A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 276 is a Recap of GroceryShop 2021, new woes for Amazon FBA sellers, and industry news.
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- GroceryShop is a trade show dedicated to the grocery and CPG industry, with a particular. After going virtual last year, GroceryShop returned to a live event September 190-21 in Las Vegas.
- Facebook’s IDFA (mobile privacy) woes.
- Ocean freight challenges are making life hard on Amazon FBA sellers.
- Nike, Costco report Q2 earnings.
- US Dept of Commerce releases August advanced montholy sales data.
Episode 276 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday September 24th, 2021.
Transcript
Jason:
[0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 276 being recorded on Thursday September 23rd 2021,
I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scot Wingo.
Scot:
[0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott chaussures
Jason you being the world traveler you are have not let covid slow you down and you are fresh back from a trip to Las Vegas for grocery shop and I have been on pins and needles to hear how that went.
Jason:
[0:56] Yeah yeah so my I have done a few customer trips but this is my first imperson industry event in a while and I feel like there’s some old skill sets that if I ever had them they I have lost them.
Scot:
[1:12] Cool what are some examples.
Jason:
[1:14] Patience.
And I feel like I’ve always been a criminal Jim but like everything’s too far apart like I have to walk too much I’m I’m very angry at the ice machine at the hotel.
I don’t know I was I let some things get to me that I don’t remember used to caring about as much.
Scot:
[1:36] We need to we need to send you on some really long trips into middle of nowhere so you get more patience.
Jason:
[1:42] Yes yeah and so this is good practice because so you know I attended that event which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a minute and then I have another industry event in real life in New York.
Next week Commerce next Friends of the show so so I’ll get two weeks back-to-back of e-commerce trade show goodness.
Scot:
[2:02] Wrinkle will tell us what the buzz was at grocery shop.
Jason:
[2:06] Yeah so obviously it’s kind of early to have an in-person show again and particularly Las Vegas is not like one of the Cities that’s doing the,
the best with their covid management so attendance was way down I want to say,
two years ago the last time the show is in person there were like 11,000 or 12,000 attendees this is a grocery specific show put on by the people that put on shop talk.
Um and so this year I think they said that they had 2,500 people registered and I would guess.
A pretty significant chunk I don’t know 30 or 40 percent of those people probably didn’t show so it was a couple thousand people but.
Scot:
[2:49] But what happened when shoptalk is they haven’t got this year.
Jason:
[2:52] They said they skipped a year of shop talk and the next shop talk is scheduled for March of next year.
And that is intended to be in person at in Las Vegas and knock on wood hopefully things will be a lot more open and Strong by then.
Scot:
[3:08] Okay but the name Brave through and had groceryshop.
Jason:
[3:11] They did yeah and historically.
I would argue that shop talking grocery shop what they’ve done really well is they get.
Marquis speakers from from the companies you would most want to hear from.
So that you know they tend to have a good lineup of speakers with you know excluding myself and then,
as a result of those good speakers a lot of people want to go to the show and the networking can be quite good so obviously with.
With this diminished attend the dance the you know the networking opportunities were considerably.
Smaller than usual but they did have a good stable of keynote speakers now the potential downside is part of the way they get all those speakers as.
[4:05] They’re very speaker friendly they make it really easy the speaker doesn’t have to write any content they can just do an interview they can you know the interviewee probably knows the questions in advance so they don’t have to be too nervous and they and the speakers are allowed to like.
You know run commercials for their companies so in general there’s a lot of interesting speakers they don’t all choose to share very interesting stuff.
Um and I would say that that Trend continued so there was a mix so there was like.
I’ll just run down the keynote super quick but like Rodney macmullen who’s the CEO of Kroger you know he gave a lot of,
they’re kind of can positions he spent a lot of his time talking about this initiative they’ve been doing for four years which is zero hunger zero waste,
um which you know is certainly a noble goal the thing I was most interested in from Rodney is they did a deal the week before grocery shop with instacart they launched a new service called Kroger delivering now,
which is a 30 minute delivery guarantee for groceries and.
That’s a pretty big shot you know most most Grocers are doing these like 224 our windows,
um and they’re complaining about sales being wildly unprofitable and so for Kroger to you know who like hasn’t had an awesome service level before to say hey we’re going to deliver in 30 minutes is,
it’s an interesting promise I.
