Podcasts about shopify merchants

Send us a textDiscover how Maxx turned setbacks into stepping stones, overcoming supply chain woes and financial turmoil, only to emerge with Madison Braids—a brand that skyrocketed to a $3 million triumph. Imagine having the insights to double, even triple your ROI with laser-focused strategies; this episode holds the keys to that paradigm shift.In this episode, Jordan West with Maxx Blank, a cofounder of Triple Whale, as he shares the incredible evolution of his ecommerce ventures. Our conversation navigates through Maxx's early days launching boutique operations like Ivy and Fig, to his current success with Triple Whale, a game-changing analytics platform for Shopify merchants. Join us as we explore Maxx's lessons learned from navigating supply chain challenges, leveraging Facebook ads, and developing cutting-edge solutions for the future of social commerce.Listen and learn in this episode!Key takeaways from this episode:Ecommerce Opportunities and Challenges: The initial phase (2015-2016) offered great opportunities in ecommerce via platforms like Facebook, but also brought challenges with supply chain and marketing.Targeting Niche Markets: Madison Braids' success shows the value of focusing on niche markets and how expanding to broader audiences can drive scalability.Robust Data Platforms: Triple Whale's evolution from a dashboard to a comprehensive data platform highlights the importance of meeting real business needs, especially in ad attribution and real-time analytics.Leveraging AI for Insights: The development of "Mobi" showcases the benefits of using AI tools to generate data insights and automate workflows, aiding effective business decisions.Adaptability: Maxx emphasizes staying flexible and skeptical of absolute predictions, which is crucial for navigating business changes and consumer shifts.Community Engagement: Events like the Whalies play a key role in building brand loyalty and recognition within the industry through community engagement.Pandemic-Induced Shifts: The ecommerce boom during COVID spotlighted the necessity for businesses to adapt strategies in response to external shifts.User-Driven Growth: Triple Whale's growth illustrates the power of user engagement in product development, leading to organic expansion.Today's Guest: Maxx Blank, cofounder of Triple Whale. Maxx is highly connected to the ecommerce industry, particularly in data analytics and marketing strategy. He is an expert in developing platforms that provide comprehensive analytics solutions for ecommerce businesses, addressing challenges like ad attribution, and evolving products to support multi-touch attribution and real-time data visualizations.Growth Plan: www.upgrowthcommerce.com/growMillion Dollar Offers: www.upgrowthcommerce.com/growIn this episode's sponsor is Revenued - is a financial technology company that provides businesses with revenue-based financing solutions. Instead of relying on credit scores or collateral, Revenued offers funding based on a company's revenue. This allows businesses to access capital quickly and repay it as they generate income. Learn more here: Revenued

In this episode, we explore the critical impact of site speed on Shopify stores. Our guest, Darin Archer, Vice President of Product Strategy at Yottaa.com, shares expert insights on optimizing ecommerce sites for better performance. Learn why speed matters, what slows down your store, and how to boost conversions through improved loading times. Discover actionable strategies to enhance your Shopify store's performance and drive revenue growth.Topics discussed in this episode: Why site speed optimization is crucial for ecommerce successHow slow loading times impact customer experience and salesWhat common issues slow down ecommerce sites and how to identify themHow to measure and track the performance improvements of your Shopify storeWhat specific strategies can be implemented to boost Shopify store speedWhy faster loading times lead to higher conversion rates and revenue growthLinks & ResourcesWebsite: https://www.yottaa.com/Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/rapid-insiteLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/yottaa/Twitter: https://twitter.com/yottaaGet access to more free resources by visiting the show notes athttps://t.ly/AkezlWant to be a smarter online business owner? Ever wish a seasoned entrepreneur with 20+ years of experience could help your business?Join my Founder's Sidekick program for personalized guidance to build a business you love and finally achieve work-life balance. Get weekly expert advice tailored for busy founders.Learn more at https://founders-sidekick.comSign up for our free newsletter. We scour and curate content from 50+ news sources, saving you hours of research and helping you stay on top of your ecommerce game with the latest news, insights, and trends. Ideal for online sellers, merchants, marketers, and DTC brands on Shopify who want to stay informed but are short on time. Subscribe. Learn More. Grow. Every Thursday in your inbox. 100% free. Sign up at https://newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com Rate, Review & Follow on Apple Podcasts Enjoying this episode? Help others like you by rating and reviewing my show on Apple Podcasts! Your feedback supports more people in achieving their online business dreams. Click below, give five stars, and share your favorite part in a review! Click here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ecommerce-coffee-break-digital-marketing-podcast-for/id1567749422And if you haven't yet, follow the podcast to catch all the bonus episodes I'm adding. Don't miss out—hit that follow button now!

Mariah Parsons and Yaw Aning discussed the importance of creating a seamless post-purchase experience for e-commerce merchants. They emphasized the need to align the experience with the brand's strategy and goals, educate customers about the brand, and set goals based on the strategy. Both speakers highlighted the importance of keeping customers updated and mapping out the customer journey to build trust and transparency. Episode Timestamps: 0:05⁠ Post-purchase experience optimization for e-commerce businesses Expert CEO shares 10 post-purchase lessons from 5000 Shopify brands. Yaw Aning advises merchants to understand their post-purchase default settings. 3:55 Post-purchase experiences, brand strategy, and metrics for success Understand your brand strategy to choose the right post-purchase platform. Consumers prefer post-purchase experiences that educate and build the brand. Develop goals based on strategy to create a cohesive experience. 10:13 Post-purchase experience optimization for e-commerce merchants Yaw Aning suggests partnering with an agency to optimize post-purchase experience. Yaw Aning: Key moments in customer journey build trust, transparency. Mongoose's proactive communication best practices defuse frustration, build trust. Yaw Aning highlights Soylent's post-purchase strategy, segmenting customers based on their journey stage and providing tailored content and CTAs. Mobile-first design is crucial for tracking experiences, as 83% of views occur on mobile devices, and customers are often interrupted during on-the-go activities.

We're talking AI chatbots as a top of funnel marketing medium with Recycled Firefighter founder Jake Starr. Jake spills the tea on turning his unique products (recycled firehose American flags!) into a digital sensation earning 20,000 email subscribers monthly, thanks to his new chatty AI sidekick. Dive into the fun and quirky world of Jake's creation 'Josh' the sales bot, and uncover how AI is the secret sauce to customer engagement and skyrocketing sales. It's a blend of old-school crafting meets new-school tech. If you're looking for a new top of funnel strategy to engage prospective customers, this is it.Show Linksjakestarr.aiGoHighLevelManyChatRecycledFirefighterZappyChatKlaviyoPostScriptSponsorsFree 30-day trial of Zipify OCUFinale InventoryGrowth CollectiveNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin Kurt's newsletterHelp the showAsk a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook GroupLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Kurt up to?See our recent work at EthercycleSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelApply to work with Kurt to grow your store.

From the archive: In this podcast episode, we discuss 10 ways to automate your Shopify business. Our featured guest on the show is Joe Lannen, founder of orderautomator.com.Topics discussed in this episode:What key automation strategies streamline Shopify merchants' operationsHow affiliate integration boost automated traffic and salesWhat potential risks and benefits come with outsourcing or automating tasksHow automation and optimization reduces fraud and chargeback risks in ecommerceLinks & ResourcesWebsite: https://orderautomator.com/Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/order-automatorGet access to more free resources by visiting the podcast episode page att.ly/3qP6sSubscribe & Listen Everywhere:Listen On: ​ecommercecoffeebreak.com | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google PodcastsGet Your Custom Shopify Store Audit. Visit https://www.clauslauter.com/audit/Our Newsletter Join over 6,000 other merchants & marketers to stay updated on eCommerce news, marketing strategies, tools & resources, and podcast interviews, all designed to help you grow your revenue. Every Thursday in your inbox. Consumed in 3 minutes. 100% free. Sign up at https://newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com

One of the most highly regarded independent consultants in his industry, Kurt Elster is a Senior Ecommerce Consultant who helps Shopify merchants like Jay Leno's Garage uncover hidden profits in their websites through his ecommerce agency Ethercycle. With two million downloads, Kurt is best known for hosting The Unofficial Shopify Podcast.In This Conversation We Discuss: [00:55] Intro[01:55] Compare platform to Shopify before migrating[02:51] Figure out why you want to migrate[03:45] New things acquired after migrating to Shopify[04:44] Migrating helps you reconsider and review things[05:26] Maximize migration & explore change opportunities[06:40] Prioritize customer service over minor details[08:42] Migration is doable, but never easy[10:38] Navigating Shopify data migration[12:37] The impact of design on migrating[14:26] Map out key considerations when migrating[16:21] Embrace change to get better results[17:21] Keep up and learn new tools and techniques[18:28] Make learning easier with efficient solutions[19:23] Overcome fear with secure data migration[22:19] Streamline unusual Shopify migration[24:54] The importance of thorough sample checks[25:23] Challenges in subscription & internationalization[26:25] Addressing backend processes [27:10] Navage Nose Cleaner's Shopify migration story[28:42] Wheel Wiz's Shopify migration story[29:37] Realities & considerations of a rush migration[30:45] Adams Polishes' migration story[31:47] Migration as a line item in a project[32:35] Modern Sprout's migration story[33:32] WordPress freedom VS Shopify constraints[34:43] Corresponding tasks & results of blogging[36:10] Shopify's unique ecosystem advantages[38:46] Telltale signs that it's time to move to Shopify[39:27] Migrating during redesign is the key[40:09] Leverage Shopify features to implement discounts[41:09] Learn more about Kurt ElsterResources:Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on YoutubeEcommerce consultancy for Shopify merchants ethercycle.com/Follow Kurt Elster linkedin.com/in/kurtelster/Subscribe to Kurt Elster's newsletter kurtelster.com/Listen to Kurt Elster's podcast unofficialshopifypodcast.com/If you're enjoying the show, we'd love it if you left Honest Ecommerce a review on Apple Podcasts. It makes a huge impact on the success of the podcast, and we love reading every one of your reviews!

This special Black Friday and Cyber Monday episode features advice from seven Shopify merchants, including Momofuku, Dieux Skincare, Jono  Pandolfi Designs, Magnolia Bakery, Offlimits, Bandit Running, and perfectwhitetee.To learn more about the podcast, find past episodes and show notes: https://www.shopify.com/blog/topics/podcasts

Und wieder mal 100+ neue Features für Shopify auf einen Schlag, vorgestellt im Rahmen der Shopify Editions Summer 2023. Daniel Höhnke und Tim Schestag diskutieren mit tatkräftiger Unterstützung vom Shopify Plus Experten Simon Freimoser die Highlights dieser Edition und worauf sich (zukünftiger) Shopify Merchants und Brands freuen können. Und nein, die besten Features haben nichtmal mit KI zu tun :-)

Roku is partnering with Shopify to give users the ability to purchase products from Shopify merchants through their TVs, the hardware company announced Tuesday. 

Join us on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast as eCommerce accounting expert Wayne Richard shares financial strategies for Shopify store owners. Learn common mistakes, efficiency metrics, sales tax nexus complexities, and money-saving tips. Wayne also advises on choosing the right accountant and emphasizes the importance of setting aside profits for unforeseen expenses. Supercharge your store's finances with insights from Wayne Richard in this accounting-packed episode!Show LinksBean NinjasBench (Referral Link)Gustoa2xecommercefuelProfit FirstWayne on LinkedInSponsorsFree 30-day trial of Zipify OCU - To get an unadvertised gift, email help@zipify.com and ask for the "Tech Nasty Bonus".Venntov, makers of SEO Manager, Order Lookup, and ClockedInRetention.com: Reclaim 5-10x Abandonment RevenueLoop Returns: Ecommerce Returns Management for ShopifyNever miss an episodeSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsJoin Kurt's newsletterHelp the showAsk a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook GroupLeave a reviewSubscribe wherever you get your podcastsWhat's Kurt up to?See our recent work at EthercycleSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelApply to work with Kurt to grow your store.

EP305 - Amazon and Shopify Q1 2023 earnings  Amazon and Shopify both reported their Q1 2023 earnings last week. Amazon had a strong first quarter, slightly over-shadowed by it's slowing AWS growth. Shopify also had strong Q1 2023 earnings although it did not achieve profitability. Shopify also announced a second reduction of headcount and announced that they were selling all of the recently acquired logistic assets. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 305 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, May 4th 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 is episode 305 being recorded on Thursday May 4th May the 4th be with you 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 showed listeners Happy Star Wars Day May the 4th be with you hope everyone had a great Star Wars Day Jason people can't see you but you are wearing your Jar Jar Binks cosplay. Jason: [0:53] I kind of assumed people just assume I'm always wearing that. Scot: [0:57] You should do the whole episode and jar jar speak well said Jason what's a new at the Amazon what. Jason: [1:10] I feel like people don't get the jar jar one I did I did do an act during covid-19 doing all this pitch theater online I did a pitch on Halloween in a Darth Vader mask. And we won the pitch so I feel like I should be doing costumes more. Scot: [1:28] Awesome you guys intimidate them and it's called the Darth Vader intimidation closed when you wear the Vader the Vader suit. Jason: [1:34] Exactly exactly and it had the voice changing thing and so it is. Scot: [1:38] Honest I find your lack of faith yeah there's a lot of death lot of lot of puts you can use in a pitch. Jason: [1:48] Yes unfortunately not a large enough chunk of the total addressable Market are Geeks. If you like is wrong I know how I got in this like funky like creative advertising world with all these I kept custody clients like I totally don't fit in. Scot: [2:09] Yeah been a misfit toy my whole life so sir not going to stop anytime soon embrace it Jason. Jason: [2:15] Yeah it was announced today that we won a big new client lvmh and so I like went on LinkedIn and joke that like it was largely thanks to my my stature is a luxury influencer. Scot: [2:29] Nice congrats your tick-tocks on luxury have one the death. Jason: [2:32] I know I know for a long time people were like why are you wasting your time with that and now they know. Scot: [2:38] Who will we have it's been a while since we dropped a pod because we both had spring breaks and then you've been traveling a bit so it's great to be back. Jason: [2:49] Yeah it's super fun to catch up with you and with the audience. I feel like the last show we did was right after shoptalk so I did get to see a bunch of folks and now you know it's a treat your season is starting to heat up so I have a bunch of upcoming trips so. If listeners are going to any of these shows make sure you make a point to catch up with me and you could see the jar jar costume. In person so I'm actually doing this show from. The famous Mayflower Hotel in Washington d.c. because I'm in town for the. Home and Commercial products Association I'm doing the keynote for their annual conference tomorrow morning. And then I'm going to sap Sapphire which is their big customer show in Orlando in on May 15th if you like. There's a fair amount of our listeners that go to that show and then to fun ones that are you know core Commerce shows after that we have Commerce next by our friends Scott Silverman is in New York in June so June 20th. And I'll be doing some fun stuff stuff on stage there and then in RFC you know has their kind of future looking executive digital Summit. [4:07] On the beach it Tara no in Rancho Palos Verdes it's called the inner F Nexus on July 10 and all both be giving a keynote and I will also be interviewing Kara Swisher so I feel like. I'm going to spend an hour just making fun of Scott Galloway with her. Scot: [4:25] Nice yeah that's good the dog dog is off the porch whoo. Jason: [4:30] Exactly I was thinking about like maybe bring a mask I've already you know I have audio collection of a lot of my favorite Scott Galloway predictions meaning which didn't come true. Scot: [4:43] Macy's Woodberry Amazon and apparel. Jason: [4:47] But I feel like this is. Scot: [4:48] Amazon to be Roadkill. Jason: [4:50] Like Freaky Friday like so like Cara is this like super famous interviewer and I am interviewing her and we're doing it at Tara know where she started code conference so it's very topsy-turvy. Scot: [5:03] Yeah yeah just bring red tears without her trademark thing. Jason: [5:07] I assume she just travels with one of her own yeah that Herman Miller red chair yeah. Scot: [5:09] BYO RC okay. Jason: [5:15] I actually think she's not with Vox anymore so I don't know you know she may be in withdrawn not she may have said said goodbye to the red chairs will have to ask her. Scot: [5:24] Look that's that's question number one. Jason: [5:26] Yeah but besides all of that we are just getting started on q1 earnings season and you know of course for most of our listeners one of the most important earnings calls happened last week. Scot: [5:39] Yeah it wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show if we didn't have some Amazon news. So on April 27th which was last Thursday when we're recording this Amazon had their earnings it was what Wall Street would call a clear beat meaning both top and the bottom line where a beat this is welcome news because Amazon's earnings have been kind of like not not mrs. but not amazing. [6:07] So revenues came in two percent above consensus which is a slight beat but what got Wall Street very excited was operating income came in 57 percent above and longtime listeners will know I usually cover the retail portion of Amazon and Jason covers the cloud or a WS part, we're going to mix it up because I read all the reports and what was most interesting right now in kind of the world of Internet stocks the whole world has been turned upside down by chat GPT which is put out by open AI Sam Altman startup who is partially owned and supported by Microsoft there and investor and the hole, infrastructure runs on Azure their cloud computing, platform this has been a huge win for Microsoft because it's enabled them to add a chat gbt like component to Bing. [7:02] And you know the buzz is that, search is dead a lot of people are even speculating maybe even apps will be dead you know maybe maybe you don't really need apps on a phone if you could just talk to your phone and say hey book me restaurant reservation as 6:30 at the one of these three restaurants why do you need a nap if an AI can go to that room so there's there's a lot of people in the Wall Street and Tech world are, I would say there's like this wall of worry around this new innovation and this is real so chat GPT was the fastest product to 100 million users what was it Jason like four weeks or something. [7:42] Like an egg yeah if you see a chart it's like this a vertical wall whereas like Facebook and some of those kinds of things were previous record holders for this and it took, you know years and so-so. Jason: [7:54] Two months to a billion or 4 months to a billion users. Scot: [7:58] Yeah so it's just this crazy adoption curve unlike anything we've ever seen before so you know there's, this was top of mind when this came out so the so while streets pretty obsessed with what's going on with the cloud also Amazon's Cloud division has been slowing their growth it was the you know the darling of the Amazon portfolio and now it's been slowing because as we head into this recessionary period, also another concern is we cover this a little bit last time but Silicon Valley Bank failed we've had all this kind of startup craziness and a lot of those startups use cloud computing and Amazon so, so that was what all eyes were on and you know what we saw was the growth did slow to 11 and a half percent which was less bad than what people were thinking so is kind of viewed as positive which is always one of these counter, Wall Street all about expectations not like the real absolute numbers but 11.5 percent growth is this is this part we've been covering this for for. [9:04] Years of this point five years and it's always growing north of 50% but this time it really slowed down and they're even projecting for next quarter or slow 2011 Amazon did Jesse did talk a lot about AI there they've talked about how they're going to do a lot of people the other problem with Chad gbt is it looks the prior to the prior a I think we all spend a lot of time with which was Alexa now feels wildly inferior because you're having these really robust conversations with chat gvt and Alexis can do like, yeah it's not really like at that level of conversational AI you can get some weather maybe play a song and a couple other little things add something it'll talk to you about do you want to reorder your dog food and yeah that's about it right so very, Barry and then you know that used to be cool and now in a world where we're chatty be teeing it feels inferior so Amazon like Google is a little bit on their heels from this and they basically came out and said we're going to do a lot around Alexa here and it will we're dedicated that being by far the best voice assistant, and we'll be adding chats ubt like capabilities but then for AWS they basically said look there's all these language models out there and we're going to be neutral will have all kinds of different flavors kind of thing so whatever you want we'll have. [10:30] And the one of the concerns is these large language models use a ton of gpus and those are expensive. Azure is adding a ton of workloads from this and their conference call they went so far as to say. It's like accelerated growth dramatically at Azure they're getting all these loads that they would have never seen before thanks to their relationship and, they're scaling up this gpus and so it kind of feels early and Aang's like maybe Microsoft has got like this. Bit of an advantage over both Google and they WS so, so you know it was interesting because I'm saying all that because what happened is they announced their up a little bit that day and then they announced and they were down and they've been kind of sideways since then so and what was clear be quarter with AWS not as bad as you would think it would be you had the numbers would say oh the stock should go up 5 to 10% but they didn't because I don't think everyone really liked, body language around you know what's going on chat gbt and Amazon's response. [11:40] So that was a that was a long part but that was I thought it was kind of interesting. The whole world and like the last yeah six months has been turned upside down by this and it's always an option or that always gets my attention because this is where unique opportunities are created for disruption and all kinds of what happens is when my favorite books is the innovators dilemma when something new like this comes along, people that were previously the leaders have a really hard time adapting to it because they get baked into their business model so for example to pick on Google it's very hard for them to offer a chat interface on the core Google search because, every pixel of core Google search is like so highly optimized and them hitting their numbers relies on that that real estate. [12:28] Basically not changing that to change that real estate and experiment with something that is expensive and not monetized is. Almost impossible you know it's it will certainly make them lose mountains of Revenue and even worse on ibadah, so it's really kind of fascinating to Think Through the strategy here of what's everyone going to do and how do they adapt to this new world and to some extent Amazon not as bad as Google I would argue but that Amazon is a little bit of a in a pickle. Um it got even so bad also around the same time Jeff Bezos was at Coachella and he was just out there dancing and wearing this kind of fun butterfly shirt and everyone's kind of like you know it almost felt like fiddling while Rome burned so a lot of people are like and then you know so Disney's CEO has come back and a lot of people are projecting that maybe we'll see a day where like a Larry Page comes back to Google and a Bezos comes back to Amazon to it's going to be interesting to see what happens this next next three to six months are gonna be really fun to watch in the world of large trillion-dollar internet companies to see what's going down. Jason: [13:39] Oh for sure and I keep saying this but we're going to have to do another. Deep dive on AI and chechi because there are so many it's changing so, fast and there's this whole like shift from keywords to prompts and you know like all of you know Google's intrinsic strengths are suddenly becoming weaknesses there's this interesting battle, um between like these AI capabilities as destinations versus these AI capabilities as. Sort of infrastructure that that you add to any destination right and so you know the interesting thing about Chad gbt you can license the. The GPT for engine and build it in your own apps or your own website but 1.2 billion consumers a month, are going to chat. Open a i.com so that's now a destination on the web that's bigger than Bing. [14:40] Like move more people last month went to their website opening eyes website then went to Bing and that's a, Game Changer I get it's feels like a huge missed opportunity side note that there's not ads on that website yet I'm sure I'm sure that that that is coming in Italy but so there are all these like super interesting changes. I kind of feel like even if all that wasn't playing out like just the the fact that AWS is decelerating a little bit. [15:10] Would be the news from this earning thing and it's what everyone's talking about and it's almost a shame because it's kind of masking what otherwise like is a pretty remarkable quarter compared to like what most of their peers are likely to do. Scot: [15:25] Yeah yeah walk us through some of the highlights that you saw in the non aw site. Jason: [15:30] Well so the first thing if you look at North American gmv it grew 13% in q1 so that that is a deceleration from, their Q4 growth but like to put that in comparison. Us retail sales grew four percent in the first quarter so so you know this is kind of back to pre-pandemic levels where Amazon's growing. Despite being you know the largest or second largest retailer in the US depending on how you count growing quite a bit of water faster than the industry, you don't normally we would we compare Amazon's growth to all retailers growth but also to all of e-commerce has growth, so the US Department of Commerce comes out with their Q2 growth numbers in a couple weeks so May 18th I think if you want to mark your calendars will do a show and talk about that but. Just kind of interpreting the data and extrapolating. [16:31] U.s. e-commerce and q1's likely to grow about 10% which is kind of a recovery for e-commerce but still, that means Amazon the largest e-commerce player out there is growing faster than the industry as a whole which is. You know typical for Amazon but you know not very typical in the rest of the world so the retail story was, was really strong and it was driven almost exclusively by your favorite part of the retail Echo System the marketplace right it was almost all. [17:00] 3p sales which I want to say grew 16 percent. Or fifteen percent for the quarter so so 3p continues to be a super important part, and you know I always like to talk about the ad business ads were up 21% which is a, a deceleration of the ads business as well just like AWS but a couple interesting things, there's a ton of headwinds, for traditional dip digital ads right now as the economy is getting a little more challenging you know a lot of brands are cutting back on their spinned because the privacy issues they're cutting back on a lot of the traditional digital channels, um so you look at like metas ad business in q1 it grew three percent Google's ad business grew to percent. [17:55] Pinterest was the leader of those kind of traditional platforms their ad business grew five percent, and Amazon which is has a bigger ad business than Pinterest Amazon grew 21% so that that growth you know continues to be remarkable, um I did a quick back of the napkin estimate and I, I know AWS generated about 5 billion dollars in earn income for the quarter the ad unit probably generated 7.1 billion dollars in earning come for the quarter so quite a bit more, profit to the bottom line coming from that ad business then coming from from AWS, and then you know Amazon you know as they always do they kind of pepper and some favorable stats so they talked about how. They they had 26 million customers for same-day delivery in q1 which is fifty percent growth year over year so you know you. You kind of you've seen a lot of other retailers that as the economy has gotten kind of tough they've kind of. [18:58] Ratcheted back their service level a little bit like you're seeing a lot of people starting to charge more for returns you're starting to see delivery promises get stretched out a little bit and you know Amazon is kind of. Adjusting their returns policy as well but like they're they're all in on that fast same day delivery. And it seems like consumers are continuing to embrace that. Um there's this kind of big strategic shift that they talked about Scott that I know you've been falling which is kind of the shift from a national fulfillment model to a regional fulfillment model. And this is all about getting more efficiency so the idea is you know in the old model you placed an order and you know they ship from whatever Warehouse fulfillment center had the goods in stock so often that. Are shipping things from pretty far away, and mold you know in a you know your your multicart order could have Goods coming from a lot of different fulfillment centers and you know this quarter the focus is really on redesigning the whole fulfillment center to optimize. [20:06] How many trips they have to make to your house and how many, how much of the goods can all come from the same fulfillment center so there's a laser focus on kind of getting the inventory in each fulfillment center right for the market that it's serving, um and the you know in their investor call the CFO was talking about how like they're starting to they're already starting to unlock. Um significant improvements in their operating margins as a result of cutting down on the amount of trips in order to serve the same amount of gmv and they think there's a lot of Headroom to continue improving math if you've been following that kind of, Regional shift it almost feels like the Reinventing the you know kind of against innovators dilemma they're Reinventing their whole fulfillment model despite the fact that they have the. The world's largest fulfillment model. Scot: [21:00] Yeah yeah I think this is really interesting and in some ways maybe the go Puffs the world kind of showed him how to do this ironically enough and you know and this surge of same-day delivery I think they're having. I think you know in the early days the same day delivery I remember Sebastian going ham he was SVP saying yes he was at our conference and he said something like we just put out there to see and we were surprised by how many people use it and then you know they had data that indicated this is like five years ago that it was addictive because you. [21:37] We have forget which of us going this is your zero friction addiction so once you have one of these low-friction experiences you're like yeah yeah you know of course I would like it yeah, I'm running this morning all like it the same day but that's making them for deploying a lot more of the product to be able to satisfy that demand but they have the data to do it the key is it's a you know there's, there's this you know something like 300 million skus out there in the cloud that you can buy a small portion of those percentage-wise large sales wise is in the network of FCS and then the system learned what to, put at the edge near you and that same day thing there's a set of skus and it's probably down to 10,000 at that point, that they know those are the most frequently Asked seemed a things it's going to be things like toilet replenishable toiletries, dog food for me all those types personal items Healthcare Beauty and you know it's not the it's not the Xbox or something that can kind of weight well I guess some of that could be but you know there's plenty of stuff people are happy to wait for so, that that edge Network allows them to Ford deploy 5 to 10,000 excuse and get them to you really fast. Jason: [22:56] Yeah and I think what's interesting is that it turns out that the. The those skews that are needed for same-day delivery in Raleigh are not the same as the skills that are needed in Chicago and AI is really helping them sort of optimize. Those fulfillment centers and the numbers are actually a little bigger than your you're saying there are now like 300,000 same day skus in the system and in some markets there they have over 100,000 skus available for same-day so it y you know there. [23:26] They're kind of expanding from the head in skews to you know at least the chunky middle scuze. On that same day delivery and it and it seems like that's continuing to work for them. I just think it's you know again a lot of people that had you know the huge infrastructure lead the Amazon had him fulfillment centers you know would. But I find it hard to disrupt that model and pivot to a new model and it seems like you know Tim zones credit they're they're not afraid to disrupt themselves and it feels like that's kind of what they're doing here. And it seems like it least pull narrowly it's working you know they're also. Over the covid time there have been some capacity constraints and they rolled out a lot of technology to help help third-party sellers better manage their own. Capacity and you know I'm hearing from third-party sellers that that is going better that they have you know are better able. [24:29] Predict the cost and the capacity that will be available for them and they're not getting as many unpleasant surprises as they as they kind of had had in the past of that that stuff is all interesting, I also think Amazon's big enough that they're they're you know kind of a. A good surrogate for for the actual consumer economies at this point and so is interesting you know they talked about the Americans can consumer and you know the North America was where a lot of Amazon's growth was. Um They they had a statement that they're continuing to see the US consumer is being conscious that she's definitely moderated her spending on discretionary categories, she's trading down to more value oriented eizan's. [25:16] You know there continues to be healthy demand for Staples and you know I think we heard similar things from other big retailers like Wal-Mart and Target so that kind of felt in line but what was interesting was Europe. The growth is much slower but it was a significantly higher beat versus expectations than North America was and they had kind of an interesting editorial on Europe they said that, European demand while cautious came in better than expected, we see customer confidence increasing with inflation tickling down in the EU and that's kind of at odds with a bunch of other retailers that that are competing in Europe that are still you know kind of talking about, the consumer Demand Being really repressed in Europe and the European consumer really struggling due to even higher inflation then then what consumers are experiencing here in North America so, um it either sounds like Amazon's having a better go of it than a lot of other retailers in Europe, or Amazon is being the first one to sort of see the economy turning a little more favorable in Europe so. I kind of found that interesting. [26:42] Yeah well again you know the. Historically like Europe is smaller than North America for Amazon but it you know because it's smaller it was growing faster but you know there have been more. Challenges supply chain disruptions there's more uncertainty in a lot of the European economies and so you know it's like for global companies I'm particularly brands that do business everywhere. Um that European softness has been a challenge the one outlier of all that is luxury so it does feel. Like kind of a bifurcated economy that like luxury can you know is actually kind of bounce back in Europe and is continuing to do pretty pretty well worldwide while. High inflation is hurting a lot more of the kind of staple Industries a lot more. Scot: [27:35] Having Survived the Great Recession of 08 and 09 at Chow buzzer the weird thing about the data was the luxury segment accelerated you have to have the the wealthy folks do find during economic downturns turns out. Jason: [27:50] Yeah this was a weird one in that like that's for that was for sure true where the demand was shifted in unusual ways because often you have a lot of. Really wealthy consumers are also tend to be really mobile consumer so you have, historical you'd have a lot of really wealthy people from China that would go to France and buy a lot of luxury goods and in covid of course nobody was going anywhere so there was this huge, spike in luxury goods in China so like the overall worldwide demand for luxury was very high but there were these weird mismatches where the demand was not coming from the markets that it typically came from and now it feels like it's. Reverting more it's starting to revert to more traditional. [28:37] So there was a another interesting earnings call this morning. Scot: [28:41] Yeah so Shopify came out with their earnings and they've had just kind of set the stage. In the during covid they were Off to the Races and they've had a really hard time in the last year kind of in that post covid era as they invested so much and then covid the e-commerce growth reverted to the mean as you've been, so good at pointing out and they thought it would just continue up into the right and so they did about a ten percent reduction in force I think is a year ago maybe a little longer, and so then this morning they came out and they beat Lowered Expectations to put this in perspective of their growth has slowed to 25% and they were consistently growing well north of 50% so they're they're definitely, this was good for a while there were kind of Contracting but now at least they're back to growth they are losing money but they should get back to profitability here in a quarter or two but the big surprise was you know if you recall they were going to take on Amazon and they started really building out some fulfillment and they bought a couple companies to do that and started building out this whole infrastructure called Shopify fulfillment Network or sfm. [30:00] So they announced on the call today that they're just basically abandoning that whole strategy and the assets they previously bought an aggregate for over two billion dollars they sold to a company called Flex port for a billion so that had to hurt so basically a billion dollar loss on the strategy and they basically said you know the future is AI and that's where we're going to put our effort, and then when they sell this unit there also some people go with that but they're also announced they're doing at 23% that would include some of those people it's not it's not entirely clear. [30:36] How many will be core Shopify versus the people leaving with the sfn I think it's. Relatively small you know I don't think that's happened was like this huge. People operation like you have an Amazon anyway so they're going to reduce headcount by 11,000 people 29k so from 11,000 29k, so about 23% reduction these things are always kind of. [31:06] Little tricky emotionally because you feel for those people that are losing their jobs and found out this morning that's going to be no fun, but then Wall Street loves a good reduction for us because that means more profits oh, the stock this is a huge win for the stock because Wall Street has hated hated hated this idea if you take this super high margin software business and you layer in a super low margin fulfillment business, so you know Wall Street this is part of the innovators dilemma, once you've baked your margins in at 85% or whatever you can't then go to Wall Street and say we're going to bring that down 15% 270 because we're going to be fulfillment and that's a, yeah 30% margin business your blend that in with our 85 you get us to 70 or whatever it is, so so Wall Street was very happy to see them abandoned us, it does raise the question one of the reasons they got in this is you and I talked a lot about Shopify versus Amazon and you know the same time. Amazon is raising the bar on e-commerce we just talked about this two same day, Shopify was going to arm the rebels so that they could at least keep up with two day now they're abandoning that you know there's gonna continue to be, yeah this could be a big moment in history where Shopify messes up and you know. [32:29] What's a I going to solve if you have this great product recommendation or something that doesn't show up for five days in Amazon eats the Shopify Merchants lunch because they just are better at Logistics so this is this is a big decision throwing in the towel and it's going to be interesting to see, if this is wise or not I obviously lean towards I don't think this is going to be a great in decision for him. Jason: [32:57] Yeah it is tricky. The you know I would also mention there's this so I you know scary service from Amazon looming on the Shopify Horizon that it's not clear Shopify his really declared what they want they're going to do with yet which is the. The by with prime service which is you know in in effect to use that really solid Amazon Fulfillment Network even when you sell stuff on Shopify. And so you know maybe they're they're dumping on the Shopify fulfillment Network stuff in there just gonna see the Fulfillment Amazon we'll have to see. Um I do I've decided to correct one thing you said like Shopify is huge on talking about e-commerce regress to the mean. That's actually not true right get when they talk about that they're talking about the ratio of e-commerce sales to retail sales and it's partly true for that. That you know we kind of went from 14 or 15 percent of all sales being online to 17 or 18 percent and we bounced back down to 15%. Um you know that that shape varied while we you know depending on the category so image digitally immature categories like Grocery and Automotive had kind of a permanent Spike whereas, like apparel you know had kind of a temporary bump. [34:23] In absolute dollars e-commerce is way bigger than before the pandemic e-commerce is 90% up from from 2019 and so when when they kind of use that. As an excuse for the layoffs I would say like don't buy it right like that. [34:41] There's a lot more demand for digital Goods than there were in 2019 and Shopify isn't laying people off because that demand has receded like throwing people off because they haven't perfectly figured out what the right business model is and from my standpoint. They're still a little dyslexic on who they're even trying to serve they still have all this language around you know serving the small Independent Business the mom-and-pop and arming the rebels and all that but like you know when you listen all the success stories in their earnings calls. It's it's Staples it's why it's it's you know it's it's bigger or midsize specialty retailers that are moving to the platform, it's not the rebels I, Kendall Jackson and Kendall Jenner and Staples are not the rebels and so I don't know like I think they like that that narrative but like I'm not sure they've come a perfectly aligned their product offering to the. The companies that are like driving the bulk of their gmv growth and when they you know do focus on the long tail Mom and Pops. It really makes that gmv number kind of office gated because there's so much churn over there right and they go or gmv went up 25%. Was that because like all your customers are thriving and they're all growing or is it because you just added way more companies that will have a nine-month mortality rate than you then you did the quarter before. [36:09] So I think it's like I definitely like there's a lot of strong, sort of advantages and and experiences still in the Shopify ecosystem and. Feel like shot pay is getting some traction the shop app has got a lot more traction than I originally predicted and now there are some legitimate. Marketplace features in there there's a lots of things going for them I certainly would not write them off but I do think. Like in the next couple of quarters we need to see some more clarity about like what they want to be and where their growth is really going to come. Scot: [36:46] Yeah yeah it's going to be we'll be tracking it closely on the show as we have them so it's going to be interesting to see I don't think either of us had this in our predictions though sadly. Jason: [36:57] Yeah no I mean I was definitely caught by I never thought this Acquisitions made sense but I certainly thought that you know they would hold on to him longer so I don't know I guess if you're an investor like. Like once you realize it was the wrong decision like there's probably something good about like cutting bait quickly instead of trying to. Drag it around drag it out longer just because you you don't want to own up to the mistake. So anyway that feels like a pretty good recap of the two big earnings there's a you know a bunch of the traditional retailers will be record reporting over the next four weeks and of course we'll have US Department of Commerce data, including q1 e-commerce. Later this month so lots of reasons to have another new show and I still do think we got to get that. That large language Model A I show on the on the books. Scot: [37:52] Yeah yeah we will we're through our vacation period and we should have some time to lay that down and Jason you've got a keynote tomorrow and you got some slides to work on buddy so we're going to make this a short one in the pantheon of Jason and Scot show lengthy episodes. Jason: [38:09] Yeah yeah we'll give it a few minutes back to our listeners and I will go write a keynote for tomorrow. Scot: [38:15] Awesome it's always good when you're up against deadlines so you're going to crush it. Jason: [38:20] I feel like the one thing I have going for me is the present the content will be very Timely. Scot: [38:26] Good yep fresh like. Jason: [38:30] Awesome Scott thinks every very much everyone for listening as always enjoyed the show we sure would love it if you jump on iTunes and give us that five star review and until next time happy commercing!

