The Jason & Scot Show - E-Commerce And Retail News

EP307 - PrimeDay, NRF Nexus, Commerce Next http://jasonandscot.com Amazon Prime Day 2023 occurred over June 11 and 12th. Adobe says total sales were up 6% over 2022. Discount levels were much more conservative than holiday. We give a complete breakdown. Commerce Next 2023 was held in New York City June 20-21st. NRF Nexus 2023 was held at the Terranea Resort in Southern California July 10-12. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 307 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Sunday, July 23rd 2023. 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 307 being recorded on Sunday July 23rd, 20:23 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:39] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason and Scot show listeners, Jason it's been a minute since we recorded a pod as the kids would say we've had a series of feels like the universe doesn't want us to podcast either I'm out of town or you're out of town in a place where we don't have Wi-Fi or a mic and then I had a little kid drama and we had to reboot and but here we are we're finally getting the pot in them. Jason: [1:07] Thank goodness and we're I think we're going to talk about this in a minute but I've been to several events and people are starting to get on me they're mad, that we fallen off of our regular recording. Pace in so I feel like I hope we will get credit for recording a rare Sunday night show and I'm looking for even extra credit, I'm actually recording this on vacation at an upper Lake Michigan lake house sitting in my car stealing the neighbors Airbnb Wi-Fi. Scot: [1:42] Yeah I give you 100 extra points on that one yeah definitely definitely some kind of new Ninja level podcasting that you're doing there. Jason: [1:51] I feel like that alone deserves a five star review on iTunes. Scot: [1:55] Yeah I feel like at some point the police are going to tap on your window and it's going to be fun to listen to that when it happens here you hear you explaining what you're doing in that that foggy car there. Jason: [2:05] Exactly I promise to keep the bike running if that does happen. Scot: [2:09] Maybe some post-show editing we'll call you've been a busy on the road retailgeek so I know you went to Commerce next and NRF Nexus which sound kind of relatively somewhere they both got that NEX in there, I was not able to make those and we purposely haven't really talked about it so I'm excited to hear your take on the State of the Union that you've been at to trade shows. Jason: [2:36] Yeah yeah I think Commerce next might have been shortly after our last recorded show so it happened June 20th in New York City in Manhattan at the the Midtown Hilton and this is a show, I don't know what year it is it's been going for a while but this is put on Friends of the show Scot Silverman who's been on several episodes and his Partners Veronica and Alan, and you know they they sold the show so as to raise some money last year so the show is getting, more serious they're hiring more staff they hired another friend of the show Jill Dvorak from the in our EFT, to manage content and it was you know bigger and better than previous in our interests Commerce next shows which were already good so I thought it was a good show in New York. [3:33] Two days one track of content for the most part on the main stage so you know you got to see most of the main speakers, there were like lunches and breakout sessions I did a session on sort of the evolving art of platform selection and you know this kind of shift from monoliths to, to these sort of mock based headless platforms and the pros and cons of, in picking the Best in Class vendors for each little Point solution versus all-in-one sweets from one vendor and, we had we had some good dialogue about the relative merits of all those approaches and sort of the evolution of the technology platform. [4:19] Which I used to talk about and work with clients all the time and I feel like. Kind of I've lost some of my muscle on that like it it comes up less often and I think part of the reason is all this stuff is getting, somewhat commoditized and it's just easier and safer to pick a solution and and you know get into the e-commerce business than it used to be. Scot: [4:43] Yeah the Pod we've talked a lot about headless and then there's that whole acronym of what they do which escaped to be just as internet yeah mock then you work on them and not the best branding is that this till the very much, you know what folks are looking at or are you just kind of walk them through the 30,000-foot layer of you know and on-prem open source SAS and then headless or her like what's. Jason: [5:13] Yeah so it's yeah so it's mostly Cloud it's headless it's it's you know multi-tenant Cloud headless. You know what Gardner calls compostable Commerce so you know 8 micro services or you know efficient apis or however you want to look at it but often it's like. [5:39] Rolling your own UI or buying a you I versus getting a you know pre can you I from. What they the funny term for the old Legacy Solutions is monolith so I guess AP Oracle and IBM now HCL are these like mono. Monolith Solutions and like Commerce next and fabric I'm Commerce tools are kind of the more modern architecture is for the actual platform. You know once on an interesting you know Shopify there's headless version of Salesforce you know Bigcommerce they're all kind of playing in this space and the interesting thing is it used to be a huge game-changing decision what you picked and. In many ways it just is less important it's a less critical decision to your overall business because they're all like pretty good and somewhat interchangeable today with any of them the sort of modern ones it's you know the folks that are. Kind of still trying to feed the servers under their desk and keep the the you know sort of on-prem, proprietary Stacks going you know are the are the folks that are usually behind. [6:57] Also and I know even, Wes about the specific nuances event of individual vendors but the there was a robust Exhibit Hall at Commerce next and by far the most common vendor is a all-in-one, AI based marketing Suite so you know all these tools that have like a CD P email server SMS server personalization engine like all of these sort of. Out marketing Outreach Tools in a single vendor driven by Ai and I have great empathy for anyone that needs to buy one of these things because there's like, 30 of them and they all have the exact same words on their Booth the same same Basic Value prop so it's a crowded space right now. Scot: [7:46] Yeah yeah that was gonna be my next question the AI Buzz is sweeping through every company and I'm sure I'm sure our e-commerce vendors Are Not Alone. Jason: [7:54] Yeah yeah and there were a number of sessions at both shows, switching per second from Commerce next which was June in New York to Nexus which was July in California so interrupt Nexus is kind of the spiritual successor. Before in a ref acquired shop dot-org we used to have this great shop dot-org show but we have another great show the shop dot-org merchandising Summit that was a smaller show in California there was a little more sort of tactical Hands-On type stuff, and in some ways this interact Nexus is the spiritual successor to that it's like four or five hundred person conference. At beautiful Resort the Tara no resort in Southern California on the beach. [8:47] One track of content great networking and just you know a nice week to spend with, many of your co-workers and, I was vastly Overexposed at this show I feel like they spent their whole Budget on the venue so so they had me do way too much content so the first night the big keynote was an interview with Kara Swisher so I got to interview. Kara Swisher who you know famous Tech journalists started New York Times started the code conference so I interviewed Steve Jobs Mark Zuckerberg Jeff Bezos you on mosque like all those guys multiple times and so you know very famous interviewer, here's the brutal part of this the most common thing that happens to me at these shows is people recognize my voice from this podcast. And they're super excited and then the first thing they say is oh it's great to meet you but where is Scott. Because everyone is way more excited about you than me which kind of hurts so then like now I've made the big time I'm on the big stage interviewing Kara swisher and what do you think everyone says to me. Scot: [10:10] We're Scott. Jason: [10:12] Yeah because she does a podcast with Scott Galloway. Scot: [10:15] Galloway. Jason: [10:16] Exactly and so if they're not disappointed. Scot: [10:18] The big dog. Jason: [10:19] Yeah yeah that it's me instead of you they're disappointed that it's, it's a me instead of Scott Galloway and I did mention probably on stage that we both did podcast with egotistical co-host named Scott, but I also alleged that my Scott was way better than her Scott and she agreed even though I don't think she knows who you are. Scot: [10:43] No no lies detected. Jason: [10:45] No exactly. Exactly no but we had a pretty good conversation she's. David very opinionated and outspoken but she's also pretty well informed so we got pretty deep into Ai and some of the pros and cons and some of the, the near term and far term use cases around AI we talked a lot about social commerce and why it's, hasn't caught on here yet and it you know has has more legs in China she's very psyched and in favor of autonomous vehicles I thought you would. You like that and so I feel like we had a pretty wide-ranging conversation that got pretty good reviews I got good feedback that I didn't blow it. [11:32] And then we're that not enough I also had my own keynote onstage right kind of recap the state of Commerce and you know did one of my data pukes and I spent a fair amount of my keynote talking about the emergence of these Chinese juggernauts particularly Sheehan and Tim ooh, and I showed a chart that was pretty eye-opening to the audience of web traffic like a lot there's a lot of charts footing around about mobile app downloads particularly of ten Moon how quickly they've gotten, you know to be the top downloaded shopping app on the US app stores but I showed. Amazon Walmart Target Tim ooh Incheon. Monthly web visits and you know, for people that aren't following it closely she has been around for 10 years they've been kind of in the u.s. in their current form for at least five years Tim has brand-new just launching last November and. Shion is. Almost it is about 80% as much traffic as Target, Tim ooh past Target for when monthly web visitors in January of 2023 and is now sort of halfway between Target and Walmart. Scot: [12:56] Yeah it's amazing. I spend a fair amount of time with 16 to 25 year old young ladies and it's all she and all the time they don't ever mention team and they call it Shy and I tell them retailgeek says it she in and they say they don't care. Jason: [13:13] Yeah she's an Insider. Scot: [13:14] Call It Shine they say everyone calls it Shine so sorry. Jason: [13:19] They started out selling wedding dresses. And yeah the they also are doing well you know we haven't talked a lot about them lately but they've expanded from a apparel retailer to a broad set of categories including consumer electronics and they've launched a third-party Marketplace on the US. Scot: [13:37] Wow. Jason: [13:39] So both Tim ooh and she and are now third-party marketplaces kind of competing with a very similar assortment and yeah both both are capturing. Pretty pretty significant attention of us consumers. Scot: [13:57] The did you get booed off the stage or they were like you. Jason: [14:03] No not theirs I think people are were I suspect people are slightly less informed than they should be on them and I feel like people are interested in we're taking note and then I did a third session for the CMO marketing Council on, generative AI there are a bunch of other sessions on AI as well but I kind of did a deep dive on some of the Commerce use cases and I'm, particularly interested there is a lot of new I mean there's new stuff every week and there's a general stuff that you can imagine, being applied to Commerce but like Google launched a new generative AI feature for apparel try on, that's remarkable like so you upload a picture of yourself and you pick any of these garments and it shows you that garment on you and it's not. [14:58] Some stupid rendering where it's like you know a gif on top of you. Or you know some distorted thing like the garments flow on your body type but in a very realistic way and this is a functionality that a few websites have offered for a while with really complicated 3D models and really expensive. Product detail Pages because they have to scan all the apparel and have to get