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Welcome to the Json and Scott show this is episode 325 being recorded on Sunday May 4th I'm your host Jason retail gee Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host Scot Wingo.
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Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott showed listenershappy May the 4th Jason.
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Happy Star Wars Day Scott.
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What did you and your family do to celebrate.
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My family is all consumed by fortnite and conveniently this month is a Star Wars themed fortnite so I've been playing Dark Sith Jar Jar Binks all all day on fortnite.
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True,
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cool well I think it's is it the 20th or the 20th and the issue of episode 3 it was recently so I was watching that today just to kind of get my Star Wars on and I've really been enjoying the season 2 of Andor so that's like some of the best adult
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Star Wars,
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drama and the Spy show if I find a lot of people don't watch it but it's excellent it's kind of a slow boil you got to be a little patient it's not built for today's Tik Tok Society but the
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the payoffs are very good and the writing solid and yeah I really enjoyed the acting is amazing.
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I agree totally into it I'm behind on season 2 my wife and I made the mistake of starting to binge watch the pit which is impossible to watch in super depressing but we can't stop now.
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Okay sounds like a a hell of a pitch good use of your time.
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Finnish punishing ourselves we have 1 more episode which we would have watched tonight were it not for my appointment to record this podcast so my wife is angry at me and then I get to start catching up on on season 2 of vandor I've only seen the first episode.
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Okay I won't no spoilers for me but it's excellent.
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Cool it's been a while since we recorded because you sir have been burning up the airline miles I thought you said you don't ever need more miles in here you are just stacking them up.
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Yeah it turns out I didn't get a vote that I I almost thought I was gonna get to announce a huge milestone on this podcast I think it's gonna happen sometime before our next episode but I'm,
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I'm a perilously close to passing 2 million miles on United which is I I do not say that as a a badge of Glorynot recommended.
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You get an extra bag of peanuts.
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Exactly the pilot comes and brings you your peanuts that's the.
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Nice.
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The big benefit and the actual for those.
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For for frequent fire and all we need is the benefits you get from 2 million miles are you get to keep the benefits that you got at 1 million miles that they're now taking away from all the 1 million milesyeah it's that kind of Life yeah.
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Controversial stuff loyalty not what it used to beum yeah but so amongst all that.
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Jetting you around what do they want you to talk about where are you going what's.
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They are they are I I have been on the road pretty much every week and I I am continuing to travel I'm visiting a client at their event in Las Vegas early tomorrow morning,
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but kind of working backwards last week I was in New York a division of pubis is the healthcare division that worked predominantly with all the the health care companies and they have their own Big Show,
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and apparently they could not get any good keynote speakers this year so I got to do,
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1 of the Keynotes and talk about all these disruptions to Commerce that are that are coming to the healthcare industry,
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so that was super fun hey I got to follow Chelsea hand or so it was it was it was great to try to be funny right after someone who's actually funny.
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Yeah.
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Uh yeah and then and I think she made disparaging remarks about everything I was about to talk about if I'm if I'm I try to Black it out already but uh.
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So that was fun and then mostly what I was telling the healthcare industry is that all the the pharmacies that they're depending on to deliver their products are all going out of business so that was super fun.
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1 time I got invited to this B2B show and I was like I usually ask like where am I in the agenda and stuff I was like ah it's a B2B show they put me afterclay Christensen who's likelike the world you know is like a.
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Yeah were you able to cross the chasm or no.
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I was I was I was like in the bottom of the Casual with a broken arm behind my back I had a knot off.
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Spent a lot of time there and so then earlier in the week was a better boondoggle
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there's a long-running show that retail insiders will know called the nacds National Association of chain drug stores and despite its name it's slightly broader than that it's a
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it's like a very good 1-on-1 meeting shows for all the big.
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Pharmacies but also Mass merchants and grocery stores and all the big,
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kind of cpg and everyday essential providers and all the over-the-counter companies so I I got to see a lot of uh clients and friends there and it's all basically on a beach in in West Palm Beach so,
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you know if you're gonna if you're gonna have to travel and work it's fun to do it in uh in resortwear.