Discover how barcodes can benefit Shopify Merchants in this episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast, where I'm joined by Charlie Tyler, Product Manager at EasyScan.On the Show Today You'll Learn:The advantages of working with barcodesAn insight into your day-to-day operations using barcodes as an entrepreneur on ShopifyThe process to transfer from not having barcodes in Shopify to having every product labeledHow barcodes help to make shipping and returns easyLinks & ResourcesWebsite: https://506.io/Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/easyscan-inventory-and-orderLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charleshtyler/Get access to more free resources by visiting the podcast episode page at http://bit.ly/3UyZTfF Episode SponsorFor inquiries about becoming a guest or sponsoring the podcast, email claus@clauslauter.com.Subscribe & Listen Everywhere:Listen On: ​clauslauter.com | Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Amazon Music/Audible | Stitcher | Deezer | Google PodcastSubscribe today so you don't miss an episode!By rating and reviewing the show in the app that you are listening to, you will enable us to invite bigger and more impactful guests.Tag the podcast on InstagramSupport the showGet free marketing ideas to help grow your revenue on Shopify. In your inbox for free. Every Thursday. Consumed in 3 minutes or less. Join 3,500+ Ecommerce Merchants, Founders, and Marketers here: newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com

The players who are going to stand the test of time in the NFT space for a long time are those that have been playing the long game from the very start. That is what Big Time Studios has been doing in the NFT gaming space. In this episode, CMO Michael Migliero explains how they craft their games in ways that are revolutionary even in the already disruptive crypto gaming universe. He also explains how they handled the process of building their game and engaging their community during the critical transition from a relatively bullish market to today's bear market. For our hot topics segment, we are joined by Adi Sideman of Revel.xyz, who explains how they are reimagining social networks as a place where stakeholders can co-create and collaborate to a greater extent than what was previously possible. Plus, learn more about the developments at Shopify where merchants can now sell Avalanche NFTs. Tune in for all these and a lot more! Creators & GuestsMore from Edge of NFT:

The players who are going to stand the test of time in the NFT space for a long time are those that have been playing the long game from the very start. That is what Big Time Studios has been doing in the NFT gaming space. In this episode, CMO Michael Migliero explains how they craft their games in ways that are revolutionary even in the already disruptive crypto gaming universe. He also explains how they handled the process of building their game and engaging their community during the critical transition from a relatively bullish market to today's bear market. For our hot topics segment, we are joined by Adi Sideman of Revel.xyz, who explains how they are reimagining social networks as a place where stakeholders can co-create and collaborate to a greater extent than what was previously possible. Plus, learn more about the developments at Shopify where merchants can now sell Avalanche NFTs. Tune in for all these and a lot more!Creators & Guests Jeff Kelley - Host Josh Kriger - Host Eathan Janney - Host

In this episode, I speak with Jared Haas of UPS Capital about porch piracy and other shipping issues. We will discuss what insurance options you have for your ecommerce stores.On the Show Today You'll Learn:An insight into how shipping companies operate.How to communicate with your customer about making their deliveries safer.How Shopify merchants can get one-click package protection for their business.How the InsureShield App for Shopify can significantly improve your conversion rate.And moreJared Haas is the Digital Agile Solutions Supervisor at UPS Capital. He has been with UPS Capital for just over three years and has been an instrumental part in the creation of UPS Capital's InsureShield App for Shopify, an app designed to help brands improve their conversion rate, brand affinity, and brand loyalty by protecting against shipping mishaps, including porch piracy. The InsureShield app gives consumers and merchants opt-in options for shipping insurance protection on orders.Links & ResourcesWebsite: https://upscapital.com/resources/consumer-elected-insurance/Shopify App store: https://apps.shopify.com/insureshieldContinue the ConversationIn our ECOM MERCHANT PRO community, you can connect with our podcast guests and continue the conversation.Our community is also a great place to get advice from other Shopify merchants who have achieved what you are aiming for.This is your safe place to actively grow your online retail business with the support of the most amazing and helpful group of ecommerce entrepreneurs behind you.Join the Ecom Merchant Pro Community! Podcast listeners get 50% off for life with the coupon: EMPCJoin here: https://www.clauslauter.com/ecom-merchant-pro/Subscribe & Listen Everywhere:Listen On: ​clauslauter.com | Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Amazon Music/Audible | Stitcher | Deezer | Google PodcastBy rating and reviewing the show in the app that you are listening to, you will enable us to invite bigger and more impactful guests.Please also remember to subscribe to our podcast and switch on the notifications to never miss an episode.Tag the podcast on Instagram @clauslauter and let me know what you like about it.If you like the content and would like to support the podcast, you can buy me a coffee here.Support the showBecome a better Shopify merchant. Subscribe and get tips on how to run a profitable Shopify business. Join our free newsletter at https://www.clauslauter.com/ecommerce-podcast-newsletter/

The Ecommerce Coffee Break Podcast - an eCommerce podcast for Shopify Merchants and Business Owners who want to maximize conversions and revenue.Each week you get actionable advice, and strategies, and hear from special guests talking about various topics on how to run a profitable business on Shopify.Learn how to survive in the fast-changing eCommerce world with your host Claus Lauter and get eCommerce business advice you can't find on Google.Voted as Top 20 Shopify Podcast on FeedspotListen in your favorite podcast app or directly in your browser at https://www.clauslauter.com/ecommerce-podcast/Support the showBecome a better Shopify merchant. Subscribe and get tips on how to run a profitable Shopify business. Join our free newsletter at https://www.clauslauter.com/ecommerce-podcast-newsletter/

EP296 - Guardian Baseball Co-Founder Matt Kubancik  Episode 296 is an interview with Matt Kubancik (@mattkubancik), CEO and Co-Founder of Guardian Baseball. Matt is a serial e-commerce entrepreneur who was the founder of Street Moda, Co-Founder of SKU Vault, and most recently Co-Founder and CEO of Guardian Baseball. Mark is an experienced Marketplace seller, and his current business Guardian Baseball is a hybrid seller selling both wholesale and owned brands direct to consumer from a Shopify site, and via multiple marketplaces including Amazon. Guardian Baseball is an early adaptor of Buy with Prime, and shares in the interview, that they would migrate off Shopify if necessarily to keep using Buy with Prime. He also discusses a number of the current limitations with the Buy With Prime offering. Episode 296 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Friday September 23, 2022. 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 296 being recorded on Friday August 23rd 2022 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 Scott showed listeners today we have a fun interview this is kind of a both a TBT a throwback for me and then also modern discussion around by with Prime but to set it up we are very excited to welcome mat kubancik to the show welcome mat. Matt: [1:00] Thanks Scott and Jason have my own. Scot: [1:02] Matt what's your what's your current title you have you have 50 things you're always doing so I never know what to say other than. Matt: [1:08] Always doing but Maine. Scot: [1:10] Entrepreneur genius. Matt: [1:11] Yeah sometimes sometimes a genius sometimes but that's the life of an entrepreneur I co-founder and CEO of Guardian baseball.com or multi-channel hybrid direct to consumer and brand partner of you know some of the biggest. Brand names and Sporting Goods retailer so predominantly in the baseball and softball market and we're on Amazon Walmart eBay and on our Shopify site. And we were named the fastest growing e-commerce retailer by ink magazine in the Inc 5000 and number 180 overall this year. Jason: [1:48] Amazing that congratulations I definitely want to jump into it but before we do you know our listeners always like to get a little bit of a gist of our guests background and so I'm imagining you you went to college and got a degree in baseball e-commerce is that how you started. Matt: [2:05] No not at all actually spent six months in in college dropped out was one of the original I started selling on eBay 1999. Um during think my first year of high school sold baseball cards ironically and then. Started selling fashion and store stock Closeouts Retail Arbitrage early days of eBay and then when I was 18 years old. I met an executive that was retired from the Footwear industry and him and I started a company called Street motor together, and we were a early on 2000s multi-channel retailer and I met Scott through signing Channel advisor when I was 19 years old I remember signing my contract, verbally over the phone like a grain to the contract and then I went into school and said hey I'm going to withdraw after six months of Indiana University so. Dropped out and did 100 million over, 10 11 years mainly thanks to the a lot of connections Channel advisor helped me create you know Market places like Amazon eBay buy.com back in the day, a lot of the shopping channels like Shopzilla and sites like that and we exited that business in 2017. And been involved in e-commerce and various other companies and degrees. Jason: [3:30] That's an amazing story for a couple of reasons first of all I love everybody that that helps helps fun they're beginning through Retail Arbitrage have you seen the latest version of we Retail Arbitrage kind of making the rounds right now. Matt: [3:46] What is the what is the latest version of I probably have but I'm wondering what it would lose. Jason: [3:50] It's dudes buying Walmart frozen pizza and then selling it as a ghost Kitchen on doordash. Matt: [3:56] I love it yes I actually posted that somebody needs to hire that guy with the tick tock video yeah. Jason: [4:01] Yeah that that was amazing and then one thing that's that I found peculiar about your background is most people tell me they even back then Scott was too fancy to actually talk to customer so it's kind of impressive that you were able to meet Scott in person back then. Matt: [4:16] Yeah the I would think I was like 18 and I was a channel advisor conference and I had a beer in my hand and he walked up to me and I remember he was like are you are you 21 I was like I don't think so. Jason: [4:26] So it was mostly a liability concerns. Scot: [4:30] Yeah yeah Matt Matt's a brilliant marketer and he would bring these t-shirts to the shows he did he did Wingo as my homeboy and then was a twingo made Millions so those are some of the best best marketing gimmicks, and I will show up at the show and I was wearing this this t-shirt with a picture of Miss really weird. Jason: [4:49] I feel like it's even it's gotten increasingly true and more much more true in the last month that you could sell more of those t-shirts the Wingo made me Millions. Matt: [4:59] Yeah it was a it was a lot of fun so. Scot: [5:04] And then so then that was your primary thing so then you did you guys realize that you needed to build you look at all the software for shipping and inventory management and build your own and then you, tell the story of that. Matt: [5:19] Oh yeah so it was like 2012 or 2011 and kind of the only inventory platform out there other than like something on the level like sap Oracle custom build for like larger retailers or Manhattan, a red Prairie was what was it called Scott like Stone Edge or something what was it was on Old access bit database yeah and I remember, they actually got bought out by a former competitor of Channel advisor so and there were so many Channel advisor clients on there so we tried to launch that in our warehouse and my childhood friend and he says who got an engineering degree and eventually became the CEO of skew vault, tried to implement that and then him and a programmer who was programming a bunch of stuff Slava who's the co-founder skew vault try to implement that system and it just didn't work properly for us so they came back to me a few months later and they were like hey we're just going to build it and I was kind of like okay if you guys can really do that and you know it worked we built a skew Vault version 1 out of Street Motors warehouse and then eventually I help those guys kind of get the business off the ground. [6:25] Was original co-founder Andy just exited the business lat ironically a week before Channel advisor so, to a company out of the UK and you know still work with Andy on a daily basis and good friends so really proud of those guys and yeah it was it was a great thing we did up having, thousands of customers and help them with their fulfillment needs and help a lot of the big direct to Consumer and Shabba fine Amazon retailers on a SAS, like platform manage their inventory and cycle counts and you know all that kind of stuff. Jason: [7:00] And so was q v predominantly like a order management system or I guess I always thought of it as kind of like a almost like a dim and a CMS and a way am I thinking of it wrong. Matt: [7:12] Predominately a warehouse management system you know we never we had a really good partnership with people like Channel advisor and, and other channel listing tools so Andy was always very adamant on not disrupting those Partnerships I think you saw a lot of, a lot of our competition would eventually move into the channel management and then disrupt those Partnerships so we always relied on and Scott was a huge part of that, and driving force and then Channel advisor folks were always a huge you know big partner of skew vaulting especially in the early days of really driving that home so we never really got into the listing. Pain management we really tried to rely on our. Excellent capability of functioning in the warehouse so providing quality control integrating with the shipping carriers like ship work shipstation. Companies like that and and then integrating with the channel Partners like a channel buzzer. And providing all the quality control Pick Pack you know scan in audits inventory sinking buffers all that type of normal WMS type of functions. Scot: [8:17] Cool so you you were a e-commerce entrepreneur so you've done that then you did software-as-a-service so you get the check that off the box and then I saw on LinkedIn you've also been working with a turbo host so that's actually getting into my world of cars now tell me tell me how you got into that one. Matt: [8:34] I just really like nice cars and you know I started renting them on Taro and I was down in Florida which is like a second home for me and I had one of my best friends move down there and from Louisville, and we just started buying cars it started with one so I didn't have to like rent Ontario anymore and then you know the turo market got really flooded so what I started to concentrate on was more mid-tier Exotics, so we bought cars like Porsches and Ferraris and then Terro raised there, they used to have a lower like coverage they would do like 150,000 and it was something that I was used to you know Scott on very well versed in the marketplaces I think if somebody looks at my. You know in between companies I've always consulted and I've always been brought in by big Brands to be on marketplaces Amazon eBay and how to really run and function those within a larger organization, so I really adapted well to the turo marketplace because I felt it was much like an eBay or an Amazon type of, mentality where they provide the customers you provide the inventory and then provide the service, and then you don't have to worry about all the legal jargon and a lot of the compliance and you know worrying about marketing spend, and Roi so you know we had three or four cars and and still working with my partner on that. Scot: [9:57] Cool it's a as I got into this Mobility space myself I was poking around it's like otter oh and then I saw the CEOs name is Andre Haddad and he's actually an eBay guy and it rang a bell and I had met him a couple times in eBay meetings so it's funny you've already kind of made that correlation there's a lot of, e-commerce people in the mobility world that I run across and then so my big question is if a Ferrari is a mid exotic for you what what's up there about already like Bugattis here like. Matt: [10:29] Like it in your old Ferrari California so it's something like a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and then we drop you know 20,000 into it to fix it up and it's running. You know we run it at like 750 to 1,000 a day where I would consider a more like. If you look at a competition like in Miami or Vegas they're generally running in the you know the Uris has or the Bugattis of the world so that would I would consider kind of the luxury like Newark here. Scot: [10:57] Got it where's and Lambo is kind of in the middle. Matt: [11:00] I would say Leo Lambo Huracan would be kind of be in the middle mid-tier luxury. Scot: [11:05] What's your daily driver their ass. Matt: [11:07] I have five kids now so it's a Ford Expedition in Louisville Kentucky but I have to I have two choices in Suburban or yeah there's no. Scot: [11:15] Low exotic low exotic yeah a lot of gold fish floating around in the car there I'm a that's our bread and butter here at spiffy is the five kids think you guys are Jim. Give them and give them lots of food to throw around back there. Matt: [11:33] Applesauce back and everything yeah I'm the Costco dead. Jason: [11:37] Spiffy spiffy charges extra for apple sauce stains just so you know. Side note I just got back from Vegas from grocery shop a grocery e-commerce show in the big news in Vegas is they just announced that formula one is coming to Las Vegas. Scot: [11:54] Yeah yeah that's gonna be awesome. Jason: [11:56] They're doing a track that's going to be on the Strip their clothes in the strip for a week it's going to that could be pretty cool. Matt: [12:03] Who's at that shop talk conference that they're involved in. Jason: [12:06] It's put on by the same people that started shop talk yes but it's more focused specifically on the like Grocery and Food Industries. So you've got all this Marketplace experience you got your fashion experience through shoot Street Mota. How'd you get there. Matt: [12:39] So I started the business with a friend of mine he owns the largest travel baseball organization in the state of Kentucky it's called The Wolves baseball organization he's around my age, Jewish kid from l.a. got recruited to play baseball in Kentucky so moved here were both only children both the same age both outside of Kentucky so we got along real well, he started training my kids he's really good with people really good people skills, really good with developing children and just teamwork and a lot of stuff and so we just started Guardian as a as honestly. It was supposed to be a lifestyle based business he was paying full retail from a local sporting goods store, for all his equipment and uniforms and I was this is when I was Consulting for the company that had bought Street mode and I was like hey, you know why don't we just go direct to the brands will sell some stuff on Amazon you know we'll have a little half a million dollar business. [13:35] And so we started working with like the wrongs and the Wilsons of the world and the Maru cheese and when I got into this business you know coming from the fashion business and when I consulted I consulted a lot of direct-to-consumer apparel Brands and launching them on. Amazon and helping with them their Logistics and health and beauty and those are very. Competitive Industries in the direct-to-consumer world right and they're very Advanced and a lot of their metrics and there's just heavy competition and there's a new direct-to-consumer player subscription boxes which is very competitive market and there's always something new. But in the Sporting Goods industry and you know Jason if you play baseball growing up is the same Brands like the same Louisville Sluggers Easton's. Of the world and you are having some direct-to-consumer. Brands that are kind of infiltrating the baseball and softball world but it's very much like an accessories like they might be a Brandon sunglasses or a bad brain and batting gloves but there's not really a big brand kind of doing it all, and there's almost no direct-to-consumer penetration so it's something that. [14:34] As we started evolving the business we started by buying just equipment then we would go to the brands and we started making our own equipment with them so we go to them and say hey. [14:44] You guys do black pink bags for girls that's really cool but like a lot of the girls are sick of black pink so we're going to make black Tiffany we're going to make black rose gold. How about we do these like new colorways kind of relating into the fashion business so you know I was still active in fashion and Consulting for and working with a lot of Brands like Puma, Steve Madden and Brands like that so I know kind of the colorways that are clicking and women's heels or Footwear and sneakers so I would and apparel and I would kind of put those over, and say okay maybe baseball and softball is a year or two behind so we kind of started doing that and that worked really well. And then we started producing our own cleats which are an Amazon bestseller so we're you know we out sell some of the biggest brands on the market came from Footwear so we started making kids cleats, our Guardian one of our Guardian kids please says over 6 700 reviews on Amazon it's one of the top sellers, we had inventory we have more inventory coming in so we just started started with cleats and then we started making sliding Nets bat bags. Um and then we released a baseball bat with a huge kind of direct-to-consumer startup brand that's taking over a lot of the market in the BB core which is high school and college is called stinger, bad company and we did a collab with them and it was called The Guardian bat by stainer and standards whole thing is basically the traditional direct to consumer. [16:07] Where they're you know the normal high school and college bats are costing three to five hundred dollars and they come in around 250 price point, 260 price point it's the same quality most of their sales are direct they do have a few retailers, and we came in and did a brand collaboration and we we had over 120,000 views 130,000 reviews on bat Bros which is the independent bat testing and they rated as a top five bat, and then when it came out for three or four months it was a top five bad on Amazon in terms of sales so. You know that's kind of what we're doing now and kind of evolving the business into more of a direct-to-consumer and making our own equipment and then working on with brand collaborations like a supreme would in the fashion business where, putting a guardian and going to a traditional brand and saying hey instead of just doing black and navy and red catching equipment let's do a kid's shark-tooth let's do a camouflage but like blue and green camo or something so we're kind of making it fun. And it's been good you know it's been a fun ride we're growing rapidly we, closing investment with Matt Joyce this year he came on as an owner so my business partners Evan I own the business along with a 14-year major Leaguer who just retired, and he was kind of a good Target for us we didn't want somebody that was just just going to sign a check like a really really big guy that was a Hall of Famer something and wasn't want to be active we wanted somebody that. [17:36] Was very entrepreneurial and Matt owns a line of gyms and Florida he does a bunch of real estate Investments and he's had kind of a blue-collar dad you know family raised him type of hard-working mentality and we wanted somebody like that. So he came on this year and we're really glad to have him and he's kind of helped line out a hole. Roster of athletes with us so we're very early on in The Cutting Edge of Ni El marketing and yeah so we're just kind of a cutting-edge retailer. Jason: [18:06] Interesting so a couple of quick questions jump to mind when you first got in the the baseball business, I would call that the sporting goods in general and I'm kind of assuming you'll correct me if I'm wrong baseball in particular is a little bit of a digital lagger right so, like you don't think of like Rowling and Wilson as kind of digital first companies. Matt: [18:31] No I would say the industry overall is is very traditional and they don't like a lot of change in the industry I think that's the baseball and softball equipment baseball in all I mean you see baseballs really losing out to Big sports like football and basketball and they're trying to figure out how do we become more engaged with the fan so I don't just think it's. Just necessary the equipment Brands I think it's overall as a sport but we definitely do see that in the baseball and softball equipment you know I think they don't really. They get they hand me these 500-page catalogs and there's 498 pages that are literally dedicated to male athlete ages 14 and above. And what they really forget and they do make equipment for him but it's not a focal point of their business and that's what Guardian kind of focuses on, is the softball Market is very underserved and then the youth market and if you think about the under 8 years old that's the most kids Everybody Plays little league right ever played buddy place, t-ball and coach pitch and then as you kind of Rise through the ranks then maybe you get more involved in swimming or maybe you get more involved in Lacrosse and that's your sport, or basketball or football and then you stop playing baseball so we are our cleats actually really Market to a 12 and under, and that's where really really kind of honing in the market and then the softball markets been huge you know two of our biggest influencers are Bella Dayton and Jasmine Perez chica they play for Arizona and Texas. [19:56] Their videos on Tik-Tok and Instagram we've done on marketing as and IL marketing have. Gotten hundreds of thousands of views and actually get more views than Major Leaguers we work with, and softball NCAA softball I think it was last 2021 surpassed college or viewership, for college men's baseball in the world series for the first time ever so college softball and softball in general is a very underserved Market by these Brands and it's something that, we're working with them on to develop more items and we're also working on ourselves of really kind of dressing that market and putting women at the Forefront. Jason: [20:33] Yeah that's super interesting I want to come back to the influencers but I'm just trying to make sure I understand so you started Guardian. In a lot of categories like a bunch of the aspirational Legacy Brands it's really hard to get a license to sell them right so you know. You do you want to start new footwear company you're not getting a Nike license you know it's really hard to get get a wholesale agreement with Oakley folks like that was it easy to get like Wilson in drawing to sell to you. Matt: [21:02] Yes it because of my business partners. The 14 travel teams he has the largest so those companies were already knocking down the door to be his uniform. Facility and and that sort of thing and at that time we started the business 45 years ago and like you said they're kind of behind the times of e-commerce so they hadn't started to clean up the marketplaces like a lot of the fashion brands or Electronics Brands had, on the Amazon and eBay world yet now they're starting to make a lot of those and they've kind of grandfathers as they in and putting those in those contracts. Where we've been able to do some special stuff like a lot of Brands we have you know brand registry with are able to come and do viral videos on the Amazon Marketplace and do a lot of things like that. Jason: [21:43] Yeah well you you anticipated my next question which is like it's often for those Brands controversial if they want to be on marketplaces and particularly on Amazon so with do I was that part of the discussion where they already on Amazon was it a foregone conclusion that they were okay with their products being a marketplaces or is that something you had to kind of evolve into. Matt: [22:03] Some of the brands are receptive to it you know I think there's three buckets there's you know brands that are like hey you can sew on your own.com but you can't sell in marketplaces then we've had brands that are like, hey you can be an authorized retailer but you have to kind of like follow these guidelines and fall in line you can't change product items we're not going to make smu's for us, and then we have a third brand the third option where a lot of and these are I would say these are more of your up-and-coming Brands and more of your brands that are, maybe number two that are really trying to take the market share of number one, you know like what's the car rental company that always said we're number two were working going to work harder so those type of brands are the brands that we really have the best relationships with like a stainer that's, kind of said hey go ahead and take not only can you be on Amazon but we're going to give you the keys to the kingdom here's brand registry go run with it, and you know do video ads do all type of editorial marketing handle all that for you so we're kind of acting like an agency in that type of a relationship, more were handling that and following all their guidelines working when it with ownership working with the executives, and then carrying their core merchandise and also making exclusive merchandise for the Amazon Walmart type of marketplaces. Jason: [23:16] Gotcha so not only are you doing it but you're helping them get better at it and is that controversial at all like are you potentially enabling them to go direct and not need you as much. Matt: [23:27] I think yeah I think we you know that is controversial right I think you know I spent. Six figures on an event in Florida last year hosting all the top equipment Brands and was very adamant on here's our vision you know I think we're going to be like a Target or a Costco where. This industry is a little unique because you're always going to have. The traditional brands on the Major League field and in the college's so this is not a. An industry where people are just going to say okay now I'm going to wear all birds instead of Cole Haans right where so there's always going to be elements of the industry like people are always going to want to use a Rawlings glove or you know a little Slugger bat right. Or a Marucci bat so. Working with those vendors and carrying that type of merchandise that the people demand kind of creates the ability for us to make our. Merchandise that we make. You know advertised more and have more effect in the market because we're carrying both so and we kind of have always said that that we're going to be like a Costco or a Target and carry our own private label but we always want the Best Brands and the best equipment in there. Jason: [24:38] Yeah so then that brings me back to the influencers because in my mind the world is slightly changed a little bit like hey. But influencers have become a much more effective comment marketing tactic in almost every category but but in Sporting Goods particularly like, Sporting Goods that have a significant College element like baseball historically the influencer wasn't the player it was the University because the players we're not allowed to be in for answers but the the team's I'll sign contract so you so if you were super rich you could go buy a bunch of colleges they are would use your gear and then you were the de facto market leader but you know for the last couple years it's been legal for those individual players, to be their own brand and in some sports a lot of those players had then. Opted out of using the team sanctioned equipment is like and I was curious is that happening in baseball at all and is that going to open the door for more brands or have they figured out how to keep it locked down pretty well. Matt: [25:41] Yeah so not so much on the latter part of the equipment I'll kind of get into that in a minute but the obviously we were very. Early on as soon as that IL law came out we were one of the first, people to start signing College athletes and we've kind of been at the Forefront as a retailer and especially even outpacing a lot of Brands a lot of brands are asking actually asking us for advice and how we run the program so we have it, about 15 College athletes now between baseball and softball signed to our roster and we utilize them and. Not so much in a sales standpoint you're seeing a lot of traditional retailers out there big box stores are signing these college athletes and they're having them like take a picture in a shopping cart, like in their store and it just looks very like hey use my code at the checkout for 10% off. And what we really try to do if you check out our Instagram or Tik-Tok as we do a little a lot of viral like videos of Just interviewing them, we fly them in or will fly out and do a lot of photo shoots with the video team and will do videos of them using different equipment Guardian Brandon also non Guardian Brandon some of our brand partners, which they're really appreciative of and will leverage that content not only on social media but on our website email marketing but also on the marketplaces, and it's you know, I think the new wave of Amazon you've had this wave of Scott seen the different cycles of e-commerce retailers out there and I think direct to Consumer brands are really going hard. [27:06] Are really coming hard on the Amazon Marketplace so I think really the private label companies you know that are strictly just trying to create a commodity product on Amazon, are really going to be forced out by brands that are really bringing really good content and really good marketing on the Amazon platform much like the direct to Consumer brands of the last five years did on social media. Scot: [27:28] Got it so one way of reframing Guardian is you know there's some percentage of your stuff that you sell that the bread and butter its existing Brands but then you're also inside of their building a DTC brand to fill in the holes that by selling other people's stuff you realize hey maybe there needs to be a bat that's kind of like you know it's BBCOR this and we'll all that jazz but it needs to be at a lower price point is that a is that a fair. Matt: [27:51] That's exactly that's a yeah. Scot: [27:54] Cool so you're like a delicious d2c doughnut or a yeah with a with a good feeling so, so one of the reasons I wanted to get you on the podcast is you've been out there pretty vocal talking about by with prime so maybe explain for listeners who don't know what that is what it is from your perspective and then then how you guys got looped in on that. Matt: [28:18] Yeah so by with prime is a new offering from Amazon and it integrates into. Platforms like Shopify and Bigcommerce. And it allows a e-commerce retailer to pool their FBA inventory if they're on Amazon or they can send in inventory into Amazon. And there's a button on the Shopify site or the Bigcommerce site that bypasses the normal checkout process and it's just a one click buy now with Prime and then that item is fulfilled by Amazon, and that can choose and what type of box or whatever and you can actually deliver it in very competitive pricing compared to UPS FedEx you know a lot of the mail consolidators in one to two business days. Scot: [29:06] Got it and then if I. Matt: [29:08] It's a lot like it's a dressed-up it's like a gastropub version of their original like multi what was it called mer multi-channel fulfillment service. Scot: [29:17] Yeah yeah but with a consumer front end to it. Matt: [29:20] Yes with the consumer and actually some of the people in that department are like. Hey we had this originally for like five or ten years but they just dress it up and gave it a good logo so and some more front-end technology but you know it's a very compelling offer. Scot: [29:35] Yeah so the user consumer is I go to your website and I see I'm in the checkout process and it says hey you're a prime user you can just you've already got your payment and everything with Amazon and you know you're familiar with the prime promise which is the fast free shipping and then I just essentially press a button in her my Amazon credentials and I'm good to go is that. Matt: [29:56] Yeah and it's actually before the checkout process so if you it actually supports variation so, if you were selling red dresses and you had extra small and small and FBA but you were sold out and medium and you I'd meet him in your Warehouse then, it would actually if you chose the extra small or small would populate that button on the checkout before you click or on the item page before you added it to check out. Scot: [30:17] So you need you need to make it an inventory aware that it's in a FB a kind of thing okay interesting yeah alright but then the you know so, so this has been another reason this was topical is you know if we kind of rewind I like five years I think there's been this kind of started this got on my radar well first of all shopify's Mantra is arming the rebels right and so that folks being a Star Wars fan that invokes a Star Wars kind of thing and then you're kind of like well who's the Death Star and it turns out Amazon's the Death Star and their arm the rebels so then they've been poking Amazon. Jason: [30:52] Oddly Kylie Jenner is Luke Skywalker in that metaphor but yeah. Scot: [30:56] Sure yeah and and then and then the Shopify social media started to really poke around Amazon it made fun of Jeff Bezos was in some tabloids for some pictures that surfaced and they were making fun of that and then his divorce and all that and then I was sitting there watching that you and I have seen other companies kind of poke the Amazon Baron it hasn't gone very well for him sitting there watching as like this is not gonna go well for these guys and then sure enough you know flash word to hear Shopify has hit some issues with growth rates they over-invested in the post covid world and then famously Toby the CEO was talking about he got asked on a conference call a Wall Street conference call what he thought about by with Prime and he's like oh we love Innovation and we would we would love to adopt it well then they had to backtrack that so are you guys caught up in that like are you know because they basically are now telling Merchants that if you use it, it's pretty hard language they're saying you're probably going to be open to fraud and we can't protect you and so they're definitely heading down this path I think of, trying to make it very hard for you to use this feature. Matt: [32:13] In terms of like are you asking what would I do as a business or in terms of where do you think the industry will kind of go. Scot: [32:19] We'll have has you know I'm assuming you're tracking this pretty closely because you're all you always are yeah. Jason: [32:25] Did you get the threatening letter from from Shopify. Matt: [32:27] Yeah it's we didn't get a threatening letter but we've seen all the pop-up of the terms of service and are account that popped up. Scot: [32:33] Yeah yeah it reminds me of the early days of eBay where they were like there's this thing PayPal we think it's very suspicious and we're not really sure you should use you should use our crappy payment thing that takes 50 clicks and rarely works but it's so super secure, yes so that that's interesting do you where do you think that you know as a merchant, you are on this platform and you want the flexibility to do everything how does it make you feel as from a business perspective to. Matt: [33:00] From a business for so personal and then where the industry is heading I mean where the industry is heading I think you have to look. Amazon is going to rule the world of logistics you know you've seen FedEx come out with the reports where they've had one of their biggest messes ever and I think. You're seeing Amazon trunks more and more and it's the more reliable you know delivery than a lot of the common carrier so. And I've seen you know Scott we've seen what GSI and eBay and Walmart I mean Rockies Han launched of a competitor try to take out FBI I mean these are huge companies that really tried to take on Amazon and Logistics front. And I can tell you I've used what is now I guess Shopify Logistics or whatever they're going to rename it but deliver and, it it did not really work for our business you know I can't speak for other people but it had a lot of bugs in the integration it's there's a lot of flaws with the delivery process and I don't know if that was the best egg acquisition for deliver and I don't know if it'll really work out. For a merchants and so I think there's a lot of there's a lot of progress that Amazon has made to really out do a lot of everyone in the logistics world. [34:14] And I just don't know if other people are going to be able to keep up and I think Innovation is always going to you know fee if Amazon is able to deliver things in one to two days for a Shopify, at prices than most Shopify Merchants can negotiate directly with UPS or FedEx or USPS for standard shipping then you know. [34:35] I understand what's good for Shopify and they want him to go through the checkout but what's good for their merchants on their platform than somebody might actually start to. Take that business platform because I know as as a business owner and as a CEO I would I would make the Assumption if Shopify came in and said that. And we saw by with prime become successful as we've seen in some initial few weeks of launching it, then we would probably consider re-platforming maybe to a Bigcommerce or maybe somebody that Amazon had a really good relationship with. And maybe that's not you know the smartest move at this point but in the future when you know we can deliver Goods because part of our selling feature to people to outdo the box stores, is not you know because people can go to a dicks or Academy, and they can have the much better selection they VIP programs and everything so something we instituted on Guardian baseball.com is when I set out to start the business is I wanted to offer a free 6-month extended warranty, on all bats and equipment. [35:35] Because the Brand's only offer a year so we're a year and a half and I said if we compete with these brands in a world of price monitoring and price mapping and the price is the same everywhere if we're going to have a pair of cleats listed on Amazon and F ba and then we're selling them with standard shipping on our website then the only thing we really have to do is play with price and discounting, and enduring a world of price parity that's impossible so for a d2c Merchants that plays on the Amazon space you have to able to offer that same offering, of that one to two day shipping like Amazon does on your own D2 seeing if you. [36:06] Then you can't really expand in the Amazon because you're just going to cannibalize your own sales on on your own d2c site so I think you have to offer it both so I think Innovation will always continue to succeed, in the market and I think Brands will start to partner with people that are going to partner with Amazon. Scot: [36:23] Yeah often kind of war game did this Jason I'm pretty sure we've said this on the podcast a couple times if I was personally Amazon and I got the job of disrupting Shopify, you know what I would do is I would leverage FBA and I would go and I get as many Shopify people using FBA and then then that would give me the hook to then say well let's say they came out with a competing platform or or they just. They wanted you to go to a, friendly third party platform like let's say it's Bigcommerce or something then then you just kind of proved to me that that is enough hook for the merchants to to make a front-end switch because that that, that fast relatively inexpensive shipping is so important to most companies and because customers expect. Matt: [37:09] And I think Amazon has the war chest to say if Java does come out with that I mean. And I go to the by with prom team and say hey look I have to lever I have to change the Bigcommerce it's going to cost me X you know if you want me to continue using by with prime what can you guys do for me I mean you know. Scot: [37:26] Yeah so you hinted that it's going really well are there any stats you can share with us so like I guess there's one thing would be you know you can only show it so many times because there's going to only be a surface area of inventory that's an FBA but then when it's shown is that got higher conversion than other things anything you can share there would be interesting. Matt: [37:46] So it does have some cons there's a lot of things that are on the road map with by with prime but I mean the obvious obviously the successes are, we're seeing a slight Improvement do the familiar with the prime badge and also the estimated shipping dates the Fulfillment costs are generally 25 to 30 percent less than we can currently negotiate and I'm with a lot of mail consolidators, you know resellers a post office obviously you know I've been in this world so I know that different ways to negotiate with FedEx ups and a lot of the mail consolidators. In the quicker delivery times are generally seen 24 to 48 hours max we're seeing is 72 hours and the a big con of that as you can keep the customer data unlike regular FBA sales. Um and they're also offering you know obviously I was doubted accelerate I spoke at by with Braun conference prior to accelerated Amazon HQ, last week and it accelerate they announced that they're you know offering a bunch of different initiatives that are kind of new for Amazon where they're offering. Brands are participating by with prime the ability to actually mark it on the Amazon platform but back to their d2c site. [38:53] So there's a lot of compelling offers out there that they're kind of opening up the amazon Universe to which is kind of unique and I was actually surprised about. But one of the big issues that they're working on is the conversion tracking so our marketing pixels don't record purchases made from the by with prime button which is something that they're working on. And the akan that they're working on other are releasing this is you can purchase you can only purchase one bearing at a time so it's not like a checkout experience, where you can group a bunch of different items you actually have to like physically buy one item go back to the site so we have a lot of multicart, on our website unlike Amazon which is a lot of single item you pts and so we're seeing you know on a lot of those bulk they're still going to do the traditional checkout process because I don't think it's like it's hard to really explain that to the customer we're like hey if you want to buy the single item go with by with Prime. So we're seeing at limited success with a lot of 10 items. [39:53] If we don't currently with the current integration with Shopify it doesn't have the inventory transparency so we have to double up with an mcf integration. So it's something. You know it's kind of a unique situation with our business model because we have a separate FB a skew so there's some you know quarks in there, and there's some different things that they're really kind of coming out so with but it's I call them cons but it's really things that are calling the roadmap and right as they kind of said at the conference to me and a large group of you know. Agencies and sellers is we wanted to get it out there in the marketplace and I said that's smart and then we want to work on these as opposed to having a perfect program and releasing it a year later. Jason: [40:38] Yeah so I actually just realized we didn't. We didn't articulate a couple things for visitors to just make sure everybody is tracking Guardian baseball is running on Shopify. And you are an early adopter by with prime so and you even you promoted on the homepage right so you've got like very distinctive branding by with prime which is Amazon's program that you know if you're already a Prime member gives you that, that Prime service level of fulfillment and the prime wallet even when you buy it on Guardian baseball so. A couple of things kind of jump out at me there. You hit one that is a big problem for me is the multi skew problem but I think of the by with prime checkout flow is being very similar to the traditional shot PayPal flow. In that the checkout button shows up on as a separate button on the pdps but PayPal also let you. Like use PayPal as the payment method in the cart for the multi skew purchase so you Amazon doesn't have a solution for that today but you could imagine that they would enable by with prime both on the product level and at the cart levels. Matt: [41:54] Yes and that's what they're working towards. Jason: [41:56] Yeah so so that's always one big problem because you know side note most e-commerce sites are not very profitable if the if the, if the average items per order is 1 so so we definitely we need to sell more stuff in most cases to make this profitable the threatening letter I would add to is not Shopify saying hey you're not allowed to accept by with, it's simply them saying in our opinion their security flaws in, doing this kind of thing and we might not be able to indemnify you if there's a fraud problem as a result of that right like that's that's the kind of passive-aggressive, approach shopify's taken to date on it and it is funny to me because all of those same security holes would also be true of PayPal by the way and Shopify has never really complained about PayPal before. Um so that gets me to the other big problem I see for both Prime and I'm curious if I'm wrong or if you're seeing it by with prime only works for existing Prime members there's no onboarding experience so if I'm not a Prime member and I go to Guardian baseball.com I see this huge well go on the homes thing that says by with prime which I don't have Prime and then when I'm looking at an individual skew I want to buy there's a by with prime checkout button, and I could click that button but I won't be allowed to check out because I don't I don't have Prime and so if the only. Scot: [43:21] Who doesn't have Prime. Matt: [43:23] I'm glad it's got Evans. Jason: [43:27] Nobody listening to this podcast but there's 100 million Prime members in the world so even if we assume, 70 million of them are in North America 80 million if you want to be really aggressive are in North America there's 240 million households in North America so two-thirds of the households in the United States of America would be the answer like can't click that button right and so I guess I went like you've got this fragmented inventory you have some of your inventory you can you can fulfill through the the Shopify check out some you can only fulfill through by with prime but then like you have no way to give the non-prime members access to that is that a am I making up a problem and that hasn't been a problem for you or do you think you have, have non-prime members that are kind of in the whole right now on that. Matt: [44:16] I think that's something to Amazon can better communicate we are obviously limited to what they can do on the side but a normal customer can still do the normal checkout process of adding the cart. But I think yeah that's obviously something Amazon can do and then also doesn't support discounts which is a big not only the conversion tracking but discount so obviously a lot of direct to Consumer sites. Like us are offering discounts or first-time customers or email you know pay 25% off with this code or Black Friday Cyber Monday so the currently does not support so it's very limited, but we really feel it's kind of right now in its use and this is going to change in the next three to six months but right now it's kind of like a fast lane, you know where you're paying like at Disney World for the fast ticket or whatever the top-of-the-line and we really feel that hey you can go through your normal checkout process. But we also have this ability we're going to a fast pass you know if you want it now you don't want to Discount you know you want it quicker and you want that problem delivery. Jason: [45:13] Yeah so it's weird like here's how I like I totally agree with how you're thinking about by with prime you also take shop pay on the site and I would argue there's a different set of pros and cons to shop pay for different customers in different circumstances it seems like the solution to all these that none of these companies are willing to do is you ought to be able to just expose the by with prime button to known Prime members and you ought to be able to just expose the shop pay check out to known shop pay holders. Matt: [45:46] I love that idea. Jason: [45:47] Yeah trust me when you suggested to Amazon they're not going to like you because they, because they want that logo everywhere but yeah so that that seems like the, the state of by with prime right now it's super interesting and it's super interesting you're saying like man if Shopify ever said we it's a it's a hard know then that would make you reconsider the platform like that you know like that speaks volumes that's interesting. Matt: [46:14] I think you know I think Amazon's coming out with this program in there. [46:19] I think everyone say okay is is a lot of these direct-to-consumer Shopify Brands going to adapt Amazon FBA and I think a number of them are but I think what also this is going to help. A lot of Amazon Brands a lot of Amazon DTC brands that are really executing well like a guardian on marketing, on creating good content in there not just these Dropship Private Label Amazon sellers, that are out there and you know let's go Source one or two products on Alibaba and sell them under some name and compete with the Chinese but really people that are building a brand you know the brands that are getting acquired by the aggregators and those type of brands. And those brands that may be. Our and expanded into Walmart expanded into other categories but are scared to kind of make that big investment into a Shopify site and hire the marketing team and really become like a full-fledged direct-to-consumer I think. What Amazon's doing on the marketing front. And the Fulfillment front is going to help these Amazon d2c Brands and I think what's going to happen is going to create a rise of the next wave of d2c or the next kind of. Trendy type of companies that come out there so you've seen obviously a lot of trends like 2010's as flash sales and then you saw direct to Consumer Brands and subscription boxes, and the direct to Consumer Brands predominantly grew on social media Instagram Facebook when the iOS changes you know weren't adapted and traffic was still cheap so. [47:44] I think you're going to see a lot of these the next wave of cool direct to Consumer Brands will come from Amazon and they will adapt on the data see sites with the help of Amazon. Scot: [47:54] Prick. Matt: [47:55] And I don't think you're going to see as much D to see big brands that are adapting the Amazon by with Prime at least initially and I think eventually that you'll see a lot more adoption once a lot of these quirks are worked out. Scot: [48:09] Yeah a lot of d2c Brands got born off Facebook but apple and the atti DFA of kind of crushed that so now Amazon used is kind of the way to go so I think what you're saying right. Matt: [48:20] Yeah I think so and I think that's going to create a next wave of either the brands are going to adapt from a t2c over to Amazon or you're going to see these kind of Amazon native people that have kind of running this world like I have for the last two decades that really know how to master the marketplace know how to assemble the teams of marketing customer service and everything and use the right technology stocks, for those businesses and really adopt and really grow really Innovative brands. Scot: [48:47] I know you need to go and like four minutes so we could wrap it a fire this. Matt: [48:50] You're good you can tell Ron few months if you. Scot: [48:52] About dying dying to know what do you think about all the FBA Roll-Ups they were all quite the fashion and now they seem to be hitting some hard times did you ever buy into that trend. Matt: [49:03] I think anyone in this market I mean you look at a lot of our outspoken people on social media of those, you know it's tough to acquire that many Brands and I think there are some people that are successful with it that are more going in The Tortoise and the Hare that you know we all I'm hearing some successful people where there's let you know. By maybe they own 15 brands or they own 10 brands but obviously the big big aggregators that everyone talks about are obviously struggling you're seeing layoffs so. I wasn't really you know how to directly opinion on it I thought it was there's no way they could acquire that many Brands and with it with the market model of not keeping the entrepreneurial on because I think there's always an art form to e-commerce you can have all the analytics you want you can have all the data scientists and, and all the formula but you know when you hire College grads and to run these businesses that don't have experience you it's always a touch and feel there's always 20-30 percent art right, that somebody needs to know and the older I get I realize that I have that on the marketplace of how to really build the brands and how to adapt Brands to that, and that's why I've been successful and I'm realizing that's my strength so I think some of those aggregators really didn't have that kind of DNA of the entrepreneur and keep that intact and that might have been a downfall of some of those. Jason: [50:21] Yeah it's it is interesting I can certainly see companies kind of being born direct-to-consumer on Amazon having their first customers come from Amazon and then outgrow Amazon over time where you want your own URLs or move to other things which like I mean I think, anchor is kind of the Prototype. Matt: [50:42] That yeah that was that's a really good. Jason: [50:45] But I do think I think it's really risky whether you're a rollup or an individual brand or whatever it's really risky to think I'm Amazon is always going to be my exclusive, acquisition Channel because the problem is Amazon Super efficient at getting the maximum, fee for each customer you acquire and so yeah you can buy some of those you know customers at first to get started but you're always going to be paying the highest price and you know the big news that came out this month is I forget what their new name was but Pharma packs which has been a top five, seller on Amazon for like 10 years, and exclusively sell through Amazon they just they declared bankruptcy and they're like one of the biggest most successful Amazon sellers of all time and to me that's a cautionary tale for, like at some point you need to diversify your customer acquisition you can't solely rely on Amazon as that is that source for you. Matt: [51:42] I think yes I think it's a part of a Playbook and you have to adhere to other channels and grow in other channels but you know obviously. Amazon's one of the biggest places to acquire customers one of the most successful so I think it's always going to be in a portfolio but it needs to be part of a whole portfolio. Jason: [51:58] Hundred percent that's why they robbed the money from the banks right because that's what, that's where the money is but man I think that's going to be a good place to wrap it because we have used up our lot of time as per usual if you got value out of this episode we sure would appreciate that five star review on iTunes. Scot: [52:16] Matt we really appreciate taking time to tell your arterial story and share with us your thoughts about both Prime if lister's want to look you up online other than going in and buying some stuff that Guardian baseball what should they do. Matt: [52:29] I'm on LinkedIn Instagram and it's (2) Matt Kubancik