you to take a picture of your body to scan your body and it's like a cool experience but it's a lot of work to get there in this Google thing just does it with a couple of flat images and it's. [15:35] It's really pretty remarkable so I you know I definitely think the the future of a Peril shopping and a bunch of visual categories. Is going to be you know seeing this stuff on a realistic representation of you. And they have another feature coming out soon that they call scene Explorer which is kind of the, the augmented reality hold your camera up to the Shelf at the store and overlay all the products it sees on the Shelf with all the digital product detail from, from the Google catalog which is interesting. Scot: [16:09] I was gonna ask you about the Google thing because when it was announced there was some confusion where it looks like you could say it had like somebody types some Matrix of 256 body types and you could say that's me and you could see the body type not you but you're saying you can actually upload your own picture. Jason: [16:27] Yeah so the the confusion is understandable because they launched a feature with a predetermined set of models. There was kind of a proof of concept and so you could like pick a model and they had models with different body types and so you know and ethnicity so you could see kind of your ethnicity with your body shape and then three weeks later they said and here's how you upload your own picture. And so they're technically two different products but they happen in such close proximity you're like I wonder why they launched the first one. And In fairness the first one is a like in available to use API that Commerce sites can use now the second one is kind of a science. Like proof of Technology concept that they've released to the academic Community but I don't think they've released it for commercial use yet. Scot: [17:21] Ian timing-wise I don't know if this was before after your show there but Shopify has their new kind of like co-pilot kind of like, a eyepiece it's really more at the store level though. And you got a lot of buzz but I looked at it it just seemed like a fancier wizard for setting up stuff but God it didn't seem as game-changing as some of the Google stuff. Jason: [17:46] Yeah yeah although it is interesting that just everybody's building that Rai into every product right like you know I think someone said recently like. Like every text box on the Internet is going to get a large language model. Scot: [18:02] Yep the expectation is you can just like talk to these things and having to do stuff for you so it's going to be. Jason: [18:06] Exactly yeah yeah so it's interesting and that was for sure a Commerce it interrupts Nexus that was probably like 80 or 90 percent of the conversation was AI base so it was kind of. It was fun for me to talk about a few things that weren't a i based because it was getting getting a little tiresome and fun fact. Nexus if you recognize those dates July 10th through the 12th it's because it was during Amazon Prime day. Scot: [18:33] Yeah yeah and anything else before I move on. Jason: [18:39] No I think those those were the big things you know two shows that are well worth attending for for folks that are looking for Commerce events and I'd say you know congratulations to both for. For putting on a good growing robust events in a in a semi challenging climate to get people's attention. Scot: [19:01] So you know there's always the what you talked about in the front of the hall and then the back room chatter what's what's the back room chatter what's top of Mind are people worried about and by people I mean people in our industry are they worried about the recessionary headwinds and inflation or do they you know they feeling pretty good about. Holiday this year what's kind of the scoop. Jason: [19:26] So I don't know I might even say there's two tears there's like what's the normal conversation in the hallway and I do think there's a lot of conversation about. What's going on in the industry right now from a momentum standpoint and and I think that the. The sort of Top Line there is it's complicated like it's really weird like there's, there's economic indexes that are becoming more favorable I mean we're seeing like the inflation numbers come down, you know there's still some data to suggest that the US consumer is in like pretty good Financial shape All Things Considered, but there's a lot of indications that consumer spending is slowing down and, you know we're just coming into kind of Q2 earnings season I think Amazon is going to report next week and so obviously we'll do a show about that but, you know a lot of retailers have kind of reported soft q2's and even more alarming they're lowering their guidance for the back half of the year so you kind of simultaneously have some like. [20:31] Decent economic news and Pew no more economists are starting to say hey a soft Landing is possible and maybe we're going to avoid a recession which you know I feel like. The majority of economists earlier in the year we're pretty convinced that we were going to end up in a recession and so that would feel favorable but then at the same time, customers feel like they're cutting back and you know a lot of growth indexes are kind of slowing so I feel like there are variations of what the heck is going on with all of that when I like privately talk to people and get into a lot more specifics, I have to say I am not optimistic for a robust holiday I feel like a lot of people. Are gearing up for a pretty challenging holiday with pretty deep discounts, like there already is a Slowdown in sales and so people are worried that they're going to be in a bad inventory position for holiday and they're just seeing. Consumers in continue to trade down there seeing, sort of elective category product categories really start to take a dip and you know more consumer budget going to Necessities versus wants and so. It is increasingly sounding like it's going to be a challenging holiday especially from a margin. But I hope we're all wrong. Scot: [21:57] Is that shared by folks or that's kind of like what the big gun on the elephant in the room is base. Jason: [22:03] No that's I when I talk to retailers about like what they're bracing for and you know what their their Play books are for holiday and you know people are talking about expecting to see deeper discounts. More competition on discounts which than roads margins and you know some some traditionally stalwart categories being soft and stuff like that. Scot: [22:26] Cool well you mentioned primeday and it wouldn't be a Jason and Scot show without some. [22:46] That's right so unfortunately Amazon doesn't announce their second quarter results until Q3 and then we'll get the real well July they won't really talk about primeday but we do have some Amazon news coming and we'll do you doing a show if the universe aligns for us around those results but until then we can talk about primeday first of all did you end up buying anything this year. Jason: [23:10] I did I feel like I talked in the show every year about, over buying on like cables and chargers and I did do all of that again, the other I bought some I think I mentioned on the show before that I moved from a condo to a house in the last year and so we have this new thing that we didn't use to have called patio furniture so I bought some. Like Furniture to hold the covers when it rains in Chicago some weird weird outdoor stuff. Scot: [23:45] Up getting some accessories one of my anchor multi-headed. Octopus things died and this is frustrating I thought I was buying another one and I specifically was searching on anchor I was on my phone and I was having to go fast and the thing showed up and it was like a no-name it wasn't an anchor device and it's already acting wonky so kind of. You know how they can advertise and like really get this is kind of the negative side of some of the Amazon experience these days I was pretty sure I was in an anchor only mode but but a non anchor product snuck into my cart I end up getting up. But it was cheap so there you and it doesn't work so yeah that was a bummer. Jason: [24:29] Yeah if you want to buy like cheap no-name stuff you should buy it from Tim oh it'll be like 99 cents. Scot: [24:36] Yeah no like wish does it take six months to show up her. Jason: [24:39] No it's you know so Tim who is seven to ten days and they offer you a shipping guarantee so you get like store credit if it doesn't arrive in 10 days. Scot: [24:54] That's good cool well what did you see on Amazon Prime day I'll do a little Wall Street piece but I thought you may hit some of the high notes. Jason: [25:04] Yeah so a you know primeday is important just because it's primeday but also a lot of people use it as sort of kind of a first indicator of what the second half of the year is going to look like so this year was on the 11th and 12th it's been 2 days for, for a number of years now and you know Amazon doesn't really report anything very useful about primeday it's everything's a record. [25:29] They did more than they did last year which they're always going to do more than they were last year, but they don't give you any real numbers so Adobe is the most commonly cited, some estimate of primeday an adobe estimates twelve point seven billion dollars were sold on primeday which is up 6.1 percent year over year, now A Wrinkle In These third-party estimates is none of them are just estimates of Amazon. They all you know talk about this phenomenon of other retailers doing sales on primeday and so they're actually measuring, e-commerce sales on the primeday is not just Amazon sales so they're saying industry-wide, 12 point 7 billion in sales up 6.1 percent year over year, which is robust there were people that were forecasting would be bigger than that the other forecast I've seen was emarketer emarketer with same ballpark they estimated thirteen point five billion, they said about eight of the billion would happen on Amazon and 5.5 billion of that was going to happen off Amazon, both of those are us estimates so that would you know be decent growth it would be a deceleration from, from the last few years of primeday growth. Scot: [26:50] Yeah the so one of my favorite reports was from Colin Sebastian who's a friend of the Pod and he's from Baird and he basically said that they thought it was an acceleration so meaningful, so Amazon reports items sold and then they take that and some proprietary data and they're saying it was a 20 to 25% you're over your rent increase and they ended up increasing Q 3 is estimates based on them so it'll be interesting to see you know, where it's going to fall on that so that seems like the bookends we're hearing are six percent and 25% that's a pretty big big range to see where it's going to fall into the will never disclose, Axel primeday results but, we'll know when they announce Q3 if they beat her exceed that that it was kind of towards the high end and if they come in on the lower end of the range well no it's more like that six percent. Jason: [27:51] Yeah yeah and that'll be interesting 25% in the current climate would be pretty darn impressive not saying it's not true but you know you look at like the last couple quarters of Amazon's growth they weren't that high you know you look at the end retail Industries growth, not near that I so like if they're driving 20-25 percent that would be big, yeah and I guess we'll never win we'll never know for sure did anything else jump out at you in The Baird report. Scot: [28:20] That was the meat of it they were just really focused on that a little little things in there like last year there was a lot of supply chain issues and lot of reports product not getting to people it does seem like this year they things work a little bit more flawlessly so there was some, some just Optical stuff like that. Jason: [28:39] Yeah I really didn't hear the many glitches in this year's primeday which you know it's one of the sort of like highest demand is the year so you know it is a day when you would uncover glitches I saw a bunch of other a smattering of other interesting data points about Prime from various folks Adobe and it is in addition estimating sales they showed category growth and so they call that out like appliances was the big category growth with 45%. Up year-over-year household products were up 28 percent year-over-year Electronics were up 18% year-over-year apparel up 17% and then the big winner is Office Products which is up 76 percent, and at first that might surprise people but one thing to know about Office Products is they always do phenomenally well on primeday because primeday tends to fall right at the beginning of back-to-school shopping. [29:35] So it's kind of a perfect perfect storm there, yeah and then they also