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EP268 - Amazon Prime Day Recap with ChannelAdvisor CEO David Spitz

David Spitz (@davidspitz) is the CEO of ChannelAdvisor. He joins us this week to share ChannelAdvisor data from Amazon Prime Day 2021.

Amazon Prime day was launched in 2015 to celebrate Amazon’s 20th anniversary, and has become a world-wide summer shopping event. The length of the event has been slowly expanding since 2015, so it is now two days long.

Traditionally Prime Day has been a summer event taking place in July, for example July 15-16, 2019. In 2020 due to the pandemic, Prime Day was held in October 13-14, 2020. This year Prime Day is earlier than usual on June 22-23, 2021.

Topics Covered:

• ChannelAdvisor view of prime day: Prime Day 2021 Wrap-up | ChannelAdvisor
• Morgan Stanley (Brian Nowak) Prime Day Recap
• Robert Baird (Colin Sebastian) Prime Day Recap
• Salesforce Prime Day Recap
• Amazon’s Prime Day 2021 sales total $11.19 billion | Digital Commerce 360
• Amazon Prime Day 2021 Insights & Real-Time Tracker | Numerator

Episode 268 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday June 24, 2021.

http://jasonandscot.com

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:
[0:24] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 268 being recorded on Thursday June 24th 2021, I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scott Wingo.

Scot:
[0:41] Thanks Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners if you enjoy listening to this show as much as we do creating it for you this would be a great time to pause go into your favorite.
Podcast listening device technology and leave us that five-star review right Jason.

Jason:
[0:59] That sounds like a great idea Scott I’m glad you thought of it.

Scot:
[1:03] Jason’s mom they throttled her she can leave one review every week or so so we need we need more help out there from the other other folks that listen.
Coupe so this week we are talking about one of my favorite topics Prime day so
Amazon introduced Prime Day in 2015 as kind of a summer holiday
the first Prime date was July and 15 2015 and if that’s a lot of 15s it may sound familiar to 1111 which was the holiday that Alibaba created called signals day
Jason I don’t know about you but it feels like we just had a prime day so it’s kind of a groundhog Prime day for me this year but then as I delegated to one of our many interns they did the math and it’s actually been
eight months so not exactly your but also not two months to feel like we just had a prime day to you.

Jason:
[1:55] It kind of did I was going to say that Prime days my like favorite season of the year but then I realized well wait it’s a different season every year.
So yeah yeah it no I agree I have barely recovered and then as you know I work with a lot of retailers so I’ve been doing a ton of holiday promotion so I get internally getting ready so to me it kind of feels like December just ended,
and now we’re having prime day I’m like all backwards upside-down and topsy-turvy.

Scot:
[2:23] Did you buy anything on Prime day.

Jason:
[2:25] Boiler over no I totally assumed I would find some stuff to buy and I found nothing there was nothing that I got excited about this year what about you.

Scot:
[2:36] I always use prime day to load up on my my little cables that I have three kids that love to rob my specifically my iPhone cables so I did find a set of anchor cables that I liked,
no but they were half off so I bought a bunch of those so I’m good for what probably is going to be another 12 months of cables hopefully we’ll see.

Jason:
[2:57] My wife has placed a restraining order prohibiting me from buying more more charging cables so.

Scot:
[3:02] Yes no more dongles are cables or power juicers or anything.

Jason:
[3:06] One of my favorite charging accessory companies has been like banned from Amazon so that like there was less for me to choose from this year.

Scot:
[3:14] Bummer what because Aki got what do they do.

Jason:
[3:20] I like the anchor stuff I get a lot of anchor stuff but there were some holes in anchors line that Aki filled really well.

Scot:
[3:25] Interesting well in this episode we are going to go really deep on Prime day because it is what we known for
and to help us out with an analysis of this we thought we would bring on an expert that has a front row seat and some fresh
real-time data on the topic so we are excited to have for the first time on the show David spits CEO channeladvisor’s.

David:
[3:48] Hey guys appreciate you having me on long time listener first-time caller so it’s good to be here.

Jason:
[3:54] Dave we are thrilled to have you and obviously we’re eager to jump into all the prime day goodness but tradition we have on the show is always to give listeners a little bit of background about our guests so can you tell us,
how you came to your current role at channeladvisor’s.

David:
[4:11] Yeah absolutely so I’ve been a techie my whole life studied computer science and I was.
An entrepreneur a couple times started and sold a couple companies and after my second company I was trying to.
Figure out what I was going to do next and I had coffee in 2006 with this fellow named Scott Wingo Jason who I think you may know and.

Jason:
[4:34] It almost never goes well to have Scott coffee with Scott but yeah.

David:
[4:36] Yeah it’s hard to keep up
but since I wasn’t you know doing anything really productive at the time he said you know he asked if I’d be willing to help out on some projects at channeladvisor’s and I quickly fell in love with the industry and the customers and the people at channeladvisor’s and
it quickly morphed into kind of a full-time role and end up running day-to-day for the company and then we took it
public in 2013 I think it was and
I became CEO in 2015 when Scott became chairman and so you know it’s been one of those funny careers where I never expected a little bit of side work to turn into a 15 plus your career but you know sometimes you get Serendipity it’s been a lot of fun.

Jason:
[5:17] Yeah and I by all accounts those have been the best 15 years in the history of channeladvisor’s by.