EP293 - E-commerce leadership changes and news Episode 293 previews Amazon no good, dirty, rotten, Q2. Including why Amazon's much hailed SCOT software may have led them astray (not a surprise given the name). We also discuss the recent leadership changes at Amazon, Google, Pinterest, and Bed Bath & Beyond. Episode 293 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday June 30, 2022. 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 293 being recorded on Thursday June 30th 2022 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 Scott show listeners Jason this is a start-up land it's like a triple witching we have the end of the month the end of the quarter and the end of the first half so too it's a big day to be making sure you're hitting your opening so that's what I've been doing today how is your summer been. Jason: [0:59] Less XLE than yours it sounds like. Scot: [1:02] Oh I've seen you in that department of Commerce data comes out so. Jason: [1:13] I don't know maybe I feel like we should move it to like python or are something more more hip for the geeky kids. But I am I'm having a great summer there's been plenty of New Avengers and Star Wars content on in it's fun to see some people in person there have been a few more in person events, I'm a little stressed tonight though there's a big day for listeners is being recorded on on June 30th, and Twitter is sun setting my Twitter clients that I use numerous times a day tonight so it's, it's possible that a lot of people that are used to getting spammed all day by me on Twitter are going to go into withdrawal tomorrow. Scot: [1:56] No you're gonna have to use the app like the rest of us mere citizens. Jason: [2:01] Yeah yeah the neophytes I have to jump in with the unwashed masses and the vanilla Twitter client or some other third-party client if any listeners have a personal favorite I'm open to suggestions. Scot: [2:15] Yeah they're not a lot of good ones whatever you do don't sign up for that paid service because it just makes your tweets take 10 times longer to go out it's like the opposite of a feature. Jason: [2:25] Yeah doesn't sound that appealing. Scot: [2:27] It's supposed to keep you from drunk Tweeting or something but then like you just kind of forget that they're all cued up out there waiting. Jason: [2:34] My best Tweets are the advised ones. Scot: [2:37] Yeah yeah your best ones are grumpy grumpy old Jason once where you're like all right digital on the get the most interaction. Cool well we wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show without some Amazon news. Jason: [3:00] News new your margin is there opportunity. Scot: [3:07] Yeah there's a lot going on at Amazon one of the. If you kind of remember back in our queue to 2022 recap from their earnings they talked a lot about how they had over built their capacity for warehouses so that's the first time they've done that since, oh I don't know 1995 and that was just like a line in an earnings call well now we're starting to see that they're closing warehouses there's been reports of them closing between five and ten warehouses I've heard they're closing delivery stations and figuring all that out one of the funny topics is a lot of folks started contacting me and realize said things like hey did you know your mention and this Amazon article is like what, what turns out they have this technology they've developed called the supply chain optimization Technologies, abbreviated sco T which happens to be my name. Jason: [4:04] And for newest nur's that's actually the correct way to spell Scott is it not. Scot: [4:08] It is yeah it was the 60s and my dad thought it would be fun to have a unique name and it's he was right it's made me infinitely google-able so I have a lot of very easy to find on the Google. I'm very envious of my friend Michael Jones who is impossible to find on Google so so no anonymity for me, but anyway you know what's interesting is and I want to read this little excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article a thousand or something, you and I both know at Amazon because they have this engineering culture they try to take people out of most decision-making process sometimes they call it hands off the wheel so they have all these AI like one time we had a guest on that told us how you know frequently a vendor will be negotiating with an Amazon buyer through a chat and it's a bot on the other side of the the chat not a human. So they have this technology called Scott and what it does is it makes three different projections for basically the orders for looking out into the future it does a high medium and low and during the pandemic. [5:12] The high wasn't high enough so they were kind of taking the high and adding some percentage to it and building out the Fulfillment infrastructure and everything based on what this a I did well because the a I had never seen a pandemic and it obviously it couldn't keep up with the upside of the pandemics demand curve it didn't see the downside of the demand curve coming either, and then I think the humans you know when you when you have your, pilot like six to eight quarters into adding 10% to what this thing does and nailing it. You know they also didn't anticipate this in the bottom fell out and that's one of the reasons why you know they just kind of too, kept taking the Scott forecast adding 10 to 20% and then suddenly they found themselves kind of with their skis out over a cliff. This is really interesting that kind of in a way that the an AI gone wrong kind of caused some of the problems here so I thought that was kind of funny. Jason: [6:09] Yeah I mean like the synopsis here is that Scott is the biggest money sink in Amazon. Scot: [6:18] It's true yep I like to think because they listened to the podcast they named it in honor of me and somewhere in there is a robot named Jason I'm sure. Jason: [6:26] Because you are their Nemesis yeah. Scot: [6:28] Yeah retailgeek it's hard to do an acronym for retailgeek but I'm sure someone there is is working on. Also you know as listeners know there's a new CEO and the jassy and there have been a lot of high-profile departures and it's not clear if he's cleaning house or. Um you know these these issues stocks down a lot of the compensation that Amazon is from stock-based compensation and then, you know someone has to be accountable for these problems so they had there was kind of this domino effect so there was right one Jesse took over there was two other people that were are parents Bell and Wilkie and they left, and then just recently this year a 23 year old veteran Named Dave Clark left and he ran the whole consumer business. Interestingly he went to a company that's been in the news a lot called Flex Port their CEO has been on CNBC and the all in podcast talking about how to fix the supply chain problems. So that's that's interesting that he was able to see your Flex Port was able to lure away a 23 year old Amazon bet. So there was some Sour Apples on the way out Dave Clark told someone that Jesse's just a, terrible micromanager and yeah he'd been there 23 years and shouldn't have to be micromanage and that kind of thing. [7:51] And then they announced that this the guy that ran North America consumer who previously had reported to Dave Clark his name is Doug Harrington he was moving up into that role, what caused a further chain reaction for those people that didn't get the Dave Clark opening one of those was Alicia bowler Davis she was SVP of global consumer, and she went to this online pharmacy called Alto Pharmacy and then Dave Bozeman he went to he was the VP of Amazon transportation services kind of the middle mile so she was if I understand she was Last Mile and he was middle mile, so they both left so that's interesting that the Fulfillment center they've been building out and to the key Executives for the last five years or so left those not clear if that was because of this build out and someone had to be accountable or if they got picked away or what's going on there, so a lot of changes in Amazon at the upper echelons and yeah some chaos here as they re adjust for the new post covid normal. Jason: [8:54] Yeah and I mean almost feels like there's a little bit of a perfect storm of reasons for that senior leadership to start to turn right which historically they have had very little turn by the way right through most of their history but you know the the founder departs as you point out there's a ton of the overwhelming majority of compensation is, stock equity and is that becomes less valuable like those jobs are. Are less sticky you know and there's just the rates of growth at Amazon are are naturally slowing down and it's, you know for a lot of people that you know are used to being the Rockstar that's you know constantly doubling your business and growing really fast it's not as much fun to. To manage their downturns and you know at best slower rates of growth. Scot: [9:45] Yeah and then you notice some changes coming in the grocery side. Jason: [9:50] Yeah so grocery ends up being kind of a really interesting part of this whole Amazon churn so the first thing to know is the new head of consumer that did win Doug Harrington, had previously started Amazon Fresh at Amazon so so, he is a grocery guy and his pre Amazon experience is with webvan which is sort of the original digital grocer. So he is a pure digital grocery guy obviously he's had brought more recently he's had broader roles it. It Amazon. Then then just grocery but you know one would assume that Amazon Fresh is near and dear to his heart that's the only brick-and-mortar concept that still. Sort of in play and growing at an Amazon so that's kind of interesting and historically there's been kind of a tension between Amazon Fresh which is. The grocery business Amazon built organically and Whole Foods, the grocery business that Amazon bought right and there have been times when they seemed like they were smashing them together and then there are times when they're pulling them apart and at the moment they're opening a chain of Amazon Fresh doors that compete with Whole Food. [11:02] You would assume Whole Foods is kind of upmarket expensive grocery and Amazon Fresh is meant to be well Market but like when it washed Amazon Fresh was a little more mid-priced, then we expected and Whole Foods is kind of moving down price a little bit more than you might expect so it's all, it's all been interesting they fight a lot over over Revenue recognition for online grocery orders and it's I would argue it's a confusing customer experience right now because you can order a. Assortment of items with different prices and different service levels from Amazon Fresh and from Whole Foods. So it'll be interesting does Amazon fresh wind because that's Doug Harrington's baby or you know does he at least. [11:44] Put more more stock in solving that problem you know I would argue digital grocery is the biggest white space in the kind of digital retail thing and so it. It's not bad for Amazon that they have a senior leader that understands that space so it's that's going to be interesting, and then on the whole food side the you know the founder of Whole Foods has remained in places the CEO which is kind of surprising given that when was the acquisition 2017. [12:12] Five years ago so five years sounds like a suspicious number for an urn out but. The you know he stuck he was the founder he stuck with a company for a long time like culturally he's, kind of different than Amazonian so when one might not have expected him to last that long but now there's a new CEO which is a long time Lieutenant of his Jason Bushnell boo shell rather and, whether this is the first initiative from Jason or it's a coincidence like Whole Foods has kind of announced that they are pivoting their pricing strategy in really focusing on, improving their value prop and reducing their prices and obviously there's a lot of Economic headwinds and there's kind of a. You know a big big segment of consumers that are concerned about the economy so superficial you go oh yeah it's obvious. That Whole Foods would want to get cheaper but I would actually argue. That we've really seen and shout-out to our friend Steven Dennis we've really seen like this very overt bifurcation of the consumer and there's a bunch of consumers that like do not appear to be changing their shopping Behavior based on inflation and, economic concerns and then there's a bunch of value-oriented consumers that are very overtly changing their shopping behaviors and you would. [13:33] You know a lot of luxury brands are actually raising their prices right now and doing quite well and so you'd almost expect to see Whole Foods lean into that affluent consumer, and Amazon Fresh you know try to try to Target that that value went into consumer but it appears they both have decided to go after value. Scot: [13:51] Yeah it's super confusing as a consumer to figure out and sometimes what I want I want for things and it'll split the cart between the Whole Foods in the prime and like then then it's a hot mess at that point. Jason: [14:04] Yeah I can't get my weekly shop from either one like I like some of the items and my weekly shop are not available from Whole Foods and some are not available from Amazon Fresh it's annoying. Scot: [14:14] Yeah. Jason: [14:14] To add further customer confusion so Amazon Fresh is Amazon's grocery store concept what you might have thought that there'd be a bunch of benefits to being a Prime member and shopping in Amazon Fresh. But you'd be wrong until recently like there were no special Prime benefits for Amazon Fresh Shoppers and so they just launched last week a new program which is kind of a. It's I would almost call it like a traditional retail grocery Affinity program you basically get 20% off on a lot of. On an undisclosed random list of thousands of items where they call everyday essentials if you're a Prime member shopping at Amazon Fresh So this is you know I mentioned that Amazon Fresh didn't come out. Quite as good a value as I was expecting well this is the big move to maybe make them you know compete more directly with with Aldi and. Scot: [15:08] Caught another thing I wanted to pick your brain on is a couple folks have tagged us on social media because they have seen the prime pay badging and new payment mechanism out in the wild have you had a chance to play with that. Jason: [15:22] I have and I confess I'm I'm a little more perplexed than I was when it first launched so maybe like the 30-second recap, um you know Amazon announced this new beta pilot called Prime pay and it's essentially letting third-party sellers that are not selling on Amazon. [15:46] Accept Amazon pay and. Offer Prime benefits and have your orders fulfilled from fulfillment by Amazon. [15:59] Like if their Prime members right so if your Shopify Merchant in you're selling cat litter, you know you can have a bad you know and someone's a Prime member and they're on your Shopify site you can say hey check out with your Amazon pay and and you know get your goods in one day or even same day, if our cat litter is in the Amazon Fulfillment Network and that's that was when they announced this beta and they didn't provide a lot of the details. You know my first reaction was that's a shot directly across the bow of Shopify. Who had been making a lot of traction with shop pay and was making a lot of noise if not traction with their fulfillment systems and now you know Amazon swooped in and said hey don't screw around with these, you know barely scaled fulfillment things just put all your goods in the Amazon's fulfillment and when you sell it from Shopify will ship the order or when you sell it on Amazon will ship the order, and will give you access to the. The biggest bet best digital wallet in the US market which is Amazon pay right and I thought that was super interesting and I was frankly really curious. If Shopify was even going to allow its Merchants to use it which. It would have been way off brand for Shopify to not allow that but you have to imagine they didn't want to vote. Scot: [17:18] Yeah. Jason: [17:20] And so now fast forward a few months and we've seen the first betas in the live in in, live in the world and they are all Shopify Merchants so first question answered at least for now Shopify is allowing its merchants, to use prime pay but there's a huge Nuance in Prime pay that I kind of missed when the beta was first announced but now it's glaring at me, um Prime pay will only fulfill your goods if you're already a Prime member. So when they first saw this I thought oh my gosh they just captured the whole 3pl market and no other 3pl is going to have any room because you're not going to be able to compete with the service level of Amazon and the convenience of the aggregated inventory and then the bonus of. Of the Amazon digital wallet on top of all that that it was just going to be too compelling a value prop and so everybody every small seller in the world is just going to rely on Amazon for all those Services game over. But. There's about 100 million Prime members and there's about 240 million households in the US so there's still an awful lot of households that do not have Prime. And if you're a Shopify Merchant and you want to sell something to any of those households that don't have Prime. You can offer Prime pay for the Prime members but you have to have an alternative 3pl to fulfill for the non Prime members. So they really haven't put any of the other 3pls out of business at all they've just stolen some of their volume. Scot: [18:49] Yeah yeah Anderson more more complexity. Jason: [18:53] Yeah yeah so it's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out, but it yeah shout out to our friend Joe a Marketplace poles they always have great content and, he was the first one in the made me aware of some of these betas in the wild and he found the cat lady's.com and I'm not going to ask how he he. Scot: [19:14] Put me there. Jason: [19:17] But Joe I'm a fan and props to you. Scot: [19:21] Your fan of Joe or the cat ladies are both. Jason: [19:23] Now both originally Joe but now I my my love has expanded to the cat ladies. Scot: [19:29] Do they really sell kitty litter. Jason: [19:31] I believe they do or at least like artificial grass. Scot: [19:35] Yeah that's definitely in the crap category hey hey I'll be here all night, another thing that Amazon announced that I know you're excited for because you're actually moving so this is a great time to buy some cabling and some new mesh network key things they announced Prime Day this year it's going to be July 12th and 13th and then they promptly have started pushing the deals out like right now like just today and yesterday I've been getting flooded with emails that say, they have a new brand for it and they call it early Amazon Prime Day deal exclusives so it feels feels a little desperate to be honest with you that you know they set up this big shopping holiday and now they're kind of, pushing the deals out with a before then I don't know if they're trying to juice Q2 or if there. One school of thought is if we're going into this recessionary period the more dollars you can grab out of that shrinking wallet due to inflation as well, get them sooner versus later so maybe they had set this up before things the macro deteriorated now they're kind of like wow I wish we could set this earlier let's go ahead and get some deals out I may be reading too much into that but I don't ever remember them kind of they've always had you know. Black Black Friday and January or early October kind of things holiday deals in early but I've never seen them, push Prime day as hard and early as they are now. Jason: [21:00] Yeah I mean they always have had some pre-primed a deals like it's not completely unheard of but I agree with you the volume seem significantly higher and it's funny that we still call it Prime day right because for a long time is over it went from like Prime day to Prime 18 hours to Prime two days and now it's starting to feel like Prime month. Um which is interesting I don't know this comes into play, there are some consumer surveys out there that show less interest in Prime day than years past right and you're comping against a tough Prime day in a very different economic environment and so like it's possible that there's some concern like Amazon's rate of growth has slowed and everything else it's possible possible that there's some concern, that. That you know Prime day won't have the it's for sure going to have a spike but that it won't have the same spike it has in years past, um and you know so they're they're trying to you know find ways to Goose it more I you know. I don't know I do think one of the interesting Dynamics there's kind of like two opposite forces that happen on Prime day like secretly. The stuff that sells best on Prime day are Amazon. [22:20] But the penetration on those Amazon products you know continues to be higher so that that like. The what the law of large numbers just means like. You know not you can't sell a smart speaker to as many people as you used to be able to do because everyone has a heck of a lot of smart speakers right and they're they're frankly getting so cheap that it's not as big a win when they do sell one. And so then the other half is this long tail in there like one of the problems there so many sellers on Amazon there so many Lightning Deals that like the signal-to-noise ratio in the, the awareness of some particular good deal and the scarcity of a deal like all of those things that you would normally do that a normal you know brick and mortar retailer with you know constrain inventory, would do for a sale like they just don't work as well. For this Marketplace model and so I do think it's tricky to keep the hype and you know we've seen you know Prime day was modeled after singles day we've definitely seen singles day lose some momentum still a big deal but rate of growth slowing significantly and reasonably that will see that at Prime Day to all that being said the way to think about prime day is it's it's two days of sales in one day which is kind of a big deal. Scot: [23:38] Yeah and then I thought this was interesting that Amazon announced that they're going to use some of that data that we've been collecting in their stores that don't have a check out the just walk out technology and they're going to be selling some of that data to Brands so they can basically say to our brand hey 800 consumers walked by your product three picked it up and put it back on the shelf and you know of those three they read the ingredients and then they put it back on the shelf and and then presumably there are some action ability to that data what what do you think about that. Jason: [24:16] Yeah so I think it's really interesting you know way before there was just walk out technology like we were starting to get some some very early technology to give us some insight about how consumers behaved in stores right so you were starting to get some like, smarter people measuring things that could do heat mapping and and you know we were getting these I could GI tracking technologies that we'd put on on a small subset of customers to kind of understand how they browse through a store, because you know frankly for the last 100 years of Shopper marketing we mostly have been based on these like urban legends about how Shopper shop, and not having a lot of data and then e-commerce comes along and suddenly you've got super granular data about how people pick products and what they glanced at and didn't buy and what they added to their card and then check out and what they you know added to their card and then took out of their car like all of this pre buying behavior that we get in e-commerce, we've never really had in the store and you know the Technologies and the methodologies these match Panel test all these different studies we used to do we're really sort of Kluge, and so a lot of us have said hey one of the secret benefits of just walk out technology is that by accident, it collects all of this really valuable consumer data about how people behave, before they get to the cash register or before they consummate their purchase since they're I guess there is no cash. [25:41] Um and you know we've talked about that being a useful Advantage for Amazon and that they're probably using it too, um sort of inform how they design these new store Concepts, and so now like so many other things than Amazon does they take this this. [25:59] Like you know competitive advantage that they have and they turned it into a product and sell it to other people so now they're selling those. Those Shopper insights to cpgs and you know you're a cpg trying to figure out how people decide to pick your cat litter versus someone else's cat litter on the cat litter shelf in a retail store. Um [26:21] Kroger won't tell you a lot about how they make that decision because Kroger doesn't know but now you can get real data from Amazon about how they make that decision and Amazon and you can probably assume that there's a similar path to purchase at Kroger so, suddenly like Amazon becomes the market research firm for all of the Shopper marketing so I do think that's super interesting, um they're not alone Walmart actually has a store that's heavily instrumented like this that they watch first that's called them, the intelligent retail lab store that you know it's kind of a it doesn't have just walk out technology but it has thousands of cameras and sensors and they sell data from that store through their data licensing arm which is called illuminate if I'm remembering right. And then you know Amazon launched a new product. [27:09] Nine days ago on the 21st that I'm really excited about this called Amazon marketing stream and Amazon marketing stream is, a much higher volume more granular api-based, access to all of the marketplace shopping data so that's you know data on traditional Amazon shopping that like, previously was locked up or you could only get for your own brand or you could you know you can only get in Amazon premium services. Now it gets plugged into pack view in all of these of these digital media tools you get all this real-time visibility to have people are making purchase decisions and then at the same time. They're rolling out this that same kind of data for how people are making purchase decisions in a brick-and-mortar store, super long answer but I think this is kind of a big deal and I do think this is the future is kind of replacing, like urban legends and opinions about how consumers behave with actual data about how they really are. Scot: [28:11] You do you think this stuff is kind of stand-alone or they're going to build this is going to be kind of feeding into this ad Network because they seem to be really putting a lot of effort into Excel. Jason: [28:20] Yeah I do so I think there's only so much so many brands that are so I'll tell you who's not in a position to buy that data is all the digital native startups that then cut a deal to get you know distribution through. Right against the big cpg brands that can afford like have budgets to buy that data and then you know they have so much like institutional. Impediments that then you know they all talk about how much wonder they are with that data but it's really hard for them to act on that data and do anything different than they historically have. And so I think the best way to make that data actionable is you know to filter that data into. New audiences and new ad formats for retail media networks right so like I think there's a natural. Fit between those. Those two products so I'm sure we'll see more Integrations in that but I do think for really smart marketers and in particular the folks that are involved in customer experience design, the the raw data is is super useful and and you know gives gives Brands a competitive advantage that are able to get it and take action on. Scot: [29:30] Cool did you so that's where we are on Amazon any non Amazon news. Jason: [29:39] Yeah just a couple of things to keep our show in its it's tidy timebox format we talked a lot about executive changes so in my mind there are two other huge executive changes, in our industry this week. There's a guy that we've talked about on the show several times Bill ready who's the in X PayPal guy in X PayPal mafia guy. That red Commerce for the last couple of years at Google and he just announced that he's leaving Google to become the new CEO at Pinterest so the, the founder is stepping out of the CEO role at Pinterest and they're bringing over Bill ready, and to be honest that has the pundants whipped up into a lather because everyone's like oh man Bill ready is a Commerce guy he was PayPal he was head of Commerce a Google Now the fact that the Pinterest is bringing a you know a dedicated Commerce guy in the lead the company, it's the most overt sign yet that you know Pinterest thinks it's future is Commerce. Scot: [30:39] Yeah which I think it's driven by the IDF a stuff don't you. Jason: [30:44] Yeah yeah again harder to make a living on ads when you can't show the efficacy of the ads quite as well and you can't Target the ads quite as well and so it becomes much more appealing to say, you know let's monetize our Audience by selling stuff to our audience directly and also that you know gives you that first party data that then you know keeps you, well immersed in the in the advertising business so I think for any of these. Free hydrographic social media sites it's a, it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis to explore to say hey we got to figure out how to play really well at Commerce and make Commerce part of our core offering and certainly you know Pinterest is doing that they've talk forever about how, how much higher buying intent that their users have then other other social networks Tick-Tock is leaning heavily into it snap is leaning heavily into it it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, the one unfortunate truth is nobody's been particularly successful at it yet and. Have they not been successful because they just haven't gotten the execution right or is it because the consumer doesn't really want that like I honestly think that's an open question I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that Commerce can save all these social media networks I mean it's worth trying, but I think the jury's going to be out and I will say the. [32:10] The sort of part of this the bill ready transition that's not talked about that I'm frankly more interested in is to me one of the companies that. His best position to win a Commerce and is underperforming at Commerce the most is the company Bill ready as weaving its Google and you know, bluntly like I don't think Google has made a ton of Commerce progress over the over the last two years that bill ready has been there it's going to be interesting like will Google replace him will they replace him with a, Google Insider will they replace them with another Commerce person will that person have some new ideas like you know will they be able to find a way to kind of Marshall some of the inherent assets Google has and be better at Commerce oh my God I'd love to see Google lean into in-store Commerce more and help solve search and you know all of these retail media Network opportunities for brick-and-mortar retailers like I feel like there's a lot of untapped. Opportunity there that I've been surprised to see Google not succeed at and so it'll be like is this a new chance for Google to start anew. Scot: [33:20] Yeah and then you know it's also interesting so if your Pinterest board and you're like we need an e-commerce Guru the PayPal Mafia thing is good but that was quite a while ago and Google hasn't. Done a ton so I would be hiring somebody to Amazon expects you know it'll be interesting to see what if. Because there's so many floating around what if some of them one of them ended up at Google that would be dug be kind of really interesting to see if Amazon has own Minion. Jason: [33:49] Especially when yeah if Flex Port can get a super senior SS team member. Scot: [33:53] Yeah why can't Google yeah it's kind of weird right, yeah and then you know to watch someone that maybe had a chip on their shoulder that said hey I didn't get a promotion I'm gonna I'm going to you know use all these assets that Google has and bring them to bear I think the reason why is when these people interview at these bigger companies be at a meta a Google or whatnot. You know there's not a board sea level and board level focus on it you know 21 if you're a Google. The sacred cow is the add thing and if you if you say something like you know what I want to divert 20% of traffic to this new thing then you know if you're not going to do that so so startups from probably more attractive because they have more flexibility and they're not stuck kind of in that innovators dilemma like some of the other systems are. Jason: [34:50] Yeah think about that that'll be my deep thought for today yeah so I think that one is super interesting I'm gonna continue to follow that closely one side note like Pinterest has previously hired a bunch of other, I'll call them like Commerce stars and like one that stands out to me is. The chief technology officer from Walmart I moved to Pinterest Jeremy King and so I mean there's you know this is not the first. White indication that Commerce is an important Initiative for Pinterest so we'll we'll see how Bill does there I hope he does well so one other transition that I'm getting a lot of calls about these last couple days, is Bed Bath & Beyond just had their quarterly their Q2 earnings report and it was atrocious, so their same-store sales were down like 24 or 25 percent their e-commerce was down like 23%, um and you know folks may remember like a year or two ago they forced out the. [35:52] One of the founders is CEO and they brought in a turnaround CEO this guy Mark Triton and I talked a lot about Mark Triton he was like very credibly one of the architects of targets exclusive, brand strategies and so he was, the chief Merchant that helped launched a bunch of products at Target that were wildly successful and he left Target to become the CEO of this struggling retailer, Bed Bath & Beyond shortly after they hired Mark Triton they got a new activists board member Ryan Cohen who bought a big chunk of. Bed Bath & Beyond Ryan was one of the founders of chewy and made a bunch of his money there he was like a principal shareholder and on the board at GameStop during all the, the craziness with Robin Hood and GameStop and Bone all that stuff and so, like Ryan kind of inherited Mark as his turnaround CEO and simultaneous with these like very disappointing Q2 earnings, they announced that Mark would be leaving and they appointed an interim CEO who's a Sugo of who's a, already a board member at Bed Bath and Beyond and former CEO from like Goff Smith and several other retailers. So [37:20] What I have found interesting about all this it's a really difficult situation but Bethenny on Xena in a tough situation. [37:29] And they certainly aren't performing very well and they have a lot of cooks there at the moment with with conflicting ideas about where to go but I have seen a lot of pundits kind of. Like dancing on Mark Triton's grave and talking about what a horrible higher this was and how stupid it was for Bed Bath and Beyond Beyond to go after this this. Exclusive brand strategy that Mark was trying to execute and how like oh obviously this was doomed from the beginning and anyone could have seen this wasn't going to work. Um and kind of writing him off and personally I feel like that's a little unfair like II. Mark certainly turned out not to be the right CEO for the circumstances the Bed Bath & Beyond was in but I actually think that that, you know Bed Bath & Beyond needs to invent a reason for people to go there and spoiler it's not the 20% off coupon anymore, um it's not the treasure hunt anymore, like you're not going to win on assortment as a big box like against Amazon right and so one of the smart ways to win against Amazon is to sell stuff that people want that Amazon doesn't have and if you can invent desirable products, that's a smart strategy and every big retailer in America is trying to execute that strategy and Mark like frankly has been better than most of executing that strategy I think. [38:52] That strategy kind of sucks when you're hemorrhaging your customer base people don't have a reason to come to your store and then you, execute the first wave of your private label products and they all get trapped on a boat off the coast of Long Beach and never make it to the store right and so I don't know of in a different era if Mark strategy would have worked. Ed Bed Bath & Beyond I don't think it was an unsound strategy you know it just right you probably needed a CEO who's a lot more focused on being good at supply chain and cost-cutting and was willing to make some hard decisions about. Curating the store assortment and stuff like that to kind of cut costs. Before you got around to launching these products and you know horrific timing that you tried to launch all these products like you do as a. During a huge supply chain disruption so I don't know what do you think you think it was a doom strategy. Scot: [39:47] I don't think the externalities are hard to pick out you know so you go from a supply chain crisis into a inflation. No stagnation spiral this is like a it's a really rough rough rough hand that he was dealt for sure. Jason: [40:04] Yeah yeah so I don't know I do think they're a bunch of other retailers that really aspire to launch more products so I have a feeling that you'll see Mark glance I'm somewhere pretty soon because I think he has a skill set that. That will be in demand and then it does not appear they're calling Sue an interim CEO I don't think anyone thinks she's the, the future of Bed Bath & Beyond so I think they're they are out there doing a CEO search it's going to be interesting to see what kind of person, what you know will step up to that challenge right now. Scot: [40:33] While you were talking about it kind of the crazy idea popped in my head you know these these Amazon FBA acquisition vehicles have all seemed to hit the skids pretty hard thrashy oh and what not, yeah there's a there's a path where maybe they buy one of those if you wanted to like parachute in 500 private label Brands to try and restore that, that's one acquisition path that you can take to become interesting I don't know if you know if that makes any sense for the categories or whatnot but that would be an interesting, way to solve that problem with an acquisition. Jason: [41:09] Yeah no I do think there's something there and I think just the. You know I'm not sure you want to hire a traditional product Centric Merchant driven CEO. You know for a traditional product Centric company you know that's kind of losing its way right like you probably need some complementary skills they add something new to the mix and you're right like there's kind of a big remix going on in the world right now there's a bunch of digital Talent from you know the Amazons and Google's of the world this spinning off there's a bunch of digital Talent from all these, kind of startup ecosystems that you know we're we're playing in the Amazon Echo System and now we're less appealing and in the the you don't have to be a roll ups are a perfect example of all those, you know I think a bunch of those guys you know and and women will probably find, their next career opportunities taking what they know and taking it to a different kind of business than kind of just recreating what they've been doing. Scot: [42:10] Totally agree we will see. Jason: [42:12] In e-commerce guy solving Carwash for the world or. Scot: [42:15] Crazy crazy talk you do cat litter I'll do car washes. Jason: [42:20] That sounds like a great plan and that sounds like a great place to leave it because it's happened again we've used up all our allotted time, but as I always have you found the show helpful or it was entertaining to scream at how wrong we were into your podcasting client then you could reward us for that entertainment by jumping on iTunes and leaving us that five star review. Scot: [42:44] Thanks everybody and until next time. Jason: [42:48] Happy commercing.