[5:32] I find it interesting that they’re using instacart because it frankly hasn’t seemed like insta cards had a lot of extra capacity to improve their service level so I’m not clear how they’re gonna.
Going to hit those service levels.
But but that’s an interesting Evolution and we’ll talk about that that’s one of my takeaway Trends is this whole instant needs grocery category that will talk about more.
Um Chris Rob Who’s chief customer officer at Albertson’s Albertsons is doing a lot of interesting digital marketing they launched a new live streaming Commerce feature for food that’s hosted on their website so,
that’s something nobody in the west has made successful in China people buy millions of dollars of produce from live streaming so.
So we’ll see if they’re able to make that work here one of the Keynotes I was most interested in was Tony’s you who’s the co-founder of door –
And door – has become a pretty significant grocery player they have a service called Double Dash which means like your driver will pick up your meal that you want from a restaurant and stopped at a convenience store grocery store and get any items you need.
[6:41] So they’re there.
Not doing a lot of fresh but they’re delivering a lot of like fill in groceries they’re playing in this instant needs category.
And so that you know in there and they’re like actively recruiting e-commerce and grocery sites for for delivery and of course if you look at the trajectory of those two companies,
you know there was a strong rumor that instacart you know is you know kind of hit some bumps and it has been trying to sell themselves to Door – so.
[7:15] So that’s interesting Rick Gomez Who’s that sort of head of food for Target was there,
um as you know I’ve talked a lot about targets success in their in their own Brands and Rick certainly let you know double down on that he talked a lot about good and gather which is already a two billion dollar food brand and they launched a new one called favorite day,
it’s already trending in a good direction.
People may not remember this but while Target is always have curbside pickup they did not offer curbside pickup for groceries at the beginning of the pandemic so they they sort of launched digital fresh.
During the pandemic and they’re there already the fourth largest digital Grocer in the US so they’ve got some good traction there.
Walter cook who’s the CEO of ahold of Zoomed In from Amsterdam.
And you know they hold owns Fresh Direct and Peapod.
[8:16] So the best digital grocers in the US so that’s that was sort of interesting he was funny he talked about have their behind.
In digital in in sort of their big markets which are Europe and then they’re the market leader in digital here in the US which is not their primary Market.
We Julie Bowerman who’s that the chief digital officer at Kellogg and Kelly Caruso who’s the CEO of shipped,
did a CO presentation talking about leadership and talent that’s a big you know issue in the world right now and in groceries as well,
and then you know one of the ones that the keynote that probably got the most buzz from this whole show is this guy Yakir Gola who’s a co-founder and the co-ceo go Puff.
And hopefully our listeners are all familiar with go puff if you’re not you should definitely get up to speed they are.
Born digital instant needs convenience store grocer so they started on college campuses delivering snacks to dorm rooms,
they expanded rapidly there and every Market in the u.s. delivering.
[9:35] You know fat quick need groceries in under 30 minutes but what’s unique about them is they’re not a Marketplace or gig economy system,
they they have built you know dark store micro fulfillment centers in,
you know every big Metro in the US and hired a bunch of their own employees too,
to deliver all the goods and they they’ve been successful enough that they acquired the largest,
liquor store in the u.s. BevMo which is based in California and so they converted 238 BevMo stores enter distribution centers.
And they’ve raised a ton of cash at some pretty high valuations I want to say north of 4 billion dollars.
And so,
you know they talked a lot about this this exploding sort of instant needs category is they defined it or I sometimes call it the top off category but you know most of the digital grocery we’ve been talking about are people buying 60 to 120 items.
And you know getting delivery in like four hours the new thing is you know buying one in ten items and getting them in 10 minutes so so go puff is probably the market leader in the US but.
Door – is certainly trying to compete in this space there’s a company called gorilla that’s in several big their global company but they’re in several big metros in the US and they offer 10 minute delivery.
[11:02] So that’s a super interesting space I think those were the main key notes that.
We’re sort of interesting to me there are few others and again impressive lineup of people and then I did two sessions,
so I did a session on grocery fulfillment models,
and I did it with a guy called Ben Thompson who’s the chief digital officer for endeavor drinks and Endeavor drinks is.
The largest adult beverage retailer in Australia.
They’re spin-off of world wars and and so he and I talked about and they’re kind of a cool retailer for this because.