Adobe reports discount rates and here's where it starts getting interesting they said that on average Electronics were 14 percent off, apparel and toys were twelve percent off and that those were the deepest discounts and to put that in perspective on holiday of 2022, toys were 22% off consumer electronics were twenty-three percent off and a pair of was 14 percent off so that data would imply that the discounts have Prime were. Not as significant as the discounts, that we you know Tennessee over holiday period another does that surprise you at all. Scot: [30:24] No I dunno you know so since we're in the this kind of economic situation I think the consumer is really. Not getting off the dime unless they have deeper discounts and I think they probably had a pretty good data science reason for the. Jason: [30:43] Yeah so then one interesting thing which also says something about the consumers Health the. Buy now pay later use was up 20% on primeday and represented 6.5 percent of all sales. So that you know quite that's been a growing payment type for a while but I would argue it's kind of plateaued and so it's interesting to see that big big step up on prey. Scot: [31:08] That's a firm right there married to a firm set. Jason: [31:12] Well so on Amazon but again all these debts are this kind of like, everybody is primeday and so I think that does include like Target and Walmart sales which are not a firm so so it's all those guys karna and affirm and, and there's too many to name these days but then to me some of the interesting things were like who participated in primeday and so you know a. A digital marketing agency Acadia that tracks this stuff pretty close and that Q Masters works for who who I think is one of the really smart voices on Amazon sellers they reported, this year eighty percent of all Amazon sellers participated in primeday in some way and from their methodology last year 69 percent participated so it's. [32:12] The participation levels continuing to increase in its nearing 100 percent of all Amazon sellers participating in primeday which, isn't super surprising it seems like primeday is a pretty successful important thing to participate in, they also said in general that primeday that's ours had to spend fourteen percent of their total revenue on primeday on Amazon digital marketing so that came from momentum Commerce that estimated that so that's a, pretty high, on top of the take right you know that's that's just all the Amazon marketing services and then a particularly interesting take was from our friends Joe it Marketplace pulse he reported that, 150 Brands were promoting by with Prime on their own websites, on primeday which would be up 10x from last year where there were like 15 Brands using by with primeday. [33:17] So you know just interesting how it's all playing out with kind of Amazon expanding off-site like all these other retailers getting in the market I feel like the vibe, there have been other years when a lot of other retailers more directly counter programmed against primeday in this year. There were a lot of sales on primeday for sure but it almost felt like more retailers did like Fourth of July sales and almost tried to. Preamp primed a little bit as opposed to completely focus on. Scot: [33:48] Yeah I guess we won't know until the data comes out windows so we won't have that. Jason: [33:55] Yeah so the. Scot: [33:56] While. Jason: [33:56] The Debbie Downer. Scot: [33:58] Anyone. Jason: [33:59] This is you know primeday is actually in Q3 right so we're we're just going to start getting cute to data here like the US Department of Commerce Q2 data for e-commerce will come out in mid August, Amazon report Q2 next week and then a bunch of other retailers in the next couple of weeks but that'll all be Q2 data in this primeday stuff is all cute 3 so it's it's going to be you know four months down the road before we have. Have more clarity on that and will be you know well into holiday when we get that clarity. Scot: [34:32] Yeah well speaking of data I saw you had a tweet where you went through some of the new Commerce data what are you seeing there. Jason: [34:41] Yeah so obviously we talked about the US Commerce data every month so last week just after interrupt Nexus on July 18th there's Department of Commerce released its June data and, this is one of those it's complicated these results don't seem that that favorable kind of stories June retail sales overall were up six percent from June of last year which is a pretty meager, growth rate and a significant deceleration so if you go year to date January through June sales this year are only up 1.9 percent, versus last year and again like normal retail years sales tend to go up about 4% a year the last three years you know largely impacted by the pandemic we've had the three highest growth rates in the history of retail so they're all much higher than four percent so only being up 1.9 percent year-to-date is a, pretty disappointing place to be it's still. Healthy amount from before the pandemic so year-to-date we're up bike 35% from before the pandemic, you know what everyone immediately asks when you talk about these numbers is well what does inflation due to them and if you adjust those numbers from PlayStation year-to-date we're down 2.8% and we're only up 14% from before the pandemic so. [36:10] You know that reflects you know a consumer that's being pretty conservative with their spending. And that you know is a worried sign going in a holiday if we only grew you know less than 2% or you know on a real adjusted basis We Shrunk three percent from last year. We don't get great monthly data for e-commerce we get better quarterly data so the monthly data we get is this thing called non-store sales which is kind of like. Cattle catalogs and e-commerce and it's a little bit of a broader catalog but it was up. [36:46] Nine point nine percent in June which means year-to-date we are up 7.9% for, non store sales and so that's reflecting kind of a return to typical e-commerce growth rates like before the pandemic e-commerce would grow 10 to 15 percent. Year-over-year in brick-and-mortar with grow 4 percent. At one point during the pandemic we had an inversion where retail is actually growing faster than brick-and-mortar than e-commerce and e-commerce has over the last couple quarters been kind of, flipping the script and kind of going back to normal and so at the moment we have this thing where e-commerce growth is back to its normal, eight to ten percent level and brick-and-mortar is well under it's normal for percent level. Um so that's kind of the Commerce story and again will get better e-commerce data because will get the Q 2. E-commerce data next month. I did have one funny story I didn't mention when we're talking about the Tim ooh and she in stuff Tim ooh and she and are now suing each other. Scot: [37:59] They're in their Chinese companies room. Jason: [38:01] Yeah so Bo for Chinese companies Sheehan has a US headquarters in Boston I don't think Tim who has a US headquarters that I'm aware of, so she in which again has been around for a while is suing newcomer Tim ooh, by saying that Tim has been impersonating Sheehan on social commerce platforms including Twitter, where you know of course the verified system has been kind of, put in flocks and so Tim who is accusing Sheehan of creating a bunch of fake social media accounts to undermine. [38:42] She in and, Tim ooh is counter sewer not countersuing their separate suits Tim who sued Sheehan in US court for violating us antitrust laws because what Tim who is saying is that she and is trying to walk up all the factories in China and get all these factories to sign exclusive trade agreements to only sell products through Sheehan and explicitly to not sell through Tim ooh, and so Tim was trying to use us us antitrust wada sort of, who have all the playing field so you know and it just addition to being too fast growing sites that are winning winning consumers and and you know taking as a meaningful share of retail sales there now both be coming, jobs programs for lawyers just like every other retailer in America. Scot: [39:34] Yeah the I just don't think that's going to work I don't think the US courts are really going to find you like. Jason: [39:41] Yeah so definitely not it. Scot: [39:43] Hi going to say your evil Chinese company. Jason: [39:46] Yeah so I don't know I doubt it I doubt know so I think they all have standing to Sue and they're all obligated to follow us law so I think the suits will go through I do think there is a. All right Leah wrong there is a sort of anti-chinese sentiment in the US but I doubt that carries through to the courts I think that's a lot bigger deal for. Potential regulation against some of the things these companies are doing and there is a. [40:14] There's a complicated thing that both TNT Moon she and her getting partly accused of violating like, there's a a a cap, on Customs that shipments have to be worth over 800 dollars in order order for you to have to pay tariffs and you know meet all these import obligations so if you ship a container of clothes from China to the US you're going to pay tariffs on the import of those clothes and you're gonna have to comply with a bunch of laws like that the, clothes were made at a factory you know in a region of China that's known to violate human rights and all these things and there's this loophole that if your sale if your shipment is under 8:00 in value. [41:04] You don't have to do any of that and so when she and started they were shipping a lot of stuff straight from China and and it was all under this 800 our threshold and timbu is still shipping everything straight from China XI and has built a few warehouses in the u.s. so there, probably Blended but like there's a lot of talk on Washington about changing our trade treaties and lowering that minimum, to because there's a significant amount of shipments coming from China to the us that are. They're now under that threshold and taking advantage of that to not not be you know incur all these costs that the bigger companies are having to do. Scot: [41:46] Michael we will see it'll be funny to watch that one rattle through the courts and see who wins. Jason: [41:51] Yeah yeah yeah it's a you know it's all if you don't have a huge financial interest in it it's fun to grab some popcorn and just just follow the drama of all of it. Scot: [42:02] Cool any other exciting news you want to go into. Jason: [42:05] No I think that is everything on my list for for the this month I'm going to be, interested to see how Amazon earnings play out next year again there's a weird thing like, you know in general growth is decelerating the industry average is decelerating and our friends at Amazon and Walmart which are the two largest retailers in the US by a significant margin, Arbor of grow have historically been growing faster than the industry average which kind of means. There's not a lot of growth for the rest of the industry and so it'll be interesting to see whether that Trend continues, in with this Q2 data or whether you know the law of large numbers starts to kick in with these guys. Scot: [42:53] Yeah and if you have these fast Growers out here like these upstarts the Sheehan and the team is who are they taken care from that's that's always the ultimate question that we ask. Jason: [43:04] Yeah absolutely so we're going to have to continue watch and more data becomes available. Scot: [43:10] Cool so do you have any trips coming up that people need to be worth any appearance. Jason: [43:14] I'm all vacations all the time now so. Scot: [43:17] Having done three Keynotes you're burned out. Jason: [43:20] I am not of course I'll be at every show so I think next up for me is eat a least in Boston so if any talks are planning on attending that or in the Boston area, drop me a line and we can meet for a Starbucks coffee and you can give me a hard time about why you wish Scott was there and not me. Scot: [43:40] Cool and then on our docket we have August 3rd as Amazon earnings will try to get a show out pretty close to that one and then we've been promising folks a deep dive I get notes all the time and now that you've done a talk on one that will that should be helpful because now you've hopefully got some slides that we can use as an anchor it so we'll have to get that in the can once we get back to a more normal schedule here. Jason: [44:04] Yeah and that's a deep dive on generative a I assume you're talking about. Scot: [44:07] Yeah yeah yeah I do too cool. Jason: [44:10] I love it well we'll give back some time to users so if you appreciate this nominally shorter episode feel free to give us a five star review and encourage us to be briefed more often. Scot: [44:24] And until next time. Jason: [44:26] Happy commercing.