In this episode, Burc Tanir, CEO & Co-Founder of Prisync, tells me how their SaaS-based price tracking platform makes it easier for Shopify merchants to track their competitors' prices, price changes, and even their stocks.On the Show Today You'll Learn:What you need to know about your competitors' pricingWhy it's hard to analyze your competitors' prices manuallyHow competitive price tracking can increase your conversion ratesThe importance of reports in helping you find the right priceWhy competitive price tracking will increase your revenueAnd moreLinks & ResourcesPrisync Website: https://prisync.com/Prisync Twitter: https://twitter.com/PrisyncComPrisync Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/prisync/Subscribe & Listen Everywhere:Listen On: ​clauslauter.com | Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Amazon Music/Audible | Stitcher | Deezer | Google PodcastPlease support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!Share the podcast with your family, friends, and co-workers.Tag the podcast on Instagram @clauslauter and let me know what you like about it.If you like the content and would like to support the podcast, you can buy me a coffee here._______________

In this episode, I speak with Matt Remuzzi, founder of CapForge, about how accounting isn't the sexiest part for e-commerce sellers, but it's still crucial. He shares practical advice on how people can use tools of accounting, so they can keep more of their hard-earned money.On the Show Today You'll Learn:Why you should hire an accountant who understands eCommerceThe challenges that a traditional CPA and bookkeeper face when it comes to eCommerceHow global selling eCommerce businesses need to approach bookkeeping and taxes differentlyThe importance of having your accountant act as your business consultantThe importance of a proper accounting systemWhat the process is for changing bookkeepers and accountants.And moreLinks / Social:https://capforge.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/capforge/Subscribe & Listen Everywhere:Listen On: ​clauslauter.com | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon Music/Audible | Stitcher | Deezer | Google PodcastPlease support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!Share the podcast with your family, friends, and co-workers.Tag the podcast on Instagram @clauslauter and let me know what you like about it.If you like the content and would like to support the podcast, you can buy me a coffee here._______________

Is Shopify Plus worth it?In this episode, Jordan West talks about being a former hater of Shopify Plus once and what changed his mind. He discusses why and when Shopify merchants should switch to Shopify Plus.Listen up and see if making that switch makes sense!KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODEAs soon as you get to 4 Million, your transaction fees will outweigh the Shopify Plus cost.With Shopify Payments, you get access to ShopPay.Shopify now has a “buy now, pay later” platform.Shopify Plus support is so much better than regular Shopify.Shopify Plus is also a good option for wholesale.Shopify Flow has all sorts of templates that you can use to tag customers and do automation.Script Editor allows you to have greater control over shipping costs and lets you do customization.Shopify Plus also has deeper analytics.You will also have more control over your checkout in Shopify Plus, allowing for upsells.Book quick wins appointment here:https://www.mindfulmarketing.co/quickwinsConnect with Jordan here:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-west-marketer/We love our podcast community and listeners so much that we have decided to offer a free eCommerce Growth Plan for your brand! To learn more and how we can help, click here:https://mindfulmarketing.co/growthplan-applyIf you've been paying attention and your brand is ready to GROW, apply now to be the one new brand we take on this month!https://mindfulmarketing.co/apply

US Consumers spent $8.9 billion online on Black Friday, down from the record $9 billion in 2020, the forest ever year-over-year decline for eCommerce sales [source]. Traffic at retail stores on Black Friday dropped 28.3% compared with 2019 levels [source]. I ran a poll asking whether people shopped at a physical retailer after Thanksgiving and whether people made a purchase online after Thanksgiving. It was the fifth Black Friday sales for our in-house eCommerce company, DermWarehouse! Go behind the scenes! $2.9 billion. That's the total sales of Shopify Merchants on Black Friday. That's up 21% from 2020 and more than double their sales from 2019 [view source]. The skin care line my family developed, Park Perfection, is ranking in the top five positions on Google for the coveted search query, “Instant Eye Lift.” How'd we accomplish this? If you own an eCommerce store, it's important to optimize your product pages. I wrote a blog on how to optimize your eCommerce product page. What differentiates our eCommerce marketing and development versus other agencies? You'll find out in this podcast! I recorded a podcast on Facebook and Instagram best practices for eCommerce brands [listen here]. Make sure you check out episode 59! One of the biggest eCommerce misconceptions of the holiday season is that it's a great time to acquire new customers. Did you know that Amazon took 19% of total spend during Black Friday weekend last year? [source]. They expect to do even more sales in 2021!

Bonjoro the video tool driving sales, repeat customers and loyalty for Shopify merchants. Are you ready to grow your business with video? Bonjoro gives you all the tools you need to master personal video and build powerful, lasting connections with your customers. Bonjoro has been on our radar for a few months, but it wasn't until Simone Anderson joined us for an episode of the podcast and told us how much she and her customers loved it, we knew we had to investigate further. Very quickly we knew we had to have someone from Bonjoro on the podcast, and boy did we get lucky with Casey Hill. Casey is the Head of Growth at Bonjoro and is so passionate about what he does. Customer retention is highly important for merchants. Finding new and innovative tools to keep existing customers engaged and returning can be a challenge, especially when competition is tough and prices are high. Bonjoro allows merchants to quickly and easily send customers personalised videos at several stages of the customer journey. It integrates directly with Shopify and has a Chrome extension and mobile app making it an absolute breeze to use. If you're a merchant and have been looking for a tool that is going to drive return customers and increase customer engagement - Bonjoro is for you. Listen to this episode to understand the functionality available to Shopify Merchants, Success stories and creative ideas of how to use Bonjoro. The absolute BEST part about Bonjoro? You can start a Free trial with no credit card required. Bonjoro - https://www.bonjoro.com/ Get in touch with Casey Here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseyhill/ For more information about Zyber Digital Visit our website - https://www.zyber.co.nz Follow us on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/zyberwebdesign/ Join our exclusive Facebook insider groups Shopify NZ - https://www.facebook.com/groups/shopifynz/ Shopify VIP - https://www.facebook.com/groups/shopifyvip Follow us on Instagram - zyberhq