They own every flavor of last-mile fulfillment like they own a company that.
[11:51] Deliver that inventories beers in Vans and drives around and delivers them when they get an order.
They own a hundred drive-through liquor stores which apparently is a popular thing in Australia and then they own hundreds of traditional,
liquor and wine stores that you know sort of rolled out curbside pickup and Home Delivery during the pandemic so we talked about.
The trials and tribulations and and all the evolutions of all those various fulfillment models.
And then I did a second session on sorting the hype from reality for for sort of emerging Technologies in the grocery space,
and I did that in conjunction with Dave Steck who’s the CIO for schnooks Market Chinooks is a.
A good Midwest grocer I think that a hundred eleven stores here and.
Kind of very busy at the moment because they’re the first grocer to deploy to all of their stores inventory tracking robots so they’re using this.
This tally robot from simbi Technologies which is kind of a Roomba with a camera that roams around the store takes pictures of all the shelves and uses that to update the.
The out of stocks and inventory information.
Scot:
[13:13] It’s cool so give us a feeling for the vibe so was this vaccine card required and then everyone didn’t have mask or you had like.
All the everyone had a vaccine card and it was masked and except for the keynote kind of people and how was that.
Jason:
[13:28] Yeah so Las Vegas so this is at the Mandalay Bay and I think all the Las Vegas hotels,
because again they opened up pretty early they had a you know like a bad Delta wave of covid and so at the moment the hotels are pretty strict that it so Mass are required at all endure.
Things which would include all of the show so nominally Mass were required I would say for the most part,
no speaker wore a mask on stage but the.
You know I don’t know probably 80 or 90 percent of the attendees were mask the whole time.
Some masks were pretty prevalent and then they added again because kind of covered wasn’t going the right way about two weeks before the show they sent out Communications that they were going to require proof of vaccination or.
A very recent negative covid test and so they kind of had a portal and you could upload your proof like the you know a couple days before the show or you had to show proof when you picked up your registration.
Scot:
[14:31] Was it hard to network wearing masks.
Jason:
[14:36] Yeah so again it just like I’ll be honest,
I skip some of the traditional networking events because it just seemed like the the winners many people there like I mean I know this is gonna sound rogatory but the ratio of vendors to,
to retailers was probably worse than usual and so and yeah and it just wasn’t as appealing no like stand around and in a bar wearing a mask like.
You know trying to nurse a beer so so I did a few things but and we had a couple private events.
Is you know Publicis owns a bunch of agencies and one of the companies we acquired recently is called Citrus add so there,
a big vendor that provides retail media networks for for retailers and a lot of a lot of big Grocers use them,
and so they had a big Presence at the show and they hosted an event and stuff and of course I went to the channel advisor event you were missed.
Scot:
[15:32] Huh bummer I’m glad you were there representing podcast.
Who will so it seems like some of the big themes I think the instant thing is pretty interesting I saw that company grow has raised 950 million so that was
pretty pretty crazy I think they started in Europe but now they’re in the US and competing with go puff let’s see,
what was what’s the general Vibe on how much of this covid activity is going to stick I know you have this whole,
you know this whole spiel about how many calories we now get through delivery versus Grocery and restaurant.
Jason:
[16:11] So it’s interesting because all the data we get tends to lag the real world by at least 30 days,
so it’s actually like restaurants have almost fully recovered and I don’t mean economically but they’re their share of stomach from before covid-19.
Now it’s different restaurants than then we’re the winners before covid because an awful lot of restaurants did in fact go out of business a lot of restaurants go out of business just anyway it’s a fast,
hi gern long tail industry but.
Because of covid the restaurant industry is Consolidated like the you know the big chains did better at surviving and people are like.
From 60 days ago we’re buying a lot of restaurant meals what they’re not doing is consuming them at the restaurant so they’re buying restaurant meals for off-premises consumption which,
most often meant they got them delivered by door – which meant the meal was way less profitable for the restaurant to sell but from just a pure share of stomach standpoint you if you were in the restaurant business you’d say hey this looks pretty good like.
[17:15] Before the pandemic we were 50/50 Sheriff stomach with grocery stores the peak of the pandemic we were we were losing 17 to 30 and we’ve been slowly creeping back and now we’re within maybe four percentage points of even.
And they’re definitely most of the economic indicators where that the restaurant industry was starting to recover.