EP306 - Apple WWDC announcement, Generative AI, and Holiday First Look Apple previewed a new mixed reality headset called the Apple Vision Pro at it's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this month. Apple calls the new category spatial computing and we speculate about how it may or may not be a big deal. We also discuss the latest Echo hardware from Amazon, which is mostly disappointing. We discuss the rapidly evolving generative AI space and some of the commerce use-cases. And we take a first look at Holiday 2023. Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 306 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, June 8th 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 306 being recorded on Thursday June 8 2023 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 well it's been about a month our weekly pot has become a monthly cut pod because our lives have gotten pretty busy here in this postcode world I know you've been traveling a lot what else is new with you. Jason: [0:57] Yeah yeah it's finally feels like summer which I'm very grateful for, a lot of interesting stuff going on in the world of Commerce that keeps me engaged but I feel like the main reason our podcast is slow down is because you are an entrepreneurial mogul. Scot: [1:15] I don't know about mobile but I'll take the entrepreneur piece yeah the day job is a occupying 100 or 99 point, eight percent of my time and I used to be able to use speed like 97 and I could squeeze in more time so I podcast start button but got a there's a lot of cars out there to take care of and we're doing our best to get to all of them. Jason: [1:35] And we are grateful for it I feel like I'm I'm going back in time about six months because we've been on such a leg but I feel remiss. There was a huge accomplishment like six months ago you were named one of the founding members of the. Marketplace Hall of Fame. Scot: [1:57] I saw that yeah yeah. Jason: [2:01] Here's the thing I'm going to say about that I didn't know that much about it and I don't think anyone would be surprised to hear you're a founding member but like. Don't like five names and it was like Jeff Bezos Mar Quarry. And you and Jack Ma I'm like I'm like man you are going to be the best looking dude on that Mount Rushmore. Scot: [2:24] Yeah usually I'm I'm kind of Groucho Marx not sure I want to be in the club but this is one I was very happy to be being is like me and like three or four other billionaires all I'll take I'll take being included in that group. Jason: [2:39] Yeah yeah you don't want to be the fanciest house on the Block so. Scot: [2:42] Yeah I got a yeah I'm I'm excited I'm punching way above my weight on that list for sure. Jason: [2:48] Yeah well so anyway congratulations on that for sure I know and westerners would appreciate it and then while I'm thrilled for summer I've been a little down about one bit of news. Scot: [3:00] What is it Jason. Jason: [3:01] Disney click closed the Star Wars Hotel before you and I got to go there. Scot: [3:08] Yeah I know we could have done a live stream when this thing was announced I was excited and then I saw the price and then I saw the promo video and then I saw the reviews and you could just tell they had totally the totally whiffed on the whole thing it was. It was it wasn't just kind of a hotel you stayed at you had to just do that thing alone you didn't have to but it was so expensive. You're paying like two or three thousand dollars a night which I don't know this gonna be some. Someone in California makes these decisions I guess I don't understand the the tolls of the everyday American or even the higher in Star Wars hand that's a that's a big ask and you know I'm not in the cosplay so I think they had this if we kind of put on our marketing hats they had death by a Thousand Cuts so you had to be a Star Wars fan number one number two you had to be willing to spend 5K on this fancy hotel experience number three had to be in the cause playing and then number for the experiences that people that try to gave it you know at best a. Jason: [4:11] Yeah mediocre. Scot: [4:12] Yeah it felt very Star Trek e which is definitely a problem for Star Wars fans and you know it had a lot of kind of fun Spacey kind of vibe but like not enough Star Wars so yeah but you know. I'll say kudos to them for trying but it was an expensive mistake and I'm sure they can repurpose the real estate it's not like they're gonna I'm not shedding a tear. Jason: [4:36] Real estate has been depreciated I'm sure. Scot: [4:38] I think they'll be okay but yeah you know it is bummer because I was kind of hoping it would work, I've done some other Star Wars experience you'll stuff that was really fun there was there's this group in the UK and they go create movie scenes and industrial areas it's really weird the way it's described is called like underground movies or something like that they did a Star Wars experience that was like amazing where they had a Cantina I guess galaxies Edge is kind of like yeah. As when I mean I haven't been yet but I'm actually going to go this summer so I'm excited about that all. Jason: [5:11] Yeah it's really good you should. Scot: [5:12] Yeah everyone says it's good so that's on my list. Jason: [5:15] Yeah I'm in the same boat like it I don't feel like I'm disappointed that I missed it because I feel like. It sounds poorly executed in poorly conceived but the high-level concept of a. Experiential Star Wars Hotel experience I was super excited about and I hope the fact that this does didn't work isn't going. Like slow down future future ideas on that space because it could have been cool if they did it really well. Scot: [5:44] Yeah yeah I don't put salt down. Jason: [5:47] Onto something more reliable Apple announcements. Scot: [5:51] Yeah this was exciting so I'd love to get your take on the Apple Vision Pro so first of all the the earlier announcements I was kind of like I was getting a little concerned because they're like you know coming up the biggest new feature in Mac OS is a really cool screen saver and then the phone had a new sleep display mode I'm like, we've kind of jumped the shark if this is the big new OS features there were some other ones and I'm being a little bit facetious but there were there were to say there were minor tweaks which is kind of a Fair assessment I think. [6:24] And then they finally gave us that one more thing that we've been waiting for and I went and our crack staff of interns went into the Jason and Scot show vault and you and I and 2016 gave a talk at an in our F / shop dot-org event where we were asked to talk about the future of retail and in there I remember I pulled up the presentation we talked about drones and 3D printing and then we talk about a rvr and at that point in time Facebook they're used to this company called Facebook now you may know them as meta they they had just acquired Oculus and we were speculating would Apple enter the game and turns out we were right but like many of our predictions we were maybe a little early if I've done the math on this right we were about seven years ahead, but I think the wait has been worth it because they definitely swung for the fences on this one and you know the the feature sets and the user interface no one none of us have experience to have read the reviews of folks that have sounds like it I can't wait to get my hands on one and I'm definitely ordering one so excited to hear what you think. Jason: [7:37] Yeah yeah so maybe half a step back Apple tends to do two big events a year they and they do as software announcement and they do a hardware announcement this is normally the software announcement where they detail all the. New releases of the various operating systems for all the devices and they do sometimes, launch devices at this which they did again they launched a number of new configurations of Max and then in like September they announced. The hardware which is up you know generally includes a new phone for October. So you don't necessarily expect a huge new hardware product at this announcement and I was I was kind of with you most of the OS and announcements were very incremental the new. Computers were all like like very very incremental there is like. [8:35] The new 15-inch the the MacBook Air is now a 15 inch. So that's maybe going to be an appealing laptop for people that want to pretty powerful laptop that's super light. But I will say there's a number of small enhancements in the OS has that I'm looking forward to like they their incremental but they did you know call out a number of sort of pain points where like. The autocorrect on the keyboard can often be very annoying and they're going to use a large language model too. Um what you keep your curse words and proprietary language a lot easier and, a few little bits like that and then yeah to your point like at the end they go and one more thing and as I assume most of our listeners know that's magic language at Apple, that's that's the language Steve Jobs used before he pulled the first iPhone out of his jeans pocket or the first MacBook Air out of the manila envelope and you know that language has been used to introduce a lot of apples game-changing products and it frankly hasn't been used very much. In the in the modern era so the mere fact that they started the innocent reduction with an one more thing tells you that Apple thinks this is a. In extra big deal and. I'm with you like I will I'm embarrassed to say somewhere in some ways I will probably buy one I think there's a bunch of. [10:03] Cool things about it like the the hardware achievement is is pretty impressive so this is a. They would be pissed at me describing it this way they invented a new term they call this spatial Computing but it's a it's an AR VR headset and it kind of looks like ski goggles. And you know a lot of people had predicted this and their renderings that weren't too far off but the hardware is beautiful as you would expect from Apple it has a bunch of Premium finishes it is not an accessory that talks to a computer a phone it's a. Computer that you wear in your face and in fact I think it has to M2 chips in it. And in the specs are really high each eye has more than a 4K screen so very high resolution VR headset and the latency, it has this Mode called pass-through mode which means there's cameras in front of it and it can feel like a transparent visor because. The the cameras see outside and then you know project that onto these two 4K screen so it makes it feel like you're seeing through the visor and it's in full color at 4K with less than 12 millisecond latency which is. [11:20] Other VR headsets have a pass-through mode like the Oculus has a black-and-white pass-through mode but the latency is. As much there's a lot more lag and so that creates like all these like motion artifacts and stuff. That this is all very premium high-end Hardware which seems, pretty cool and so the experiences seem cool everyone I've read you know just got to actually try it thanks though I. On your face experience was vastly better than any other a rvr. They had experienced and then they also you know brought in Bob Iger from Disney and who announced that they were doing a bunch of proprietary content for the platform which is a. Another exciting thing right because the these headsets are only as good as the. The content you have for them so all that to me was super favorable the things that they're rightly getting knocked on is you just talked about the price of the Disney hotel being unrealistic they didn't really even mention the price in this announcement but they released it afterwards and it's the base price is going to be over 3500 bucks and if you're blind like I am you're going to have to then buy some prescriptions Iceland's is that screw into it. And so it's an expensive device. [12:43] It also has kind of mirror battery life like the there's a small battery on the device but in order to get a two-hour battery they make you put a battery pack the size of an iPhone in your pocket and connect it via a cable, to the