Episode 254 is a breakdown of Walmart and Shopify Q4 2020 earnings reports, a recap of 2020 sales data from the US Dept Commerce, and Amazon News. 2020 Sales Data US Dept of Commerce released it’s retail data for December, which gives us a full picture of 2020, as well as the Q4 e-commerce data. Retail sales in 2020 were $5.6T, representing 27% of the U.S. GDP Retail as a whole experienced healthy growth of 3.4% versus 3.5% in 2019 E-commerce grew 32% to $792B in sales, vs 15% growth in 2019 E-commerce was 14% of all retail sales (vs 11% in 2019) Jason wrote a detailed recap of 2020 in Forbes: 2020: Not Quite Retail Apocalypse, But Great For E-Commerce Walmart Earnings US Q4 comp sales grew 8.6% eCommerce sales grew 69% FY revenue was $559.2 billion, comp sales increased 8.6%, E-Commerce sales grew 79% Shopify Earnings Fourth-Quarter Revenue Grows 94% on GMV Growth of 99% Full-Year 2020 Revenue Grows 86% on GMV Growth of 96% FY Subscription Solutions revenue grew 41% to $908.8 million,  FY Merchant Solutions revenue grew 116% to $2B Shopify Expands Its Checkout System to Facebook and Instagram Amazon news: Amazon acquires Seltz, a Shopify competitor Episode 254 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded live on Thursday, February 19th, 2021. 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. https://retailgeek.com Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 254 being recorded on Thursday February 18th 2021 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 sir listeners will Jason today is a big day for science nerds we saw the perseverance Rover landed on Mars with an interplanetary helicopter how cool is that. Jason: [0:55] That is the coolest part I was super excited I actually put a note on my calendar and stop working and watch The Landing it’s pretty amazing. Scot: [1:04] Yeah I didn’t watch it how much could you see. Jason: [1:07] Um well they had like a pretty detailed animation for the whole thing like like you you know they don’t have cameras of the Rover in the air but they but they, they show like a 3D animation of it you know as a checks through all these detailed milestones and then pretty quickly after they confirmed it had touchdown you got the first. Actual photo from from the Rover and there was still like dust everywhere from The Landing so it’s. It’s pretty amazing to think that like we can launch shoot a drone 250 million miles away and landed on a planet that’s like yeah. Scot: [1:45] Yes soon elon’s can be landing people there. Jason: [1:48] Yeah yeah I know he’s close on their heels my favorite part though was the news guy like after they did their whole recap he’s like um and I feel compelled to remind people this actually is rocket science. Scot: [2:01] Nice. Jason: [2:04] Yeah yeah so it’s very cool I feel like I remember some of our very first podcast we’re like early in you know as SpaceX was knocking off all these milestones and we were we were talking about those a lot at the beginning of podcasts and. Five years later we’re still doing it. Scot: [2:20] Yeah now every other day they’re shooting off a mission it’s it SpaceX is pretty pretty amazing. Jason: [2:25] Yeah yeah that’s that’s become totally routine I don’t know you watch Westworld right. There’s actually scenes in Westworld we’re like just in the background they have SpaceX Style Rocket so I glanced because it’s so rude to you know they Envision it being so routine this cute. Scot: [2:43] Yeah very cool but even bigger than that I know one of your favorite days of the year is when the US Department data of Commerce data comes out so yesterday I’m sure you were, up and ready and you had all your Tableau and your data scientist lined up walk us through some of the data that came out yesterday. Jason: [3:02] Yeah you I wish I could deny it but I kind of am super excited to get up on the mornings when this data comes out because I as you’re as you’re mocking me I did set up a bunch of automation over. Over the winter break and now I get to use it and knock on wood two months in a row it hasn’t broken. Scot: [3:20] You wouldn’t be retailgeek if you didn’t you can’t be a science geek can’t be space Kiki and me tell you you gotta gotta pick a lane. Jason: [3:26] I have to keep my creds so what came out yesterday is a reminder for our listeners. The January Advanced monthly sales data so this is a. A simpler set snapshot of what happened in January and then we got the full data set for December and so the reason that that’s particularly exciting is that now let’s us roll up. The complete 20 20 year and kind of work back to the whole year so so we got our first advance to look at what January is going to look like, we got a detailed look at at December in the whole year for 2020 and then there is another data product that comes out quarterly that’s the e-commerce specific slice and that actually comes out tomorrow morning but based on all the data we already have I’m pretty confident I already know what it’s going to say so we’ll talk a little bit about it. Um but so let’s start with January. And it’s interesting because my take on January was different than a lot of the media coverage in January so so Top Line. Year over year this January sales were up 10.8% versus last year so that’s a that’s very healthy increase. [4:48] The the one of the sectors in that data is non-store data which is kind of a. The closest thing in the Advanced Data we have to 2, e-commerce and that was up 28.7% so so if you look at this January versus last January very robust again last January wasn’t impacted by covid and anyway so we’re comparing a. You know post covid with pretty covid. [5:17] But what what got a lot of media attention was the that the January sales were 5.1% bigger than December so not year-over-year month over month, and the reason people are excited about that is because. [5:34] December sales were lower than November’s and November’s were lower than October so you kind of had two months of negative growth looking on a month-by-month basis and so this this 5.1%, increase kind of reverse that monthly Trend and a lot of the analysts had predicted that we might grow 1.2% and so. 5.1% was a pretty big beat. And so people were kind of giddy about that like oh it looks like we’re we’re coming out of the doldrums a little bit, and you know one of the big reasons is there were some economic stimulus that went out early in January and almost all the retailers I work with like. You can see to the day when customers start getting that that stimulus it’s a very obvious Spike and so that helped help January for a bunch of retailers but I would also point out this month over month data. [6:30] Is not that important or valid and there’s a bunch of systemic reasons why months aren’t the same and Retail has a bunch of tent poles so I generally am a lot more interested from a trend standpoint in the year over year and, year of a year it was a January with a stellar month but I will say there were a couple outliers in this January data, department stores were up 23.5 percent from December so month-over-month, department stores had their first increase in about 15 years and clothing which would has been decimated the last year was up five percent, um but again to me. [7:14] Month-over-month trans aren’t very relevant and especially in the middle of a holiday period and. If you if you look at the year-over-year trends both those categories were still down from last January so department stores are down three percent from last January, and clothing was down 11% from from last January both of those are, slower rates of decline than we saw for most of last year so it’s it is a silver lining but you still wouldn’t want to be in either of those categories. Scot: [7:45] If we just forget retail sales you know the headlines I saw on the financial sites were you know stunning retail sales 5.1 percent versus 1.2 estimate like why was why was that estimate so off. Jason: [7:59] Yeah so I don’t I don’t know what goes into to the. Scot: [8:03] Who made this the Department of Commerce doesn’t make it. Jason: [8:06] No it’s not and and further it’s not like as rigorous as like stock public company earning CPS estimates for example like I don’t think there’s a. Like an industry-standard estimate what what you do have you know again think about this December had a weird or shape than ever before it was way more e-commerce n trick. December and all of those sales were front-loaded in the first half of the month because of ship again and the second half of the month so you so December was, in you know large part was half a month and so January was a full month with economic stimulus, dollars versus December and you also had all these like you know covid reasons that sales were slow and December right. The cases were peeking people weren’t traveling with their family etc etc so for all of those reasons it’s not surprising to me at all that, January was way better than December but to me a more valid you know perspective is what was this January versus last January because that’s more apples to apples. [9:17] Um but I’ll be honest I’m was more interested in in looking at the 2020 data in aggregate because you know this was a. A very unique year and it’s interesting to see how it played out you and I had all these debates early in the year, is it a v-shaped recovery you know what would happen all these things you know people in April were writing these doomsday predictions about how far down retail was going to be in 2020 and, and things like that so it’s interesting to see the real data, so for all of 20 20 retail sold five point six trillion dollars in sales which is an all-time record by the way like that’s the the, the highest retail sales in the US have ever been that’s twenty-seven percent of the GDP which is a little bigger share than it normally is it normally is around 25 percent of GDP is retailgeek, so that’s huge GDP to go down this year I think people expected that because of covid. [10:15] So that growth rate is three point four percent so retail grew at 3.4 percent. And you could say hey Jason is 3.14 percent good, well 2019 retailgeek rude 3.5% so it’s pretty typical it’s right like we normally years we expect to be in that three to four percent range when we fall below 3 we call it a down here and, you know we haven’t seen very many years in recent history that were above for so. So it’s right in The Sweet Spot of typical growth that you would expect if there was no covid-19. Which is super interesting to me so you know but there’s a bunch of micro Trends in that Top Line and in the biggest trend is, that a way bigger chunk of those sales were e-commerce than usual so so e-commerce Guru 25.3% for the year. Which a normal year for e-commerce like 2019 we grew 12.9% so so almost yeah so it’s basically two years of growth in a year some. Scot: [11:25] Wait I thought it was five years of growth in a week 10 knots to noon. Jason: [11:27] Mackenzie said 10 yeah yeah they lied. Scot: [11:32] Well why don’t you sidebar this so that everyone is on the same page so what what happened with that so I know Mackenzie put it out and it’s somehow wrong. Jason: [11:41] Yeah well and I. Scot: [11:42] Did they did they blow the year-over-year aspect or what where did they. Jason: [11:46] So they did a couple a like they were roll up of a bunch of other data sources right so they took the same US Department of Commerce data we’re talking about, but then they took some estimates from Bank of America and and a different definition of retail from Forrester and then they they did this thing that we used to do in e-commerce all the time they said hey let’s not talk about all of retailgeek, because nobody buys food online so grocery in restaurants shouldn’t shouldn’t be in that number, and nobody buys cars online so let’s take cars out and let’s invent this artificial definition of core retail and call it you know growth of core retail, um So so a there’s no way to check that because there are no actual numbers for that that arbitrary definition but I’m sure I’m sure if someone from Mackenzie won on the show right now they’d be saying hey Jason it was higher than your. Your 25%. But I would also point out that the biggest growth in e-commerce were all those things that they took out right like tons of people were buying buying food online tons of people were buying cars online so I feel like those old. Those old things of saying like hey there’s some categories of retail that don’t qualify for e-commerce has is no longer valid. [13:05] But if we use this nice normalized data from US Department of Commerce we grew 25% normally years thirteen percent so that. Is is awesome. If you if you kind of think about the shape of the year last year 12.9% April peaked at 18.4% and then we finished the year at 15.7% right so. But in terms of what percentage of retail the. Is e-commerce so it never spiked up to the 33% that Mackenzie predicted in there 10 years of progress, but there are certain categories which probably did have have five or ten years grocery probably it you know did hit our five-year forecast. Overall e-commerce hit like our two-year forecast so it was a doubling not a 10 Xing. [14:00] And for sure in that those retail sales you had clear winners and losers we’ve talked about this on a bunch of shows but. The you know if you were a grocery store or a sporting good store or home hardware store you had a great year because of covid and if you were department store or an apparel store or gas station, you had a really crappy your, because of covid and one of the biggest Trends is this whole shift from services to products right so nobody spent money on travel and instead they bought. Furniture and stuff for their house and mostly nobody went to restaurants and instead they bought more food from grocery stores and so those that Trend had the effect of pouring extra dollars. Into retail and for sure it goosed e-commerce in those categories. If you if you think specifically around food 2019 food was a 50/50 split between restaurants and grocery stores, at the peak of covid it was like 70/30 that we were spending on on Grocery and ended up about 60/40. So that’s an extra 200 billion dollars hundred ninety billion dollars in grocery store sales as a result of people going to restaurants OS. [15:21] Restaurant as a whole industry were way down we’ve talked about that a lot but. Full service restaurants in particular we’re totally creamed they were down like 92% so the whole end restaurant industry was down 15% because, you know the Pizza Hut’s of the world and the the McDonald’s of the world like could actually do pretty well with drive-through and home delivery, um but the full-service sit-down restaurants just got obliterated. [15:48] And then the last thing that I will tell you I still haven’t totally figured out in surprise me is if you said hey Jason based on all those trends. Would home furnishing stores be winners or losers and covid I would have said oh man there are a winner because instead of going on vacation I remodeled my house and I bought new dishes and new sheets and I did all these things from, from William Sonoma and you know Lamps Plus and all those stores and I would have also said that because we were stuck at home and there was a new video game launched that electronic stores would have been way up. And two categories that were down for the year we’re home furnishings and electronics which is interesting to me in a little surprising. Scot: [16:32] Risk is a Wayfarer has really picked up nicely. Jason: [16:36] Yeah there are there by in Best Buy would say they were up right so so where’s the electronics that’s down to offset best by being up, and William Sonoma was up so what’s the home furnishings that’s down to offset that I, it’s a little confusing to me in the overall scheme of things these are not categories that are huge numbers so you know. Why. There you know it would it’s totally possible for those numbers to be skewed or maybe even like not have a huge sample size in the US Department of Commerce survey data. Scot: [17:13] And there could be Folks at only have physical stores that you know were not essential that haven’t opened yet solar something that don’t have e-commerce. Jason: [17:20] Yeah yeah I’m certain that that is a big big part of it is they were more disrupted. Scot: [17:26] Person will call anything else so a second I tie that back to the Amazon numbers but were there any how do we so if we think about that. You know that I guess it was 25% so the growth the e-commerce growth ends up being what again. Jason: [17:43] 25.3%. Scot: [17:45] That’s the grass okay yeah so I think that is a new Baseline Amazon grew like 40 and change right like 46 47 oh that’s just cute for number your that’s a 25 as an annual number it. Jason: [17:57] Yeah but if you if you think Amazon grew 43-39 40 so you could you know call it 40 41 percent. Scot: [18:07] Yep so they over indexed eBay was a little bit under and then we’ll talk about Shopify a little bit but they were way over that. Do if Walmart was over so it’s one of these things where everyone was over except eBay again how is that possible. Jason: [18:26] Yeah the math generally doesn’t work out right like I so the answer is I don’t know like for the last two quarters Q2 and Q3, Amazon was about exactly the same as the industry average so they they mirror this Department of Commerce data really closely cute, Q2 Department of Commerce grew 4045 percent Amazon 43 Q3 Department of Commerce group 37 Amazon group 39 so that that. [18:54] Correlation actually gives me confidence in the numbers to be honest. The but almost everyone else put your point wildly outperform those you know William Sonoma was up 50%, you know Walmart was up by Katie to a hundred percent Home Depot was up eighty to a hundred percent Target was up like a hundred and two hundred hundred fifty to two hundred percent. BJ’s Albertsons Best Buy were well over two hundred percent so you look at all those big big companies that are up way more than the industry average in your like man a bunch of small companies. Must have really gotten cream for this to be true, um and I do think that is partially true I think covid-19 disproportionately hurt hurt smaller retailers, um but it also underscores that there is not a terrific measurement methodology for this e-commerce data and the US Department of Commerce guys worked really hard to get this number accurate but there, they’re dependent on the accuracy of these surveys that retailers fill out and send to them and I just I don’t have great confidence that retailers fill them out with, with ultra care. Scot: [20:06] Very cool did your automated cloud system survive all this thinking. Jason: [20:14] It did it did it worked really well I found it really useful and I generated a bunch of what I think are reasonably attractive visualizations and so I’ll put a link in the show notes, but I’ll publish a Forbes article tomorrow recapping all this data with some charts in case anyone wants to see him. Scot: [20:31] Brickell cannot wait now I’m going to be all getting tomorrow waiting for that to show well Jason it would not be a Jason and Scot show without some Amazon news. [20:55] This was a this was a weird week in that there was not very much Amazon news and in fact. This one was really interesting so I think what happened here is there’s a start-up in Australia that has a Shopify competitor that companies called cells SEL Z. And I I first heard about this because. I saw conversation after I saw this one of the socials and people are like hey did Amazon by cells and what started this is the founder just kind of put a or someone put a nonchalant kind of like post. I can remember is like on their blog or their about me page but it basically said hey we’re going to be shutting down soon or Amazon has bought us we’re not accepting new customers I think that’s what it said. So it was really weird because it was super under the radar and then. I posted it because I thought it was interesting I thought the conversation will have in a second list was the interesting part of it and then Del Rey Jason Del Rey Chase it down and gut verification from Amazon that it was true that they have acquired the company. There’s a big online kerfuffle around you know some folks are saying oh it’s just a choir thing what is it. And what I think is interesting is you know so we thought the news probably like what was it two months ago that Bezos was really engaged in Amazon and spend a lot of time thinking about what they do about Shopify. [22:24] So but then now he’s effectively kind of kicked himself upstairs well that you know a lot of people are kind of like oh that must mean it’s not a priority but. I don’t think that’s right. Amazon’s watching these guys are really closely and they want to take our legs out and you know the interesting thing it’s a fun thought experiment for me to thank all right if you had Amazon’s resources and that’s the fun part of it right. Sir so you know some someone. Jason: [22:51] I would watch a space program oh wait. Scot: [22:53] Amazon hires Jason Scott and they gave us a mission of like you know how do we take out you know or how do we slow the growth of Shopify or. Um let’s say they’ve identified them as a threat which I think is a valid assumption what do you do there and so it’s really interesting and you know I think, I think they’re going to take this pretty seriously and I think they’re going to go buy a bunch of things one school of thought would be you could. You know you and I have talked about on the show a big Trend kind of a lot of people think the next generation of these platforms is going to be more headless so so microservices right. So microservices would be a nice offering inside of AWS if you look at AWS they’ve got offerings for all kinds of crazy stuff from game development tons of machine learning. Everything you can imagine now so imagine they could build a whole e-commerce stack inside of AWS that would be these microservices as an offering. I think that’s going to be part of the strategy I think the cells company the cells company was known for making it very easy for people that had. Started their e-commerce Adventures on marketplaces to then open a store. And I think that’s really interesting to me because that would be another hook right so if you think about it Amazon need to disclose this down don’t they have like two million sellers is that a number I was at four and get two million us for globally. Jason: [24:19] I think you’re that’s the order magnitude. Scot: [24:21] Yes that’s I don’t know if that’s the exact right number and then Shopify is it like 300,000 that’s where they’re sorry yeah okay so. So then you know. There’s more there’s more people that could set up stores on Shopify than have and one strategy would be. So if you have if you worked at Amazon and you had unlimited resources basically. You don’t have to choose your strategy can just choose them all right so normally in business I’ve had to like really choose a strategy with a competitor and really go at it so see typically you know kind of an a military strategy lingo you like go ahead on Adam like battle them feature for feature punch each other in the face kind of thing, or you can try to outflank them and start to nibble away at the edges well if I’m if I’m in my thought experiment if I’m Amazon I do both right, so I think this is a flanking maneuver this is kind of the all right let’s. Let’s roll out a feature or set that says hey if you have a if you’re on the Amazon Marketplace we’re going to make it really easy for you to open a store I feel like that’s where this is going to go. But then at the same time I think you would go right at with the microservices strategy so and I don’t think this is part of that but I think it’s you know I think at some point that’s going to be another shoe to drop in this because it just feels like little bit obvious to me that they would do that so that was a really long intro I really wanted to hear your take on what you thought about. Jason: [25:50] Yeah I think you’re wildly wrong and thinking about it wrong no. Scot: [25:55] Okay that’s fair enough. Jason: [25:56] Yeah so I think Amazon is taking Shopify super seriously I think Amazon’s a you know apex predator that that. Doesn’t like to have any competition and I think they look really long term so I for sure think they’re they see the growth at the shopify’s of the world and say we don’t like that and need to have a response so I have. No problem imagining that Jeff Bezos is like you know the first person in the conference room for the project Santos meetings to figure out what Amazon’s response to Shopify is and I think, him as executive chairman not embroiled in day-to-day operations actually. Makes it easier for him to focus on those kinds of projects so I’m toy down with all that I could easily see AWS base microservices and and super easy, web store sales you know tied to the Amazon Marketplace being part of that answer and in fact in my annual. [26:56] Annual predictions I think I predicted that they would have some kind of use fulfillment by Amazon 444, you know owned web store sales as as part of the response to Shopify what I don’t think happened though is I don’t think Amazon bought seltzer. Um for anything to do with project Santos or to have some Global answer to, to Shopify Celta is a 35% company in Australia, and my experience with Amazon is there one of one of the biggest not invented here egocentric technology companies around like they believe they can build. Everything and they dissolved a Healthcare Partnership with Goldman Sachs and Berkshire Hathaway, because those two companies were too slow so I sort of don’t think that Amazon says hey we need to compete with Shopify the way to do it is to buy the IP from these these 35 guys in Australia, um it just it just doesn’t pencil out for me they like Jeff Bezos would put you know to Pizza team of super smart guys and they would knock it out themselves and probably are doing that right right now as we speak there’s probably a bunch of two Pizza teams working on it. [28:11] I think the reason about cells is because Amazon’s a newer entrant into Australia, and they’re finding that they’re not getting adoption as quickly as they have in some more mature markets and that they need, to Goose their third their Australian third-party Sellers and I think they acquired cells because cells had a bunch of. Australian third-party sellers so I think it was a local customer acquisition strategy in a emerging market for Amazon not part of some Global strategy and I it wouldn’t shock me at all if, Jeff Bezos and Andy jassy and Company like weren’t involved in this acquisition at all. Scot: [28:57] That okay we will see. Jason: [28:59] Yeah I’m and side note I’m usually wrong. Scot: [29:03] I don’t think it’s the foundation of their strategy I think it’s one of a hundred things they’re going to do and it’s going to be a. Jason: [29:08] Yeah I mean if they’re you know it’d be more interesting if they had some unique IP or something like that but I just it doesn’t seem likely that they did. Scot: [29:16] Yeah well let’s then answer this question so your Amazon how do you either stop or or hobble Shopify. Jason: [29:25] Well you you leverage your platform advantage to say it’s way better to get my webstore platform from Amazon than it is anywhere else and the way you do that is you say, hey if you guys want to use FBA and have Consolidated inventory between your webstore and Amazon, then the way to do that is to use the, you know Amazon Web Store 2.0 based on microservices hosted on the the greatest web service platform in the world, um and that if you you want your web store on Shopify you’re going to have to figure out fulfillment yourself or you’re going to have to send some of your your. [30:05] Your inventory to the the new Shopify fulfillment Network and you’re still going to want to leave some some of your inventory and our fulfillment Network because we have way more customers than you do, and they’re just going to leverage their their network advantage to walk customers in, two years ago I think they would have said oh man sellers should know they don’t need their own website they can just sell on our thing but I think they’ve lost that battle in the the, Flagship example for me is Anchor like to me anchor is one of the greatest success stories, that was sort of you know born because of Amazon right like their product company they exclusively sold through Amazon you couldn’t buy direct from anchor you couldn’t buy ink or anywhere else you could only buy it as a, 3p seller on on Amazon and and anchor went public last year for a with a ten billion dollar market cap, based on that business but guess what anchor has today they have a direct website so if anchor has decided that, hey you know what we need to own our own website in addition to selling on Amazon then it’s really hard for Amazon to credibly argue that no one else should be doing that and to me that means, they have to get back in the web store business but like I bet you they do it organically. Scot: [31:22] The the other interesting thing I thought about is and we’re going to go through Shopify earnings in a little bit so Shopify is fascinating because they actually don’t make, that much money off of their their software as a service Revenue right so what they do is they basically they almost give away the software and then the GMB flows through and then they skim off the GMB so they’re essentially you know they skim off the payments they skim off the shipping and handling they skim off like a firm that’s part of payments you know so that so that’s that’s interesting because it does make it hard for Amazon price against it right you can’t you could offer a free offering but it’s almost free as it is you know it’s so so then how do you go at the gmv flow could you offer the Shopify Merchants a, one and a half Point payment plan or something like that or you know could you because one way to look at it is, shopify’s getting a lot of economic value off that gmv and not passing it on to the sellers could you build about business model this is what Mark Lori did with jet this was kind of clever thing he did there is he kind of said well I’m going to take some of this and give it back to his example the buyers but here you give it back to the sellers I wonder if Amazon kind of come up with a different economic model that would unwind shopify’s model. Jason: [32:43] Yeah I mean I for sure, it’s not fun and not a super appealing business to be the a longtail webstore SAS company right like Amazon was one right there was one before Amazon it was John who web stores right and Amazon launched Amazon web stores and took all the customers and I think what they discovered is that it’s a sucky business it’s not fun like you know collecting 30 bucks a month from these small businesses you know with 50% charm because they go out of business and every one of them having. [33:16] Different needs and desires and different things they want to see on your road map right so I think in 2015 Amazon just said the juice isn’t worth the squeeze here, like we’re not getting any benefit from this let’s just get out of this space, and per your point Shopify figure it out the the equation to make money it’s not to charge more for the web store because small businesses can’t afford it, and it’s not make the unit economics you know super lucrative for charging a little for that web store it’s, you know get a nice piece of all the gmv that flows through that web sort through this whole assortment of services, and side note that’s Amazon’s main model for profitability to write like like Amazon’s Maine, profit driver is not consumers buying from Amazon, it’s third-party sellers selling on Amazon right and they sell 20 billion dollars worth of ads to those third-party Sellers and they sell, you know I don’t know how many billions of dollars of FBA services and credit card processing services and sales tax calculation services so Amazon’s right in the middle of that that gmv stream, and that’s the reason I think they, they decide to get back in the web store business is that they can monetize it now with all those those incremental seller service revenue streams that they didn’t have in 2015. Scot: [34:43] Yeah yeah let’s um I guess that’s a good place to pause and then let’s pick it back up and Shopify because then that’ll give us some numbers to do it before we do that let’s have a little appetizer of Walmart earnings. Jason: [34:57] So they release their earnings this morning and it was interesting I read the top line numbers and I’m like man had a good quarter and a good year right, and the market did not agree with me so so from an investor standpoint it was a Miss there their earnings per share came in at one point three nine, they had a big adjustment in there they had a bunch of write-offs and stuff too but the the Gap earnings per share was 1.39 and consistent consensus estimates was 1.51 so they. Um and then compounding that miss their guidance for 2021 was not very optimistic and that this is a trend I think we’re going to see across every retailer, is everybody is going to say, 20/20 was an exceptional year because of covid and we’re not going to come up very well against it right and so you know we have more covid costs and we’re going to probably see slowing, consumer sentiment in 2020 so combination of the Miss and the low guidance Walmart stock took a pretty good hit I think they closed down 6.5 percent today. [36:06] So if you’re an investor that was an interesting story that I didn’t toy so you coming, um but if you just look at it from how did they do as a retailer their Q4 comps were up 8.6% so Amazon’s the lard or Walmart’s the largest retailer in the world, and they grew 8.6 percent which is like more than double what you would ordinarily expect, them to do right so that’s a fabulous quarter and then e-commerce growth was sixty-nine percent, so again that’s a huge number if the, industry average is 40 percent if if you consider Amazon the industry average or 25% if you look at the US Department of Commerce, sixty-nine percent growth for the quarter is in e-commerce is great. [36:58] What wasn’t so great in Q4 is their profitability they you know as Walmart’s mix shifts to e-commerce like they have challenging unit economics and profitability goes down, they had some they raise their, their labor rates last year and paid can their Associates more they paid hazardous hazardous duty pay and all these other, other unique covid fees and so so fair enough profitability was was definitely a soft spot but from a customer demand standpoint. I thought they had a great quarter they also announced that 20:21 was going to be a huge capex year for them they’re expecting to spend 14 billion in a. [37:42] Normal big year for them is like 10 billion and by the way like those 10 billion dollar years were. We’re like from the days when they were building out a lot of Supercenters and so to spend 14 billion in a year when you’re not going to do a lot of new store growth. Um is a remarkable commitment to investment and what they said is a bunch of that Investments going to be in fulfillment and automated fulfillment and particularly, grocery store micro fulfillment which should scare Scott because that was one of my predictions, in our January show they’re making a big investment in health care and and services that go around retail in addition to retail which might sound familiar if you follow the the Amazon Playbook at all. They also did announce that they’re going to increase their average wage to $15 an hour, um average being an operative word their target and Amazon raised their minimum wage their starting salary to $15 an hour Walmart still not committing to that, but they are committing to have an average wage of $15 an hour and I want to see which is a raise for like half a million folks and. [38:56] The I want to say they’re starting salary is still like 11 11 bucks an hour so that’s going to be a big expense, so and again this was Walmart’s last quarter of the year so you can now see their full year and so their full year they ended up with five hundred sixty billion dollars in Revenue, which was up 7.7 percent on a constant currency basis, u.s. comp sales were up 8.6 percent which is a phenomenal year e-commerce for the year grew 68 69 percent or I’m sorry seventy-nine percent eighty percent so that’s that’s, very fast growth for the second largest e-commerce site in the United States and then kind of an interesting one, in 2019 e-commerce was 2.5% of Walmart sales now e-commerce is 6.2 percent of their sales so it’s become digital is becoming real at Walmart. Scot: [39:51] Brickell awesome and then anything else there. Jason: [39:57] I know that you know it’s going again this is why you should take retail advice and not stock investment advice from Jason. Scot: [40:07] It’s all about expectations yep speaking of expectations let’s talk about Shopify earnings like that transition. They are they actually smashed expectations so Wall Street Hanna met a buck Twenty Eight on the EPS side and it came in a buck fifty eight so be by 30 cents. But the stock went down and I think what you had there was. You know a lot of runaway expectations so there’s there’s printed expectations which is kind of analysts consensus and then there’s kind of like quote-unquote whisper number and my sense is whisper number on Shopify everyone was kind of like Mmm Yeah. Amazon came in pretty good and Saudi Bay and you know will they be able to continue this over a hundred percent growth in the answer was no so they Top Line grew at 94% which. Is just amazing right for the fourth quarter but I think people had let their expectations run away that it could be higher because Q3 there were at a hundred nine percent and then back into to a hundred nineteen percent. So it was a pretty good step down from from those growth trajectories. Jason: [41:13] That’s a first world problem when your growth deceleration slows down a 94%. Scot: [41:19] It is but hey it’s Wall Street they’re hard to please what have you done for me lately. And then we’ll talk about in a second but I think also so Wall Street you kind of look at the print and then the forward-looking stuff so, so so you know beat be current but then we’ll talk about the four projections, for the year that puts them at 99% I know that was pretty frustrating to them I hate it when numbers do that to me can’t you just get that one more percent there to make it triple digits. The revenue grew for 2020 full year 86% and the gmv grew 96%, and then gmv for the fourth quarter was over 41 billion that puts them at a hundred twenty billion for 2020. So if you line that up against Amazon’s third-party gmv that’s about, 40% and I think there are there are bigger than eBay Now by a good margin that number I think last I looked if you take Autos out of eBay I think there’s sub a hundred billion still. [42:18] I’ll have to have one of the interns fact check me on that and then as we mentioned it’s really interesting if you take that slice of Revenue that they have there. The subscribers subscription Services which is the soccer as a service Revenue the software licensing Revenue that was 280 million, but then merchant services was 700 million, so you can get the mix there that you know I think it’s 4060 so 40 percent of the revenue comes from software revenue and then 60 comes from quote-unquote merchant services and this is where they’re essentially, you know, charging a merchant two and a half points for payment and then you know passing through two and making a half point on that gmv that flows through there, then they make laugh Point here so they effectively have at a crate like a Marketplace would but it’s against all the services and aggregate that there are consumers that there. Their business customers are using and then yep, so that Merchants Solutions actually grew a hundred sixteen percent so when, you know which grew faster than govt which means they’re take rate went up effectively so there, you know the their Merchants merchant service Revenue grew faster than gmv and overall Revenue so it took share from the software side of the business. And then the take rate is going up so there you know whatever mix or things are happening there. [43:47] Um so one of the things that I think shocked Wall Street a little bit is that they effectively said that they’re going to get very serious about the Us distribution Network and, storing and shipping things I think they had one fulfillment center up in Canada where they’ve experimented with this and it sounds like they’re going to lean into it so that’s going to be interesting. And then another thing that was announced around their earnings was that they are going to put their payment system on Facebook check out so I thought that was a little tidbit that I wanted as the payments guy wanted to get your feedback. [44:18] Um so yeah so so if we if we tie that back to that Amazon acquisition you know. This is definitely going to be on you know Amazon’s radar so they’re DMVs heading to 1/2. It one way to look at is you all are selling things into this pool of people selling online now they’re going to be building their own F be a competitor, so it’s going to get really interesting to see what’s going to happen here and then Ivan IV, I thought it’s funny the Shopify and I don’t know if this is a corporate policy but there, there are social media people there like poking the bear at at Amazon so when Bezos left they did a kind of an odd goodbye kind of a thing that I thought was kind of it was funny but. It was definitely you know not I’m a pretty risky kind of guy that was just kind of like I was just like oh my God I if I was to see a that’s that was a little bit of a step too far so so there’s there’s definitely going to be a really interesting story this year watching these two battle it out and I’m excited to watch it. Watch the blows land. Jason: [45:28] Yeah I’m hoping to launch a new television service which is going to be Toby and Jeff Bezos playing Starcraft so we’ll see you that. Comes to fruition but seems my money would be on Toby actually in Starcraft but. Scot: [45:44] Who has the coolest hat would be even better. Jason: [45:46] Good point yeah they both have discovered some interesting foil later in life but yeah I mean. It’s funny because I do I think shopify’s a phenomenal story that growth is Monumental in the fact that their 40 percent of Amazon’s third-party Marketplace like. That that is serious right and they’re competing for the same wallet and so they’re absolutely competing for dollars, and they’re both well resource to escalate the fight so it’s going to be exciting to watch, the thing I like I try to remind people of is that they don’t actually have huge overlap in services today right like what Amazon does better than anything else is they acquire eyeballs, and then they they rent those eyeballs to sellers through all of these services. Shopify does exactly the opposite the one thing they don’t do is bring any eyeballs to to your product they exclusively sell you a bunch of services for you to monetize the eyeballs you already have and so, for sure they’re gonna grow an overlap each other and you know we’re starting to see that with a fulfillment networks and and various things but they’re not starting from a. [47:01] They’re competing for the same dollars but they’re competing from two opposite ends of the service spectrum and so it’s you know they’re going to meet in the middle somewhere, and it’s going to be interesting to watch but like you know my big takeaway from your numbers are, um not only is the is that g that Revenue that’s tied to gmv is much bigger than the revenue that’s tied to subscriptions it’s growing, twice as fast right so it’s both, they win when one of their existing customer sells more they win when they sign up a new customer they win when they find more services to sell to that same customer they win so that that is a nice Network, um and you know let you let you see what investors are seeing in this in the Shopify model and you know I in the back of my mind I’m hearing that soundtrack, you know your margin is my opportunity you know I have a feeling that that Jeff and project Santos are, not gonna sit back idly while that happens. Scot: [48:03] Yeah absolutely another thing that’s interesting got. Jason: [48:08] Just on the shop pay thing them being on Facebook isn’t that interesting to me but it what it signals is right so. It’s highly unlikely, that there are new buyers that are going to go to look at the new Air Jordan shoe on Instagram and buy it because they can now pay with shop pay right like I you know I doubt there was anyone that said like who I really want that shoe I’m gonna buy it through Instagram check out. But I’m not going to use PayPal only do they accept my shop pic, um so I don’t think it brings any new eyeballs to the those products on Instagram like I don’t think it’s a big draw but, if you already decide you want those shoes and you find out that checking out is going to be easier and lower friction because your payment information is already stored because they’ll accept your shop pay I do think it can improve conversion, for the people that are already discovering that product so to me it’s. [49:06] There’s it’s a smart play fun shopify’s part and Facebook’s part to offer it it’s probably not game-changing or super, incremental, um at the moment but what’s super interesting about it to me is as far as I know it’s the first example of shop pay being accepted outside of the Shopify echo system, um in this is another interesting you know potential Battleground you know the one of the biggest pieces of that of that gmv Revenue stream for Shopify is because you know they used to, to Outsource credit card processing to stripe and others and now they’re doing it on themselves, and if Shopify is going to become a legitimate digital wallet and offer their payment you know method available you know far and wide that that is kind of interesting, Amazon is tried to do that and hasn’t had very much success because. The Amazon brand is in direct competition with every other retailer the Shopify brand really isn’t right and so it is interesting. If this first move to Facebook signifies you know Shopify deciding that one of their growth opportunities is, is digital wallet that is an area where I think they’re strong and have a competitive advantage over Amazon so that that. Scot: [50:26] Yeah and then then there’s been a lot of speculation so then there’s a recruiter for Shopify that’s very he hangs out in the Twitter circles you and I frequent like the DTC and kind of area and the retail e-commerce group and then he put a. Really interesting listing out there essentially saying we’re building a high growth team you need to be on the west coast and we’re looking for a lot of talent and kind of from the D in the, DTC world so that and a lot of other hints have me thinking I think it was this one of my prediction said they’re going to build a Marketplace so so I feel like I feel like they’re going to go at the eyeball part of Amazon and it’s gonna be interesting to see how that goes for. Jason: [51:10] They could like I think I’m less optimistic that they will then you and others are, they totally could and you could interpret that job listing as, as you know a Skunk Works to hire people to build that Marketplace but to be honest I give you look at through a different lens that same job listing could be for a team to help, Sell Shop paid tune on Shopify Merchants right like so you know it could be other things it could be selling those fulfillment services to other Merchants it could it could be lots of things. Scot: [51:43] Yeah but it’s DTC no those are all B2B this is a consumer team. Jason: [51:48] Yeah yeah well we’ll have to see again A lot of people are speculating that they’re going to do it and they have the resources to try and I’m not even saying that they will fail but what I will say is. That. They don’t have any proof points that they can attract eyeballs and attracting eyeballs is super hard and so just because they’ve been successful in these other businesses. Um does not mean that they’re going to be able to create you know the hundreds of millions of consumers brand Affinity that that they would need to to compete with an Amazon. That’s super hard to do it would be an impressive story if they they launching can do that and and the day they do that a bunch of the things that people like about them suddenly breaks, so you know a lot of the reasons you do business with them is because they, they don’t compete with you and they don’t compete for eyeballs and they don’t claim ownership of your customer in the same way Amazon does so as soon as you become a Marketplace, you’re gonna start struggling threading the needle with all of those things so you know you can imagine ways to part we do it but but it it could get messy. Scot: [53:04] All right so it’s going to be a really interesting 2021 with this battle of these two Tech Titans and it’s gonna be interesting to see how it plays out. Jason: [53:12] Yeah I admire the heck out of both companies I’m glad they’re both there and I hope I hope they do compete in a bunch of services and make him all better for all of us so. I think you know as non financially in observers I think it’s going to be super interesting to watch. And Scott that’s probably a good place to leave it because we’ve taken a short Newsweek and turned it into our full hour-long show as always if you have any thoughts or questions about any of the topics we discussed today you can totally hit us up on Facebook or Twitter, and if you found this valuable you know if it got you excited about what’s going to happen in 2021 a great way to start off the year on the right foot is to jump onto iTunes and leave us that five star review. Scot: [54:01] Thanks everyone for taking the time to leave that review and. Jason: [54:05] Until next time happy commercing!

To find out more about international marketing from Katarina, take a look at her guest post for Blend Commerce, here. 

Are you ready for Brexit?  Don't worry.  No one is.  The trade deal was finalised so late into December that most merchants are still trying to work out what they need to do to get ready.  Join Adam and Rachel in this episode to find out how you can get the process started and be ready to trade under the new Brexit rules.

Intro James Corr is an entrepreneur focused on product development, marketing and optimization. While operating the successful growth consultancy OnlyGrowth, James worked with Shopify Plus merchants, and realized there had to be a better way for brands to build meaningful relationships with their customers. Passionate about helping them grow, James cofounded SMS Live to help Shopify merchants increase conversions using text messages. Bullet points 00:50 - Intro 03:20 - The start of the journey: building websites 05:13 - Getting into Facebook 07:20 - Working with brands 08:30 - OnlyGrowth 09:27 - What can brands optimize? 12:53 - SMS Live 15:40 - What stats you should look at 17:13 - ROI 19:00 - Personalizing SMS Live for you 21:56 - Order status + post-purchase follow-up 25:25 - How to get started 27:08 - Rapid fire question round 27:31 - What superhero would you be and why? 28:00 - What is one thing that people incorrectly assume about you? 28:31 - What is the most pointless subject taught at schools and what would you replace it with? 29:24 - What is one random act of kindness you either witnessed or done yourself? 30:06 - What unusual or underrated food or drink should more people try out? 30:51 - What is one mistake in your life and what did you learn from it? 31:58 - What does the first 30 minutes of your day look like and when does it start? 32:32 - What do you do or where do you go to get inspired? 33:18 - What book do you read or gift the most? 34:11 - What silly thing should people do more of? 34:57 - If you could change one world problem with one wish, what would it be? 36:00 - What makes you happiest? 36:51 - Any asks or requests for the audience?

Shopify has announced a partnership with TikTok to connect over 1 million stores with the TikTok community. This partnership is another facet that will solidify into a great influencer reach for Shopify stores. There’s an early adopter opportunity for brands to leverage a new advertising platform, and TikTok might be one of the most direct channels for many emerging and existing Shopify stores. This will make it easier for merchants to tap over 100 million active users in the US alone. This will be a new TikTok business manager features straight into Shopify with 1-click pixel setup, campaign targeting and creation, and an ad builder to create simple ads in minutes. TikTok is also offering a $300 ad credit to launch your first campaign. Subscribe for daily podcasts! (Always fresh!) FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM, TWITTER, AND LINKEDIN BELOW! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikedzima/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/michaelzima LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikezima/