Scot:
[5:23] No doubt about it absolutely.

David:
[5:25] Scot Scot reminded me actually earlier today that would this is actually our 20th anniversary on July 1st and so it’s a
it’s a pretty big ear you know it’s a lot of tech companies don’t necessarily last for you know two-plus decades and so it’s kind of kind of cool milestone for us.

Jason:
[5:41] I know for sure you guys have definitely surpassed the traditional mortality rate that’s.
Um not even for startups just like like twenty percent of the fortune 40 rolls over every every 20 or so.
In 20 years is great and by the way fun Serendipity their Prime day was started as the 20th anniversary of Amazon right wasn’t that the.

[6:09] Official stated reason for This brilliant invented holiday so.
I do want to get a little background in to why it is that you have such a front row seat to Prime day but just to kind of set the table Scott and I joked about it a little bit but just to be super explicit.
Prime day just ended it was June 22nd and 23rd of 2021.
Last year because of the pandemic Prime day was in October so it was October 13th and 14th.
And traditionally every Prime day before this has been actually in July.
So like inside baseball analysts like normally Prime days Q3.
Last year it was Q4 and now it’s Q2 which is interesting so that being said I know a lot of our listeners are super familiar with channeladvisor’s.
Pitch on what channeladvisor’s does and why you guys have so much insight into what happens on marketplaces.

David:
[7:16] Yeah sure so our mission is to connect and optimize the world’s Commerce and so we have a software platform that helps thousands of Brands and retailers
market sell and fulfill on a variety of e-commerce channels and fundamentally what we do is we consolidate and simplify and automate a whole lot of that work so that our customers can focus on what they do best instead of
spending time on the nitty-gritty of integration details and things like that so our goal is to just make it all work
and we’re best known for marketplaces we started off helping eBay sellers 20 years ago and today we support
well over a hundred fifty Market places around the world and by this time next year we expect it to be over 200 so we’re doing a major major Marketplace expansion over the course of this year and into next
so we’re best known for that and of course we drive a lot of volume on Amazon eBay Walmart but but also you know pretty wide variety of others.

[8:10] And maybe a little bit lesser known as it were a pretty
pretty major player in digital marketing retail media social and shoppable media shelf analytics oh and even fulfillment so we have a pretty broad platform and we work with many of the largest Brands and retailers and channel Partners all around the world and really what I think sets us apart is,
obviously the breadth of our platform and the pace of our Innovation but also the breadth of,
sewing channels we support and the fact that we have a global footprint so so yeah so we’ve been in business 20 years helping to make e-commerce easier for for everybody in the industry.

Scot:
[8:46] So that’s a good pitch I’m I’m glad I hinted that over teeth.

David:
[8:50] Took me 15 years Scott but I got it.

Scot:
[8:53] Nailed it okay so you have all this data and all these customers and what were some of the themes of this this year’s Prime day compared to maybe other years.

David:
[9:06] Yeah so I would say we characterize it as fairly robust gmv volumes across the two days of prime day writes a prime days really two days as you mentioned Jason and
you know we I actually see this as a pretty significant positive indicator for e-commerce because last year
as you guys mentioned Prime day was in October it was you know right in advance of the holidays we were still you know effectively in lockdown mode across the world and of course now it’s in June which is
typically seasonally a little bit slower the restrictions are easing so you think that would be sort of a
tougher compote seasonally and you know just with the with the covid situation but we still saw growth and still Saul volume v volumes increasing so to me that shows that
that the e-commerce games that we’ve seen over the last year are pretty are pretty durable and we would expect that they’re going to continue to.

[9:57] Continue to continue to grow and as I kind of peel the onion I think a couple of interesting things we saw faster growth on day one
Prime compared to Day 2 and so weird
just to be clear we’re comparing the two days of Prime in June this year to the two days in October last year so day one growth was was higher and day two was a little bit a little bit lower than the growth rate but
having said that day two was also the highest level of GMB we’ve actually seen all year so far in 2021 and I was a pretty big milestone because the last high water mark was mid-march with the stimulus that went out
and what we’ve seen during covid is when there’s a stimulus you know check that goes out to to consumers in the US we tend to see a pretty meaningful bump in beat in GMB so we saw that in March but
like I said day two of prime day actually exceeded that and was our biggest so far in 2021
and what’s interesting about that is in the u.s. starting I think it’s July 15th we’re going to start to have advanced child tax credits
get deposited in taxpayer accounts I’m not sure if it’s for every month for the rest of the year but it starts in July I think it’s the middle of each month for at least the next few months
and if the past is any guide will probably see that continue to fool the fuel some some e-commerce gain gains and then the one thing I would I would comment on will probably die of an Amazon little bit is that.

[11:23] At least in our data and I should be clear that you know we’re talking about when I say our data so all of the sales data that comes through channeladvisor’s
you know all of the different channels we support around the world so that it may not line up exactly to you know what
Amazon or another Channel sees right I mean we have we have a lot of data but it you know because of our customers skew or whatever it may not may not necessarily indicate how a particular channel did but we saw in our data at least is that
Prime day really seem to induce a pop in gmv internationally so we saw.
About three times the growth rate both in Europe and in Asia Pacific than we saw in the US and we also saw.