But then I would say the last 30 days of data in the restaurant industry is pretty discouraging like more like restaurant tickets slowed way down more restaurants had to close,
it feels like the kind of re-emergence of the Delta variant has.
Slow down you know you know people had an unfulfilled need to go to a restaurant and so they kind of did but then Delta kicked in and they’d scratch that itch a little bit so it feels like restaurants are getting a second dip.
Right now and then as you know compounding that problem,
restaurants are hit like amongst the hardest by the labor shortages and so restaurants that want to open are really struggling to get enough people to open so a lot of restaurants aren’t Limited hours because they.
They just don’t have enough people.
Scot:
[18:26] There’s okay any other Trends before we move on to some other news.
Jason:
[18:32] We covered like so last Mile and you know curbside pickup digital groceries a huge one how covid going to you know continue to play out in the food space is a big one instant delivery top offs the other two I would just highlight really briefly.
[18:48] It’s really hard to make money on digital grocery right like selling a banana,
profitably is really hard in a store but when you have to pick the banana for the customer and deliver the banana it’s almost impossible to make money and so retailers are looking for every way they can,
to take costs out of that and so two of the big plays to take costs out of that are to automate the picking so the so a lot of.
[19:11] Automation for the human Pickers so I this might be.
Tablets with with route optimization that tell you how to walk around the grocery store in what order to pick the items,
it might be audio prompts that are telling you what to pick in your ear while you pick these are all technologies that used to be used in warehouses and are now getting used in grocery stores,
and a lot of robotic picking systems what we call Micro fulfillment center so if you walk the trade show floor,
about a quarter of the floor was dedicated to these these Auto store and take five in these various companies that do.
Picking Automation and it’s always fun to watch Robots so that’s cool,
um and then the other thing that retailers are doing to try to make more money is there they’re all selling ads on their e-commerce sites and their mobile apps and so we call those retail media networks and their you know was quite a bit of.
Vendors and content around,
you know teaching retailers how to how to add this Revenue stream and Brands talking about you know what they do about all these retailers that are trying to get more hands in their pockets.
Scot:
[20:18] Got it.
Jason:
[20:20] So there I just saved you a trip to Las Vegas you owe me.
Scot:
[20:24] Thanks we are in the listeners appreciate you putting yourself In Harm’s Way so that we can get all the scoop without having to thanks.
Jason:
[20:31] And Scott I have to say like we skipped in the banner but I just want to get it in here I’m super excited for tomorrow but I feel a little guilty about it.
Scot:
[20:39] Are you getting your new phone.
Jason:
[20:41] Yes oh yes oh The Goldberg family has a lot of Apple products arriving tomorrow and I thank you you swept through the ordering window.
Scot:
[20:52] Yeah just wasn’t so excited this time so I kind of is like noon is like you know isn’t today the iPhone or during day and I ordered at noon so I’m going to get mine next week.
Jason:
[21:01] Well hopefully you’ll be pleasantly surprised and they’ll get it to even faster.
Scot:
[21:05] Yeah yeah I didn’t get a shipping notification sometimes maybe it maybe it is coming earlier we’ll see.
Jason:
[21:10] Nice so the next show it could be it could just be a little more sparkly because of our new phones.
Scot:
[21:17] It could be yeah and then our battery May last just a little bit longer the things we do for better life.
Jason:
[21:23] I will always accept I will always accept greater battery life.
Scot:
[21:29] That’s a good segue into a topic I wanted to throw out there that’s been while you’re a grocery shop I was watching Twitter closely and
there’s been a lot of interesting things going on so way back in episode 257 we did
what I think was an excellent preview of ID fa which was the new privacy settings that were rolling out in iOS 14 where the essentially
killing first-party cookies and there we posited that this could be if you
if you had a lot of concentration on Facebook ads and especially if you were like a gaming company and really focused on downloads or
why these dnv bees do get a lot of their customers from Facebook that that could be in the crosshairs
and then it was interesting it was kind of a whimper there wasn’t really much that happened when that came out but what I think happened in hindsight is Apple’s kind of been dialing this up slowly but surely
kind of you know cooking the lobster one degree at a time.