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. Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 218 being recorded on Thursday April 30th 2020 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 Scott show listeners Jason 40 jump into it we do have a pretty exciting announcement we tested about a month ago now we tested a live event so with listeners and that went really well we had a lot of folks on and got a lot of really good questions and engagement from the community out there so next week we are going to do another one of those you zoom so I think everyone’s pretty familiar with zoom at this point so put May 6th at 9 p.m. Eastern that’s 8 p.m. central 7 p.m. mountain 6 plus 6 p.m. Pacific on your calendar in this episode show notes you’ll find a link to that Zoom and we’ll be sharing the link on Twitter LinkedIn and Facebook all the socials so we hope you’re able to join us and just kind of hang out talk e-commerce see each other we can’t get together at conferences right now so it’ll be a lot of fun and we’ll talk about whatever topics everyone’s interested in talking about. Jason: [1:41] Yeah and if you have any questions feel free to send them to us in advance. Scot: [1:45] Jason how are you doing this is probably the longest period of time you haven’t been on a plane in 40 years. Jason: [1:53] Yeah some maybe not quite that long but yes I like to say I’m living the covid dream I just wish I could wake up from it. Scot: [2:03] Are you frantically checking your tickets to make sure you don’t have a flight tomorrow or you you’re out of the. Jason: [2:10] No but there are still some like cruel reminders like there’s you and I were supposed to be in Arizona if I’m not mistaken doing a gig together this week which I was very much looking forward to. And so like a reminder on my calendar will pop up for the check in at the Marriott Inner in Flagstaff or whatever and I’ll be kind of sad. But I feel like the bigger question is how is my family doing if he guess they’re not used to quite so much Jason. Scot: [2:45] Yeah and a little behind inside baseball your son and I had a little mini Star Wars podcast before this sucks one. Jason: [2:52] Yeah he’s been planning that all day he was super excited he found out that you and I had a podcast and so he wanted to start a Star Wars one with you beforehand so that was super nice of you. Scot: [3:02] He I’ll give you he asked what is he 5 6. Jason: [3:06] For four and a half. Scot: [3:07] He asked kind of like 8 to 10 year old Star Wars questions so you’re doing some good parenting. Jason: [3:13] Yeah I will. Scot: [3:14] A plus five stars on parenting. Jason: [3:17] Yeah in the morning I’ll walk by and he’s having like morning meeting with his kindergartener teacher on zoom and he’s like explaining the nuances of how Anakin got turned to the dark side by Palpatine and that Palpatine was actually tricking him. Scot: [3:33] He’s like forget the alphabet let me tell you about Anakin. Jason: [3:37] Exactly yeah I feel like he’s going to be illiterate but super well-versed in the Star Wars universe. Scot: [3:43] He’ll do fine I that’s how I got here. Jason: [3:44] Yeah it’s all it’s all a trade-off how are you guys doing in the pandemic. Scot: [3:51] It has been a bit of a roller coaster over at spiffy on the personal side fine no no no issues North Carolina has been, pretty mild from a, pandemic perspective so but we’re still Sheltering in place and following all the good rules and all that good stuff but on the business side it’s been a bit of a roller coaster the I don’t know if you saw it or not but we had ABC they do a show called pandemic what you need to know and they did a four minute episode on us this week about. They called the pandemic pivot so we’ve had to so a big segment of our zits if you was rental car companies and they’re obviously feeling pain because folks like you aren’t out running cars and then another big segment of ours is office Parks so that was those two big hits that we took so we’ve been diversifying as rapidly as possible and the ABC show highlighted we’ve moved into disinfecting vehicles but then also one of our Fleet customers asked if we would disinfect the facility we said sure so we’ve added that as a pretty fast growing product line. Jason: [4:58] Yeah I so I’ma get spiffy Fanboy so I’ve course I saw the ABC segment and I will put a link in it in the show notes I think have to put a link to like the Twitter post because, the link on the website isn’t Perpetual but that I thought that was a totally cool story it seem like you both, expanded you’re offering I wouldn’t call like disinfecting Vehicles necessarily a pivot for you but then the facility’s thing I thought was very agile and clever of you. Scot: [5:30] Yeah when desperate times call for desperate measures so we we put it out there and then you know the other benefit is being on national TV is very good promotion so we have had a surge of activity this week so that’s we’re kind of we’ve been down the roller coaster and now we’re kind of heading back up in here. Jason: [5:48] Yeah I if you watch that that segment and then you click through you have a facilities disinfecting landing page on your website now and it’s super fun because there is a dude with a disinfecting cannon that seems like he can blast like seems like he could like disinfect an entire Costco from like one location with that thing. Scot: [6:10] Yeah we’ve invested in all these spray misters and all kinds of cool disinfecting technology. Jason: [6:17] Yeah I’ll bet you you have learned some things you you didn’t necessarily think you would ever learn. Scot: [6:23] It’s true as the software guy I get over my skis a little bit on chemistry but hey I can I can at least say the works. Jason: [6:31] That yeah Bill Gates I feel like as a software guy that’s pretty credibly giving the pandemic talk so if he could do it you could do it. Scot: [6:40] Okay. Jason: [6:42] Have you are you keeping one foot in retail are you following the catastrophe that is covid news in retail or maybe we’ll get to that in a minute should we do. Scot: [6:53] Yeah and we thought tonight we’d go through a little bit of news just kind of catch up on some things we haven’t been able to insert or talking to guests with the the big news tonight that we want to really get to and spend a fair amount of time on is the Amazon results or what I would also call hey shareholders take a seat so that was kind of a we’ll get to what that means here in a minute. Jason: [7:14] I like this I like the cliffhanger. Scot: [7:17] So two before you to Amazon we wanted to spend 5 to 10 minutes on some of the other things going on and I’ve been dying to chat with you all week about these two and I really just want to see it up to here your your thoughts so the two big things and I kind of put these both in and kind of newish marketplace news so number one Google shopping announced that they’re bringing back free listings didn’t announce it this way that’s a, that’s my my framing but remember I think it was 2012 so it started to be as this thing called Frugal that was just free then they changed it to Google shopping branding wise and then that was paid and free and then in like 2012 it became paid only then they had a brief kind of a flirtation with kind of shopping kind of aggregate doing their own fulfillment kind of a thing and then kind of like it’s a good Postmates like a Postmates kind of a business model they get rid of that and then now so then it was just, paid listings and then now they’re adding back in the unpaid listings they talked about you know pandemic had accelerated their thinking and wanting to help. [8:31] Small businesses so that was one news I kind of think what’s going on there, is they’ve been investing a lot in this Marketplace when your revenue from retail is way down that’s the best place to launch a Marketplace because you can’t really cannibalize you’ve already cannibalized the ad Revenue that’s always been the big hurdle for them becoming a Marketplace also during the pandemic their shopping experience really really suffered so I tried to buy some paper towels and it was like going through. [8:58] The darkest alleys of Internet kind of up in the Dual shopping there, another one I wanted to ask you about a Shopify so they had this little app they moved their their notification of shipping to an app whose name arrival arrived I can remember name of and then they just. [9:17] That’s the former name and then they just kind of change the name of arrived arrival to shop and then they put a little bit of a front end on it and everyone’s always been kind of wondering you know what if Shopify became a Marketplace so I know the Strategic Regice your teacher a guy talks about this all the time Ben Thompson he was like losing his mind he was so excited so but you know and there’s there’s a lot of different ways to look at it I kind of think they’re going to be a front door they’re going to kind of get into the discovery game the challenge of that is when you have all these merchants. There’s a data problem in a don’t want to I don’t want to step on your toes you may be wanting to talk about this but how do you feel about those two things and we can kind of like chat about it more. Jason: [10:04] Yeah it depends on how you look at both of them so I think in and of there’s the themselves both of those pieces of news are like, kind of nothing Burgers right like they like neither one dramatically change their experience or improved things in a in a way that is likely to be very meaningful to real consumers and so that was the only thing you were ever going to see from Google about Commerce or the only thing you were ever going to see from Shopify about marketplaces I would say it was totally silly what’s what’s potentially interesting and exciting about both is that you know they could be sort of first initial steps into, much more significant Commerce activities right so that that’s what would be exciting to me as if Google really invented, a new experience around marketplaces on their platform or if Shopify really leaned in but but. These two steps by themselves are like not very significant in my view. Scot: [11:07] Do you think they lead to something significant. Jason: [11:10] I think we’re going to see other efforts I think the jury is going to be out it’s interesting they both suffer from similar problems in my mind like the messaging about both is pretty muddled so I start with Google shopping. Right. You know Google is an amazing company and so it’s always been totally shopping to me shocking to me that they’re they’re shopping offering like The Branding is always super. Confusing and their naming conventions are constantly changing and it’s like my job to keep up on this stuff and I can’t keep up so I have no idea. How average consumers are but so for example hey you know they did a press release with this white grandiose headline. Group listings on Google shopping is now free. It’s now free to list your products on Google right and so there’s a lot of people that were like paying a lot of money to list their products on Google and they’re like wait do I so now everything I was paying for I get for free which is of course. [12:15] Not the case whatsoever essentially what they’ve done is they like if you pay for a what used to be called a product listing add or you know you you do a Google shopping listing. You that add shows up in the shopping tab in Google but it also shows up in Blended search results in a bunch of other places. And essentially what they’ve said is we’re going to bring back organic listings but only in the Google shopping Tab and only below the the. The paid ads and so and they’ve never disclosed anything about what kind of traffic that tab gets and spoiler alert when someone like Google won’t tell you how much traffic something’s getting it’s because it’s not getting any traffic. [13:02] So like having an organic listing and that tab probably isn’t going to get seen by anyone. And so in and of itself that doesn’t seem like a very big change and there’s like something that I’m still unclear about there’s a separate thing that used to be called Google shopping actions which is. The actual ability to complete a transaction within your ad unit as opposed to just referring you to the Commerce site to complete that the transaction and it’s unclear to me whether these. Free listings are enabled for Google shopping actions or not and if that’s voluntary for example right so I potentially, the listing is free but then they’re going to try to conduct a transaction that they’re going to charge you a commission fee on for example. Scot: [13:56] That’s called a Marketplace and that’s what’s exciting I’m tingly all over. Jason: [13:59] Yeah so yeah but it’s like I haven’t no one’s been able to articulate to me whether why is that the case with all those listings can you opt into that on a voluntary basis is that not an option that’s available. Scot: [14:13] It’s the funnel you got to you got to bring these free people in get them addicted to a little traffic and then you flip them into the marketplace. Jason: [14:18] Yeah it’s a great model it certainly worked for the rest of Google and Facebook so so that one again like. Kind of muddled kind of overhyped if you just look at what it is now but you know they it is a. A possible step towards a more significant Marketplace for five months ago they did hire this guy Bill ready he was the CEO at PayPal so you know maybe this is like one of his first initiatives to as president of Commerce to kind of get the Commerce ecosystem Juiced and you know, for sure Dougal wants to have relevant search results when you search for products and like increasingly they were losing that that search to Amazon and if the only results you could get from Google are from advertisers that paid. Like you’re just not going to have a complete product catalog so to me this feels like the biggest benefit of this is to Google which is to collect more product data to enable you to have better search results that you can then monetize. And then Shopify I’m I’m kind of concerned that I’m burning a bridge on Shopify because. Scot: [15:36] Toby’s going to kick your butt. Jason: [15:37] Yeah I feel like I had some negative comments on Twitter and in the press and I wasn’t smart enough to like not see see Toby on those comments so I feel like my. My Shopify Fanboy status might get revoked. Scot: [15:53] They’re Canadian they’re super nice and forgiving. Jason: [15:55] That’s that’s what I’m banking on. And again I would be interested in Shopify leaning into a Marketplace I think there there there would be some challenges for that but there would be some intriguing things about that. This is not that right so here’s what here’s why I was pretty negative is because six hours before this announcement I was on Twitter in the middle of the night as one does, following shopify’s Chief product officer who made a tweet that like in the next few hours we’re going to announce our most significant product release ever. [16:31] And I’m like oh that’s interesting like that’s a pretty grandiose statement I’m pretty excited to see what they launch and, you know I’m every couple hours I’m waking up and I’m refreshing my feed to see what they announced and then they announced this exciting new mobile shopping app right. And at first I’m like okay so this is going to be, you know we’ve complained for a while that Shopify actually isn’t very good at mobile right so if you want your Shopify site your, desktop browser experience is likely going to be way better than your mobile browser experience your mobile browser experience does not have awesome performance. And Shopify has mostly ignored, some newer web development standards that I think are pretty important for mobile like Progressive web apps Toby’s not a big fan. So I thought oh so their solution to mobile web is I mean mobile shopping is they’re going to launch a new app that you can shop from. So a that was a wrong assumption. Scot: [17:30] That’s called it’s called shop it’s right there in the. Jason: [17:32] Exactly it’s called shop so so jump on this thing and I’m like alright let’s see what the shopping experience is. Spoiler there is not a shopping experience as you mentioned they rebranded a app for tracking shipments. Which I’ll come to in a minute is kind of an oily space. Um and then in addition to tracking shipments it lets you favorite some of your Shopify merchants and it will promote. Some items from the Shopify Merchants which you would then click to their website in order to browse or by the individual items. And it has a super limited experience for helping you discover some new merchants. So so a couple of things first of all if I download an app to track my shipping status. And it suddenly changes its name to shopping and is suddenly about Merchants Discovery like I’m I am probably annoyed. And you know everyone was arguing with me on Twitter the right no it’s genius like they built in 18 million user user base from day one by repurposing this existing thing and I’m like oh well they should have bought like The Words With Friends app. That had a hundred million users and made that the Shopify shopping app if that’s like you know there it’s not the same audience. Scot: [18:58] You can’t track packages worth word from Friends. Jason: [19:01] Yeah so side note there’s a bunch of apps exist in the world to help you track your packages and what they mostly want to do is scrape all of your e-commerce purchases from your Gmail and sell that data to evil marketers like publicist. So that’s that’s what most show shipping tracking apps exist for and the the Shopify app it’s really weird because nobody, shops or buys from Shopify right like you buy from beardbrand or Kylie Jenner and you have no idea what platform. They used to sell those goods to you so a like aggregating shipping information for all Shopify merchants. [19:49] Makes no sense because that’s not a context anyone understands and then, they don’t tell you this but they do scrape your Gmail and I and highlight all of your Amazon and apple purchases for example so like not clear what the privacy policy is there but you at the very least you’re telling Shopify what else you buy and you know in this age where we’re all really concerned about what data we share with, with whom that’s potentially interesting and then the whole, so I’m like what this feels a little bit like bait and switch it doesn’t feel very Sharpie it’s not a very like revolutionary experience and it’s really just a bookmark to e-commerce stores to jump you to an e-commerce site and you know a bunch of Shopify Defenders than jump in on Twitter and they’re like no you have this all wrong I’m Toby’s personal friend and this is all about the post-purchase experience this is all about providing better customer service and driving greater lifetime value it’s not about the first time shopping experience and so then I’m like alright well question one. Why do you have a post-purchase experience called shop that seems kind of dumb to me it seems like. Scot: [21:08] Because you just shopped it’s obvious Chase. Jason: [21:11] Yeah yeah you get it more than me that’s the problem and then customer lifetime value for whom right like if I’m beardbrand which is a great, direct to Consumer brand that happens to sell on Shopify and I get it at market and get a bunch of customers that are customers of beardbrand and I want to provide them a great customer experience to know when their packages are going to arrive and all this stuff like, I don’t want to send them to a third party not beardbrand branded experience that then is going to Market other shops with competitive products to mine like it makes it makes no sense if it’s a lifetime value play it’s a lifetime value for Shopify not for the merchants and heretofore one of shopify’s biggest strength has been their position that unlike Amazon there they their completely altruistic in terms of benefiting the merchants and this does not feel like it particularly benefits the merchants. That’s my. Scot: [22:16] Doubles I’ll give a devil’s advocate. Jason: [22:17] Yeah save me. Scot: [22:18] He gives Merchants everything they need to be successful online but if you kind of compared it next to Amazon or any Marketplace. Place their most deficient is. Aggregating demand so Kylie is fine she doesn’t need help but if you set up Jason’s Star Wars store no one’s going to find you on the internet except for like R5 podcast look. Jason: [22:46] Yeah you and Stephen. Scot: [22:47] Cast listeners Stephen and I and maybe like five of the people that listen to this hobby that we have and so you know, yes they’ll give you tools to go spend money but what if they could say look. You can opt into this Marketplace and we will you will now show up in this front door that we’ve built so I think I think they will build a friend or because they’re going to use it as a way that’s what you get with Amazon you simply say. I’m tapping into these hundreds of millions of people that you have captive there so I think they’re building that but then also you know another if we kind of line those things up another area where they’re deficient and we know they’re investing a lot here is not only fulfillment but a fulfillment subscription program so I think that’s that could be, you know between tracking packages and a front end is a big step I think there’s probably a middle step there where they say to folks hey. Yeah and they have this checkout flow where they could say to people hey we use this thing called Shopify would you like to join the Shopify shipping program and get free 2-day for one day shipping, kind of like so they can be successful we’re like shop Runner wasn’t because they’ll have a much better aggregation point in this app and in the checkouts of their aggregated merchants. So that’s how I would do it I would start at the end like they’ve done they’ve got a they’ve got however many users of this happen now visit 80 million or something now you. 18 so now that’s pretty good that’s more than shop Runner I think shop on her head like. Jason: [24:14] 475,000 of which have already written a review for the app by the way that launched yesterday. Scot: [24:24] And then then put that it you have to admit that gives you a platform to launch a prime Shopify Prime. Jason: [24:33] Yeah totally get it and I think we’re basically an alignment like. Turn my original comment if this isn’t a first step like there could be some really cool steps that fall on and in my mind the biggest mistake if Shopify made a mistake is just overhyping this right like if they just said like hey we’ve got some super exciting aspiration and like you know given the situation in the world right now like we’re gonna like you know release fast and iterate and here’s our first little step like I feel like the reception would have been. Universally favorable but I feel like they over sold, that this first step and yeah we’ll see how it all plays that I’m I have nothing against him I’m rooting for him. Scot: [25:18] Toby actually apologize I can’t find it now but he essentially said yeah we had to put this out fast so we had to strip down a lot of the functionality. Jason: [25:28] Yeah yeah I’m sure and I’m sure they have some cool stuff in the in the works to make it more better I like I totally get it like the one thing that Shopify doesn’t provide is traffic and this is a you know a a much more mature version of this could potentially be a traffic driver for those merchants and that could be a, a great trade-off right so if that’s what happens totally cool I would just like to me Shopify and Amazon are not direct competitors they’re totally synergistic that like Amazon the thing they do better than anything is get give you eyeballs and Shopify you know gives you the infrastructure to have your own presence on the web if covid-19 has taught Amazon sellers anything it’s that they shouldn’t be, single sourced on Amazon like they should have their own presence in addition to being on Amazon so you know frankly if I was. Scot: [26:23] This is why they’re rushing it out to compete with him I think they view themselves as. Jason: [26:26] Yeah I would be leaning into man we love Amazon to but in addition Amazon like you you should have a Shopify presence to have your own brand and yeah instead like there. Scot: [26:38] I’m not following your argument so your you don’t think they compete but then you do think they can be and then you don’t think they’re helping Merchants but they are helping rich. Jason: [26:45] Yeah basically yeah I think you summarized. Scot: [26:48] Did your cabin fever has messed up your logic. Jason: [26:51] Yeah yeah I just I think their strengths don’t overlap I think their future is much more likely to overlap but today yeah anyway. Scot: [26:59] Take it that was our 30 minute 10 minute segments so on to covid impact generally. Jason: [27:07] Yeah so while you’ve been saving the world get spiffy I mean Liam giving these briefings on the likely impacts of covid to all of our clients. And I feel like my new job is done on the Grim Reaper. Scot: [27:23] That’s why you’re in kind of a bad. Jason: [27:26] Yeah yeah maybe so. Scot: [27:29] So how bad is it to say. Jason: [27:30] Yeah it’s pretty bad so I’m not going to give everyone the whole Debbie Downer our briefing but like some highlights to kind of. Frame the impact this is having on retail. Right now there’s about 630,000 retail businesses that have closed since March so that’s about 61 percent of all retail square footage in the United States so. A huge swath is just closed. Like obviously you know a bunch of that is is Big National chains but a lot of it is also independent sole proprietor retailers and on average that sole proprietor retailer had 19 days of cash on hand so. The fact that they’re now being forced to have zero revenue for 30 or 60 days is pretty economically. Bunch of those retail stores are never going to be able to reopen. [28:30] Forrester I did a pretty good analysis on the US Department of Commerce data that came out. For March and they said the basically hey before covid 16% of all King e-commerce was online as. [28:47] Forrester defines retail sixteen percent of all retail was online. April we project that 25 percent of all retail spending is going to be online so a huge jump that likely would have taken 5 to 10 years. Just happened in one month in terms of digital transition that if you you do some fancy math that means that about 70% of all purchase decisions are primarily digitally influenced like even of you do curbside pickup or pick it up in the store you still use digital for the majority of your. Your shopping Journey so there’s a huge, Boone to digital shopping before covid about 3% of groceries in the US were purchased digitally right now 10% of all groceries are being purchased digitally, so that is kind of appealing the problem is that that digital shopping behavior isn’t close to enough to overcome the loss of brick-and-mortar shopping Behavior so. Goldman Sachs, has this retail chain index that kind of tries to show retail sales amongst National chains and they said that April they’re all retail sales are going to be down by about 20 percent. Which to put things in perspective in normal times like. [30:13] Plus or minus like one to three percent is what you’re used to seeing so twenty percent down is several orders of magnitude worse than we’re used to, Shopper track which is this company that sells traffic monitoring equipment to a lot of chains and they aggregate their data they said all retail traffic is down by 48 percent. So that right there is the. Scot: [30:34] It seems like to me do you think that’s light like should I be like 90%. Jason: [30:37] Yeah and so well so. Part of the problem is Shopper Trek cells meters to some particularly big chains that. In general tend to be classified as essential right so they’re skewed by like Walmart and Target but but even in those stores. That like are their sales comps are way up at Target and Walmart even in those stores traffic is down but fewer people want to go to the store but what they had to do pretty early in this pandemic is there actually throttling traffic and not letting as many people come in at the stores and probably don’t have time to Deep dive on that but that’s probably going to be the new normal in retail for like 18 months. [31:23] So a huge problem it for retailers with the brick-and-mortar fleet is you know you had some economic model where you were you know nominally profitable with the amount of traffic you could entice to come in your stores for the foreseeable future you’re going to have like half the traffic in your stores that you’re used to and it’s in there for you know profits are going to be super challenge so most most retailers in America even if they’re allowed to open, I really going to have to lean into digital sales and curbside pickup to augment. Very soft brick and mortar sales because we’re just not going to be allowed to have the density in the store. So add all that up and a bunch of retailers are going out of business right so like the ones that are already being talked about in the media there’s rumors that J.Crew could file this weekend, Neiman Marcus has like skipped a bunch of their interest payments and and is talking to lawyers. JC Penney is skipping payments and talking to lawyers they’re smaller chain but Tuesday morning is a dallas-based value-oriented chain that’s apparently talking to lawyers, Warden Taylor was acquired by. [32:43] The Footwear guys and now that looks like that they’re going to have to go in a bankruptcy again confounding all these bankruptcies is that it’s kind of pointless and difficult to file bankruptcy right now. Like ordinarily you’d file bankruptcy you do some kind of liquidation sale try to get some value for your assets and see if you could restructure. And at the moment you can’t do a liquidation sale so. Scot: [33:06] And I bet the courts are jammed up because there’s a lot of you know got all these restaurants filing bankruptcies and traditions like a lot of business churn right now. Jason: [33:16] Yeah and the dockets are just moving slower because the courts aren’t business as usual right now so so for so it’s a very weird time but there’s a bunch of retards that are at risk. There’s this company if you ever want to invest in a company that does well in bad retail times it’s this company called Gordon brothers so they’re the guys. Execute all these liquidation sales for all these retailers and they have come out and said hey we think 25,000 retail stores and a hundred thousand restaurants are likely to permanently close this year. So an ordinary year for retail would be like 5,000 retail stores closing a badger for retail would be like 8,000 closing. And and you know some closing is healthy because there’s this churn but 25,000 would be pretty unprecedented and then the restaurants are almost unimaginable. And then a different spin on that same premise. Is that UBS they kind of looked at this and said hey this is going to facilitate a permanent shift to e-commerce o we think. That would permanently going to see this shift from 15% e-commerce penetration a 25% e-commerce penetration. And that’s going to force a bunch of stores to close to keep the equilibrium and they did the math and said basically that means we need to close a hundred thousand retail stores by 2025. [34:43] So that means you’re in that 15 to 20,000 stores going a business closing every year for the next seven years. [34:54] Yeah so that is the super Doom and Gloom. Portion of my normal briefing I like to always end on a slightly happy note and so the. Scot: [35:10] I was going to ask you get invited. Jason: [35:11] Yeah yeah well like if you pay me you get the second half of the story which is what I think you should do to survive and thrive in that Clement. Scot: [35:20] Okay cool. Jason: [35:21] Even if you don’t pay me the one happy Trend and all this is you can no longer adopt a pet because all the pets have been. Adopted from all the shelter so lots of deserving furry friends have a new home which in and of itself is super happy. Yeah there’s a bunch of metrics to look at to talk about this but one simple one is search volume on Google for Adopt-A-Pet is up three hundred thirty five percent. The fun ramification of that is we now have the the largest cohort of new pet owners in the United States of America that we’ve ever had and of course they all learned how to get their pet food and cat litter and all their supplies via e-commerce so if you’re a you know and Ecommerce in the pets base or pet adjacent you know you probably have a pretty bright future at the moment. Scot: [36:18] Cool what a couple other kind of what I would call Green shoots in the from I’ve had a lot of time to watch CNBC so a couple of things interesting their Apple and Google results were not as bad as expected and you may think what’s that have to do with anything but Apple actually it’s going to start opening their stores here and that will be good and then people were expecting gloom and doom from these two folks and it wasn’t as bad as expected so so there that indicates that you know. Maybe this mix of things isn’t quite as bad and we’re going to kind of come through this faster on the other side Simon properties announced a plan to open a bunch of malls and then I had a question for you everyone talks about, dopest and now there’s curbside delivery but the is and Opus is in store right so. I propose we come up with a new term just to be clear so we have both this what we had, go pack buy online pick up at Curb do you like that. Jason: [37:18] I do unfortunately I have to tell you I believe you independently invented that but you are not the only one to have invented that. Scot: [37:25] Shucks about in the UK they have click and collect how about clicking curb. Jason: [37:30] You are the first person I’ve heard to invent that I’ll add one to that vernacular though like we talked a lot about curbside pickup and that like if you’re a store with a parking lot curbside makes a lot of sense but a lot of stores don’t have their own parking lot if you’re in a mall or you’re in an urban center you might not have your own parking lot and so curbside pickup may not work and so, I’ve heard a lot of stores that have launched a door side pick up. Meaning we don’t let customers in the store but come to our front door with your your quick your QR code and we’ll deliver your order to you in a touch u.s. way. Scot: [38:09] I propose we call that bow pad bulbous bow pack and moped. Jason: [38:11] Yeah absolutely yeah can’t have enough good acronym. Scot: [38:17] Trademark Jason discussion. Jason: [38:20] Inside note like based on how things were covered from SARS in China and in 2003 when we had kind of a this kind of quarantine and what we’re seeing in China right now which is maybe two months ahead of us, you want to learn those acronyms because, curbside pickup or door side pickup are going to be a super important part of the retail shopping experience for the foreseeable future and, like probably has customers weren’t how to do it and retailers get better at it like probably forever. Scot: [38:56] Yeah so another interesting kind of thing to keep an eye on is in this is again from watching CNBC in the first weeks of the pandemic and we’ll talk about a v-shaped recovery and then it was kind of like a you and now it’s like a long L but if you there’s enough data out of China that it looks like it’s been a very sharp V recovery there so another kind of thing to be slightly optimistic I don’t want to burst your death bubble but something to be slightly optimistic about. Jason: [39:21] Yeah so so I like so what I’ve actually like when you dive into it what’s interesting is some segments some categories of product had been very v-shaped in China and other segments have been very u-shaped so it has not like not everything has come back at the same, rate which is interesting and not necessarily what you’d predict so there was a there was a theory in China that there would be a ton of Revenge shopping like that as soon as you’re allowed back in the store everyone would have rushed back to their old vices and in some cases that has happened and then another cases, it’s recovering very slowly like primarily because both in China and here consumer confidence is it all time low people are super concerned about the economy. Pretty obvious that we’re going to come out of this in a deep recession and so all of those things tend to make the recovery slower. The the most terrifying letter that I’m hearing is not U or V or L it’s w. And that is because there are a lot of places where they thought they were through the worst open back up and then saw. Re-emergence as of the virus and now and in the height of irony foreign Travelers are traveling back to China and bringing the virus back, to China with them and so like the worst thing to happen here is this w-shaped recovery where sales start to recover and then get knocked back down. Scot: [40:50] Yeah yeah I’m optimistic it’s going to be I’m going with a sharp V I’m going to be The Optimist on this show. Jason: [40:57] I I think that’s smart positioning and I admire you for it. Scot: [41:02] Let’s jump into Amazon results so so it was interesting setup coming in this because eBay actually had a really good quarter they got a new CEO so you guys got a little momentum in the e-commerce world you had this kind of, super dark clouds like Jason highlighted there and then we had Amazon results tonight so I want to walk you through those just kind of frame this up this is Amazon’s q1 results so covers January February and March we’re recording this. You know very late April so we have kind of a whole nother month of knowledge based on what happened in that quarter but just kind of you know time is, getting really warped oddly at least for me and this pandemic state so just kind of put some dates out there California was one of the earliest dates to do shelter in place / quarantine whatever you want to call it and they did March 19th in the New York XX and another States kind of came in there all the way through as late as April 1 I think Alaska was the latest it like April 3rd or something like that so so you really only had you know call it, 20 days out of the 90-day quarter so whatever 2/9 is from a math standpoint so so it’s really only kind of 15 to 20% of the quarter was impacted by the pandemic and it happened so fast it wasn’t like this kind of slope into it really. [42:27] So that being said the results are a little mixed so clear beat on the revenue side and I think 2 2 is just going to be, tremendous if they only had 20 days of this in q1 and they had him significant bq2 is just going to be there just going to destroy Q2 see how that goes but the the- was to achieve that they had to do really heavy spending on fulfillment and my guess is what happened here is Amazon, it is a stream a well-run company and one of the downsides of being extremely well done is you have the impact of like Cyber Monday in, and you know for 10 days at the end of March the system wasn’t planning for that and prepared for it so it probably took it a while to flex and know what you have to do is you have to say well we weren’t really ready for that so we’re gonna have to eat some shipping fees we’re going to have to run a bunch of extra shifts we didn’t have people for Grant to eat some overtime you know those are the kinds of things that just ramp cost way up because they are probably really good at predicting this is what revenue is going to be this is exact number of people we need in trucks and fulfillment centers all that and then when Revenue kind of surges 30% it can kind of blow that up and take you a while to catch up so that was kind of the mixed part of it let’s see another thing so that also kind of flowed through margins in the bottom line and we’ll get into specifics. [43:52] We’ll talk about AWS that was interesting a lot of people think the stock trades more on AWS even than all the other parts I’m a little skeptical about that but you know just kind of the early read and we’ll know more about this when the podcast lands but here tonight the stock was down 5% and you always see these news reports Amazon mrs. bottom line stock down 5% well the stocks been up 30 percent year-to-date nose actually up five percent during the day to day so it just kind of like went back down to the price before takes people a while to just these things and see what’s going on. So we are going to dig so that’s the high level so we’re going to dig into the corridor go through some of the results and then we’ll have detailed and super intellectual analysis so Jason run us through the headlines on revenue and profits. Jason: [44:39] Yeah happy to I’m just hoping you’re signed up for the super intellectual part of the end Revenue was a happy story so Global Revenue came in at seventy five point five billion which is up 27 percent year-over-year once you take out currency fluctuation and that’s actually a faster rate of growth than Q4 which was a 21 percent growth so 27 percent Revenue growth, in this in this quarter that is you explained is kind of only, partly influenced by covid is a happy story Wall Street was looking for 70 3.7 billion so that’s a Beat, and the high end of Amazon guidance for the quarter was 73 billion so so like from Wall Street perspective the revenue was a great story and then as you alluded to the down side of the story was profitability right so gross margin for the quarter was, 41.3% which was below wall Street’s consensus expectation of 42.5 percent so that’s a myth, largely for all the reasons you talked about like they just incurred a bunch of extra cost and. [45:55] Therefore like didn’t hit their margin goals so that means operating income came in a little bit below their goal I think it was like, it’s right around four billion dollars so I think it actually came in at 3.9 billion. Versus a goal of 4.1 billion and shipping costs which always grow rapidly for Amazon grew. Like at a an accelerated rate so shipping costs were up 49 percent year-over-year previous quarters we saw like 43 percent up so faster shipping went up even faster they’re still a hangover effect you know remember it’s not that long ago than Amazon really leaned into one day delivery and so cost kind of went up for that as well so, a perfect storm of negativity on the profit side. Scot: [46:45] Yeah and when you dig into that revenue and Amazon used to have a lot more color here now they really only give you the kind of the Geo split so North American Revenue came in at forty six point 1 billion that was a 29 percent year-over-year growth so again I haven’t seen numbers during the pandemic but coming into this e-commerce was growing, twelve to fifteen percent is that kind of what you’ve seen Jason. Jason: [47:08] Yeah I think like US Department of Commerce our comscore would say like yeah right in the fifteen percent right now. Scot: [47:14] Yeah so yeah so here you have you know Amazon accelerating up to 29% and and acceleration the way it is if you look at the year-over-year growth from queue for their at 22% so then they ramped up to 29 percent so that’s that’s a. More than a third increase in the acceleration of growth which is just it’s just really hard to put that into. It’s hard to wrap your head around it because I know we’re talking about 22 to 29 wow big deal but this is this is that a 46 billion dollar quarterly rate you know and those accelerations there just like I did the math one time and they were gobbling up like 10 JC Penney’s. A point of grow that I don’t know what that math is now but just kind of amazing. Jason: [47:58] That’s the problem like you you hear that those kind of growth rates all the time but you hear them from the smallest companies in the industry like not from the overwhelmingly you are just company in the industry. Scot: [48:10] Yeah there’s the rule of large numbers that Amazon seems to be able to defy which is which is pretty amazing International revenues came in at 19 Point 1 billion that’s 20% growth all the numbers I stayed are in constant FX or what they call XFX taking out the fluctuations of financial are, currency fluctuations so the so International Group at 20% that was also a material tick up in fourth quarter the international growth wait rate was 15% one of the units of measure everyone looks at with Amazon that’s interesting is called the unit growth rate that accelerated, just 32 percent year-over-year and then fourth quarter it was a 22 percent so that’s kind of the fastest-growing metric here that went from 22 to 32 so what’s interesting is. [49:02] That accelerated more than revenue and what that indicates is asp came down and Amazon talked about that a little bit I think they said yeah the mix really shifted a lot this Corridor to essential Goods so you can imagine toilet paper paper towels face mask know all these kinds of things they have a lower ASP than buying please digital camera or something like that so so that was interesting aspect of the quarter on the prime side, this is one of the growth rates that didn’t accelerate materially it grew 29 percent this is tucked into a footnote called subscription Services Revenue it includes some other things but it’s mostly Prime so that grew 29 percent and then in fourth quarter that was 32% what you have to realize is the fourth quarter usually almost doubles so I think like if you looked at the third quarter it was like sixteen percent and then because of the holiday you have all these people signing up for Prime so then it surges and then it usually goes back down to kind of like about half the rate of Q for so it actually kind of hovered at that cue for a rate so while it’s not an acceleration it’s pretty much signing up Prime members at a Holiday pace so that that’s you know I think that. [50:15] Probably the most material metric in here that just kind of. This is brought all these new Prime people in they’re going to get addicted to the Amazon experience post pandemic and they’re just going to kind of raise the. The sea level of so to use your setup that you said at the top of the show you know if we do get to that 25% of sales are our online Amazon’s going to get a disproportionate. Chunk of that because I’m get everyone addicted to Prime. [50:44] Third-party Marketplace the mix there has been hovering around 50 to 53 percent so even with all this going on still a lot of activity on the third party Marketplace 52% of units were from that one of the one of the big amazon things I wanted to kind of inject here not not specifically related to the quarter is there is a lot of noise so there was a congressional hearing and some ex amazonians and then some current ones gut got asked a lot of tough questions about Amazon’s private label business and in there and I haven’t read the specific thing maybe you have Jason that the kind of let. [51:21] The kind of quote-unquote let slip that they absolutely do look at third party data to come up with all these products so that was kind of. Blew Up in a New York Times article that you know Amazon is set for years they don’t do this now there’s proof that they do then you know. One of the Amazon lawyers was like yeah but you can’t know what’s in our heart or something like that and that that caused it to get even more negative PR that they kind of like they didn’t intend to but it just kind of happened so that that didn’t sound very. Very apologetic tickets so so there’s there you know it’s kind of tucked into politics little bit so this then this whole thing like kind of rolls into some politics going on but that was interesting because you know Amazon has said for a long time don’t look at that data I think everyone kind of knows practical standpoint you know how do you how do you go researcher so let’s say we were in charge of. Amazon private label batteries I mean you’re not going to look at Amazon’s data you’re going to look at, Walmart’s and Best Buy’s but not your own that just doesn’t seem practical for a lot of different things what did you think about that article. Jason: [52:27] Yeah so again like Amazon has. A number of PR challenges and that certainly one and they testified to Congress that they weren’t doing that so that that like create some legitimate concerns for them like there’s part of me that’s like. This is nothing new that hasn’t been going on in retail for 60 years right and and, I mean private label and lately exclusive products like Target is wildly successful at creating their own products and there’s nobody that doesn’t think targets not using, the sales data they get from National Brands to influence what what products they make so it’s a little bit weird. The Amazon gets singled out for this like I you know I feel like a lot of other retailers are benefiting from Amazon being in the boogeyman now like even when they. They all engage in a similar practice so to me like I don’t look at that as a super nefarious thing but I certainly understand why. You probably shouldn’t testify in front of Congress that you’re not doing something that you are I guess. [53:38] I did want to like once white piece of color onto the other things like just talking about the the revenue growth that you talked about, one of the things that’s impressive in that is once covid kicked in there’s a lot of evidence that Amazon was doing everything they could to slow down sales right so you know they certainly reduce their shipping promises for non-essential Goods, but the more interesting thing is they turned off all of these like suggestive selling features and recommendations and it really seems like when you buy stuff from Amazon right now a lot of the the successful tools they use to try to increase your basket size. [54:13] They’re intentionally not doing right now so that Revenue growth all the more impressive considering they probably didn’t use their full arsenal. To sell, and then the thing that’s interesting to me on Prime is going to be there now is this event every year that really Goose has Prime Membership which is prime day and nobody knows what’s going to happen with prime Day this year like most of us believe, at best it’s going to get postponed I think it’s on unofficially already been announced that it’s going to get postponed, but you know you wonder what’s going to happen with that this year so interesting stuff to watch as you know the category of Revenue that I like to always pay attention to is the super excitingly labeled other revenue and the the the reason I’m interested in other is because other is primarily Amazon’s advertising business so the ads the revenue they generate selling ads on their platform that that was the fastest growing piece of the revenue That’s That Grew at 44 percent which is a significant its acceleration that amount of to like 5.56 billion dollars for the quarter. [55:34] You know it’s it needs to be seasonally adjusted but if that’s a a twenty billion dollar advertising run rate to put that in perspective Google does like 41 billion in advertising so, that that they’re becoming a significant number three advertising platform behind Google and Facebook. [55:58] And I I’m spacing in my head is Google that Google does like 41 billion a quarter right. Yeah yeah so so 20 billion versus 120 billion so you know still not still far away but by far the third largest advertising platform out there so that makes them much bigger than like a snap or a Twitter or some of those folks and it’s way higher margin than all these other services. Scot: [56:28] Yeah the growth rates are pretty interesting so Google’s growing it Google and Facebook are growing kind of mid teens so call it 13 and 17 percent so the Amazons continue to grow kind of in this 40% so yeah your chart it out they’ll eventually catch up it’s going to take a while but yeah you and I are saying that about Walmart for like five years and then like sure enough five years later they did that that’s the amazing thing about that Amazon is day you know. You can kind of set these trajectories at five and ten year cycles and you know I’ve been at this long enough that you’re like crap it they just kind of did it you know if they got there. Jason: [57:03] Yeah and so this is a place where the law of large numbers probably is working right in the much slower growth of those bigger players but, like what’s also interesting not only is Amazon potentially catching them but Amazon is catching them with a mixed Revenue model where they have Diversified set of Revenue which is way better than being exclusive exclusively single Source on the advertising Revenue model which is essentially the position that the Google and Facebook are in so if Amazon ever caught them they would caught they would catch them with a much. More robust business model than, the Facebook’s and Google’s of the world so that is is super interesting and it has all kinds of ramifications every other retailers trying to figure out how like this is another you like huge competitive Advantage for Amazon you can operate on a lower retail margins when you’re supplementing that Revenue with all this ad revenue and so if. Amazon’s retail competitors you’re trying to figure out how do you get your share of that and it’s very difficult. The other piece of Revenue that everyone totally totally follows that I tend to think is overhyped you alluded to earlier is the AWS business and AWS is an awesome business there’s no question about that. [58:22] Revenue for this quarter native us was ten point two billion which is 33 percent growth which is. A slight deceleration I think I think they were right 34% last quarter but but it’s been consistently. It’s growing but but at a slower rate which again is probably the. The law of large numbers now what is interesting this quarter is margins. Um we’re considerably up for AWS so they’re up to Thirty point one percent versus 26 percent last quarter so that’s a. Meaningful increase the the reason I say overhyped despite the fact that AWS has this great business it’s a great business that’s. Segmented in the earning statement so you can see it by itself and so everyone tends to look at that and go oh that’s where all the profit is an Amazon and the retail business for example isn’t profitable, and as you and I know and as we always try to teach listeners on this show. You really can’t think of the retail business as one business there’s a bunch of business models in there and some of those business models, are probably even more profitable than AWS so you know I think of for example the three piece out of Amazon’s business as being. A much larger piece of Revenue than AWS at similar gross margins so. [59:45] Like I would not turn down the AWS business if someone offered it to me but it’s not the only jewel in Amazon. [59:56] They obviously in their earnings hyped up a lot of the ways the AWS is being helpful in the fight against covid-19 and you know there’s a lot of Educational Tools that they’re giving away free to teachers. They’re providing a lot of data and processing power to researchers all over the world to help fight covid which is interesting. The other Revenue class that I’m always interested in is Brick and Mortar retail. [1:00:22] Um and so brick and mortar retail this quarter for Amazon was up eight percent which is super interesting because the last, quarter and for the last several quarters brick and mortar retail had actually shrunk at Amazon so it was down 1% last quarter this quarter it’s up 8%. And that’s actually remarkable because. There’s a super important piece of covid friendly Revenue that isn’t in that number, so if you think of all the people that are now having Whole Foods delivered at home and you go oh Jason yeah Whole Foods is selling way more stuff as a result of covid-19 and that’s why brick-and-mortar retail revenues up. That would make total sense except that in Amazon’s world if you place the order for those groceries online and then pick it up curbside or have it delivered to your house. That’s not considered brick-and-mortar Revenue so this 8% is actually people that paid at a cash register, in a whole food store and so interesting that that jump so much this quarter, and potentially bodes well for Amazon given that they kind of had lost ground there and and historically what they’ve said is oh yeah we lost ground because we shifted a bunch of people to digital, so this quarter more people than ever shifted to digital and they were still able to grow brick-and-mortar Revenue which is interesting and and along those lines. [1:01:46] I forget the count but I want to say there are like 340 Whole Food stores in the country. They’re only delivering groceries out of 80 of them when this whole thing started and so like well. It gets a lot of Buzz the amount of groceries Whole Foods delivers versus like a Walmart is is Tiny and what is interesting is that. Being the great operators that they were they were able to expand from 80 stores delivering groceries to 150 stores, delivering groceries during covid so they added a lot of infrastructure very quickly to sort of beef up their their curbside pickup and grocery delivery presents, and a little fun fact, I’ve been talking for a while about this new grocery concept that Amazon was working on and getting ready to open in LA and it probably was scheduled to open during this and did not open but what’s interesting is that that store in Woodland Hills has a, unique technology in it for optimizing grocery packing and it’s called the micro fulfillment centers kind of a robotic e-commerce site that’s inside of a grocery store for for filling grocery orders and what they’ve done with that story they haven’t opened it but they’re using it as a dark store on there delivering groceries, out of that that store which is kind of cool so. Scot: [1:03:08] Hipsters way we call this Cloud store like a cloud kitchen cloud storage. Jason: [1:03:13] Sure sure that’s a few like dark store already existed but yeah I’ll go Cloud store for you. Scot: [1:03:19] We could call it a buy online ship from cloud bop bop fluke I need to work on that I’m trying. Jason: [1:03:26] Yeah be careful when you Wing those those acronyms like during the show you’re going to come up with some profanity. Scot: [1:03:34] I know that’s it keeps listeners on edge they love. Jason: [1:03:36] Awesome. Scot: [1:03:39] Is Scott gonna mess up. Jason: [1:03:40] Exactly so that was kind of the story on retailgeek. Scot: [1:03:44] Yes I know we’re bumping up against time so I’ll jump through this pretty quick you know in wall Street’s mind it’s kind of like what have you done for me lately so you one’s over tell us about Q2 so Amazon did put out guidance for Q2 which is interesting because a lot of companies have just essentially said they’ve got done what’s called quote-unquote withdrawn guidance meaning hey so much going on I have you I don’t even know what to tell you so you know well we’ll see how the quarter shapes up Amazon did put guidance out there and they said Q2 is going to come in at seventy five to ninety 1 billion and just kind of as a reminder at the top of the show Jason said we did 75 billion so so kind of you know at least as good as q1 but with a fair amount of upside to that 91 billion number. [1:04:34] Amazon has had a history of kind of coming in at or above the top end of their guidance at the midpoint there that would be 23% your growth and you come again we’re kind of grown at 27% here so I do I feel like they’re sandbagging a little bit there and they’re going to come in at the highwomen Part of That Wall Street was at 78 billion so kind of in line with what they were thinking they’ve been creeping that up as the pandemic stuffs happened big surprise to Wall Street and this may be why Amazon noise goes to these invest in Harvest Cycles this was a signal that hey we are going into the mother of all invest cycles and they essentially said hey Q2 bottom line is going to be a range of minus one and a half billion to positive one and a half billion so kind of 3 billion range there. [1:05:19] That doesn’t sound crazy but what Wall Street was expecting was more like four billion so they effectively said to Wall Street I know you were thinking we’re going to make four billion next quarter but we’re actually going to possibly spend all that and another one and a half billion and essentially invest five and a half billion dollars that quarter so in that kind of takes us to the analysis color commentary so in the note to shareholders it’s usually a lot of fluff in there but there was this really interesting line where Bezos said and I’m going to quote this quote if you’re a shareholder an Amazon you may want to take a seat because we are not thinking small so. [1:05:57] You know I don’t know what that means but it kind of says to me everyone interpreted it different it says to me that they have, they see the surge they think it’s going to stick and they’re going to just like invest like we’ve never seen before into that that invest mode so that’s going to be really interesting to look at they specifically called out in Q2 they’re going to make over 4 billion dollar investment that called it into covid related activities and you’re going to break that down for us so let’s see so it’s gonna be interesting how much of this do they spend on covid related stuff how much is and shipping and fulfillment centers that you know they’ve talked a lot about how they’re going to hire hundreds of thousands of folks so so that’s interesting. Jason went what did you pick apart from some of the color there. Jason: [1:06:52] Yeah well first of all like just thinking about that Top Line like I was terrified when I read that and the reason I was terrified is because um you know they’re a bunch of retailers that are going to go out of business and Amazon’s going to spend a fortune grabbing all of tha