headset and that gets you two hours which frankly isn't even enough time to watch a lot of movies that are out these days. People have talked a lot about it being really heavy. On your face because of all this like you know metal hardware and premium materials that it feels pretty pretty meaningful on your face and then the biggest weird thing to me. In the announcement they made multiple they took multiple occasions to talk about. [13:28] How important what they called presences right so they talked like there's a lot of new features and all the OSS around FaceTime. And making it a more useful meeting thing and and all of those features were around making you feel like you were. More together with the people you are FaceTiming with and when they first show this, this apple Vision Pro experience the first thing they show is video conferencing with other real people and how their faces are floating right in front of you and it you know it's this great presence experience. Except for anyone wearing. This bloody device because guess what you don't get is a picture of the person wearing the device wait what what you get is a. Uncanny valley like semi-realistic Avatar of the person. [14:18] And it just feels like very incongruity us that they're both saying presents a super important and then they're partitioning, anyone wearing this device sort of away from real people and so I that to me is worrisome I got to be honest when I add up all the pros and the cons it feels like people like you and I will buy it, but I kind of suspect that this is going to be more like an apple Lisa than the first Macintosh. Scot: [14:44] It you know but you gotta start somewhere and this is by setting the goalposts hi it's easier to go down than up so you know I can imagine several iterations and maybe it'll take another seven years but at some point I think they'll solve all those things and they'll get the cost way down but. Jason: [15:00] 100% if you look at this as like the entree into a new form of computing I'm totally with you right and and I get I wish I owned one of the a police's but and it did pave the way for the Macintosh so so I'm all down for it I don't think, if you're a retailer at home and you're going like hey do I have to invent some new Commerce experience for the. For the Apple Vision Pro like the answer is no right like and what like unless maybe your Louis Vuitton and you want to get a good press release about being a first mover you know it's unlikely that there's going to be 100 million people sitting in their house wearing this thing on their face all day and wanting to shop on it. Scot: [15:42] Yeah I saw so to last comments on this one I saw One reviewer who's really into a rvr and it was interesting framing he basically said Facebook is going down this path of VR is a social experience and you're using it for meetings and for meeting people which aligns since their social network right and that's part of their DNA where's apples kind of more saying we're heading into a world where we're more alone and you'll you know your increasingly you'll be working for home alone and remote and your you'll you know you'll be interacting with your family with this mask on it's kind of a I don't buy this framing but it's kind of an interesting you know the way it's set up today is very different view of things and then you know then the conclusion was you know for society I hope it's the Facebook silly should be good or else we're all going to be ready player one like sitting in little tiny you know compartments never interacting with each other at a human level and. Jason: [16:38] Yeah no I agree and then ironically like apples Imaging everyone sitting at home except for Apple employees who will get fired and they said. Scot: [16:46] Yeah. Jason: [16:48] Yeah another framing I heard which makes some sense is like they talked about meta really thinking of their device as a gaming platform and it's kind of priced at parity with gaming platforms and the, Partnerships that are leaning into a really gaming Partnerships and it comes with very sort of gaming friendly controllers and things like that and apple is really thinking of this as a compute platform and I think on an implied in their announcement is they Envision a future when. You know we don't we don't own clamshell devices with keyboards that we used hitter. Get our work done and that we're more likely to sit in a comfortable chair with one of these things on our face and be much more productive. Scot: [17:28] Yeah another thing that was interesting this got obscured by the announcement was I've heard a fair amount of Buzz about this roller coaster experience in Japan and I think it's a Nintendo theme park and what you yes. Jason: [17:39] Super Mario Kart and I think they did they just did it in. Scot: [17:43] Yeah. Jason: [17:44] Universal Studios in Los Angeles I believe may not have it. Scot: [17:48] Okay well Apple acquired the company that built this experience for Nintendo and. Yeah so you know kind of putting that together you see all right you got Bob Iger on stage and that was like content on the device but think about this killer you know imagine you go to your next Generation Galaxy Edge experience in your writing some kind of a ride and now they throw some AR part on top of that experience that that would be pretty cool. Jason: [18:14] Yeah I guess so to other random things I thought were mildly interesting normally apple is pretty good about dropping these announcements and then having like. Pretty quick of the ability thereafter and so one weird thing they're announcing this and June and it's not going to be available in told 2024. Um which I you know that feels a little unusual for me and then not surprising at all but like very noticeable. Three words that were not mentioned ever in this announcement were artificial intelligence VR or the metaverse. So they kind of invented their own terms and I think they very intentionally avoided. A variety of stigmas that are attached to some of those those other terms and then I guess the last thing in my head you know there's this company and I think they still exist and they have raised billions of dollars. On a lot of hype around a really high-end AR headset it's this company called magically. And I think like if there's any loser in this whole Space. [19:26] Like if there was any hope of magically surviving think I think this you know this seems like a better product in every way than what magically was promising and wasn't able to deliver. [19:46] Yeah I'm sure there's some IP that's that's interesting to someone I hope so they spent a fortune. Scot: [19:48] Yeah I think they're done they yeah they missed their window and they had these really cool early demos but. Jason: [19:55] Yeah I actually got one we're like literally the it was kind of like old-school Oculus like there's a you know a refrigerator size computer that was Tethered to the. To the screen but it definitely it was not 4K with 12 second latency. Scot: [20:10] Nothing yep and so this is where Apple wins because they can they built their own silk and they built a chip for that latency it's called the R1 or something and so they basically said alright we need to create Hardware that can have this under eight millisecond latency and they just did it and you know that's not everyone can do that. Jason: [20:28] Not many yeah so I thought that was interesting again like you and I will be able to have our little Avatar meetings after this maybe we'll be able to record the podcast in it. Scot: [20:38] Yeah people can watch us look at each other with goggles. Jason: [20:42] I feel like if there's two people that would whose attractiveness would be improved by the goggles and might be us we have faces for podcasting. Scot: [20:47] Yeah yeah I can yeah I'm kind of wondering can you change your eyes you know so those are all simulated so. Jason: [20:54] You have to be able to write like if I can buy blue contacts why can't I have yeah because that that is true for those that didn't see the announcement it can look like the glasses are clear because you can see the where's eyes through the glasses but it's because, there's cameras inside the glasses and there's always screens on the outside of the glasses and so they're they're renderings of your eyes. Scot: [21:16] Yeah I want to I'm going to do a Terminator ice that's what I'm going for. Jason: [21:20] Yeah I'm extra weary about Terminator references in our current AI climb. Scot: [21:25] That's a good Segway. Jason: [21:28] Nice I like it. Yeah so there's lots of AI news like we could do a month of AI shows it feels like the only thing I talk about it work but there's one particular subset of all this AI That's often called generative Ai and I'm going to even say focusing very specifically on the image generation Ai and there's tons of cool stuff that I think you and I have both been playing with. Scot: [21:58] Yeah I'm big into mid-journey and then everyone's done chat G PT but then the big the big thing that's helped me is once it became where you could do the links I've been able to I do a lot of writing and I've been able to accumulate all my writing in a file and then feed it in and say Here's my style analyze this so that it goes to, then I taught to start writing in my style and then that has been a huge game-changer for me that's the first one gives you like a decent draft and then you're kind of find yourself editing a lot but like having it where you can now upload new information either from the web or in a file or a PDF is a been a big game changer for me it's it gets it more like you know 95% weather. Jason: [22:47] Oh yeah I think I've mentioned this before but like there's a small subset of the writing I do that I get to partner with a copywriter so I'll like, give outlines or dictate things to a copywriter in the draft I get back is almost always will written but not remotely in my voice and so it takes me a long time to edit it and give I give the same raw inputs to chechi BT that that I've trained. To know my writing style what I get back is is way closer to use them. Scot: [23:19] Does your copywriter listen to this podcast. Jason: [23:23] Hopefully she does not. Scot: [23:25] Okay good. Jason: [23:27] Yeah yeah no I you know again there's a whole we again we could do another podcast about whether AI is gonna create or destroy jobs or both but I think like a lot of things there are things that we used to pay people to do that are it's going to be harder to make a living doing, but there's going to be lots of new jobs to write and those copywriters like ought to be the first ones learning how to write good prompts for these for these things, the image ones I've been playing with image generators to I use mid Journey, you know there's an open source one that you can kind of run on your local hardware stable diffusion, that has a lot less constraints it's not quite as high quality of rendering is mid-journey but I'll tell you the new thing that's been fun for me is Adobe announced a generative AI model called Firefly and they already built it in one of their products so the the if you own Photoshop CC you can download a Photoshop beta and it has this feature that they call. [24:28] Excuse me generative Phil and, generative Phil is a legitimate Game Changer there's a bunch of use cases that used to be super time-consuming for designers that that this beta version already like. Makes Child's Play and one of the sort of unfortunate thing mid-journey generates really beautiful images the one thing it doesn't do is, trademark images or copyright images or text right so very often you might generate an image in mid Journey but then you had you'd have to hand it to a good Photoshop artist to put the spiffy logo in it or to put you know and actual image of Scot Wingo in it or something like that. And Adobe Firefly is really good at that use case so like I've actually done a bunch of kind of Blended image where I made an image in mid journey and then, I refined it in the Photoshop beta and it's, it's super fun but man like you know if I'm any kind of designer or graphic artist like I want to get good at this stuff right away because it, I'm not saying is going to eliminate jobs but it's going to change the kind of jobs people need to be good at. Scot: [25:43] Yeah there's been a lot of really cool use cases of the generative AI feature in Photoshop where people would start like with them Nirvana cover you know the little baby swimming naked and then expand it ever bigger than you can like see the rest of the scene what the computer imagines and they're starting to it with memes to it's pretty wild to watch some output of that it's it's like it's a little scary wow it could be, how real it is it feels like it is it's not real obviously because no one knows what's in that rest of that frame. Jason: [26:15] Yeah there's a real world use case where Nike and Tiffany announced a collab product and everyone saw it and thought it was awful. Right like that it just like is just a very like not inspiring combination of Nike shoes with Tiffany branding and a bunch of people then you know went and use these generative AI models to create. Way better looking shit Tiffany Nike shoes and that really happened and then last night I actually watched the Nike are movie which is the movie about the. [26:50] Both of the Air Jordans with them. