A weekly podcast with the latest e-commerce news and events. Episode 7 covers an update on brick and mortar holiday sales. The top 5 online shopping days. Shipping woes for UPS, Fedex, and Jet. Is e-commerce at a tipping point in-terms of overtaking brick and mortar sales? And a discussion about how large Amazon really is. This episode is completely free of Star Wars spoilers!
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SpaceX successfully launched a rocket, put it’s payload in orbit, and was able to safely land the reusable rocket back on earth.
Mastercard reported a 4.6% in brick & mortar spending in November, and Department of Commerce data showed that retail had it’s largest increase in four months, directly contradicting numerous realtime estimates from ShopperTrak and others that brick and mortar sales were down. Taking automotive, gasoline, food, and building materials sales out of the Dept of Commerce data, showed that the rest of retail grew by a health 6% in November.
Scot shared the top 5 online shopping days (thus far) based on Channel Advisor Same Store Sales data:
5. December 15 (Tuesday after Green Monday)
4. December 1 (Tuesday after Cyber Monday)
3. December 14 (Green Monday)
2. November 27 (Black Friday)
1. November 30 (Cyber Monday)
In holiday shipping news, UPS is struggling to keep up with holiday demand, and has seen it’s ontime delivery rates slip from 97% to 92%, in general UPS added 6% capacity this year, but e-commerce is growing at 16%. Fedex announced a 4% improvement in profitability based on e-commerce growth, and highlighted that some retailers were much better than others at forecasting their demand. Jet is starting to warn customers that orders as of December 21st, might not be delivered in time for Christmas. Retailers are also having a hard time executing on buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) orders.
A re/code article, revealed that Jet is on track to sell $45M in December which would equate to an annual $600M run rate, with approximately 2 million customers.
Jeff Jordan of Andreessen Horowitz was quoted in an CNBC article, talking about e-commerce reaching a tipping point. In a discussion of the article on Twitter, I pointed out that while e-commerce is growing much faster than retail, that we are still a long way from a true tipping point.
Scot and I discuss an article in Bloomberg, about Amazon capturing a bigger slice of US holiday sales. While Amazon is frequently cited as having $60B to $80B in US Sales, Scot breaks down how to think about Amazon’s first party (1P) sales where they act as the retailer, and their third party (3p) sales where they take a commision for matching a buyer and seller. The result is that Amazon is likely responsible for more than $135B in annual US e-commerce sales.
Episode 7 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday December 21s, 2015 (December 17th in Korea).
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