If you have a Shopify store, growth is top of mind. And over the last few weeks, growth has taken on a whole new meaning. So we asked Kurt Elster, Shopify Expert and host of the ultra-popular Unofficial Shopify Podcast, to come back to share his wisdom. And more than 200 entrepreneurs just like you reached out with questions for him. So whether your brand is thriving or you're trying to find a way to jumpstart growth, Kurt has some tips for you.

Caroline Balinska is the founder of Just Ask Parker. Shopify's ONLY Small Task Marketing Agency. Caroline has over 18 years of experience in marketing and over 12 years experience in ecommerce. Having started, grown and sold over 12 businesses, what makes Caroline's skills so highly sort after is that she comes from everything from the business owners perspective. Caroline found that the reason startup ecommerce stores where failing was not the right help to get over that hurdle of their first 1000 sales. She created Just Ask Parker to help Shopify store owners get more traffic and sales. Caroline is also the host of the #1 podcast for newbie Shopify Merchants and created the most comprehensive Shopify Approved marketing course, find it over in the Shopify approved courses list. Support The Podcast! Buy Me A Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/tapeyourtime HER LINKS www.winningwithshopify.com/summit www.1000saleandbeyond.com www.justaskparker.com Key Takeaways: - Being busy, happiness, and merely working for money - Running a business on your own terms - Ecommerce & how it frees your time - Why Shopify - Principles that make some Shopify owners more successful than others - Product-Market fit / Customer Service / Quality Products - Importance of customer service phone number & reviews - Calling your clients (Customer experience) - Influencer Videos - 1 Type of video that works well on Ecommerce - What sort of investment should you make

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. Automated Transcription of the show Transcript Jason: [0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 190 being recorded on Monday September 30th 2019 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scott Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners hey Jason do you know what kind of show we are going to do today. Jason: [0:46] I'm guessing a deep dive, Jason and Scott show. Scot: [1:02] That's right we are going to do a deep dive into everyone's favorite topic will at least mine marketplaces. Jason: [1:09] I sort of assumed that you assumed whatever your favorites were where everyone else's paper. Scot: [1:15] Of course yeah and so we've done deep Dives on Amazon well done a couple other topics in marketplaces come up a lot. I thought this is a good time to talk about marketplaces cuz there's actually a lot of innovation going on in market place has a lot of changes and then. The ratchet here together and I'm speaking on at a B2B show tomorrow called B2B next and I'm talking about marketplaces and how that impacts B2B folks. Jason: [1:41] But it should be said that you probably created a bunch of fascinating unique content just for the podcast and you might reuse it but you're not just giving us the. Scot: [1:50] Oh no this is totally custom for our listeners. Jason: [1:52] William you of course are the marketplace Guru but so I am super excited to hear your latest updated take on how marketplaces are doing and where they're going so take it away is God. Scot: [2:05] Yeah yes it is the first thing I want to do is just the down-low backgrounds are all on the same page and the number one question that comes up is what is a Marketplace and I think everyone out there has their own definition I have a pretty broad definition of marketplaces because then I think. That helps us not talk about the different flavors and. You know some of the pros and cons of those flavors some people have a really tight definition of marketplace is a lot of times it's funny you get into these late-night over beer discussions around well is that a Marketplace or not. Azure me simply a Marketplace. Jason: [2:37] People in the world get into a late night beer conversation about. Scot: [2:40] You'd be surprised especially at the people you and I hang out. Jason: [2:45] Imagine if the channel advisor conference is that happens a lot but yeah. Scot: [2:49] There's actually Prime more discussion around what's not a Marketplace and what is anyway my kind of loose definition of a Marketplace is a venue where buyers and sellers come together to meet and buy stuff. The meeting is just part of the fun of it all but it's really a a way for buyers and sellers to meet each other or transact and and. How many conomic kind of exchange is that that you're definition. What will talk as we go into different types of marketplaces so we can kind of talk about you the different flavors with in that room. Jason: [3:23] No I don't that's not a controversial definition to me I guess the Nuance buyers and sellers come together to buy stuff like I probably would say buy stuff from each other like to me that's the. Scot: [3:36] Exchange so what's interesting is when you look at the data out there. The trend is marketplaces are growing faster so marketplaces is Corinne Gartner a growing 23% year-over-year in the US versus kind of 15% of eCommerce now they're part of that 15% so it's actually probably like. 12% or 10% - marketplaces the number of marketplaces exploding if you look at markets like China over there over 90% of transactions are on a Marketplace so you hear the US were at something like 55 60% and you have a lot of people would would predict that at some point we may actually get because marketplaces are growing so fast in there so many new ones popping up maybe we'll look more like China down the road so that begs the question why are these marketplaces so popular and I can look at five areas where marketplaces add value in in today's world in this kind of layers in with changing consumer behavior for the consumer has changed more in the last 10 years in the last hundred so consumers Love convenience what were my favorite Jeff Bezos isms is people asking you I'm starting a company what should I. [4:49] What should I bet on and his recommendation is bet on things that won't change so instead of picking something that's like the hot new thing that on something that's not going to change and this is why I consumers like marketplaces because they bring elements that that you know people are just going to love more of down the road so convenience no one. People dye their time more and more so convenience is a good one selection so if you're going to go to Avenue B at a physical location or website or an app for what not you know the more you have to buy from assuming you can navigate it the better off I'm people of Valium so in addition to convenience bball is love to save money I'm and then the those are pretty tangible and we can measure them the ones that are little bit harder to measure our trust. So a lot of the value provided by marketplaces is giving the buyer and seller this kind of trust umbrella to to make sure that if something goes wrong in the transaction and can be unwell and then. [5:48] You another thing that's really helped the surge of marketplaces is the increase of mobile traffic so a lot of bubble places we'll talk about have elements that they give mobile kind of the Titan with the phone that's obviously helped Amazon and eBay so when he when you're when you're we're out and about the more products in your hand the better off so mobile has been another area that's really cause to search here and then the creation of a lot of the new marketplaces can be put back. [6:19] Mobile the surgeon mobile the last one the last trenda I spend a lot of time thinking about it and we've had Casey on the show is that this bifurcation this is value or any consumer versus the convenience or any consumer and what are things that I think a lot of. People I talked to in the industry that don't get is you like okay convenience I get it but then there's like this addictive element of convenience so you know you and I are big Starbucks user so once you've used the mobile app functionality of Starbucks then the next time you get in that Starbucks line even though I happily waited there for years before the mobile app came out. When should when you get back in that line it just feels like it's taking 10 times longer than it should server example I checked into my hotel hear the lock didn't work they sent for someone to come they didn't come in 5 or 10 minutes it felt like an eternity so I just went it was easier to go get a new room then then to the Other Extreme tips of people are addicted to zero friction and decreasing friction and that's going to be a theme that you'll see when we talked not openly about why are marketplaces so popular vote but wire what are the next wave of marketplaces. Jason: [7:30] I totally buy that song like the focus on these sort of a bum Evergreen benefits. Scot: [7:37] So those are the benefits that marketplaces Bluebird by a lot of people are familiar with this kind of Amazon flywheel I was one of the first people to use it now it's kind of overdone but yeah it it shows this is one of the reasons marketplaces are growing so rapidly is you have this this virtuous cycle a lot of people call it Network effects where you know you. If I will get started off with selection is anger point so he could to resolve selection that brings more consumers in that means more sellers come to your platform cuz they're going after the buyers and that brings more selection that's one leg of the flywheel and then the other leg is once you get enough selection you start have overlapping selection now you have competition prices go down that's kind of this classic flywheel this built on these consumer preferences that that are causing marketplaces to grow faster than individual consumer things. Cool so you know if you're most of our listeners are kind of what I would classify as retailers or brands of all sizes why should you care. The boy that says it's kind of largest segment of e-commerce it's growing and we want to do on this one is actually kind of turn your head sideways a little bit and talk about Sony's new models and then I think that will help you dick even most retailers are already kind of cross the chasm of thinking about should I sell on a Marketplace or not there's a couple of new ways to think about marketplaces I wonder who's here if they will talk about. [9:06] Let's talk about the the types of first of all let's listen to these couple terms so we talked about marketplaces one of the things we talk about is we use this slang one piece repeat. I'm a third-party Marketplace is a Marketplace like eBay where just sellers are are there and it's only sellers involved. I'm a first party transaction is where is a traditional retail transaction. So Amazon's one of those marketplaces that's kind of unique in that you have first party meeting Amazon is departing and third-party meeting through other sellers. I'm so we would tend to use more talk about marketplaces as an industry we tend to use this one p3p kind of language. I'm your specific to Amazon a lot of people within just Amazon Silo Amazon has two platforms vendor Central and Seller Central so vendor Central is the one p platform so if you're going to sell on Amazon to use that. I'm in the 3p platform is vendor Central those things are emerging as as a popular strategy has become to do both which is even kind of more mind-bending. So it's those are just some binoculars to make sure one understands cuz we'll start to use those another common language is gmv gross merchandise value or volume depending on who you talk to I'm in weird catching there is just like the payments world you have kind of two measurements you have Revenue but it's a derivative of the transactional value going to the system I'm in the payments roll we use TPB a lot of times is that. [10:36] Kind of a transaction processing volume and then gmv is the value of the goods going through the marketplace and then the formula is the most Mark marketplaces have a a commission. Take rate are there a lot of different names for I prefer take rate the fees they charge for transacting on their platform the revenue is is essentially gmv X take rate equals the revenue of the marketplace so those are bunch of terms I just wanted to lay out there. Jameson. Jason: [11:07] I think it's the big ones a question I often get and I'm curious what your answer is is what happened at 2 p. Scot: [11:15] Yes or some people call Dropship to pee so so that would be second-party yep so you know if you want to kind of stretch at you can you can kind of say a Dropship relationship is is kind of a 2p. Jason: [11:30] Yeah I just like to say it's it's not it's not a sequence it's we're talking about first party things and third-party things not counting. Scot: [11:37] Yeah yeah there's no fourth party stuff there could yeah I don't know if you have to the types of products are the types of marketplaces so so, I just mentioned so eBay is a pure third-party Marketplace a lot of people are familiar with some of the Chinese marketplaces like tmall and taobao all those are all pure third party then you have your Amazon introduced this idea of what I would call hybrid Marketplace so you have some first-party some third-party all the other retailer type marketplaces are like that so Walmart Sears Etc they would be this hybrid kind of a thing there's. If you're on a Marketplace and you can't tell you no it's a market Place item but you can't tell who the seller is I call that a Dropship Marketplace yeah there's probably some other way there to Brand it where the seller is masked so you're essentially you know you're buying from this these kind of sellers back there but they're not identified in their own way that's how all Overstock works for example in a couple of the new marketplaces will talk about. What are those all of this stuff I just described are what we call two-sided marketplaces so there's a buyer and a seller. [12:49] What are the interesting things in The Last 5 Years in this is kind of probably part of the Advent of of the rise of the smartphone in the mobile world is 3 sided marketplaces so you add this third side I'm a classic example here is the food delivery companies so you have the buyer who is the hungry consumer not like you and I right now it's around dinner time and then the seller is typically restaurant it may actually be a commercial kitchen is kind of coming up as another thing. [13:14] That's two sides of the marketplace but the two of us unless we're going to go pick up the food the two of us can transact until we have that third side which is typically the delivery Marketplace so a lot of this was born from realizing with the ride sharing apps Uber lifting the big ones and then Dede in the. [13:35] In China's accident D D D D D D anyway. To that created this this kind of ability to say hey there's there's a fair number of gig workers out there that are willing to move something from point A to point B. Plug them into this Marketplace and now we've got a three-sided Marketplace that's one example you're now seeing. Obviously ubereats kind of participates that in themselves but now you're seeing furniture delivery all kinds of marketplaces now that are on this three sided so that the third leg that most of you they're familiar with product marketplaces is new is the the middle infrastructure Logistics kind of marketplace to get to plugged in on that side. Jason: [14:20] And is I can imagine that a little bit of a gray area like. How much value that that middleman provide sort of designates whether it's a two party or third-party market like cuz you you could look at Amazon and say. Like even on their third party sales when they're doing fulfillment by Amazon and adding all all this value to the sale that that could be a 3 of 3 sided Marketplace. Scot: [14:47] Where to get super technical at kind of think if if if the buyer or seller is providing the logistics it's a two-sided Marketplace. But an example where would be a three-sided Marketplace is Amazon does have Flex which is a driver Marketplace so so if your order came through Flex I would argue that's a three-sided Marketplace but if Amazon was employed the drivers now on Amazon does have this hold delivery program which is kind of sin cholita 99 so yeah so so if I think increasingly more and more of it is three sided. [15:19] Yea nice things blurry over time, so that's kind of where we are and that's the history so it said you can look at the size out there the biggest Marketplace operator I put elastics here cuz why these China Chinese companies that when they report these DMV numbers their there they're not gaap accounting there's a lot of craziness that goes on in the China market around did a transaction really happen or not. I'm and there's there can be a bigger disconnect between the DMV and the actual Revenue the company silver example Alibaba has a Marketplace called. A cowbell where and in an Ali Baba itself to be to be Marketplace really buyers and sellers meet and it's more of an ad platform and then you know they make some assumptions and say that's the gmv they're not actually collecting. A rake. Take Kratom from that Marketplace so I think I actually just recently taobao. What's London's weeaboo tencent. So so tencent Alibaba and JD depending on your kind of which day do you look at and believe there there's a largest ones out there and and that's because you have the Chinese e-commerce markets already bigger than the US and then 90% of its marketplaces and and the others there's there's a kind of race they all have to, put out bigger and bigger DMV numbers hard to tell how much of that is true. Jason: [16:45] I sometimes think of it they now LG is like a Craigslist where. Craigslist probably classified ads like facilitated a lot of sales but Craigslist wouldn't know. Exactly how much sales they they fulfilled so you can imagine them reporting some estimate of how much sales were generated then there may not be perfectly at. Scot: [17:08] Yeah what they do is just the way you and I we were kind of napkin diagramming this we would say well yeah we had this many what you do know is traffic numbers rights we had this many listings in this many buyers come through let's assume a conversion rate of. X percent somewhere between 5 and 10 probably and then an average order value of 75 bucks and then boom you know Craigslist does 50 billion dollars a year. Those numbers you have to take a grain of salt, then as we as we go down a level on Teen Mom which is another part of the Alibaba that one is actually you know you're required to use a Lipe and everything it has at a crate so there you can see that you. It's relatively large and even just tea Mall itself is effectively. To Amazon's in an eBay so it's huge so you know it's kind of the scale we're talking about here so there's a bigger marketplaces in the China area, I'm did you come down to the US Amazon has grown to be larger than than eBay kind of north of 100 billion and then you have eBay at about 90 billion and then you come down and and you have a bunch of smaller marketplaces. [18:15] I'm so glad all this up and it's about 50 to 60% of transactions you guys are going through I'm by by gmv dollars transaction dollar amount are going to marketplaces. So so definitely a big opportunity for Brands to consider and and and think about as well as retailers. Let's talk about some of the new trends in marketplaces so some of the new marketplaces that have hit the scenes so Target plus I think it's one of the biggest ones that's been announced in the last year that hasn't gotten a lot of PR so you know full disclosure I guess I should have said this at the top but I started a company in 2001 called Channel advisor we went public in 2013 2015 I moved from CEO to Executive chairman of still chairman of the board there but I'm not involved in the day-to-day but I didn't know we're one of their launch Partners at Target plus and that's been a big. From what I understand that's been really successful for those sellers on there now a lot of times when when folks. Get into the world of marketplaces they they rightly do so cautiously nothing Targets in that camper I think it's an invitation only type of a Marketplace but. I'm right here it's doing pretty well. [19:33] The end in one of their they're interesting Innovations is using that store footprint when we have conversations with retailers about launching of marketplace one of the big concerns is I am so someone buys a pair of sneakers from Jason sneaker shop and they try to return them to the Target store you know what it what the heck is the sales associate going to do. I'm Target to the lot of chair with their Marketplace tube to really kind of tie that whole experience together and in my understanding is it works really well where you could buy anything on the market place and return it in the store on your next Target once it's kind of a neat. Differentiator that have their Walmart obviously has had kind of ups and downs with with marketplaces so they had their own Marketplace in the acquired judge Mark Lori who came along with that acquisition is a big believer in marketplaces and he was at Amazon for a long time. He started Quincy which didn't operate a Marketplace but sold was very aggressive selling on marketplaces and leveraging them and we mentioned you mentioned on a recent new show that they're kind of doubling back down on marketplaces at Walmart, you you point it out to other new marketplaces that you wanted Highland. Jason: [20:43] So I sign in malls has launched the marketplace and appreciate that make is a head-scratcher but then you realize Simon has traffic that comes to their own website and they've. They're trying to drive traffic to their own website and they want to be able to sell all the. The goods that their tenants in their mall would offer it right and so what what's the solution for having a. You know website owned by Simon that can sell goods from all these different tenants from their brick-and-mortar properties it's essentially hosta Marketplace where are those tenants can sell their goods to the traffic that comes to send them all so they're kind of created a digital version of there. Their physical malls I know and this was interesting to me because Urban Outfitters is sort of a vertically integrated set of brands that mostly sell their own stuff. And they actually the last year launched the marketplace and sort of expanded their assortment which is interesting because I don't think that they were a big wholesaler outside of the marketplace. Scot: [21:55] Yeah and then another Trend within marketplaces is to go really vertical so you know if you're a buyer of a certain category the generic experience you get from an Amazon or Ebay or Target or Walmart is your maybe you have some filters by size or something like that. But let's say I'm a comic book collector and I really care about you is this graded by a commercial Grading Company and what is that grade and you know what series is this thing I maybe if I go to eBay looking for that item I maybe it's kind of going to 5000 listings to try to narrow it in that maybe and then I can't really get my handle on if it's really kind of what I'm looking for so you're seeing this kind of explosion of what I would call hyper vertical experiences for folks one that's kind of a really interesting one is house so this is in the in the. [22:50] Home home home improvement category, how started out is this really cool way to husband and wife team wear I think I did was a kitchen remodel I think they did a remodel part of their house they realized that there was no tools for really kind of visualizing it in and putting together the whole project. So you know being I think one of them are there both Engineers they they said there's a need here so I think they kind of. [23:16] You know I necessity was the mother of invention that created this tool I'm in for a long time it was just that and then what they realized is if you go through the steps of saying alright I want a new bedroom and here's the drapes and the bedding and the mattress and all that stuff and you could print a shopping list when I go that last kind of step and say hey here's a little Marketplace of your now you're at the bed Choice selection now you can see a Marketplace of beds you can see a Marketplace of wall coverings whatever it is so that's really interesting one where you know you would you wouldn't have to think of a Marketplace being plugged in that way but it do, I've actually seen them on the IPO watch list recently that this the GMB from the marketplace component is is by far the largest part of what they do and it kind of. You know that that tail is wagging the dog now where the remodeling tool is become just a driver for sales into the marketplace one of our favorite guest and listeners Jason Del Rey is really into the sneaker area there they're called sneakerheads so there is a huge I don't know how to size this was all so funny about the internet and then they become. [24:28] Five ten fifteen billion dollar niches because once you kind of get in there to find it in proven experience it can explode on you so there's a company called goat and they recently merge with Fight Club they're effectively a Marketplace for new and used sneakers really kind of putting out a grape by her experience for that sneaker collector I'm which can imagine you know notify me when you find this item I've been looking for in my size and this condition again the things that are really important to these folks have a different differentiated experience. [25:01] On the show we've been talking a lot about real real recently that's essentially a Marketplace for these kind of higher-end items that need a verification stuff. So if you're going to go and make a an investment in a $500 Louis Vuitton bag or a certain piece of jewelry you don't want that to be something that was sold outside the Theater District on a on a sidewalk if you want someone that is an expert in, identify certifying and verifying that these are real items that are are you know from the manufacturer. So so those are some of the interesting things Trends there another Trend we wanted to talk about was. Marketplaces kind of going offline so it so there's a couple we had date on the show that's a good example of you know you could call that a krog Marketplace but sky like a real estate Marketplace in the way to so your Betta is gone out and and adult stores and they have these brands that are kind of like Mike releasing some of the real estate inside of their crate this really interesting unified experience for people to discover products what are some of the other up-and-coming physical marketplaces. Jason: [26:11] Yeah but I think that's physical marketplaces are really catching on there's a neighborhood Goods which started out in Dallas and I think they just did. A reasonable size raised in my head I want to say like 10 million. And they've announced a few new stores like there might be one coming to New York right now there is a store in New York called Schofield fields that has some like interesting spins on the customer experience they offer for each one. Macy's has a. A separate section of the store they called Macy's Marketplace which is powered by Beta so uses the beta technology but it's it's Macy's property and they essentially lease a space in that and those are. I'm starting to me all examples of these emerging physical marketplaces. Scot: [27:01] Yeah and Alibaba is actually gone on record in and that's their biggest strategy for the next five years as they call it Ono online and offline so taking all these things they learn in the marketplace online we have infinite shelf and then boiling it back down into a physical type experience. Jason: [27:16] And I forgot to mention there's a. One of these physical marketplaces in the Mall of America which I think it's called four corners and then Mackenzie the Strategic consulting firm just announced they were going to open their own brick and mortar store as a. Certified living retail lab also in Mall of America and my understanding is that is basically a brick-and-mortar marketplaces well. Scot: [27:43] I think we need a road trip to Mall of America. Maybe we'll go next July I don't I don't go to Minnesota past October. Jason: [27:50] Probably smart and I'ma have to you may have a tough time adapting to Caribou Coffee in Minnesota that will get moved. Scot: [27:56] Okay I can make the coffee change its the minus 10 degree weather that doesn't sit well with. Jason: [28:00] Fair enough. Scot: [28:01] So that's kind of an interesting trend is in the end product marketplaces is kind of going it from online into the offline world a couple other big trends that we're seeing in product marketplaces put into two buckets what is friction reduction in this is kind of an that your convenience bucket that we talked a lot about in the other one is advertising Marketplace hybridization so I did the things are Blended together the site of reduction of friction you know one of the sets of Facebook has been quite active in the marketplace category in there taking a couple runs at this that that haven't worked if you remember Way Way Back you should be able to set up your company pages and have a little store in a tablet I'm weeks terminal out with that with folks and knowing whatever they could barely find your company page much less the antelope Marketplace tab. [28:51] And then then Facebook kind of just created what they saw was all these people forming their own little groups so we have one of these in my neighborhood where it's just kind of a the Facebook group and then it it tends to very quickly have a little kind of product section. [29:05] Play Private Eyes that with something called Facebook Marketplace which is really more that Craigslist kind of a vibe but now they're they're doing a lot of experimentation around that to make it and inviting real sellers in there that are not just kind of know hey I have used cops for fifty bucks kind of a thing they're they're putting the kind of tiptoeing into a seller platform payments platform in those kinds of things and then also. Also within that world Instagram has been quite aggressive on this and just rolled out Instagram check out and that is seems to be getting a lot of focus from Facebook and in a lot of nursing directions they could take that so what interesting direction is if I'm an influencer could I recommend a certain product and have you know almost like an affiliate type relationship there where I promote you I have a picture of this item and it made its cool pair of shoes and you know. You can buy it directly from the brand but then I get some kind of a revenue share from from promoting them so that's the only really interesting and they seem to be putting a lot of a fair amount of effort into the Instagram check out then so far it seems to be going really well didn't you want to add on the Facebook Instagram son. Jason: [30:22] No I mean again I think those are definitely. Interesting experiments at the moment like it you know it big controversial question is that that model has worked really well for a long time in China so far it hasn't had amazing success in the US so it's I feel like it's interesting to. Keep watching that and see if it gets customer. Scot: [30:46] Yeah absolutely said so the there's been way more failures here than than successes in the US to Twitter had a buy button Facebook how to buy Button as well as part of the ad format. Jason: [30:59] Yeah I think Pampers at online store on Facebook in 2007. Scot: [31:04] And you know what I would is a Marketplace person with a lot of these Market. Please continue to get wrong is the user experience so that order one for example you know and we were we were one of their Partners on this. You know it's pretty easy to put a buy button out there but it's really hard to answer questions like well where is the product detail Page live. Yeah what would a lot of people that want to do a quick and dirty Marketplace also don't get right is inventory so you know the Twitter answer was will people will go buy the stuff and then the retailer can't all of it was out of stock let's see you do that twice is consuming your life. Forget the Twitter by button because you know it's totally not helpful things like sizes so and then if you get another calories categories to get into a parent-child relationship so you got like colors and sizes and then you get into fitment in so so a lot of a lot of times people say you know this kind of Go Fast and break stuff and BP culture I'll Chris he's really bad user experiences and I would argue a lot of these guys have not made it into the marketplace world because they've got so many corners it was really bad customer experiences early on. Jason: [32:17] Diana it gives me I just in general with marketplaces what are the magic you have to get right is you you have to make it work for both audiences the buyers and the sellers and if you like you know some people are really good at. Appealing to the buyers. But they don't offer nothing manatees to the sellers or you know some people are really good at offering amenities for the sellers but they're not graded attracting buyers and it seems like the trick to all successful marketplaces is. They're they're able to grow their value prop on both sides of that Marketplace in relative Harmony so they they don't end up with a. Ton of buyers and not enough stuff for them to buy and they don't end up with a ton of inventory and not enough consumers that want an inventory. Scot: [33:02] Yeah yeah Dan and I you know how to start a guy get approached by a lot of people building marketplaces and analogy like to use is it's like rowing a canoe or a kayak if you if you only roll on one side yours can go in this endless circles and, marketplaces great when you get it up to scale but it's really hard to get it up to scale because you're essentially building to businesses you're blowing the buyer side in the seller side and you've got to have enough capital and hotspot and then also. You know there's this balance in the force kind of a thing that you have to do on on both sides of the equation to build the marketplace right and most of them do fail because they'll, they want reason of capital they'll they'll row on one side of boat and not the other or you know that they won't nail that. User experience in the middle or they won't have enough value a lot of times you just kind of introducing a buyer and a seller isn't enough you have to really kind of had that. Trust factor and you know that serendipitous Discovery and in some of those things that are really hard to nail 100%. Jason: [34:07] I was going to say I don't know that you'd call these different kinds of marketplaces or not but two that are coming up a lot and my conversations so I'm starting to have a lot of what I've been calling B2B marketplaces. A business that usually is the manufacturer of a product that historically did not sell that product to direct direct to their there. In business user that they had a an intermediary distribution Channel and so is the world is gone from physical to digital and they stop taking fax orders and move to a website. They still don't want to cut out their distribution channel so. Traffic for the product is going to the brand manufacturer But ultimately the brand manufacturer wants. One of their value-added resellers are there Distributors are there dealers or whatever their framework is to be the person that sells that product and so. Marketplaces a perfect solution. For that so I'm trying to see a lot of businesses like she would Packard Enterprise where you know one about the servers at hpe. Calm and then by the server from. A bar that's essentially a seller on hewlett-packard's Marketplace. Scot: [35:25] Absolutely yes so this is where we can I take this Marketplace concept and most people think of it and I should I saw an Amazon or not it's kind of like they're big Marketplace question but if we turn it on if we turn it 90 degrees how can you use marketplaces to make your business better so so using it as a way to using a Marketplace as a way to you know navigate Channel conflicts is one opportunity another one that we see a lot of and it is kind of what you see with the targets and Walmarts in the world is exploding Out product selection so let's say, you not like to argue about the away suitcases for example so it's always built this really great audience of Travelers and if they want to really explode out there skus sure they can go to the old school way of of kind of building a bunch of them themselves but what if what if they just want to you have some recommended products that work well like maybe some Bose headphones or something like that for travelers or. [36:22] Hello I'm selling that they probably wouldn't build they can go to that old school way of going and sourcing people to EDI and all the stuff or would it be more effective to effectively just kind of hanging a travel Marketplace off of their website so it's another thing that's kind of interesting is you know and then. And you don't have to again when it when you bring that up a lot of people like oh you know I don't want people to buy toys from my thing you can you can because you can control this you can control the rules of engagement right so even in your B2B example A lot of people will say why don't want. [36:56] Tell her one and tell her to compete with its that's fine you don't have to. Marketplaces that. Just have one seller and maybe it's by geography whatever the Rules of Engagement are of your Marketplace it have there but what you're doing is you're part of that that ethos of the Ring a Marketplace is. Everyone having a great user experience giving the seller tools to manage things on their selves versus you as a company taking on all the ownership of that management of things so it's a much better shared responsibility and your supplier will be happier when when they have cell service tools cuz they can make a bunch of decisions themselves versus you kind of forcing them on them within the Rules of Engagement. Jason: [37:40] That's why make sense the other use case that's come up a lot I don't know if it's just. Accord have timing or there's a lot of these these these kids is out there but is a Marketplace solving a regulatory problem and so by that what I mean is the automotive industry for example like in most cases the manufacturer is not allowed to sell the cars to a consumer so a manufacturer makes the car. A dealer has to sell the car to a consumer and so even one of the solutions there is at the manufacturer's website via Marketplace and have the Dealer's be. Sellers on that Marketplace and in much the same vein is illegal for the the alcohol product. Creator to sell the alcohol to a consumer so drizly one of the most popular alcohol delivery services. Is really just another Marketplace you know they're they're not the seller of record selling alcohol and having to deal navigate all the. The issues with alcohol licenses in distributor licenses versus dealer license is there a market place and they allow. Retailers that have a retail distribution alcohol license to sell on their Marketplace. Scot: [38:54] Yeah and you can imagine you know what's used automobile dealership because it's kind of near and dear to my heart you know you can imagine will who gets the lead well let's say you're in you look like our region of Raleigh-Durham there's like four Toyota dealers within like a kite area well now it now you can use those Rules of Engagement to create the right Behavior so you can say who gets the highest scores on there their service department whose sales reps get the highest NPS scores and you can kind of change the the flow of leads are our sales into the the dealership based on these kinds of Rules of Engagement and drive the behaviors you want so you maybe have a bunch of dealer saying that vehicles in stock and they don't suit so there's all out of stock in the stock thing a lot of the same kind of things we we see in the world. I guess cars are product but they can have in the widget world could be applied to the vehicle thing or or. Or even alcohol which alcohol store gets the order could be based on you know. [39:58] How update are you on this then you can start to create all these interesting new monetization mechanisms you know like you know the dealers made us an ad platform you could learn them so that's another one of things we're going to talk about the second is is this is interesting way to layer in advertising into marketplaces in and have a whole nother layer of you know self management in letting giving the marketplace seller participants pools to let them hash it out figure out what the right thing is for the consumers. [40:30] So then so the two biggest Trends in marketplaces that were seeing kind of here around 2019 I talked about reduction of friction so so we're seeing people trying to do that in Social and a lot of times what we're doing is we're bringing the transaction up right so let's use Instagram as an example so you see this exciting new shoe on Instagram now you go to Shalom some shoe site and then you have to login create a thing you know all that stuff, and then re-enter all your payment details so bad by pulling it up and getting getting a bunch of clicks it's going to make it better for everybody that's whatever it's got going for the Holy Grail and as you mentioned has worked in China but not the US ship was in that vein Google has been chewing away at this for a long time and their own kind of version 4 or 5 of this on the latest iteration is Google shopping actions and that's where you do a search for something and you'll see this little icon and that effectively you can buy now right from the Google ad on your mobile device I believe this is Android only right now but where are you know, again. Lozier child as a partner in the sand I think we're seeing some really good traction from folks that are in this program because you can imagine you know you go from a you all right I didn't add I got to click then I had to have a converging and all that good stuff to now I had an ad and I got to convert so you take all these steps out of there it's going to be better. Jason: [41:59] Just less friction between the purchase intent and the purchase. Scot: [42:02] Yeah. Yeah and you know what's interesting is the travel industry is ahead of us in the e-commerce world so Google travel has you can buy a ton of stuff right from Google travel and I think they're taking a bunch of learning as they've got there I'm weird that song Like a Virgin 600 and they're bringing it over into the product world so so I think you know with all the Google smarts going on and they seem pretty committed to this all the way up to company so so that's why I want to keep an eye on and it would be a Jason's not sure if we did talk more about Amazon sew in April this year Amazon announced one day Prime so you're just when everyone thought that they could kind of catch up to 2-day Prime now there's one day Prime and you know I seen data that shows increasing late that day since April they've really been dramatically delivering on this and ramping up their delivery program kind of in in front of holiday so it's something like, about half of the products now Prime eligible products are also eligible for one day Prime so so I think my holiday next year will have you know almost. All prime deliveries will be 1-day except for certain regions like Wyoming or something. [43:11] Another big Trend in marketplaces is this ad Marketplace hybridization and Ali Baba was way out in front of this show so taobao for example almost all the revenue on taobao comes from ads because that's a person-to-person Marketplace and they're not collecting at a crate a really is is they make all the money from ads say to bestie mad Mormon put in tea malt in about half the revenue and tmall is from a transaction fee in the other half is from an ad you have to do is we have to be careful is just when you throw ads in there it can do no do spam right cuz a lot of times the person that can spend the most on an dad. [43:49] Actually may have the worst product offer for consumers because they've got the most margin to spin on a Stanley add Amazon is very clever way around this is you have to own the buy box which means you got a great value then you can do an ad so then as we talked the Amazon ad functionality is a exploded a bus for vendor Central and Seller Central in overwhelmingly a large percentage of the pixels on the screen are sponsored or advertising. So that has been a huge Trend and now we've seen Walmart replicate that and I think you're going to see a lot of other people look at this marriage of ads and marketplaces makes it hard as a vendor in this world be at 1 P r3p or even hybrid cuz now you got all these. Just give you this whole nother set of levers should I reduce the price on my product and nickel or should I spend more on Advertising is it really how much of its accretive like truly additional and how much of it isn't so that you know you're still a lot of thinking going on around there and I'm sure you guys think a lot about that as well. [44:54] Set and then also you kind of brings crashing into the world all the agency guys now and product guys are like hey what are you guys doing here go do some TV ads or whatever it is you guys do so it's really interesting that that that intersections causing a lot of friction and and a lot of resetting and Mini Market Place examples back to you're thinking well I thought I knew it all I was on this Marketplace let me rethink that figure out how how do I leverage this advertising piece and how do I think about the ROI on that. I always keep an eye out side the World Of Products on marketplaces to see what's going on there's a lot of really interesting things they are going going down one of the biggest ones is you know for a long time investors love these kind of zero asset marketplaces so eBay 0ass at Marketplace it's a bunch of people in San Jose just kind of guiding the marketplace and all the buyers and sellers. [45:46] Get involved with the company Amazon is more full stack because they do get involved at the 1p Parton to get involved in the shipping, that's a big Trend so as companies have started to try to have a better customer experience they are they're going deeper. Classic example you a lot about is in the real estate industry so in the early days you had Zillow and Trulia those two companies. Merged and you know they would essentially they're kind of a lead Marketplace for realtors then accompany kind of came out and said you know if we if we did really good data analytics and we just bought the houses for kind of turn to 20% below market and then flipped him very quickly we can have a much higher take rate so the average take rate in a real estate market place is like 10% but these guys have like at 33%. Take right now. That's one that's kind of the the bullish example the bearish or negative example would be by really loading up on a lot of real estate if there's a recession you know who's going to be the last person kind of in the musical chairs there so it's so that it remains to be seen what's going on there we work gets pulled into this because I effectively kind of. [46:59] Kringle market place where they go and take long-term leases and then they're kind of real estate Marketplace inside of that lease Airbnb is a great Marketplace for vacations and where you want to stay there going why it is so there is trying to put together unique experiences that kind of say all right you know you you want to have a fun family outing we're going to put you in a treehouse and along with that Randy horse riding and and and that kind of thing. Last one I'll point out is this is where Uber and Lyft are doing some interesting things and this is anchoring around the customer and they're saying my customer wants transportation and they came to me for cars what other Transportation can I give them so it's this is called multimodal in the transportation world so they'll say all right Jason you want to get from this location in Chicago 2 and location in New York you're going to scooter from here to the subject of the what he got caught the L I'm here in Chicago and that's going to take you to the airport and then that's going to take a New York and then we're going to have Lyft pick you up and take you from point A to point B I'm in and maybe in there you'll you'll ride other mix mixes of Transportation so so taking the consumer and trying to grab more of their journey is a really interesting kind of thing and then that world you call it multimodality I'm so kind of fun to Think Through what else can we do in their product world for people around this stuff you know if are there signals that we get from these products where we could tie in. [48:26] Maybe a trip somewhere or travel or who knows what else we could try in there. Jason: [48:31] Even just like that installation services and stuff that you see marketplaces like Amazon start to bundle with sales feels like a a permutation of that. Scot: [48:41] Yeah and then the last one if you if you are interested in learning more there's a lot more material out there about marketplaces when I remember it was kind of lonely in 2001 being the guy screaming it top of Mount about marketplaces but now the good news is there's a lot more content out there one of the best ones is they're Dilaudid PCS that that it really almost got Focus to the exclusivity on marketplaces one of the biggest ones that that loves marketplaces is Andreessen Horowitz. Search Marc Andreessen founder of Mozilla and Firefox and then his partner Ben Horowitz It's Kind of a Funny Thing. [49:26] You eat your so the word internationalization has would like 18 character says i18n so use that same saying Andreessen Horowitz there's 16-character so I think it's a16z I'm so you go to a16z they have a lot of really good content around marketplaces the two folks that really publish a lot there or Jeff Jordan and he was the CEO of eBay and PayPal for a while and then he focuses a lot on marketplaces and then they just recently brought in a guy Andrew Chen and he does a really good job of pontiff Hughes from Uber. I'm in on their growth team so so a lot of really good content there and when you go you may say Scott's crazy while I think about this but you have to kind of connect the dots and think all right. I have a certain business problem in your B2B examples a good one could I use a Marketplace here in a different way that I'm thinking about marketplaces which is the normal should I sell on eBay or Amazon, so a lot of interesting some of this content is how do you solve that two-sided problem of building two things you know how do you how do you fake Demand on one side how do you fix a play on the other there's a lot of really interesting he said he's now in conton out there so what will link to their their blog a landing page and then they also have some good Twitter feeds that willing to in the show. [50:42] So we're getting tight on time so hopefully that gives you a good feeling for marketplaces and some of the different flavors out there and what's going on in the product Market Place world. Some action items so you know if you really one thing I wanted to One Last Train I want to talk about is this is kind of in that category of things becoming marketplaces you wouldn't think, this is maybe even a little bit early prediction for for our prediction show Shopify is an e-commerce platform press and bees and they just recently announced that they're building their own FBA like shipping capability well you know one thing. Shopify lakhs to be a Marketplace is a unified or four people come in and say I want to shop amongst all the Shopify Merchants so so for me that's really interesting one where you know I think we're going to see Things become marketplaces you would have never guessed someone Shopify does it does it then why wouldn't Salesforce all the platform companies you're having this kind of vinaigrette interesting interesting way of taking on Amazon by having a unique shop amongst my Merchants kind of a capability I think we're going to see a lot of. [51:52] Innovation in the next 5 years around that I action items to thanks for making it this far so I'm a big believer that you have to really Embrace these marketplaces they're not for everybody but in the in the kind of the obvious use case figuring out how to sell on them should you sell on them if you're if you're not going to you're going to miss kind of half the opportunity out there. Another one is everyone is very siloed and I think about advertising in one bucket and then where to sell your products in another those worlds are colliding you need to have kind of that capability integrated on your side the the table Stakes of convenience of getting your products out there are very high so you need to be able to partner with someone to help you with those delivery times. The good news is because Amazon's raise the bar a lot of people I've talked to said why I went to a 3pl and you know it was like five days and three times as expensive or more Partners out there that can do this I mention Shopify Zone Network. FedEx UPS Wise Guys now have programs that are very Amazon FBA asked not only in their cost but in their service levels. [53:09] You know you can't say enough about data quality we we we we just talked about personalization earlier and and. The Venn diagram of data quality overlaps for pretty much everything on site merchandising. Yeah that is the one topic you see people don't invest enough in product data so so that's one of those things you get kind of 10x when when he invested really rich product data the same shoe for marketplaces cuz you're going to want to go to sell on Amazon or build your own Marketplace and you're not going to have the right taxonomy and way to do this this is a whole new way of thinking about things so there's a whole new set of measuring and kpi is to develop their and then the last one we talked a little bit about this is consider applying a Marketplace to a part of your business that that's not maybe immediately obvious could have been offline thing you do could it be a way of dealing with suppliers in a much more efficient self-service type way this more scalable and then has some yo. Add-on benefits that that you wouldn't get if you just kind of did it the old school way. Should you have your own third-party Marketplace there's a variety of vendors out there now that will help you set up a Marketplace so they can plug into most of the platforms the one we've talked about on the show before is Miracle they just raised a pretty sizable around 6 to $89 you were smooching there's a couple other than yours out there. Jason: [54:31] Miracle is I think I've is sort of the original enterprise-class solution and it's it's spelled peculiarly for her listeners that I've heard it before it's a m i r a k l which I'm sure they thought was cute but it's kind of been. Yeah yeah and in fact it was the French version of best by fnac that these guys wrote an internal Market play software for. And I thought oh my God like other people need this besides fnac we should turn this into a product until it's either so that's how a miracle was born from. From a fnac but we have not seen a platform. Have native Marketplace functionality yet which is interesting like you you might expect that to come but we have a miracle has done enough traction and with the fundraising we seeing the number of. Newer competitors emerge that can be sort of a plug-in Marketplace like miracle and so one that I've seen in the US a lot recently is one called marketplacer. Which I understand is started out as a European provider in and there are some small or ones that I personally know less about but I do see in the marketplace there's one called near me. There's one called Iceberg there and then when I seen a number of times it's called arcadier and some of these are. [55:55] Flea product I solution some of these are code bases that you can use to add to sort of cells maintain platforms like Magento in a few of them I think are even plugins that are available in the Shopify App Store so you can kind of. Pretty easily add them to your to your existing Shopify installation and then kokorico is the funnest one to say. Scot: [56:18] Coco Rico. Jason: [56:21] I don't either but it's it is another one of these like a startup software service mark. Scot: [56:28] Did you have any other action items for folks on marketplaces that you've seen out there. Jason: [56:32] No I do I think your advice not to overlook. The customer experience elements that it's not just about the offer in the customer I think it is very relevant because I feel like a lot of the. The marketplaces that we've seen not succeed and not every Marketplace in the US has succeeded. It feels like it often comes down to that customer experience at execution until I I I certainly. I'm sort of agree with with that point but yeah that sounds like a great west of action item. Scot: [57:09] And with that we are we hope you've enjoyed this deep dive on marketplaces. Jason: [57:14] And as always if you have further questions especially hard questions for Scott then I highly encourage you to visit us on our Facebook page or hit us up on Twitter. We'll try to stump Scott on the marketplace questions I'm if you have any easy questions I'd be happy to weigh in on them as well. And of course if this show added value we sure would appreciate it if you'd get on iTunes and give us that five star review iTunes being another example of a Marketplace. Until next time happy commercing.