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck in it awesome movie by the way especially if you grew up in the 80s like there was a lot of fun nostalgia. But in this movie The they get a meeting with young Michael Jordan and his family who are going to come to Beaverton to talk about. In doing a Nike endorsement and and Nikes though Dark Horse like Jordans not interested in Nike and so the the the team after they booked this meeting on Friday afternoon they go to the the one Nike designer in the basement and they say Hey by Monday I need a prototype and a rendering of the world's greatest basketball shoe and this, this guy had a weekend to invent the Air Jordan which he did right and and history is made like you know it made 40 billion dollars for Phil Knight and a couple billion dollars for Michael Jordan so great success but you imagine that if that kind of thing were to happen today, um there'd be a team rendering, a hundred different concepts in these generative AI models and that it have like a way wider variation of interesting ideas to consider. Scot: [28:10] Yeah very cool. Jason: [28:12] So I will say we're starting to see some interesting Commerce use cases the I have seen a bunch of clients that are using generative AI to create or refine product images and in some cases they are literally saving millions of man hours now. You know so maybe you've got you know a huge catalog of products and they're all shot as lifestyle imagery or they're all sot on a particular background and then you now need to sell them in the new Marketplace at Sheehan that didn't exist a year ago. And there's a requirement for white backgrounds. Well you know you used to pay like an army of graphic designers to mask out all these images and change the backgrounds and now that these like generative things can do it. [29:02] Trivially and you imagine pretty quickly that all these images are going to be personalized right so instead of, you know seeing that that product around some you know model family like at some you know random persons Thanksgiving table, you're going to see that that that new food product. At your Thanksgiving table with your family sitting around it and all of these sorts of you know personalized cases as as the imagery the ability to generate imagery on the Fly gets really good, and I've actually never seen a couple of demos from Google of a product they first announced. Last year and then they announced that it's going to be released eminently last month, it's called Google seen exploration in this is a cool AR use case specifically for retail so this is walk into a store hold your phone with the camera on in front of an aisle and it recognizes all of the products on the Shelf using computer vision, and then it overlays all the products with Google ratings and reviews. [30:08] So like giving you a lot of this like valuable digital information that didn't used to exist on the shelf right and you you know they talk about all the use cases like you know you need to buy a highly rated nut free vegan chocolate bar and you're standing in the chocolate aisle and there's a you know a thousand chocolate bars there's no way to search by that right and and with this scene exploration you know you can now do that on the fly in a store and to me that seems like a, pretty cool use case and it's it's going to be built in the phones and then area of your in the OS in the very near future. Scot: [30:50] Yeah I saw a Salesforce they've been going at this very hard in within the Commerce Cloud they announced like 10 features they have one where it will auto-generate your pdp's for you they have one where it will it'll generate tags so like it'll search the description and come up with sizes and colors and and you know kind of like a variance and things out of a description to have another one, there was no actually go create product catalog for you so if you've you've this was a huge thing we had a challenge with it Channel visor is if you're selling if you're selling on Amazon and you're just matching to their Easter eysan you don't really have the rights to that product information so then you can't just copy that and then put on eBay or something like that or your own website so they've got this whole way that you can take that data your your properties which aren't, sentences create the description and then move it to other sections to a lot of really interesting things going on in the intersection of AI and e-commerce. Jason: [31:56] Yeah absolutely so exciting about that and there's going to be I have a feeling we're going to be talking about significant new capabilities on an ongoing basis for the foreseeable future. Scot: [32:06] I remember you'd walked internet retailer and there be ten vendors there that would take your product pictures and add a white background yeah. Jason: [32:15] And that win from like you know people in America doing that to people in India doing that and now it's it's an Nvidia chip doing it. Which side note like you know people keep asking who's winning the who's going to be the one to monetize a eyes are going to be open AI or meta all these small companies we also got the answer to that this quarter it's Invidia. Scot: [32:36] Yeah they're gonna win yes. Jason: [32:39] So for those that don't know nvidia's market cap Nvidia has a chip manufacturer famous for, these high-performance graphic chips that were originally used for gaming and still are and their chips have been extremely useful for training and doing refining training for all these these large language models in AI, and their market cap briefly passed a trillion dollars, um this month I think it dipped like just below a trillion dollars at the moment but to put that in perspective Intel's market cap is like 130 billion dollars. Like so Nvidia the game chip company is eight times more valuable than Intel at the. Scot: [33:25] It's crazy yeah who knows no one had that on their bingo card five years. Jason: [33:29] No I wish that was one of my year beginning predictions. Scot: [33:34] Yeah anything else on a iron. Jason: [33:38] No no did you Amazon 10 announcement last month you follow. Scot: [33:44] Yeah yeah well it wouldn't be a Jason Scott show without some. [34:00] That's right time for some Amazon news Amazon has been unexpectedly quiet so we've got a new CEO basis is out romping around wearing crazy shirts at festivals and living the high life with his girlfriend so, some of that out there other engage did not know that congratulations Jeff I know he listens to. Jason: [34:26] If you're playing bingo it was a 2.5 million dollar diamond. Scot: [34:29] Nice the one thing I saw just to highlight is a lot there's kind of a, this bit of an economic downturn has made many of the video providers get more serious about profitability so we saw both Netflix and Disney add an ad-supported tier and increase their prices and just as we're recording this Amazon announced they're going to do the same thing with prime so they're going to have an add to your 44 Prime but I know you follow the devices I totally slept on this because I was so eager for the Vision Pro tell me about the new devices. Jason: [35:07] Yeah yeah. I would characterize it as disappointing they want some new Echo devices at. The in the middle of May for release on May 31st and you know I have it. An embarrassing amount of these devices controlling smart home features throughout my house and they when I first got them like. [35:37] I seem very I felt very satisfied with them like the the accuracy of the speech recognition and stuff seemed adequate like based on my expectations at the time but I've grown to be very annoyed by them like they really struggle to know which room you're talking to and they're inconsistent about how semantically accurate you have to be like in in this world where Chad gbt is writing all my articles for me you know you just go I, man the speech recognition in this Hardware has to be better and so I was kind of eagerly looking for some new Echoes that have like an llm in them it seemed like Amazon was a first mover here, and so they did announce some new devices but they're pretty boring so they announced a new form factor called the echo pop which is. [36:27] I want by my count their fourth or fifth attempt to build a more premium speaker into an echo and this is like. A more affordable premium speaker which seems like a weird Niche so that wasn't that interesting I don't actually use the echoes. As speakers so much and then they launched a new Echo Show 5 which is. The the echo with the screen it's the smallest screen has 5 inch screen and then they announced some new Echo buds the echo built into the the earbuds which you and I both tried and I don't think we're very enamored by. The. The features are like oh the speaker sounds better than the old speaker the microphone is more accurate than the old microphone and it's 20% faster. [37:15] And so like I bought a couple of these new new Echoes to see if I you noticed a difference and it's. Like it's to me it's mostly imperceptible from the old Hardware so pretty disappointing. Um but app that announcement I will say Andy jassy said that hey the large language model for Echo is coming and you know there. It does feel like Amazon's a little behind and I don't know if this announcement was meant to apologize for that that. Status or whether there really is something that's going to be imminently announced but you know like he he doubled down on their effort to make this the, the most useful personal assistant on Earth and you know part of that is we're going to have a robust large language model that's you know on has a, a similar number of parameters to to open a I or bear door or Lama from from meta, that the Amazons going to release to make these these sneakers smarter so I hope he delivers on that promise. Scot: [38:23] Yeah the there if definitely feels like chat gbt started this new gear for Innovation and feels like apple even with their big announcement there was they worked some AI in there but it just feels like. There's a lot of people speculating do you really need a phone if we're going to head to a device where you can talk to it and these plugins at chat gbt now give it action so you can say hey book me a restaurant reservation the things you would do on your phone you're going to be almost able to do totally by voice soon therefore will you need a phone so there's a lot of you know that's a new would expect Amazon who was ahead on voice now feels like they're behind on a lot of this so it's be really interesting this next year to see who can kind of hang with this and you can't the R&D budgets are gonna go through the roof that's for sure. Jason: [39:14] Yeah and the irony is you know you go back in time and