[12:04] A pretty substantial growth rate and what we call other marketplaces so the big three and our world are Amazon eBay and Walmart
and then we have like I said earlier a long list of additional Market places whether its Target Plus or is Orlando or Allegro or Auto you know there are lots of different Market Place all around the world
we saw we saw that that long tail really benefit from from from Prime day.
Now we did see growth on Amazon I’ve seen some reports out there that Amazon was flat,
or even I saw one report that said it was it was down for Prime day but we didn’t see that we saw we saw growth.

[12:38] Although I would characterize it as modest and but I don’t really see that as a negative frame is on I mean you know again this is a comparison to last October when there was a lot more lockdown activity it was right before the holidays
and you know the fact that the fact that it’s up at all frankly in this kind of as we emerge from covid especially in the US in a seasonally slower period
I think it’s actually a pretty positive positive Mark for for Amazon now we’ve had we’ve had some customers I’ve seen some reports that ft F ba
fulfillment by Amazon is actually still is a little bit of a bottleneck just in terms of maybe Staffing or capacity constraints so maybe there’s a contributing factor there was a lot of our customers are seller fulfilled not necessarily purely FBA
and it wouldn’t surprise me right I mean there’s a ton of people around industry that are that are facing Staffing challenges everywhere and our data tends to skew a little bit more third party instead of first party so.
You know maybe that may be a contributing factors to why we saw a little bit more growth than than what we’ve seen reported out there.

Jason:
[13:43] Yeah so interesting.
First of all I feel like there’s so many things we talk about in this business that are versus last year and obviously.
Last year was such a anomalous year for so many things in Prime day just being another example it’s really hard to talk about this stuff because you’re you’re comping against a weird outlier.
Do you have a in So when you say like man we were we were up versus last Prime day but modest growth.
But you know that that’s really comparing October which really kicked off holiday spending last year versus.
Middle of summer in a time where we’ve never had this big sale before because even our two-year-old data is July versus June which is closer to you know at least start catching some of the back-to-school stuff.
So I don’t know like would you have a.
When you’re thinking about the the comps are you trying to normalize for those the different seasonality Zoar just.

David:
[14:49] Yeah I think we don’t try to do that normalization I would leave that remember the episode you guys did
with the the folks that publish the you know the e-commerce data and they are really good at sort of normalizing for that kind of stuff and that’s
that that math is maybe a little too advanced for for me you know so we don’t we don’t do that but you know it is it is kind of interesting I mean if I look at like.

[15:14] Like for example the one category that was Far and Away the fastest grower
this year versus last Prime year or last October Prime day was musical instruments right so is that like
is that because you know something about our customer base may be excused more in that direction I don’t know maybe covid inspired.

[15:32] A lot of people to say that I’m tired of being locked up like I need a new hobby I’m going to,
the banjo or the flute or whatever you know so like and we’ve published a lot of data over the last year about these category trends like you know you guys all remember early on it was like,
you know the great toilet paper shortage of 2020 right and we had like a 25,000 percent increase in toilet paper sales in our data of albeit from a from a smaller numbers it’s not typically a product our customers sell a lot of and then it was like
you know all these like different categories like things you would sort of a you know aren’t surprising in retrospect like you know sweatpants or like you know
home office desks and stuff like that but then there were some head scratchers like I think it was like April or May last year like
bouncy castles you know those inflatable bouncy houses like it was like a top set like it should like popped up and like the top 10 of our categories on our radar and I’m like what the hell like why are you know why are people doing bouncy house and they kind of like Donald me like my there’s a lot of people stuck at home with like young kids and they’re trying to get their work done and they need like
semi secure safe place for the kids to burn off energy where you know they’re not going to like wander onto the highway like what’s what a better solution than like a bouncy castle.

Scot:
[16:44] Jason actually put one on the roof of his building is 30-story building there.

Jason:
[16:48] Yeah but then Scott wouldn’t come over and play with me.

Scot:
[16:49] Very safe but I mean.

David:
[16:51] Yeah well so there’s all sorts of category trends like that and you know some musical instruments the cycle mobile phones Health and Beauty Home and Garden was another strong one.
You know and it’s just hard to it’s hard to say like you know how much of that is seasonality October versus June you know I’ll leave that to smarter people than me to figure out.

Jason:
[17:12] Side note I like to call those people that took up a musical instrument the pandemic Piccolo cohort.
Um so yeah feel free to use that the I do I want to jump into the categories a little bit more but you also mentioned.
Big boost internet or a meaningful boost internationally and one of the things personal hypothesis not grounded in any data that I have is prime day starting to be a victim of the.
Who are of large numbers here in North America that like you know one of the things we saw every Prime day was a huge growth in the number of Prime members.
Um and those you know there are a lot of people that did their first shopping on Amazon every year Prime day as a result of recruiting all these,
Prime members and now you know we’ve more than fifty percent of the population are probably Prime members there’s a lot of saturation it’s.
You know they’re selling a huge amount of good so it’s just hard to grow as fast.
Internationally you know in most markets Amazon’s not quite as well penetrated as they are North America So when you say you saw some meaningful growth growth internationally.
Why do you feel like that was more on Amazon versus the overall effect here or was it sort of similar International where it kind of lifted all boats.

David:
[18:33] Well I would I would say both it definitely lifted all boats I mean when I when I look at the list of growth rates of
number of our channels that for example are in Europe or in Asia Pacific you know like I look at you know some of the screamers that were growing you know triple digits
channel is like zalando which is a german-based fashion site fashion Marketplace Auto is another one you know so there’s there’s.