[22:31] This week it kind of exploded on the scene so the first thing was the there started to be some little low grumbles maybe last week and then this week it turned into a loud roar so a couple things out there there’s several long threads of people
that are either in these micro agencies are involved with smbs and dnv B’s kind of talking about how
everyone’s scared to talk about it publicly for fear of Retribution but there
it’s total chaos what’s going on with their Facebook ads they can’t track anything their revenues down their ad traffic is down their Roi is down Etc that’s the general theme and then because they’re Anonymous it’s hard to know like what categories and how severe this is and what not
but there was some pretty high-profile departures recently from Casper and several analysts kind of said you know the timing of this is interesting,
could be correlated to these changes that are going on with Facebook because a lot of a lot of folks have guesstimated that Casper gets a lot of traffic from Facebook so that was interesting and so these departures were in the marketing department like I think there’s they had hired a VP of marketing or a CMO and
very kind of in short order and downsize that
and then yesterday it kind of came to a head Facebook actually posted a very long blog post about this
I was listening kind of the CNBC and they broke in and said you know.
[23:54] This Facebook blog post is cause the stock to go down five percent and then people were opining on it so I went to read it was pretty interesting it basically is trying to calm people down about this and,
reading the tea leaves I feel like.
[24:10] There was you know something happened happened there they’re hearing from advertisers in a much more robust way that they’re unhappy the funniest part and we’ll put the
pointer to the blog post in the show notes if you didn’t see it the interesting thing is when you read this blog post it’s titled,
[24:32] it came out September 22nd navigating change in improving performance measurement we understand the last quarter of the year is busy and important time however we want to help you understand all these changes that are going on in the advertising industry
we’ve heard from many of you that the impact on your advertising investment has been greater than you expected and then
in there they actually admit that they’ve been measuring the conversion rate or the ROI on iOS wrong which was kind of it was weird
and then here’s my favorite part
actions you can take right now the first bullet is allow more time before you analyze your performance facility you know that that felt like the biggest head fake ever where it’s kind of like hey
I know you used to measure your performance like daily and weekly and stuff but could you look at quarterly now or maybe the annually and then then it gets up you know it’s,
a lot of people were.
[25:33] Read this for just kind of like this is totally useless and in fact is is kind of counterproductive so there it’s pretty interesting and and you know.
I was wondering.
[25:45] If you look at Shopify stores my theory is they get a lot of their traffic from Facebook they’ve got all these Integrations and I was kind of wondering if is this going to be a rough quarter for for Shopify
and then some I wonder that allowed on Twitter and then a lot we’ve had a lot of these kind of companies on the show that do fulfillment for Shopify stores and you know
it’s this is anecdotal but more than one anecdote and talking to several of them they felt like know everything seemed to be fine that,
my theory is maybe it’s a shift change maybe if there’s a pool of kind of smbs D & B B’s
and maybe a set of them was super heavy on Facebook,
they have lost prevalence now and then maybe the share has been taken by others but I was wondering if you maybe this was discussed it shop at grocery shop or if you had any thoughts on it.
Jason:
[26:36] It didn’t come up a ton of grocery shop but not shockingly I do have thoughts about it that that episode we did 257 I still get tons of great feedback and I still stand by everything we predicted in that show and it feels like.
Like there’s there’s you know plenty of reason to be as confident about the outcomes we predicted then now as there was back then.
Here’s here’s one thing that I remember that has sort of changed since that episode we were talking about two changes IDF a which is a change to how Apple tracks activity in mobile apps,
and third party cookies which is a change to how people can track behaviors on the web.
The third party cookies was kind of a more gradual change because there’s a bunch of browsers and they each change things differently on a different schedule but the Big Cliff everyone was looking at for third party cookies was Google,
depreciating third-party cookies in Chrome which is you know on most platforms the dominant browser and so Google did blink.
And delayed that change so there’s they say they’re still doing that change but it hasn’t taken effect so so that half of everything is still true but hasn’t happened yet.
Um the idea of a changes in for mobile app have happened.
[28:04] I feel like their impact is overblown in certain categories right so.
The thing that you lose the most with these new idea of a changes is Facebook can’t run an ad and then see what the person who clicked on that ad.
Subsequently did in a mobile app.
And so there’s there’s two kind of bombers about that for Facebook number one if I want to sell an ad to Clash of Clans to get a million people to download my new game.