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Nice absolutelyalways fun taking a meeting in your bathing suit.
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It is it is I didn't go quite that bold although some did.
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The the week before that and I'm going to try to work in a a weird humble brag long time listeners of the show will know I I work for a big advertising holding company,
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for a long time 1 of the accounts I look after is where the the agency of record for Walmart so we we've been I I worked very closely with the senior leadership at Walmart for.
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8 plus years in this current engagement,
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and last month we got named agency of record for Sam's Club and came out in the news and everyone's like well duh they're already there it's no big deal,
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and I just want to say like this is the hardest account I ever won and it specifically it was so difficult because they absolutely did not want to hire Walmart's agency,
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um which is,
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understandable they're the eighth largest retailer in the United States they're they're you know doing great in a in a bunch of dimensions and they don't want to be anyone's redheaded stepchild so super honored that they,
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they picked us and wanted to work with us so spent a bunch of time kicking that off and adding that to my portfolio.
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Let's give them a little wholesale bundle.
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There's a there's a lot of uh bundling yeah and wholesale was in the original Sams Sams name in fact um.
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When it was first launched I also got to visit India and travel around with the flip cart team and kind of share some some learnings and best practices there which is a super interesting and not not.
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Completely analogous Market to to the to North America.
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But I was very jealous of some of the like it's funny they're they're lacking a lot of infrastructure in some ways but like digital payments are super awesome in India um.
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And so there there's some things that are easy to do there that are hard here and vice versa so that was cool,
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it was my favorite shop talk ever and I say that no offense to all my beloved friends at shop talk but it's because I didn't go to shop talk and I went to Hawaii with my family instead.
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So no shop talk update here but but Hawaii was awesome and then I did do the 2 kind of typical e-com shows we always do right before shop talk I did a GDs Boston and eel West which you know both were kind of.
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Typical continuations of of how those shows usually are but they're they're both fun for me because I get to run into a lot of old friends and and have dinners and and talk Shop with a bunch of people and of course.
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This year the shop we talk has has.
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Changed from week to week more than any year I remember and I was actually in India when the The Liberation day when the terrorists were announced and so it suddenly became my job to explain to a billion people in India.
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What are what are strategy was with tariffs which.
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Yes I do now.
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Yeahis that what's top of mind with your clients is it.
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So yes and no like a lot of people want to talk about it like I joke that the Yuki on my keyboard's broken because I've typed uncertainty so many times this quarter.
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And people do want to talk about it I'll be honest like the big retailers that I spend the most time with.
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Aren't that focused on I mean obviously there are a lot of people in those organizations that are but they've all they all feel like they've.
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Lived through economic ups and downs and that there's there's you know multiple cycles and they all you know are kind of advantaged in,
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in these economic down Cycles which I think everyone kind of thinks we're we're going into now.
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And so to be honest they're all more focused on their kind of medium and longer term strategies than they are kind of week to week planning on terrorists it's it's all the.
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The smallersellers that you know maybe I don't work with as a client but that I I you know get to talk to independently that are,
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you know super focused and you know super concerned that you know any of these changes to their normal Paradigm you know are potentially ruin some to them so it's,
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it's very serious for them.
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Yeah searching the Amazon USB sellers I know are almost giddy over it because they felt like they've been crushed by the
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you know Amazon's love of Chinese sellers for a while so it'll be interesting but it feels like most of the goods all the goods are made in China anyway so I don't 100% understand that.
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Yeah and I think that came up in the in their earnings call a little bit too right is there like yeah.
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Yeah so I think I think that's a little short-sighted to celebrate that we'll see how it plays out.
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Yeah for sure so that was kind of some of my recent travels but I feel like you've had the way more interesting and awesome news lately what what's going on with you Scott.
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Yeah I'm back in the e-commerce game full throttle.
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Woohoo.