Jason:
[19:00] Get all my black turtlenecks from Zorro and up.

David:
[19:03] I knew it I knew it but I would say similarly with with Amazon as well you know we saw overall generally strong performance out of
various European markets and particularly strong performance in Australia.
Where you know the Amazon Marketplace launched a few years ago so it’s you know still you know probably a little bit more in the growth phase versus the the maturity phase but I think the notion of the law of large numbers is a fair one right I mean I think,
again some of the reports I’ve read of sort of had a little bit of a.
You know a little bit of a negative tone like you know I was just you know is this the beginning of the end or something like that and that just feels a little bit strong to me because.
You know Amazon is far away as you guys know the Leader by volume and so there’s there’s,
you know some limits into how rapidly you can grow that large number and I think I think I saw on their release today there are over 200 million Prime subscribers worldwide
and I can’t remember if they break that down you know domestic versus International or at least I haven’t even seen that but I think you’re right Jason I mean there’s there’s there’s only so many consumers in the US ultimately that
that are going to be prime customers and then they probably mopped up most most of them so I think that’s probably.
Contributing factors is you know there’s probably more room for growth in some of these International markets than then you know the maybe in the domestic Market.

Scot:
[20:29] Any other saw on the countryside any countries stand out I think you did you say Spain in the in the top there.

David:
[20:37] Spain was was super strong yeah we saw good growth in Italy
UK Netherlands and a few other countries were kind of in that range there were a couple that were a little bit more moderate,
they’re relatively small data points for us in terms of volume so it could be just you know more affected by One customer maybe changing strategies or something so I don’t I don’t I think that it looked to me like the overall trend was
Europe looked look pretty strong and again a pack which for us is primarily concentrated in Australia was also really strong.

Scot:
[21:13] What’s kind of interesting because for a long time we saw retailers try
Thanksgiving specials in Europe and then also Black Friday and it didn’t really stick and then just like in the last three years it’s kind of picked up a lot of momentum I wonder if I wonder if there’s this kind of lag effect where we create these holidays and takes a while for them to
to stick in Europe.

David:
[21:36] Yeah I think there’s probably something to that you know just in terms of conditioning and often you know,
Amazon doesn’t necessarily roll out an initiative globally all at once right they’ll start in a country and then they’ll kind of you know as they see success they’ll roll it out and we’ve seen that with various programs over the years so,
so even even prime day I think probably you know didn’t start off as a global event and it’s become one and
you know arguably at this point it’s become an even bigger stimulus for non Amazon properties than for Amazon but again that probably more law of large numbers and than anything.

Scot:
[22:09] Do you know if Market places in Europe have started off for the you know here in the US are one offers their own kind of counter programming if you will to Prime days is that kind of trickled over maybe that’s what’s driving.

David:
[22:21] I’m not aware of any that specifically like try to overlap with prime prime day I know here in the US you know Walmart and Target you know both had.

[22:31] You know some some compelling deal days that we’re going on I’m not aware of any that specifically targeted Prime day in Europe
I wouldn’t be surprised to see that going forward but so far like they haven’t had to do that because Prime day I would say arguably has been an even bigger stimulus for some of these non.

Marker 03

[22:47] Amazon properties in for Amazon particular in this kind of longer tail of marketplaces and I don’t I don’t mean that as you know inherently negative frame is on there just so much bigger than everyone that naturally you know the law,
our summer is kind of comes into play and even with the fast growth that smaller marketplaces are seeing they have a long way to go to be you know more than a kind of rounding error
in the space but I think what’s important is it shows that there’s still room to create value for consumers like we’re seeing this proliferation of marketplaces and where they’re winning is the create really compelling category experiences Orlando being a good example in fashion,
for they have a regional focus with regional kind of flavor and expertise or maybe they’re focused on curation and storytelling so you know if you just listen to the news you think like oh you know
kind of big Tech is taking over everything and there’s no room for anybody but we’re actually seeing the opposite we’re seeing some really Innovation real innovation in e-commerce channels and it’s creating more diversity and kind of a more vibrant ecosystem and
you know I think that’s that’s probably a story that that ought to be told more because I think it’s really it’s exciting not just for for consumers right because they have more
interesting ways to shop and find products and have different experiences and it’s it’s great for Brands and retailers who are,
looking to connect with those consumers right they’ve got multiple they’ve got more Avenues now than they ever have in so I think that’s that’s a story that maybe is a little bit under report.

Jason:
[24:06] Very cool I do want to Pivot and ask you a related question you mentioned upfront that,
one of the lesser-known things about channeladvisor’s you really are sort of an operating system for Commerce overall and that you
have a lot of digital marketing services for for all this hours that you work with did you see any interesting Trends there is there anything.
Changing as far as how people are marketing Prime day are they investing off of the primary Market places they’re selling at to drive traffic to those marketplaces is all the as far as you can see.

David:
[24:38] Well I think
in the in the sort of narrower view I think you know it’s all about like Amazon advertising and how do you kind of Leverage these Marketplace advertising programs that are proliferating you know now called retail media right
um and I think that’s a really important Trend right there’s a lot of kind of turbulence in the overall market around like.

