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.

Amazon Prime Day, Commerce Next, and NRF Nexus Recaps

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

Amazon Prime Day, Commerce Next, and NRF Nexus Recaps