So many Shopify Merchants obsess over Google Page Speed scores; to their detriment. Find out what you should *really* be focusing on. By the way, remember that GymShark (a $100+ million a year Shopify store) has a score of "D(64)". Focus on what's important to grow your Shopify store, ditch what isn't. Tools mentioned: Pingdom Site Speed Optimisation by BRND Labs Connect with Tom: BRNDLabs.com Twitter Facebook Group Instagram Email Tom Other Resources: Shopify Entrepreneurs Facebook Group Unofficial Shopify Podcast Insiders Facebook Group --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/tomwbrown/message

Customer Loyalty can be your most effective sales strategy because it maximises the value of the people who are already your happy customers. Find out more about your options and the power of well thought out Customer Loyalty activations for Shopify ecommerce businesses. Contact The Cut, we're here to help. Contact The Cut. Connect with more Shopify content from The Cut here. And take a look at a vid of our Shopify Meetups Here. Shopify Merchants and ecommerce business owners will find this Podcast very useful and full of valuable advice from The Cut Directors Ben and Scott, as they talk about Customer Loyalty, and extending the lifetime value of your ecommerce customers. There are many Customer Loyalty apps to choose from for Shopify ecommerce, but before worrying about exactly which ones offer your business the best features, the best thing to do is understand the concept, what can be achieved and some of your options. Customer Loyalty is a lot like the Frequent Flyer programs run by the airlines. For your Shopify ecommerce business, a Loyalty Program allows you to reward the people who are your most loyal customers. You can choose exactly how you want to reward them, for example with discounts or gifts etc. But you can also choose different actions to reward them for, like referring a friend or posting a great review of your business. Loyalty Programs for ecomm are not just about giving reward points, they also give your business a great reason to stay in touch with your Customers, to communicate with them, and incentivise them to take positive actions that will benefit your business, and help to spread the word about how awesome you are. The great thing about Customer Loyalty apps and the strategies that go with them, is that they provide a win-win for your business and your customers. Your customers enjoy the rewards and advantages you give them, and your business benefits from increased sales conversions from the people who are already your customers, plus the ability to attract new customers via your existing customers. Make no mistake, Customer Loyalty programs for ecommerce businesses have the power to be an important part of your customer engagement and retention strategies, plus add massive value to your marketing efforts. If you have Shopify questions or challenges, contact The Cut, we're here to help. Contact The Cut.

Customer retention and maximising the lifetime value of customers is a crucial key to ecommerce success and this podcast is dedicated to that powerful concept. Visit Rise AI here. Contact The Cut today, we're here to help. In this episode, Ben interviews Nadav Berger, VP of Marketing at Rise AI. Nadav comes down the line crystal clear from Tel Aviv, an exotic and out of the box location for this podcast. Shopify Merchants who are looking to grow, and increase conversion from their databases of existing customers will find this episode very interesting as Nadav talks about Rise AI, the Gift Card concept, how it works for ecommerce and the potential 'gifting' has to achieve substantial revenue growth for ecommerce business owners. Gift Cards give existing customers, who are already happy with your brand and products, a simple, easy and fast way to share your business with their friends and family. They can give a gift, and at the same time bring your business a new customer. In that way, Gift Cards function as a sale, combined with an endorsement of your brand. Win-win! Rise AI specialise in automated and branded currency solutions for ecommerce including Gift Cards, Rewards, Store Credits and Incentives. So many conversations in ecommerce revolve around how to achieve more value from existing customers, and this is what Rise AI specialise in. Rise AI's offering extends beyond the Gift Cards to integrated services including Marketing Campaigns, B2B & Corporate Gift Cards, Loyalty Incentive Programs, eGifts and Fraud Protection. Come on in, meet Nadav and Rise AI and learn something new for your Shopify business. Visit Rise AI here. Remember, the team at The Cut are here and ready to help Shopify and other ecommerce business owners improve websites and revenue via new themes, customisations, apps and new customer retention and conversion strategies. Contact The Cut today. Connect with more Shopify content from The Cut here. And take a look at a vid of our Shopify Meetups Here.

In this episode, Ben talks with the General Manager of boutique cycling apparel brand, Pedal Mafia. Cool name, great products, and a super interesting interview covering branding for ecomm and the value in understanding your customers. Check out Pedal Mafia here. Contact The Cut today, we're here to help. Shopify Merchants will find this podcast very interesting with topics covered including starting up, a clear vision, brand development, product strategy and the importance of understanding customers. As GM, Anthony is across the whole business, from the early days to now and from product development to marketing and growth. Pedal Mafia are serious about their niche and their brand, and in this podcast Anthony talks about the importance of focussing on your brand, your name, visuals and messaging. Pedal Mafia have seen the benefits of brand-focus in ecommerce and their Shopify story is a successful one of steady growth and a dedicated community of riders. Take a look at the Pedal Mafia Instagram account for a good example of a brand that has their photography and visual 'look and feel' well defined and looking awesome. In the beginning, Pedal Mafia's mission was to give cyclists high quality apparel with a visual point of difference, at reasonable prices. While the core mission hasn't changed, the company has expanded their product range and Anthony and Ben talk about the importance of having direct access to customers, listening to their feedback and evolving the products accordingly. Take a ride with Pedal Mafia yourself Website Instagram Take a look at the Pedal Mafia presentation from the June Shopify Meetup Presentation Deck Contact The Cut today, we're here to help. Connect with more Shopify content from The Cut here. And take a look at a vid of our Shopify Meetups Here.

Kaila explains:Make sure to reach out to influencers that have the same aesthetic as your brandGive free products to influencers so they can create content for youUse a website that is easy to navigateUse pop-ups to get emails and build your email listInfluencers would usually work with brands with products that they can useExperiment and do research with micro-influencers if you are starting outDon’t dictate the content to the influencer; Choose an influencer that makes their own content to make it more authenticTrust the influencer to create contentIn fashion, you can get a lot of influencers on PinterestInfographics work really well on PinterestCheck with the influencer if you can reuse contents that they createSupport the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinningWithShopify/)

 - My favorite features of the Shopify Platform - Dropshipping on Shopify is doomed! Here's why! - Our Backstory   - About Kamari Labs Meet the brand trusted by 3000+ Shopify Merchants and Ecomm Warriors! Kamari Labs is a certified Shopify Partner since 2012 we have helped over 3000+ merchants grow through software, web design, and digital marketing. We are based Los Angeles, California. Contact us for all of your Shopify Design, Development, and Marketing for your Shopify eCommerce store.  Website: https://kamarilabs.com Shopify Experts: https://experts.shopify.com/kamari-labs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kamarilabs/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kamarilabs/ Email: questions@kamarilabs.com Phone: 1-800-683-4783 

If this show had a mantra, it might be, "People buy from people, not brands." There is no personal commerce channel than conversational commerce. Today, Shopify and Apple announced that Shopify Merchants can now use Apple's Business Chat, a tremendously powerful new way for organizations to connect with customers directly from within Messages. Previously only available to Fortune 500 business like 1800Flowers and Home Depot, it's now available today for your Shopify store. That's exciting, but what does it mean for your business? To find out, we're joined by Shopify's Director of Product, Michael Perry. You'll learn: The game changing feature coming to Shopify Ping How to improve your customer relationships (and build a competitive moat around your business) Why you can't ignore conversational commerce How to use chat to 3x conversion rates up Michael Perry founded Kit, which was acquired by Shopify in 2016. He's now Director of Product at Shopify, and fiercely passionate about conversational commerce and its potential for the future of ecommerce. Show Links Shopify Ping Tw:@michaelperry Never miss an episode Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts Join Kurt's newsletter Help the show Ask a question in The Unofficial Shopify Podcast Facebook Group Leave an honest review on iTunes. Your ratings & reviews help, and I read each one. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

- Shopify Fulfillment Network Shopify Fulfillment Network is now available in the United States. Be sure to checkout the Shopify Fulfillment Network if you are using 3PL (3rd Party Logistics) with your Shopify store. (Click here to learn more) Link: Lhttps://bit.ly/2ZMrnkf - Shopify Wholesale Channel Considering expanding your business into wholesale? Shopify is our favorite tool for managing wholesale. We tried a lot of solutions in our own business to manage B2B sales and now with Shopify Wholesale we can focus on our growth and less on inventory and other aspects of a wholesale business on top of retail sales on Shopify. Checkout the Shopify Wholesale Channel if you are considering wholesale. (Click here to learn more) Link: https://bit.ly/2RxgkZi - Selling Digital Goods on Shopify with Digital Downloads Considering selling digital goods or services on Shopify? It's super easy with the Shopify app created by Shopify called Shopify Digital Downloads! (Click here to learn more) Link: https://bit.ly/2Kxb6w4 - About Kamari Labs Meet the brand trusted by 3000+ Shopify Merchants and Ecomm Warriors! Kamari Labs is a certified Shopify Partner since 2012 we have helped over 3000+ merchants grow through software, web design, and digital marketing. We are based Los Angeles, California. Contact us for all of your Shopify Design, Development, and Marketing for your Shopify eCommerce store. Website: https://kamarilabs.com Shopify Experts: https://experts.shopify.com/kamari-labs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kamarilabs/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kamarilabs/ Email: questions@kamarilabs.com Phone: 1-800-683-4783

We have a great episode for you this week. We’re gonna cover digital services and products, influencer marketing, why your sales suck, and how to find new customers! - About Kamari Labs Meet the brand trusted by 3000+ Shopify Merchants and Ecomm Warriors! Kamari Labs is a certified Shopify Partner since 2012 we have helped over 3000+ merchants grow through software, web design, and digital marketing. We are based Los Angeles, California. Contact us for all of your Shopify Design, Development, and Marketing for your Shopify eCommerce store. Website: https://kamarilabs.com Shopify Experts: https://experts.shopify.com/kamari-labs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kamarilabs/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kamarilabs/ Email: questions@kamarilabs.com Phone: 1-800-683-4783

In this episode we cover machine learning, data analytics, customer driven development, and creating a solid customer experience that converts. - About Kamari Labs Meet the brand trusted by 3000+ Shopify Merchants and Ecomm Warriors! Kamari Labs is a certified Shopify Partner since 2012 we have helped over 3000+ merchants grow through software, web design, and digital marketing. We are based Los Angeles, California. Contact us for all of your Shopify Design, Development, and Marketing for your Shopify eCommerce store. Website: https://kamarilabs.com Shopify Experts: https://experts.shopify.com/kamari-labs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kamarilabs/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kamarilabs/ Email: questions@kamarilabs.com Phone: 1-800-683-4783

This episode covers the Shopify community and how to get help from real experts and partners. We also discuss in depth the Shopify review system and also the death of drop-shipping! It’s gonna be a great episode! Thanks for tuning in! - About Kamari Labs Meet the brand trusted by 3000+ Shopify Merchants and Ecomm Warriors! Kamari Labs is a certified Shopify Partner since 2012 we have helped over 3000+ merchants grow through software, web design, and digital marketing. We are based Los Angeles, California. Contact us for all of your Shopify Design, Development, and Marketing for your Shopify eCommerce store. Website: https://kamarilabs.com Shopify Experts: https://experts.shopify.com/kamari-labs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kamarilabs/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kamarilabs/ Email: questions@kamarilabs.com Phone: 1-800-683-4783

Tim Matheson is CEO & Founder of Kamari Labs, LLC. a Shopify Plus Development Agency since 2012. We have worked with 3000+ Shopify merchants helping them grow their business on the Shopify platform exclusively. - About Kamari Labs Meet the brand trusted by 3000+ Shopify Merchants and Ecomm Warriors! Kamari Labs is a certified Shopify Partner since 2012 we have helped over 3000+ merchants grow through software, web design, and digital marketing. We are based Los Angeles, California. Contact us for all of your Shopify Design, Development, and Marketing for your Shopify eCommerce store. Website: https://kamarilabs.com Shopify Experts: https://experts.shopify.com/kamari-labs Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kamarilabs/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Kamarilabs/ Email: questions@kamarilabs.com Phone: 1-800-683-4783

After 13+ years in online marketing, I have seen it all! Now with Mailchimp not an option, I want to show you my #1 choice and it's FREE!This episode is full of great advice even if you already have an email service you like. Rytis Lauris is the co-founder at Omnisend and is now on our advisory board at Just Ask Parker. Omnisend is so much more than email, they offer SMS, messenger abandon carts and push notifications. While offering the most beautiful email templates on the market. MailChimp Migration Resource Hub for Shopify Merchants:https://www.omnisend.com/resources/migration-from-mailchimp/mailchimp-resources/Upcoming Event:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/3-steps-to-making-a-profit-with-your-ecommerce-store-tickets-59996422916Support the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinningWithShopify/)

In this brief bonus episode with Klaviyo's senior marketing manager, Alicia Thomas, you'll learn: What seven and eight figures brands are doing differently with their email marketing What you can do to get ahead with email marketing Several upcoming events to grow your business Links mentioned: Klaviyo's Docuseries: Beyond Black Friday Klaviyo:BOS - Use code KURT100 to save $100 on your registration Meet Kurt, Paul, and other Shopify Merchants on the 31st in at our Shopify Meetup.

NOTES: Customer Journey Graphics https://www.justaskparker.com/blogs/news/grow-sales-by-53-with-a-customer-journey-strategyAfter seeing hundreds of Shopify Merchants and the mistakes they are making, Caroline has put together the 5 reasons Shopify Stores fail. And All have to do with the MERCHANT! Take control and be successful in 2019. You can have the business and the life you want. Just it takes getting the right advice to do it right. Support the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinningWithShopify/)

Paul Kahn from Upfluence.com is part of the Social Media Influencer Summit for Shopify Merchants. He brings you the key strategy to working with Influencers to help you get more sales during special event days and the holiday season.Here is the first 15 minutes of his presentation. To get the rest signup at www.winningwithshopify.comSupport the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinningWithShopify/)

In this Episode, The Cut's Director Ben De Jonge speaks to Shopify Merchant Bree Heather from Swoodi. Swoodi use Shopify to sell the cutest hoodie/towels for kids and keen swimmers. As Shopify experts and Perth's only Shopify Plus agency, The Cut are here to help ecommerce business people learn. One of the ways we do that is to share the stories of Shopify Merchants from all sorts of businesses. There's nothing better than hearing from your peers and learning from their ecommerce experiences. This is the first ever Merchant Interview done by The Cut, in our regular series of interviews with Shopify Merchants. In this Shopify podcast Bree Heather, Shopify Merchant and owner of Swoodi. Like so many Merchants, Bree is a a busy Mum, multi tasking the raising of her two children and running her Shopify business. In her interview with The Cut Bree talks about finding and choosing Shopify, becoming an ecommerce business person and the challenges that go with that, plus raising a young family. Young mum's with new families are often branching out into ecommerce and plenty of women out there will share Bree's stories and challenges, whether they are in ecommerce, or working in other areas. Shop Swoodi here. Our aim with our merchant interviews is to share stories and gather insights and tips and tricks from people who are up and running so they can help other people learn the ins and outs and ups and downs of ecommerce. As Expert Shopify Partners, the team at The Cut have a great understanding of ecommerce and what it takes to build a successful online business. Using Shopify, we have been able to help all sorts of clients launch, customise and optimise online stores. We then offer our own Growth Programs to help clients continue to enhance and optimise their Shopify stores, with the flexibility to focus The Cut's own expertise on their areas that will give their business maximum benefits. Remember, the team at The Cut are here and ready to help Shopify and other ecommerce business owners improve websites and revenue via new themes, customisations, apps and new customer retention and conversion strategies. Contact The Cut today.

In this Episode, The Cut's Director Ben De Jonge speaks to Shopify Merchant and the ecomm entrepreneur behind Flat Tummy Tea, Tim Polmear from Founded Ventures. Tim and his team at Founded Ventures are all about ecommerce and finding new opportunities for businesses and growth. Welcome to the second of our ecommerce interviews with Shopify merchants. This time around we called in to deepest darkest Tasmania to connect with the founder of Founded Ventures, Tim Polmear. The Cut know Tim and his partner in life and crime, Bec, from their days starting up the uber-successful international brand Flat Tummy Tea. Tim is a highly successful digital entrepreneur and knows a thing or two about startups, branding, business, ecommerce and, of course, Shopify. This is a good one. You'll learn lots. Press play. As Shopify experts and Perth's only Shopify Plus agency, The Cut are here to help ecommerce business people learn. One of the ways we do that is to share the stories of Shopify Merchants from all sorts of businesses. There's nothing better than hearing from your peers and learning from their ecommerce experiences. Find Founded Venture here. Our aim with Shopify Merchant interviews by The Cut is to share stories and gather insights and tips and tricks from ecommerce business people who are up and running so they can help other people learn the ins and outs and ups and downs of ecommerce. As Expert Shopify Partners, the team at The Cut have a great understanding of ecommerce and what it takes to build a successful online business. Using Shopify, we have been able to help all sorts of clients launch, customise and optimise online stores. We then offer our own Growth Programs to help clients continue to enhance and optimise their Shopify stores, with the flexibility to focus The Cut's own expertise on their areas that will give their business maximum benefits. Remember, the team at The Cut are here and ready to help Shopify and other ecommerce business owners improve websites and revenue via new themes, customisations, apps and new customer retention and conversion strategies. Contact The Cut today.

This 3 Day Online Summit Has Been Created For Shopify Store OwnersTodays guests are Michael Jackness of Ecomm Crew, Mike of Glambassdor, Christy the legal expert and David Duncan or Brandsnob.www.winningwithshopify.comHIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE:Learn the $17k pre-launch strategy from one of our speakers who nailed itHoliday season! How to get influencers to promote your productsAre your products right for influencers?How one Shopify merchant gets 1 MILLION sales a year using Social Media InfluencersHow to spend nothing using the gifting strategyWhy using Micro Influencers is now the #1 strategy for merchantsHow to get you offer inside your potential customers Apple wallet BEFORE they even buy!How to work with influencers for freeHow to choose the best influencers for your brandThe TRUTH on the results eCom stores get from influencer promotions (what others won’t tell you)A list of influencers you can work with immediatelyAND MUCH MORE!Support the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinningWithShopify/)

Caroline discusses the Social Media Influencer Summit for Shopify Merchants winningwithshopify.com/summitLearn the 5 steps to working with influencers. Support the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinningWithShopify/)

Don't forget to signup for the free summit Social Media Influencer Marketing Summit for Shopify Merchants at www.justaskparker.com/summit.Today Kurt Elster, the host of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast shares his in depth knowledge on the real issues you need to think about when it comes to more sales conversions. Forget everything you have heard about needing to spend thousands to get it right, Kurt explains that most of it is right in front of you. He compares ecommerce sites such as Amazon and Walmart to explain just what you are getting wrong and how to turn that lead into a buyer.Support the show (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WinningWithShopify/)