[24:58] Just today Google announced they were delaying the removal of cookies from chrome for two years right and there’s a lot of the shift from sort of,
third-party cookie data the first party data and Who’s got what and who’s going to win and so the whole digital marketing landscape is actually kind of undergoing one of those kind of periodic shufflings where
you know winners and losers will emerge from that and so you know there’s there’s
because of that I think it’s kind of cracking open new opportunities again like you know whether it’s retail media you know Shopify has been reported to you know be working with I think it was BuzzFeed you know in Striking some deals too you know,
maybe create like an affiliate Network you’ve got you know obviously social advertising continues to be of interest things like shoppable media so I actually think that it’s probably a more interesting
time right now in digital marketing and it’s been in years just because you know whether it’s Apple or Google like all these policy and Tech changes and the political pressure and privacy it’s kind of
it’s kind of turning the whole you know the whole industry on its head and forcing people to figure out you know how do they where do they really get value and how do they How do they
how do they engage consumers effectively so but when it comes to Prime day I’d say you know hey.

[26:09] You know Amazon advertising how do I leverage you know Walmart media properties how do I you know because all these marketplaces are coming up with advertising strategies following in the footsteps of Amazon for good reason it right it’s a hugely profitable endeavor
and that’s creating a lot of opportunities even you know even some less traditional you know we don’t necessarily think of them as e-commerce you look at,
like insta card or – you know these other these other players and brands have a real interest in like okay you know there’s there’s obviously a lot of eyeballs on these delivery companies like how do I as a brand get in front of that.
And you know and start to you know connect with and influence consumers and maybe nose and towards towards my product so so I think the whole digital marketing world is a really different place than it was even just a few years ago and it’s probably going to be
choppy for a while as people figure out what is the strategy they need to embrace.

Jason:
[26:55] No a hundred percent I think we’re very early in that disruption so like I don’t know what it’s going to end up looking at but it is interesting in.
The more uncertainty there is in the market it feels like the more advertisers in general want to move.
Further down the funnel closer to these conversion events in so that’s that that you know is kind of creating scarcity of all of these media products that that talk to customers that are close to purchase decisions.

David:
[27:22] Yeah absolutely and ultimately that’s that’s why we exist right we just we try to try to be a little bit of a shock absorber for our customers so that we can we can help we can help manage all that changing complexity.

Jason:
[27:34] Nice little David I know you’re you are in high demand and that is all the time we allocated so I’m super grateful you were able to take some time out and chat with us and thanks again for getting us all up to speed on Prime day.

David:
[27:49] Hey it was my pleasure I appreciate you guys having me on and look forward to hearing more of what you guys have to say on the topic.

Scot:
[27:55] Awesome Dave we really appreciate you joining us and you took time off vacation so you get extra brownie points we met Jason will send you some of our coveted show swag for that
if folks want to follow your thoughts in the channeladvisor’s data that’s put out where is the best place for them to go.

David:
[28:13] Yeah so you can go to channeladvisor’s.com blog for our blog and obviously you can follow us on Twitter and Linkedin we tend to
you know push a lot of our content out there as well but I would start on the blog that’s a that’s a good starting point with for all sorts of resources including a lot of our interesting data around around covid and Prime day and stuff like that.

Scot:
[28:31] Thanks again and have a great rest of your vacation.

David:
[28:34] Great thank you guys.

Jason:
[28:35] And don’t forget to wear sunscreen David.

David:
[28:37] Duly noted.

Scot:
[28:39] Okay so that is one set of data and now
our job here at the Jason and Scot show is to give you a wide spectrum of data and then we’re going to summarize it for you Jason one of the were
more popular sources of data on Prime day is Amazon itself they always put out a pretty meaty press report and I have it on good knowledge that you dug into that and they’re going to share with us what you saw there.

Jason:
[29:04] I did and I.
For better or worse I think we’re also going to share our opinions about each of these data sources because they’re probably not all created equal and increasingly I would say you know we always have to.
Take the Amazon’s press releases with a grain of salt like as any company would do they’re going to position things,
in the best possible light for themselves and specifically in the case of Amazon you know they like to be in the information collecting business not the information sharing business so unless there’s a,
compelling reason they tend to not reveal a lot of secrets in their press releases and these days I would say there’s this extra layer that the press releases are mostly written by antitrust lawyers that are.
Trying to bolster their their defense against you know potential antitrust action so so take it with a grain of salt what Amazon tells us about prime day is,
that there was a dominant focus on third-party Sellers and they really leaned into all of the.
Quote unquote small businesses that sell on the platform they threw out some numbers that are kind of you know.

[30:11] Big numbers that are hard to put in context like more than 250 million items were purchased by prime numbers that these were the two biggest selling days for SMB in history of Amazon and that the SMB.

[30:26] Segment Drew more than one piece sales from Amazon which you know is probably the antitrust language that happened in there.

[30:35] They talked about Prime members say more than any previous Prime day so that the discount for Prime members were either larger or they bought more,
doesn’t say which and so then always like kind of fun facts to me and something that will dive a little bit more into they talked about what some of their top selling products were now this is global and Amazon is in a lot of markets,

Marker 06

[30:58] in addition to North America so they said that worldwide some of the top-selling products and they’re not necessarily putting these in any particular order as the iRobot Roomba,
a particular model of the robotic vacuum Keurig coffee maker,
apple cider vinegar gummy vitamins and Crest 3D tooth whitening strips so an Eclectic mix of stuff,
in the u.s. in particular they said top selling items were a waterpik electric water flosser a organic plant-based protein powder the 23andMe DNA test
the Roomba robotic vacuum as always the way this flavor of the insta pot which I think now is the instant pot Duo plus 6 quart,
nine in one for those of you that are looking for a new instant pot,
so those were some of the key things from their press release got anything jump out at you from their press release or did you have any immediate thoughts after reading it.