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Yeah yeah so let's see the short story is last
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August I think we covered this on the Pod but I parted ways with spiffy everything's chugging away had a co-founder that was wanting to be CEO and I'd been at it 10 years and there was the siren song of AI,
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so
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took some time read up on a bunch of AI stuff retrieval augmented generation and agentic agentic is 1 of those catch-all phrases but the,
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the agents I'm talking about are a bit further along than kind of like the early versions of those things and it struck me that there's a couple problems we encountered at Channel advisor not you know that we could never solve because of their non-deterministic kind of
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aspects so started poking around in that and did a prototype that we got to a certain point where we felt like,
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okay there's something here.
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Started a company and then came out of stealth it's all the rage do you start in stealth and then once you've raised you you kind of raise under stealth it's kind of like a uha.
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Confidential filing for an IPO but wait not not the same thing but you know definitely you kind of raise under this kind of stealth banner and then we actually
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came out of stealth on February 28th and announced to the new company and that we had raised 1.7 million companies name is Ari fee by and our URL is
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refi Bowie Ai and it stands for research find and buy which is the cycle,
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people should be going through right now they don't because I think Discovery is broken we can cover that on another pot sometime and,
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we're excited we got some really good investors but we have an angel investor that stands above all the others he is the chief digital retail and contentstrategic,
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andcommerce officer of pubis.
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Jason Goldberg so excited to have you as a a small angel investor on this venture.
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I'm I'm honored to be part of it although I'm pretty certain I'm the worst investor in your portfolio.
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Well we'll see ya.
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So appreciate your support and look forward to talking about some of this here more on our show but we are going to start a substack
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this is breaking news so this isn't announced yet so this is an exclusive for Jason and Scott show listeners we're going to start a newsletter kind of substack around this topic because I think it's a big enough topic and it's certainly enough news coming out here we're going to cover a little bit of it
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um just kind of naturally on our showbut we're going to go deep on it
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and it's called retail gentic so if you get a retail gentic do Comm you can sign up for that substack it's totally free and then we're going to be launching a podcast both a video and audio version where I interview folks and and Retail and some of the vendors out there about this new kind of
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corner of the world that that's growing very rapidlythat'll also be called retail gentic it'll be on YouTube and all your favorite
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podcast areas that you go to to find podcast.
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That is awesome I'm already subscribed I'm looking forward to it.
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Yeah and I got to call your people to try to get booked you to be a guest I hear it's hard I've heard through the grapevine that your travel schedule is a bear so we'll see how it goes.
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It is but I think you know a guy.
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Yeah I know again I I can get right to your scheduler.
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Exactly um.
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As long as fortnite is not on the agenda or the pit.
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Exactly you just have to wait till Stephen goes to bed.
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So that I feel like alone is a lot of exciting stuff but on top of all that our our friends at Amazon are still in business and sharing their quarterly results.
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Yeah and it was a really interesting quarter so the setup coming into this 1 and it's always funny the way these different public companies announced
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coming into this 1 we had mostly positive surprises So Meta and Microsoft did better than expected Microsoft's,
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having a little bit of friction in their relationship with openai and a lot of people were expecting their.
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You know their Azure which is largely driven by AI to be kind of under some pressure but it actually outperformed by a point or 2 so Microsoft cloud was good meta did quite well,
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they had just announced they had licon which is their AI thing and they announced llama 4 and then on their earnings call they announced that they were going to
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they've had something called meta AI but the and it has a lot of users but it's mostly through WhatsApp and a little bit through like Facebook Messenger or some other places you can get to it
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so they announced that they were dropping that as a standalone app to go compete against chat gbt Ben Thompson did the strategy dude did a really nice interview with Zach and he he kind of is like out there
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pushing pretty hard on their AI capabilities which was interesting to see although I watched Pretty closely and he hasn't really mentioned shopping yet so we'll
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we'll uh I'll let you know when that changesbut the 1 thing about those 2 companies is they don't have that much exposure to tariffs
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unlike Amazon and the first read to on this is a surprising 1 you probably would understand this but a lot of people on CNBC were scratching their head and it Snapchat which is a snap in in the public markets they got hammered,
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because I'll let you explain it you know who do you think their biggest advertisers are.
