A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 11 covers a recap of numerous Q4 earnings calls including E-Bay, Facebook, Alibaba, Starbucks, Amazon, and Microsoft. We also talk about the latest news from Uber, Macy’s, Walmart, and Circuit City.
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This was a big week for retailers and e-commerce companies reporting their Q4 earnings.
eBay
GMV: $21.9b for Q4, with a 4% growth of the marketplace. eBay currently has 160m active buyers.
A major focus for eBay is moving from a separate URL for every seller of every SKU, to a single shared URL for all sellers of the same SKU, or what eBay calls it’s structured data initiative (SDI). E-bay believes that SDI will improve finability of products on the site via search, as well as improve it’s organic traffic from search engines such as Google.
eBay continues to face headwinds on: organic search traffic (a Moz report shows that eBay lost ground this year) and Mobile – the migration to their V4 mobile platform did not go well, and they have not yet returned to their performance prior to the V4 upgrade.
Facebook
Insane numbers – 1.6b monthly active users (1.4b are mobile), 800m mobile-only users. Facebook gets over 1 billion daily active users. Instagram is also doing well.
Alibaba
Alibaba now has 400m active buyers and achieved 23% y/y GMV growth despite a challenging economic climate. Alicloud grew 126% y/y.
Amazon
Amazon grew 26% y/y, but did not hit it’s growth guidance which caused a negative reaction in their stock. Prime grew 51% y/y globally (47% in US). Amazon now has 300m active users.
Amazon said they are pursuing more Logistics capability because existing partners (UPS and USPS) don’t have enough capacity, not because they want to replace them. Amazon will run it’s first Superbowl commercial this year, featuring the Amazon Echo hardware product.
Microsoft
Azure cloud sales were up 140 percent.
Starbucks
US Sales were up 9%. Starbucks mobile payment experience continues to gain traction, 21% of transactions are mobile and 10% of allorders during peak hours are via their new Mobile Order & Pay experience. Starbucks now has 11.1M Active My Starbucks Reward members and during Q1, $1.9 billion was loaded on Starbucks cards in the U.S. and Canada.
1 out of every 6 adults in the US got a Starbucks card as a gift for the 2015 holiday.
Starbucks, CEO, Howard Schultz expressed concern about the future of malls:
“I think today in the headlines you’ve seen just in the last three weeks store closures of almost 50 Macy’s stores, 150 Walmart stores,” said Schultz, according to a transcript of the call. “You’ve got to ask yourself what’s going to happen to the future of many of those malls that are anchored by those big-box retailers.”
Other News
Uber launched an API to allow third parties to offer delivery service via UberRush
Walmart CIO now reports to E-Com President
Macy’s is considering putting a discount “Backstage” department in every store.
Circuit City is coming back!?!?
Episode 11 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Wednesday, January 28th, 2016.
[…] Jason, over at RetailGeek, has the highlights of items we cover. […]