Scot:
[31:56] When I read that thing I thought okay someone’s gonna have coffee in the morning and then an apple cider gummy and then they’re obviously going to need teeth whitening and then they’re going to take the little things off the strips and throw them on the floor and then the Roomba will pick them up that was kind of the use case that popped into my head,
that’s why you did all that in your one car but anyway.

Jason:
[32:16] That’s a perfect customer Journey you nailed it.

Scot:
[32:17] Boom it’s exactly how it goes and then I thought it was interesting they definitely kind of
punched in the press release on back to school so they talked about a million laptops and million headphones 240,000 notebooks and that would be paper notebooks and then 220,000 Crayola products
if all of those were the big pack of crayons I can’t do the math but that is a lot of crayons I bet we could line those crayons up to the moon and back what do you.

Jason:
[32:42] I’m game for that I know my son Steven would be a big fan of helping to do it yeah I noticed that too it’s funny they call that a lot of the b2c b-2s products and if you and when we talk about some of the other data sources,
there are other variations of that I think a very clear Trend that got repeated across a bunch of different data sources is activities for kids.
Was one of the fastest-growing Sellers and so and I can imagine a couple different hypothesis has hypothesized why that is.
Um but yeah that that was interesting what other data sources were you looking at for Prime day data Scott.

Scot:
[33:24] The last thing on the press release is the first time I’ve seen him say this they said every day is made better by Prime and I thought that was kind of interesting and in a very you know good little marketing phrase that I hadn’t seen before have you seen that.

Jason:
[33:38] No no I haven’t I didn’t even notice in the press release good call.

Scot:
[33:42] Yeah yeah it kind of felt like they’re trying it on and I liked it I thought it had a kind of a good little jingle to it
so I go to Wall Street for a lot of my data and.
Morgan Stanley the analyst Brian Nowak he he does a lot of proprietary models and.
Followed everybody and I really like his prime reporting so I kind of need them to that one he his model showed that Prime was about six point nine billion this year up nine percent compared to last year’s Prime and when I say that not
not June but the October primed it so he did feel felt like I was about 4 billion incremental add to this year now it’s interesting is if you kind of do the Wall Street map because they care about quarters and
your of your quarters and things so this movement between quarters is a big deal and Wall Street because it’s kind of a pull forward in a way of
of what last year was in Q4 now it’s pulled two quarters forward so so it’s going to make it very easy for Amazon produce you’re over your growth I think,
which is interesting because that’s counterintuitive.

[34:47] Because we’re comping over we’ve talked a lot about people are gaps kind of to your comp because it’s going to be so hard in e-commerce to copy your because we’re at
you know things were surging because we’re all locked up so so Amazon the nether that is Amazon could be one of the few kind of heavy.

[35:05] E-commerce people that that shows
pretty decent Q2 your overgrowth so it’s gonna be fun to watch that as we report on the show what’s going on he had a good he also has a chart and maybe we’ll tweet this I’ll tweak this in reply to when we put the show out there so everyone can see the visual
but I like that he lays out kind of the year-to-year trends so the unit volume so I’ll start at 2017 and kind of follow this progression so
Amazon consistently releases some data points in the press release even though it’s not super super helpful
but one of the ones they do is how many units were sold so it’s interesting in 2017 I think this was the first year they started.

[35:43] Giving more information in the press releases they had 88 million units and then it went 110 and 2018 175 and 2019
231 a big jump into 2020 and then 250 and 2021 so 8% on units but then
comparable on the revenue side so interesting interesting data there and then the other Wall Street person I watch is Con Sebastian and he does a good job for us well kind of
count him on the research team are the Jason is gotcha I think he would wear that as a badge of honor he kind of rounded up a lot of data and the most interesting data point I saw was the Salesforce e-commerce folks who we know really well and we’ve had on the show and
they gather data from a variety of sources including the old-school demandware platform it has a fancy new name
it’s a Commerce Cloud seller if they renamed it.

Jason:
[36:39] E-commerce cloud.

Scot:
[36:40] Still Still Commerce club okay good and they basically said that when you line it up against last year that it was down 1%
and so that was the most if we kind of booked into this I think Dave’s comments are kind of the most positive out there so the channeladvisor’s
in the blog post we’re kind of the most positive book in and then the Salesforce data seems to be the most negative book in and then
you know they did see a bump so they kind of said June was running 8% up your ear and then those two days kind of blipped twelve percent,
but then they said Amazon was down 1% which didn’t a hundred percent fit together for me because if Amazon was down 1% this off were they almost implied that.

Jason:
[37:26] I read that as the they were up 12% this Joon vs. last June and that they were down 1% these two days versus the October day.