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Yeah so all of these social platforms the a majority of their advertisers are Chinese sellers both big ones IE T-Mobile and shien and also a lot of small ones as kind of.
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Teamu and shun have proven out or had proven out this model of being able to successfully sell Goods direct to American consumers from China and so.
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It's a huge chunk by by many accounts over 50% of the advertising revenue on all these platforms and of course,
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that whole model is the 1 that's most directly impacted by all of these changes in tariffs and and in particular changes or elimination of the diminum provision,
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as it as it affects China so a ton of these these big and small entities that were kind of keeping keeping Snapchat a float and we're also a significant amount of Revenue even at meta.
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Are turning off all their their and Google turning off all their their ads as they,
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or at least their ads for North America as they kind of reevaluate their business models.
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Part of the setup and I I forgot to put this even in the show notes is that Google came out before Amazon and it was a bit of a flex they they beat and raised and they basically said hey
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are we're rolling out AI very aggressively and they put out some numbers that showed that Gemini is being used very heavily they've got they call them AI insights,
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overviews AI over AIO AIO reviews which is that little window that kind of takes further load and gives you kind of an answer but hopefully not,
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2 goodness or seals Still Still click on the 10 blue length,
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that is got 75% and this is interesting I read this and listen to the call they're very careful to say search coverage you and I know that there's kind of a,
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the that last 25% is probably where the innovator's Dilemma lives where their most.
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Profitable terms these are things like the most problem terms are always lawsuits like methylone or whatever that is and,
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all this kind of jazz and then you get into your travel terms your e-commerce terms,
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you know fintech kind of terms it's going to be interesting I think I think it's going to be hard for them to turn that on there so I don't think we're seeing much progress past the 75% threat,
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but anyway Wall Street loved that that Google seemed to be awake and really paying attention to the AI threat because there was a story,
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kind of a wall of worry around Google that perplexity and and and chat gbt's web search has gotten quite good anthropic now has 1 that's quite good we're starting to eat away,
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so so that was kind of the positives coming in and then Amazon announced and it was kind of a mixed bag so so the the big picture is
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they they they landed on Revenue was in line and then they crushed it on profitability so operating income they beat by 5% which is you know 5% doesn't sound a lot but at Amazon scale its billions you know that they're beating by which was very popular.
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And this kind of environment where everyone's worried about uncertainty the current quarter doesn't really matter it's the next quarter,
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and we'll talk a little bit about their guidance but it was not super well-received and I'll walk us through what happened there the other thing I thought,
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was interesting I wasn't sure if you saw
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you know they they said they would have beaten that operating income number by by quite a bit more but they pull forward 2 billion dollars in inventory yeah I think I think when they saw the tariffs coming they pulled in a ton of inventory to to get ready for,
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to bridge into Q2 for this new tariff regime.
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Yeahit's it's interesting like I I follow obviously the the retail side of Amazon most most closely.
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And I did want to say 1 thing first on the going back to the Google thing there's been so much Buzz about how.
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Effective all these new AI searches are like like perplexity and Chet gbt deep research and all these things and so there's a narrative in my world that like oh man shrink.
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Dramatically under stress it at Google as as people flock to these new search engines and well I think the new search engines are super interesting and have some good customer experiences that that should be scary to anyone in the search space,
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Google is still growing at search volume by like 20%a quarter and they're still like,
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300 times larger than the search volume on all these AI things combined so,
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while while these search engines are are a Potential Threat to Google in the long term they're not having those things are not having an economic impact on Google in the short term and I think that came through in the,
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in the Google earnings but on the retail side what was interesting to me about the Amazon,
00:20:19.130 --> 00:20:27.590
announcement was you know they're 1 of the first retailers to to announce q1 earnings so kind of coming into this,
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all the retards have done their Q4 earnings which were all
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for the most part pretty darn favorable and there are a bunch of you know people had good Q4 quarters but a bunch of retail stocks got hammered because even though they had good q4's uh
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most retailers were giving soft guidance including Amazon we're giving like somewhat softer guidance and giving guidance for 2025 that was going to be a slower rate of growth,
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then 2024 was and so then Amazon comes out with its q1 results which were kind of met that guidance and they did not.
