I am not bullish on physical drug stores so again.
You you know oil listeners now know what they should do for the investment there but like.
You know the drug business used to be a retail business you walked into a pharmacy and you got all your prescriptions today the insurance companies mostly try to force you to use mail order.
Pharmacy said the main reason people had to go to.
Pharmacies has kind of gone away and as a retailer if you don't have to go there to get a farm prescription filled.
The retail drug stores are awful retailers like they, you know they don't have a good assortment they don't have a good prize they're they're deficient in digital in and if you watch all the moves they're making, the thing that every retail drugstore is trying to do more than anything else is get out of retail and become a Healthcare company and own an insurance.
So you know a lot of the CEOs of these companies now come from the insurance sides of the business and it it just doesn't seem like.
The long-term future of us retail is to have you know multiple big National drug stores because the model is kind of waning.

Scot:
[40:28] Yeah yeah we'll I'll shut a small tear when they all go out of business and I can get things more efficient.

Jason:
[40:36] Yeah I think at least one is going to have to survive because there are a lot of impromptu emergency get it right now kind of kind of needs but you know maybe down the road we'll do a grocery in Pharmacy Deep dive.

Scot:
[40:50] Or Amazon will have things so close to you can get it in 15 minutes so you won't miss it.

Jason:
[40:55] Yeah you know one thing I will say like I thought you were going to say I won't feel bad if Amazon sells this because Healthcare in America.
Royally screwed and a lot of people you know don't have in can't afford access to it so certainly it would be good if they fix that I will say Amazon rule that a service similar to a Walmart service which is really beneficial, they're now offering generic versions of most chronic prescriptions for a flat five dollar fee and so one thing that has approved a lot in the United States in the last two years.
Between Walmart and Amazon and actually like a big startup that Mark Cuban is running is a lot of these.
You know prescriptions that were Out Of Reach for a lot of low-income people are becoming more affordable which is certainly a good thing.

Scot:
[41:40] Yeah yeah we'll take care of them but I'd need my experience you better too.

Jason:
[41:44] See how I found a way to end the show on a happy note.

Scot:
[41:47] Yeah World Peace.

Jason:
[41:50] Yeah and that you know last week we had a slightly shorter show and listeners told this they loved getting a little bit less of us and so miraculously we have done it again we brought in a voluminous Amazon earnings call in a pithy 41 minutes, so if you'd like to reward us for our brevity the best way to do that would be to jump on iTunes and give us that five-star review.

Scot:
[42:14] Thanks everyone we hope you enjoyed this Amazon Q2 earnings results and until next time.

Jason:
[42:21] Happy Commercing.

EP184 - Tapestry CDO Noam Paransky

Noam Paransky is the Chief Digital Officer at Tapestry, the parent company of Coach, Kate Spade, and Stuart Weitzman.  In this broad ranging interview we discuss Tapestry's vision for a Global Digital Experience, some of the challenges with global localization, organization structures for a house of brands, and the future of commerce.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 184 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday, August 20th, 2019. live from the eTail East trade show in Boston, MA.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Chief Commerce Strategy Officer at Publicis, and Scot Wingo, CEO of GetSpiffy and Co-Founder of ChannelAdvisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

EP183 - Jason Del Rey Land of The Giants Podcast 

We catch up with Jason Del Rey (@DelRey) Senior Correspondent, Commerce at Recode. Jason was last on episode 67.  We discuss some recent industry events and get update on this two big projects:

• Code Commerce September 9 and 10, in New York City.
• Land of The Giants: The Rise of Amazon Podcast.

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 183 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, August 8th, 2019

EP182 - Amazon Q2 Earnings and News 

• Recap of Amazon 2019 Q2 Earnings.
• Starbucks productizing Mobile Order & Pay
• UPS/FedEx go to 7 day delivery
• FedEx quits Amazon

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 182 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, July 31st, 2019