Scot:
[37:38] Okay that makes more sense yeah and then in their data they said the winning categories were Handbags and luggage luggage makes a lot of sense to me I don’t know if you’ve traveled it but actually have started traveling again
and it is busy out there you know it’s kind of like know so so it feels pre-pandemic e and but then there’s not nearly as many things open
planes flying and people working so it makes it feel that much more more kind of crazy so I could see we’re going to we’re going to have a lot of people buying
luggage to kind of get back into the travel Bud one that surprised me this furniture I feel like we should be at the tail end of this nesting
thing going on Earth so I thought that was interesting and then the busy the biggest losing category that they surfaced was apparel and I just feel really bad for apparel I just feel like when are they going to have their moment in the sun it’s been like.
A terrible 18 months at some point people are going to have to wear clothes right.

Jason:
[38:39] Yeah yeah and I’ll be honest outside of this Prime day data and they were the only ones I saw that called out Apparel in a positive or negative way but outside of this Prime day data I would say.
There’s a fair amount of data that apparel is probably recovering a little faster than frankly I would have expect it right because.
As with all of these Trends there’s an argument.
Is this the new normal or will people revert right and pretty clear we’re not going to live in the one pair of sweatpants that we were for the last 18 months forever,
um so you know some new clothes would would sell but I would say more work attire and formal attire and things like that have been selling then,
I would have necessarily expected so quickly so you know I can’t I don’t really have a hypothesis why it would be.
Prime day loser maybe apparel was like maybe they’re talking about October versus June and there was a you know starting to be there was an economic stimulus and partial recovery.
For apparel already happening in October I don’t know.

Scot:
[39:44] And then you had called out some data what do you what did you say.

Jason:
[39:49] So I do I tend to think that the.
The Wall Street analysts are really thoughtful and one of the things I like is in general they showed their work they usually give us a model so we can kind of see how they’re thinking from some of these other sources we don’t necessarily get a model.
So I guess I would be a little more skeptical of the data but just you know it’s another data point out there so people should be aware of it,
digital Commerce 360 which is kind of the.
The online version of what used to be the internet retailer magazine they were pretty bullish on Prime day so they do do an estimate every year they said,
in this is going to show you how much variation we have in these numbers they said that they estimated 11-point 19 billion in sales over the two prime days,
which would be up,
almost eight percent so and they do do an estimate every year so that that.

[40:47] 8% growth is decelerating growth which I think is a universal.
Conclusion but they’re they are estimating significantly higher sales than some of the Wall Street guys and again we don’t know exactly.
What their math is one other just fun fact that I have no way to validate confirm or deny from their data is they also have an estimate of three p versus one piece sales.
Every year since Prime day started and on the first Primary in 2015 they estimated that like 52 percent of all all.
Sales were were.
3p which kind of fits with how fast the marketplace was already growing at that point the marketplace has continued to outgrow first party since then overall but they say over Prime day that like.
Six I want to say like 61 percent of all sales were one piece o their data set says that Prime day disproportionately benefited one p vs 3 p which kind of.

Scot:
[41:58] That number seems really high just so just kind of give folks the data so there at eleven point two billion
and I assume that’s gmv and then Wall Street was I saw not a lot of variable at somewhere between six and a half and seven so it’s almost like double sets that’s interesting.
Someone.

Jason:
[42:19] I’ll be honest and nobody did this to my knowledge but a.
A fallacy in all of these numbers are that like people only bought stuff over the last two days because it was Prime day right like like what you really want to do there’s a significant basis right if there was no Prime day Amazon still would have sold a lot of stuff yesterday.
And so what you really want to do is put together a model that had like predicted the basis and then predicted what was incremental because of.
Prime day and that would have given you a better way because the October basis is going to be very different from the June basis is different than the July basis and we’ve got all these complicated factors affecting consumer spending right now.
I don’t know I’m not sure it’s worth putting together a complicated enough model to really try to try to figure all this stuff out.

Scot:
[43:12] Yeah how about there was a lot of Buzz around live streaming in the Amazon live thing and you I got heads down and I didn’t get a chance to go check it and do watch that.

Jason:
[43:24] I did I was super interested in this because in general I would say two things that were just kind of Commerce Trends running into this year that I wanted to see if Amazon moved the needle on is.
People are really interested in piloting live-streaming Commerce.
Walmart has done a bunch of really visible test of course like it’s it’s really taking off in China and so we’re seeing a lot of brands do invest in test here and Amazon has had live streaming Commerce on Prime day for.
For a while now so that it’s not a new idea to them so I was curious to see what they would do differently and I would say it was a mixed bag so.
On the one hand they I would say they D emphasized it like visually the lot the Amazon alive which is their program,
the pixels were less prevalent than they used to be like Amazon live used to get above the fold top of the page.
Visibility during Prime day and I felt like in most iterations,
the live streaming video was lower on the page so just literally less visual attention than it would ordinarily get.
What they did this year that they haven’t done in your past as far as I remember is the video is autoplay so when you go to these Pages the video is automatically running it’s muted and you can turn on your sound it felt like they had a lot more.

[44:52] Um vendors that were doing Amazon alive spots and they seemed a little more polished this year and I don’t remember they did this in the past but this year they showed you viewership.
And side note.
Viewership is going to be somewhat artificial because it auto plays right so it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re they’re all those were active eyeballs
but every time I picked it was fluctuating between like 30 thousand and seventy thousand people viewing it live and I
I don’t have anything to compare that to because again if Amazon had that feature in the past I don’t remember it and didn’t write it down,
but that that is interesting I note that they didn’t make any hey about it in there in the press release as far as I saw.
So I would say it Amazon live felt kind of incremental to me they clearly made some tweaks but they didn’t like it didn’t feel like they.
We need way more into it than they have years past or did anything wildly different the other.