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Really lower their guidance I would I you tell me if you you viewed it differently but I would say they they maybe broaden the range.
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Of of their guidance but they didn't like,
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dramatically restate their guidance for the rest of the year um a number of other retailers like even haven't even done that you want to announcement but they've actually gone back and pulled their guidance for the rest of the year or restated their guidance and so.
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Like Amazon keeping their guidance out there and and not dramatically lowering it is kind of a a flex against a lot of other retail that we've seen so far.
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Yeah yeah the as a operator.
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I run a public company for a couple years and guidance is the biggest pain in the butt ever because you have to predict what's going to happen in the year and it's actually pretty hard
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and your initial Instinct as well I'll just be as conservative as possible but it it needs to be in a certain number or your stock price will go down
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so so so you get locked it's kind of a stupid game and I've always been envious there's a set number of people and I've always been surprised Amazon,
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does this but getting rid of guidance is actually,
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a a good thing as an operator because the other thing that happens is if you miss your guidance you get there's like these ambulance chasing you know lawsuits that happen and it's always someone with 1 share somewhere or something that you know.
00:22:22.070 --> 00:22:35.640
The claim that you've ruined their life and it's fraud and all this kind of stuff and it ends up costing you all this money to fight these lawsuits that are just super villainous you can't really if you settle them then you're you're toast you'll you'll that will you know.
00:22:36.450 --> 00:22:37.280
Every dime will go.
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An entire industry in East.
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It yeah it creates a you know the the incentives are already wacky they have no cost of suing you but if you settle it all then like man it just goes crazy,
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so you knowI I have a lot of empathy for the people that use this opportunity to get rid of
00:22:53.870 --> 00:23:07.850
rid of it but it it is you know it basically does say hey our business model model is more resilient than yours which it you would think it would be you know given the global nature of what Amazon does the supply chain,
00:23:07.990 --> 00:23:11.030
of any company that can navigate this it's going to be Amazon.
00:23:11.640 --> 00:23:18.000
No 100% And so kind of just zooming into their actual retail numbers like if you go read their earnings.
00:23:18.200 --> 00:23:26.100
You'll get a bunch of retail numbers and as a reminder to listeners none of those are the most relevant to us right because it's it's,
00:23:26.130 --> 00:23:39.860
their their revenue which they you know are a 1p market and a 3p market and obviously that the 3p Market the revenue is just the fees they're collecting not not the the value of the goods they're selling,
00:23:39.960 --> 00:23:51.960
and increasingly there are all these other things that are that are in their earning statement and even in the the retail sector that it's that that number is hard to compare to anyone else's number,
00:23:52.140 --> 00:23:56.960
and so you know we always try to back out of of the numbers they report into,
00:23:57.020 --> 00:24:06.800
a number that's more apples to apples with other retailers which is this gross merchandise value and so our friends at Morgan Stanley are much better at math than me and
00:24:06.780 --> 00:24:15.100
and they they processed all the the earnings number and updated their model and they believe that in the US in North America,
00:24:15.180 --> 00:24:22.740
Amazon's gmv was up 7.9% in q1 of 2025 versus q1 of,
00:24:22.910 --> 00:24:28.020
2024 so 7.9% growth is a very good number,
00:24:28.100 --> 00:24:42.350
last year all of retail grew 3.6% core retail this year in the first quarter core retail has grown 2.6% so if if Morgan Stanley's right that Amazon's growing at 7.9%.
00:24:42.700 --> 00:24:52.250
Amazon's growing at more than 3x the rest of retail despite the fact that they're they're 1 of if not the you are just retailer in the space,
00:24:52.380 --> 00:24:54.140
so so per your point.
00:24:54.410 --> 00:25:06.760
They they have great diversification they have over you know 2 million sellers on the platform they they you know potentially have a billion items for sale now some someplace between 800 million and a billion items per sale.