Um I want to show you that ad and then I want to count how many people went to the Apple App Store and downloaded that app and installed it right,
and if I’m selling a real time strategy game maybe I want to sell ads to people that already have another real time strategy game installed on their phone,
so prii DFA Facebook was really good at both of those things like giving you like excellent targeting based on apps that users already had installed,
and really good conversion metrics based on ads whose job it was to install an app.
[29:17] And so Facebook generated a lot of revenue from those two tactics and so those tactics don’t work as well now and certain Facebook’s advertising revenue is materially impacted because of that and that’s what I think this.
This blog post does a bad job of trying to kind of cover for and so I think the idea of a impacts on Facebook are legitimate here’s the thing.
If you’re digitally native flavored Seltzer brand that buys ads on Facebook to get people to go to your Shopify site and order your flavored seltzer.
[29:53] It doesn’t really affect you in a hugely material way like there’s some targeting options that you may be used to have on Facebook that you don’t have now
but by and large you still have the same advertising vehicles at the same Roi as you had before I DFA and so,
I think because so much of us have talked about the long-term impacts of I DFA and Facebook has talked about its impact on overall ad Revenue,
that a lot of digital native companies that already had bad economics by spending too much for customer acquisition on Facebook ads now have a new excuse which is or add suddenly don’t work as well because of idea of a,
I’m for for physical Goods that are purchased from a website not in a mobile app.
[30:37] I’m I’m kind of cynical that the impact is very material and so like for most Shopify sites.
Almost by definition the people that run Shopify sites aren’t running a native mobile app to buy shop and and so like I don’t think that their traffic is being really hurt badly by this idea of a change,
there’s another change that I think we might want to talk about for a minute but it’s you know all these supply chain disruptions are really impacting,
the marketplace Sellers and I think they’re also impacting a lot of drop shippers that run Shopify site so I have a feeling that the supply chain disruptions.
And the you know greater shipping cost to get your goods from China to here are way bigger impact on Shopify sellers than is the idea of a change.
Scot:
[31:29] Yeah and then so it’s quite interesting will this will come out in the public data from both Facebook and Shopify and maybe some of these public vertical
digitally native vertical Brands the other thing that’s interesting is we’re talking about getting new iPhones well iOS 15 is just dropped and that’s got the change where
within the the phone mail client which I don’t use but you know I think
a lot of iPhone users use they have Now the default and it’s one of these do you really want to turn on the ability for people to track your every move kind of dialogues just like the idea of a one where they’re seeing a very large opt out
default opt-out and not change the email tracking is turned off so you won’t get any more
notice that someone opened or even click,
just you could embed a you can better UTM in the click I imagine Co no click but not opens rights.
Jason:
[32:26] Yeah yeah so in the old days everybody used to have this invisible pixel in their email and they would get.
They would get data on on how many times that pixel got downloaded.
But now yeah that I would argue that the email metrics were already pretty broken before this like a lot of email clients that are they broken those.
Those things but you are right like apple has added bigger ones in the native app but Apple added other big privacy changes that also impact marketing right so.
There when you when you don’t have third-party cookies you start using other.
Um digital fingerprinting things to try to attract customers and one of those might be geolocation for example.
And so there’s a lot of data about like,
what browser you’re using and what location you’re coming from and what what route your packets took to get to the origin server and
evil marketers can kind of aggregate all of these these facts and kind of make a digital fingerprint for you to kind of track you and by default
iOS 15 makes all of those practices in Safari way less effective.
And so you’re right like there’s a bunch of targeting things that the release of iOS 15 you know has a material impact on.
Scot:
[33:53] Let’s go be interested we’ll keep watching that for everybody another one that I thought was interesting we’ve had two of these these Amazon FBA Roll-Ups on the show
and there is a lot of chatter around this because one of the leading ones called Thrasher
they had this co-ceo set up in one of the co-ceos stepped down and then
someone said that they have you know a quote-unquote direct source and to some of these companies and the supply chain thing is just totally
destroying them because they go out and buy all these brands that are presumably made in China they try to stitch them all together they’re very buying them very quickly and then they’re selling them on Amazon.
[34:34] And know what the theory goes that that supply chain is so disrupted there’s something like hundreds of ships sitting off the LA Port,
just there’s so much backlog of stuff coming United States that you stock out an FBA and that really hurts your Amazon performance so F ba rewards you for keeping
products in in your Marketplace slide and you’re effectively you’re on Amazon SEO rankings are largely determined by your ability to keep things in stock so you know
there’s there’s a lot of speculation that this segment is going to come under pressure and they’re also highly levered as well so they buy these
at positions with
history of ibadah and then if there’s any bump in the road then they get loans to go by these companies effectively and then if there’s any bump in that then that cash flow can no longer cover the lung so so we’ll keep an eye on this one
and I thought that was another interesting kind of development that went on this last week.