you know all the retailers in America where happily you know shipping two weeks after you place an order in Amazon you know disrupted Everybody by saying like hey you should get your stuff in two days and then one day and then same day right and they they raised the expectations for everyone else it feels like open AI is doing that to Apple and Amazon right now on the on the natural language models. Scot: [39:43] The to the pop did not pop. Jason: [39:46] It did it did not I did that in full disclosure I did not buy a pop because again like I don't I don't so much by them for their speaker Fidelity I mostly buy them to control my lights and stuff. But yeah I like I still have to repeat myself multiple times and some rooms to just turn stuff on and it's frustrating. Scot: [40:06] Yeah so this one was one I wanted to bounce off of you I'm a CNBC junkie and I was watching the other day and Target stock had a big Miss and the folks on, Talking Heads were saying that in their earnings release they really called out this shoplifting as a. [40:24] A problem and they took a one right off of something like 500 million dollars so I'm sure everyone has seen the videos where you know this is just new organized crime kind of wave going on especially in big cities where you'll see. 20 people go in a store and just run out with arm full of stuff it's happening to starting to kind of luxury then then you saw a little lemon and it happens in Apple Stores and now you're starting to see it in every day department stores and drug stores, so I thought that was you know as e-commerce person I was thinking huh that's interesting you know I wonder if and kind of hi Pro some high-profile store closures have followed from the so Nordstrom closed a store and like San Francisco and that's kind of thing so I was thinking is e-commerce person I was kinda thinking well this is interesting this is gonna this is going to benefit Amazon pretty immensely because as the stores have to close due to this crime wave it's going to benefit e-commerce and then Amazon like 60% of e-commerce so they'll just get they'll just absorb a lot of that that that so that the crime is going to have this unintended consequence of getting rid of stores which is bad for for the local environment and then it'll yeah I don't, yeah I don't think they really want to benefit Amazon but they will so I wanted to get your hot take on them. Jason: [41:40] Well first of all just to complete your thought the the brick-and-mortar retailers and the national retail Federation would actually say Amazon's double-dipping on that benefit because they're both. Selling stuff when the the stores closed in the big cities but also most of the Retailer's blame the organized crime on Amazon. [41:59] So the The Narrative is basically that like you know people here's who used to steal from stores, people that needed something and couldn't afford it for whatever reason right so they. Stalled food for their family or you know items they could afford to buy that was individual shoplifting and, employees told stuff employee shrink and there now is this much higher occurrence of organized crime for profit where where people are stealing you know every bottle of shampoo in the Walgreens and one of the reasons these big retailers say that this kind of crime is much larger now is it's way easier to monetize that stuff after you steal it, and the reason they say it's easier to monetize it is you can go sell all of this this still the merchandise pretty easily on Amazon and eBay. Um so that's controversial like the marketplace is due a lot to sort of avoid selling, um song Goods but that one of the premises why there's more organized crime is because. It is easier to fence and monetize this stuff. But here's the thing that's super interesting about that like there for sure is this new kind of crime and it's. [43:22] It's much more newsworthy so when someone drives a truck through the front of an Apple store and then steals all the phones that's going to be on the local news when someone shoplifts pound of cheese, that's not going to be on the local news right or when an employed as a fake return to embezzle 60 dollars from a shirt like that's not as often on the local news so all of these organized crimes get put on the news and on YouTube and things like that more and and a huge problem is. Like it's much more violent people are getting hurt employees and in a few cases the perpetrators are are getting hurt or even killed and so like there is a way higher human cost to this kind of crime and so we have heard a bunch of. Retail CEOs, you know raising the alarm bells and they say two things like oh man our losses are going up this is having a material economic effect on our business we're closing stores partly because of this and you know we're having to change how we do do store operations and and you know all these things they're also saying that police forces are underfunded and you know don't have enough resources to retailers with this problem so they're there in many cases you know asking for more more Municipal support here's the thing though. [44:51] People have always stolen stuff from retailers there's always been a line item on every retards p&l for shrink and for most public companies that's that's a publicly disclosed number and usually, for most retailers and it varies by the type of retailer and the the geography but usually it's one to two percent of Revenue is lost in shrink and so. [45:19] Target's announcement was hey we lost we potentially could lose 500 million dollars in profit this year. And their stock partly went down from because of it like I would argue their their stock also went down for some, PR missteps they made and then also because their revenue is just soft compared to some of their competitors, they probably went down for that shrink because 500 million dollars in profit sounds like a big deal but if you gross up 500 million dollars in profit to product costs, that's one point six billion dollars in shrink at Target in 2022 and they're saying it could be as high as two billion dollars in shrink in 2023 that means that shrink is 1.5 to 1.9 percent of targets Revenue which is below industry averages Walgreens, has made all of these same complaints and last year the Walgreen CFO like in the earnings call said hey this is a huge deal like our shrink could potentially be up 52 percent from before the pandemic. Um and then he did his swing 22 year in earnings and Shrink was lower then then the last two years and he literally had to say like maybe we cried too much. [46:40] So I do think there is this new crime it's very serious like it is a problem and you know I have great empathy for retailers in addressing that and they shrink should be zero like a butt. It's a little bit of a fallacy to say hey there's this new material economic impact from this shrink that didn't exist before because the employee shrink is way down because the the surveillance and the the big data and in the business process has evolved eliminated a lot of that and so the net shrink for a lot of retailers, really isn't as significant now it might be more significant in particular stores and so some of the the closing of these stores, seems at least partially legitimate I will say there's even controversy about that like when, Walgreens has hey we're closing a store in San Francisco because there's too much crime, the San Francisco Police Department rides in and goes that's weird because we got way less complaints from from Walgreens last year than we did three years ago or whatever so there's there's. Room for disputes about all this stuff but organized crime, is definitely an increasingly serious thing that retailers have to deal with but don't immediately by all the hype that it's. That it's some you know New Economic strain that retailers have never seen before. Scot: [48:04] I wonder if there's a bit of a narrative around this shrink number like I you know I'm sure they're reporting it correctly but so I wonder if it has the same store sales effect like let's say Walgreens has to closed in ten stores because the shrink is so bad. That comes out of the numbers right because it's probably a seems to work kind of metric so they probably you know now gold number would improve dramatically but. They've shrunk their footprint like it's probably not capturing that you. Jason: [48:33] Yeah no agreed, all as a Wayne huizenga taught me 30 years ago like it any good healthy retailers should be closing and opening stores every year why there's like you can't if you had the perfect realist real estate in one year it would not be perfect the next year right and so in many cases like they're closing stores in economically you know unfriendly climates for them and that improves their same-store sales numbers and improves their cops right and you know whether they did that for purely economic reasons or they did it because there was more organized crime or to put protect employees or whatever like, um it's not wrong for these retailers to curate their, they're fully in an economic downturn that might mean having fewer stores than last year historically the challenge with that is investors always expect you to grow. And so infect investors don't like the story of what of closing underperforming stores and having better comps if you if your overall Revenue goes down so, you know this is yet another kind of excuse for them to reset expectations with investors I think I think that's totally fair. [49:44] In some cases I will tell you retailers are closing iconic stores that just feels kind of sad like the the, Nordstrom flagship store in San Francisco is has always been a big deal that's closing I lived in Portland Oregon and they had a beautiful REI in the Pearl District which was, like a great super friendly place to live and they're closing that store and they said partly because they didn't feel they could protect employees like. That there is something happening that feels like a bummer and there's a lot of big cities that it feels a lot less fun to go shopping. Than it did a few years ago which which is I do think a legitimate concern. Scot: [50:26] Yeah so I know you're the king of all e-commerce and commerce data what are you seeing in the the reports that have come out since our last pot. Jason: [50:36] Yeah well we've slowed down a little bit on the frequency the podcast so kind of just super brief recap US Department of Commerce data comes out every month so we we have the May report which has data through April next week we'll get the, the May data so January through April sales for all of retail are up 2.4% from last year that, that is down a little bit from historical averages pre-pandemic you'd expect retail to be up about 4% a year so 2.4%. [51:11] Is concerning if you look at it from before the pandemic retail sales are up year-to-date, three thirty six percent from 2019 for example so still by historic standards that's very high but this year feels like a meaningful slowdown in sales from last year and of course as soon as you start talking about this people go well what about inflation so if I normalize this data for inflation year-to-date sales this year are down three percent from last year, which historically doesn't happen even with inflation so that, that is a real concern like it it feels very legitimate that we're seeing a Slowdown in in consumer spending and particularly in inflation-adjusted dollars so I mentioned retail sales since the pandemic are up 36% if you adjust that for inflation there up about 14% so less than half of all our sales growth since the pend or more than half of our sales growth since the pandemic, has been a direct result of unusual inflation more than typical inflation and then you know people always ask us in particular about the e-commerce numbers again before the pandemic the. [52:25] Over the last 20 years e-commerce would average around 12 to 15 percent growth a year retail would average three to four percent growth a year there was a weird transposition in the middle of the pandemic when people