00:25:07.310 --> 00:25:17.340
And and so they're they're continuing to thrive so that was super interesting to me when I think about their impact on on the rest of retail.
00:25:17.640 --> 00:25:25.290
But also what was really interesting is secretly 1 of the soft spots in Amazon's incredible growth has been.
00:25:25.890 --> 00:25:29.860
Grocery and every day Essentials right what that those,
00:25:29.900 --> 00:25:44.540
those smaller ticket higher frequency purchases have have been harder for Amazon to capture and then and other retailers have done better Visa V Amazon in those categories most famously Walmart in grocery for example.
00:25:44.780 --> 00:25:48.470
Which Walmart probably still has a bigger digital grocery business than Amazon.
00:25:48.940 --> 00:25:58.390
So that's been kind of a soft spot and and in their earnings they they came out and said that hey every day Essentials is growing at 2X,
00:25:58.500 --> 00:26:07.900
the rest of our merchandise categories we passed a 100 billion in grocery sales in the US and so that's going to put grocery at something like.
00:26:08.210 --> 00:26:13.190
22% of Amazon's gmv so you know,
00:26:13.370 --> 00:26:23.220
I would say the 2 Lagerfeld.
00:26:23.730 --> 00:26:35.990
And then Scott I'll I'll be curious if you have an opinion but the the last thing I was paying super close attention to was any discussion about the 1p versus 3p mix and there there was not a lot,
00:26:36.120 --> 00:26:41.960
and the reason I'm super interested in that is if you kind of think of the es and flows 2024 was a.
00:26:42.440 --> 00:26:47.940
A good year of sales for Amazon everybody said 2025 is going to be slower,
00:26:48.120 --> 00:26:56.030
and and you know there were no terrorists and q1 so so these numbers aren't really tariff impacted in any way but we,
00:26:56.040 --> 00:26:59.810
we now have a at least a month of sales data where
00:26:59.760 --> 00:27:14.170
the consumer knows tariffs are coming and Amazon came right out and said hey we've we've actually seen an increase in sales in April and we think it's people stocking up to get to get ahead of potential tariff impacts,
00:27:14.280 --> 00:27:19.000
but when you talk to all these Brands they are,
00:27:19.230 --> 00:27:28.600
between Iraq and a hard place Amazon may be well Diversified and and selling really well but Amazon doesn't want to let any of these 1 piece sellers raise their prices,
00:27:28.740 --> 00:27:41.200
and a lot of these 1 piece sellers you know are very fearful that their their costs are going up meaningful even if you're not sourcing product from China I mean costs went up worldwide 10% right and in some cases a lot more so.
00:27:41.660 --> 00:27:51.420
The the brands all are worried that they need to raise prices and are finding it extraordinarily difficult to raise prices at Amazon and so 1 of the
00:27:51.410 --> 00:27:57.200
the kind of pressure relief ba valves that I'll be curious to see if plays out is
00:27:57.130 --> 00:28:04.540
if people stopped wanting Amazon to set their prices and the way you do that is you move from 1 P to 3 p and set your own prices,
00:28:04.690 --> 00:28:13.680
and so I'm I'm going to be curious I was curious if there was any any discussion of it in this earnings call but in the next earnings call in particular I'll be really,
00:28:13.870 --> 00:28:19.410
3p has been growing much faster than 1 P I'll be curious to see if that that accelerates,
00:28:19.520 --> 00:28:24.620
as as maybe some big 1 piece sellers shift more of their attention to 3p.
00:28:25.000 --> 00:28:35.410
Yeah it was a 61% and the only tell you the units right like some of the analysts break it down like like wasn't Morgan Stanley that that had the report there that that kind of back into it,
00:28:35.520 --> 00:28:42.270
I used to have a model that did this uh that people at Amazon told me was pretty close and then the Wall Street now started doing this so I retired.
00:28:42.890 --> 00:28:45.720
So I did see 61% of.