Jason:
[35:36] Yeah yeah for sure I think we’re going to do an upcoming show on all the challenges for this holiday season but like one fact that like I think rolls right into that FB a thing is.
A couple of years ago if you wanted by a container of goods in China and ship it to Los Angeles the container and freight costs would be about $3,700 was sort of the average,
average cost of the container today there’s a backlog of those containers so you you unless you know someone and you have a quota like you it’s very hard to buy a container but when you can,
that container right now is costing you $28,000.
So if you built your business and finance your business based on paying $4,000 to get a container of power supplies from China to the US to sell an Amazon and you,
you can’t get them here at all or you have to pay 30,000 dollars to get them here that’s that’s painful.
[36:40] Yeah so I did also notice there’s like there’s a couple of earnings report since our last show and you know frankly nothing that I got super excited about,
I’m a big fan of Nike I think they’re doing a lot of things right like I think they’re a really interesting brand to watch their transition to direct-to-consumer and I think they’re great digital retail so they had their earnings.
[37:08] And.
For what they call q1 2022 which was the last three months there u.s. Revenue adjusted for currency was up 12% so you know.
That is that kind of lags the.
Apparel and athletic footwear category that’s not huge growth but Nike is the biggest,
player in that space so kind of law of large numbers is not surprising but it’s you know it’s certainly favorable there are a lot of companies moving backwards,
um the but in that same period their direct sales their direct-to-consumer sales grew 25% so direct-to-consumer is growing twice as fast as their wholesale Channel,
and they you know have very overtly said we’re pivoting to direct to Consumer and their digital which again is already quite large was up 25% so I’ll be honest none of these numbers,
like totally surprised me to the good or the bad they’re kind of like in the range of what you would expect.
Like given given their their Market position and the pandemic trends in anything surprise you about that Scott.
Scot:
[38:27] No nope digital strategy is working.
Jason:
[38:30] Exactly and then Costco is also interesting Costco announced and you know there.
A terrific retailer that I always argue is like way behind and under indexes and digital so their Q2 sales in the US were up ten point three percent,
which is kind of in the range we see of all these These Guys Selling Essentials the club Stars had a slightly different.
Trajectory than the grocery stores but that 10.3% is kind of again you know about what I would expect.
Their ecomp read the quarter was only a 8.9% and,
I guess mildly interesting to me so again the this is year-over-year Q2 of this year versus Q2 of last year,
Q2 of last year was like exactly when everyone shifted to e-commerce so you expect that e-commerce growth numbers for the for this quarter to be.
So our growth because they’re you know against a much higher basis than usual.
But if you look at their last 12 months of growth e-commerce is still up 42% so like,
again not surprising for digital agar but I would yeah I think they’re outgrowing.
[39:49] The industry average for digital but you’re seeing that dramatically slow down this quarter so it’ll be really interesting to see next quarter.
Um and you know both of these guys aren’t things kind of mirrored US Department of Commerce also came out with their August data,
um and so again like if you are get August compared to July sales were up 0.7% which we’ll call that flat like that’s within the margin of error.
But as we always talked about on this show what you really want to do is compare to this August to last August and based on that retail sales were up 13.1%.
So
that’s that’s a healthy bump from that you know pandemic High base in general and if you look at year-to-date sales for this year they’re up almost 20% versus the same same month last year,
um and.
Exactly what you would expect that the come the businesses that struggled the most in covid are now like recovering the fastest so it’s a parallel gas and restaurants that are having the biggest gains against a bad bass and.
The retailers that did really well in the pandemic you know are relatively speaking like not growing as fast now because they’re they’re growing against that that big bass.
[41:11] So that is kind of the this scoop.
What do you say we wrap the show shockingly early this week and get everyone prepped for our exciting holiday preview next week.
Scot:
[41:28] Yeah and with that extra time it is a great time to head over to your favorite podcast listening device / app and leave that five-star review we really appreciate it and until next time.
Jason:
[41:42] Happy Commerceing.
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