you know finally went back to stores for the first time and slow down their e-commerce bending so like for the only time in my lifetime, 20:22 size. Retail sales growing faster than e-commerce briefly that trend has reversed e-commerce is back on top of retail but it's not back to Historic standards so e-commerce year-to-date is up about 7.4% verses 2022 still, you know, you remember in the pandemic people are talking about e-commerce spiking and then regressing to the mean just want to remind our listeners that's not true the US Department of Commerce revised some numbers and e-commerce growth. Has ended up being much more robust than like the Wall Street Journal reported in in in a famous article in 2022 so e-commerce is up about 89 percent since, since 2019 and that means. [53:29] Above and beyond the traditional growth that I would have forecasted for e-commerce we've sold an extra six hundred and seventy five billion dollars since the pandemic started so e-commerce still is the biggest winner in this kind of. Pandemic accelerated spending and it's you know we'll get the cue to e-commerce data and about two months it's going to be interesting to see, how it plays out and whether you know the consumer slowdown persist through the end of the year and holiday or whether we start to get a bounce. Scot: [54:01] Yeah and I know it's June and but you get paid to think about this more than I do so what when clients are saying Jason what are you thinking about holiday 23 Woody tongue. Jason: [54:14] I think on the aggregate I'm not expecting it to be an awesome holiday I think there's even if, the the economy listens up there's it's going to take awhile for consumer spending to come back and I think the overall consumer spending is going to be you know modest there will be growth but it'll be low growth and because inflation will still be unusually high like profitability is going to really be, be strain for this holiday that being said we are likely to see some clear winners and losers so like not everyone's going to kind of match the industry average and we've already had a couple bankruptcies Bed Bath & Beyond used to sell a lot of holiday Goods so retailers are going to fight over you know who wins that customer this holiday and so I do think. You can expect to see some retailers have a really good holiday and you know, I hate to say this for all the small retailers out there but like at the moment the the likely narrative is the biggest best retailers in the ecosystem are likely that too. Disproportionately win holiday so like if I had to guess I would guess Amazon and Walmart are going to have a pretty good holiday at the expense of the rest of retailgeek. Scot: [55:32] Got it well you're a Grinch. Jason: [55:37] Yeah I want to be wrong I want to be wrong on that I want to be right on all my year beginning forecast which I can't even remember what they were. Scot: [55:44] Yeah I'm just kidding you get paid to tell the real. Jason: [55:49] I'd rather I would rather be prepared for soft holiday and then be pleasantly surprised. I almost hesitate to even bring this up because it kind of feels like it always happens but there there are now some potential new supply chain challenges. Perking up so there's there's some labor disputes our friends the teamsters the unload all the boats on the west coast of America like are threatening work stoppages and, you know any disruption in there like has a meaningful impact on how much Goods we have available for holiday and then one I've never heard before in my lifetime, the worldwide drought is having a material impact on the supply chain what there is not is enough water in the Panama Canal. [56:39] And so it turns out the way the locks work they have to pour a bunch of water into the canal to lift the boats and there's less water available so the water costs more so it is more expensive to take a heavy boat through the Panama Canal today than it was a month ago. Because of the price of water which. It makes sense when you hear it but it's not something you would I would have thought of and so at the moment the supply-chain wonks are are talking about like you know we might have some unanticipated, supply chain cost as you know people have to pay for the constrain amount of tonnage that they can lift through the Panama Canal. Scot: [57:23] Wow learn something everyday and I can check that off my box in it. Jason: [57:26] Nice well that's probably a perfect place to end it because we have used up our allotted time but even though we've been a little less frequent than usual, I always look forward to catching up with you and it's been great to chat but I look forward to hearing how our listeners are doing. Scot: [57:44] Yeah and you know what listeners could do to help us out leave a review we would always love your feedback let us know how we're doing and if there's any topics you want to cover and we appreciate you giving us a listen. Jason: [57:57] Scot that's a great idea and until next time happy Commercing.

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!

EP304 - ShopTalk Recap ShopTalk 2023 took place at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas March 26 – March 29th, and seems fully back to pre-pandemic levels. Over 10,000 attendees, 600 exhibitors, and 50,000 one on one meetings, make ShopTalk the premiere digital commerce event in the US. In this episode we recap everything you may have missed if you couldn't make it to Las Vegas. We also briefly discuss e-commerce in Brazil, around Jason's recent trip to São Paulo. Key Themes At ShopTalk this year: Retail Media Networks Social Commerce and Shoppable Video Artificial Intelligence Retailers Becoming Plaforms Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 304 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, April 6th 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.

EP303 - Amazon, Walmartand E-com Q4 Results In this episode we cover: Amazon Q4 Earnings Walmart Q4 Earnings US Department of Commerce Q4 e-commerce data Discussion of Temu and other Social Commerce News Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 303 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, February 23rd 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.

EP302 - Kasey Lobaugh, Deloitte Chief Futurist, Buying into Better: The future of the consumer industry Deloitte Chief Futurist, Consumer Industry, Principal and Owner, Kasey Lobaugh, joins the podcast for his fifth appearance. Having previously appeared on episodes 68, 114, 180, 213. Deloitte has published some new new research, Buying in to Better: The future of the consumer industry, in which they uncover dramatic change in the consumer industry that over the next decade will impact the markets, models, and mechanics of consumer industry companies in significant ways. Also discussed The rise of digital goods and services: Opportunity over threat, and a monthly consumer tracker: Consumer behavior trends state of the consumer tracker | Deloitte Insights Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 303 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, January 25th, 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.

EP301 - Annual Predictions, NRF Big Show, Year End Recap This ended up being a slightly longer than usual episode, sorry! If we had more time, we'd make a shorter podcast (to paraphrase Mark Twain). So here are some timecodes if you want to jump ahead: Recap of the NRF Big Show 1:27 Recap of 2022 Holiday and Full Year Results 22:43 2022 Predictions Scoring 30:34 2023 Predictions 54:51 2022 Predictions Recap Jason: NFTs, Web 3, Metaverse, and Ultrafast delivery services are all overhyped and don't deliver meaningful commerce revenue in 2022. Yes Shein exceeds $30B in annual sales, disrupting apparel industry Yes Adoption of BNPL services slows down to less than 15% CAGR in 2022. Yes Amazon opens more than 100 Amazon Fresh grocery stores No Last Mile evolves Veho, X-Delivery, shipium, or Instacart gets aquired No Jason Total Score: 3 of 5 Scot: Amazon launches a competitor to Shopify webstore, possibly via a headless solution on AWS No Amazon wins ultra-fast delivery. Gopuff, Gorilla, or Jokr goes out of business in 2022 Yes Metaverse gets lots of buzz but no revenue Yes Livestream commerce goes mainstream in the US No Fabric gets acquired No Scot Total Score: 2 of 5 Jason pulls out the rare win! 2023 Predictions Jason: At least 2 retail bankruptcies (besides Party City) BNPL Consolidation (Klarna, Affirm, Afterpay. Sezzle) – at least one merges/exits US or BNPL. Shopify launches an ad product such as a retail media network Meta/Google/TikTok lose ad share to new social media platforms and retail media networks. Live Streaming Commerce Still not meaningful in US in 2023 (less than 5% of social commerce in US) Scot: Amazon uses this 2022 setback/slowdown/reversion to the mean for a public resetting of expectations, but behind the scenes they take share and raise the bar on shipping Shopify is acquired An innovation in e-commerce powered by ai (gpt4) surprises us by how fast it's adopted and how cool it is E-commerce accelerates back to the mean in 2H after a mean regression in 1H. E-com returns 10-15% growth rates. Sephora and/or Ulta move to a subscription model for new product discovery ChatGPT "based on trends and current developments in e-commerce, it is likely that we will see continued growth and expansion in the industry, with an emphasis on mobile commerce, personalize shopping experiences, and increased use of technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Additionally, there may be an increased focus on issues such as sustainability and social responsibility in e-commerce" Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 301 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, January 19th, 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.

EP300 - GoodwillFinds CEO Matt Kaness In this interview, we cover the sale of ModCloth to Walmart, Matts's subsequent work at Lucky Brand and Afterpay, and his new role as CEO at Goodwillfinds. Goodwillfinds.com is an e-commerce site, which sells previously owned merchandise, which has been donated to Goodwill. We cover many of the tactical challenges (onboarding SKUs, product content, fulfillment, and curation), as well as the opportunities of this new "CircularCommerce" space. We also get some of Matt's predictions about what's coming next in digital commerce. Episode 300 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday January 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. Episode 300 is an interview with Matt Kaness, CEO of Goodwillfinds.com. Matt was formerly on episode 79, when he was CEO of Modcloth, which later sold to Walmart.

EP299 - Thanksgiving Week 2022 with Rob Garf of Salesforce A discussion of Thanksgiving Week 2022 from a retail perspective with Rob Garf, Vice President and General Manager, Retail at Salesforce. This is Robs' fourth time on the show, having previously been on episodes 110, 248, and 282. Thanksgiving week 2022 will go down as one of the most complicated holiday weeks on record. With covid impacts still in place, a global economic crisis, supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, new retailer discounting practices, and new consumer behaviors we have a lot to unpack. This episodes covers a wide range of topics around the most important shopping week of the year. We make liberal use of real-time data from Salesforce Shopping Insights HQ, which tracks how 1.5+ billion consumers are shaping shopping trends. You can see a real-time holiday dashboard, powered by Tableau so you can interact with the data yourself on the Salesforce Holiday Insights page. Episode 299 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Tuesday November 29th, 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.

EP298 - Amazon Q3 Earnings Episode 298 is a recap of Amazon's Q3 2022 Earnings Report. Episode 298 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Friday October 28th, 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.