00:28:45.420 --> 00:28:51.310
Yeah I saw it but 61 is like within a percentplus or minus of the last couple quarters yeah.
00:28:51.480 --> 00:28:58.390
Yeah you'll you'll see it change next quarter it can move pretty quickly the other 1 is paid units and it looked like it had slowed down a good bit to me.
00:28:58.620 --> 00:29:01.540
Poses 6% it felt like really low to me,
00:29:01.750 --> 00:29:12.860
so whenever Revenue grows faster than paid units it means your aov went up which feels weird in this kind of climate because most people are trading down so that 1 that was a little bit of a head scratcher there.
00:29:13.010 --> 00:29:19.580
Yeah that is also the the outside growth of everyday essentials you would think would hurt their aov.
00:29:19.490 --> 00:29:23.130
Yeah those are cheaper items I don't know I don't know.
00:29:23.430 --> 00:29:37.210
Yeah they're still Mysteries Mysteries to be unwrapped at Amazon um and then the other part of the Amazon earnings that I always get stuck talking about is the ads business and the ad business at Amazon is still awesome it grew at 19%,
00:29:37.330 --> 00:29:44.230
the I think you're going to talk about AWS which is also going to be a a a good story for Amazon this quarter but so,
00:29:44.440 --> 00:29:55.690
it is still a rocket ship and of course it's extremely profitable as we've been talking about on the show for a number of quarters now like the ads business is almost certainly the most profitable business that at Amazon.
00:29:55.940 --> 00:30:10.020
Part of the reason I don't like talking about it is every other retail in the world looks at that and goes oh I want a piece of that and now every Ad Agency in my holding company and all of our competitors like all have stood up armies of retail media people,
00:30:10.050 --> 00:30:15.260
and I actually like don't think the retail media opportunity is near as exciting,
00:30:15.320 --> 00:30:24.210
outside of the Amazon ecosystem as as some people will have you believe right so the the dirty secret of of this ad business is it's it's.
00:30:24.590 --> 00:30:32.980
The vast vast majority of it is sponsored product listings and the vast vast majority of the sponsored product listings are from third-party sellers
00:30:32.940 --> 00:30:42.900
the as I mentioned there's 2 million sellers on Amazon there's almost a billion items No 1 is ever going to find your item unless you buy an ad to make it show up right and so,
00:30:42.900 --> 00:30:44.010
when you have,
00:30:44.170 --> 00:30:57.750
the world's best third-party Marketplace you you have a very valid reason for people to give you a lot of AD dollars and so it makes total sense for Amazon like on a slightly smaller scale it it it makes similar sense for someone like Walmart.
00:30:58.050 --> 00:31:11.390
I'm I'm very skeptical that there's a lot of incremental ad dollars for a regional grosser with no third-party Marketplace or a specialty retailer in home furnishings with like.
00:31:11.720 --> 00:31:20.230
Like no no traditional Shopper marketing spend and no no cpg or everyday essentials like I just I think,
00:31:20.340 --> 00:31:28.930
once you start getting out of these like 2 or 3 biggest retailers in the ecosystems the retail media opportunity gets a lot less exciting for me and I would I would argue
00:31:28.860 --> 00:31:36.290
it's it's overhyped not saying it doesn't exist but it's it's not as lucrative as it certainly is for Amazon.
00:31:37.050 --> 00:31:41.860
Interesting don't believe the retail media Network hype the.
00:31:42.480 --> 00:31:51.240
AWS everyone was kind of a little worried I think they were relieved coming in because of what meta and Microsoft released and Google Google
00:31:51.150 --> 00:31:56.650
that also has a cloud computing element AWS came in slightly ahead of
00:31:56.580 --> 00:32:06.930
plan at 17% year-over-year growth but what got everyone excited is this comes out so on the call they make all these announcements and then later they file their cue and which is where they file
00:32:06.810 --> 00:32:19.460
10K I think is what they call that it's 1 of these SEC documents and analysts sift through the the you know 800 pages of these things and find interesting things in there in 1 of the appendices they actually talk about the