[45:55] Big trend is social commerce and Tick-Tock right and so one of the things I was super interested in was.
Are they going to do anything interesting or novel off of Amazon to drive people to Amazon historically Amazon spends a fortune on Google ads to drive people to Amazon but you know for example have not seen any Amazon elad ever on Facebook.
And for whatever reason The Social Network that has.
Brands interested in Commerce most whipped into a lather as Tick-Tock and so and you know a ton of Amazon Prime day is about affiliates
and so I thought hey we’re not going to see Amazon do anything on Tick Tock but I wonder what brands will do some things and there were some Tick-Tock specific products that seem like they outperform Don on Amazon so like I think one of the,
top 10 sellers overall was this string of LED strip lights these like multicolored lights that you can control with your phone kind of like.

[46:53] The cheaper better version of Philips Hue strip lights and this was a product that was heavily promoted by some popular tick talkers and kind of jump from obscurity on Amazon to be a top 10 product so that was a little interesting.
There are these Tick-Tock leggings that were very popular in Amazon earlier in the year and I noticed they were a prime lightning deal so I saw some inklings of.
Some some enhance social media activity mostly by Third parties that we’re trying to drive people to their deals on Amazon but I wouldn’t say I saw anything like revolutionary or game-changing you know it was mostly.
Executing that kind of traditional tactics that we’ve seen before in the US.

Scot:
[47:41] Pickle anything else before we jump into the summary.

Jason:
[47:44] A couple things I’ll hide really quick Amazon Prime is our Amazon day is always primarily about Amazon products regardless of what they want to say.
Things like fire devices and Echoes are always on the top sellers list and I you know there were a bunch of data that like three of the top five products again this year we’re Amazon devices and interesting thing.
Amazon had two tabs on this on the deal they had an Amazon devices tab where they were selling.
Fire and Echoes and then they had an Amazon Brands tab where they were selling all of the.
The Amazon Brands product a data source that I do use for,
individual product sales on Amazon is numerator they have a big panel and they said that like in home and kitchen five of the top 25 sellers were from Amazon Basics and.
During the first day of Amazon that three of the top five.
Pet products where Amazon wag product so it it does seem like.
Like the Amazon devices have kind of saturated themselves at the top of prime day but these other Amazon brands are starting to move up the.

[48:56] The prime list and then I guess one more thing I would point out I’m super interested in what other retailers counter program against Prime day.
Um and so I would say an interesting Trend this year is there were a lot of deals as David sort of alluded to I think this has become a.

[49:13] A significant spending holiday in the United States and it drive sales everywhere whether you have deals or not frankly I just think there’s more intrinsic spending around Prime day thanks to all the the,
the work that Amazon does but I noticed less retailers overtly calling their their sales.
Prime I saw them using the word Prime less so for example Target was super aggressively competing against Amazon they called it Target deal days and fun inside baseball fact it seemed like Target was doing some really clever things to
office skate the pricing spiders and not let Amazon see their prices so ordinarily you’d see a lot of targets deal prices on the PDP.
Prime during Prime day you had to add them to cart to see them they were doing a bunch of deals at the at the sort of category level instead of at the individual product level which makes it harder to.
It’s a match,
Walmart had their event was called deals for days and they seem like they more so than I remember in years past we’re leaning into exclusive products that you could only get from Walmart so that was kind of their answer to the.
The price matching and then Best Buy I felt like just went right for it and Best Buy was like Best Buy Prime Day deals and they were seemingly getting like really aggressive on price and just trying them
to meet or beat the the Amazon Prime price on their featured item so it’s interesting just to see that all play out.

Scot:
[50:42] Pickle so if you store all that together what were your three takeaways from this year’s Prime day.

Jason:
[50:50] So I would sort of call out three things to me.
That because they do try to let all these third parties participate in Prime day,
the signal-to-noise ratio on these deals is getting pretty overwhelming I mentioned I didn’t buy anything it was because I didn’t find anything that was an amazing deal and part of that problem is because there probably were some products that were an amazing deal but they were buried.
Amongst tens of thousands of.
Many deals right and I think I even posted I got a like a feature deal sent to me that was like a hundred and thirty dollars standing desk there was on sale for $125.
And I’m like that’s three percent which I don’t know that that.
You know is necessary feature deal so I do think the signal and the noise is starting to work against primed a little bit I do think secretly.
It’s still all about Amazon you know primarily selling their own stuff my second big takeaway is.
It’s a summer holiday like you know props to Amazon for starting it and creating it but like you know it’s definitely kind of a plan spending event for consumers,
I think it’s still a little early to decide exactly what the impact of June versus July is I don’t know if we mentioned up front but Amazon claims they moved it earlier.
To accommodate challenges in the supply chain this year and especially supply chain challenges that would impact their vendors but they.

[52:20] They didn’t necessarily explain why that was and then again I do think it was interesting to see The Accelerated affiliate activity and particularly some of these these.
Products and campaigns on Tick Tock and micro influencers driving traffic to Prime day so I those were kind of my three big takeaways what about you Scott.

Scot:
[52:44] Well I was agree with with yours which is actually pretty rare and then I thought the international growth thing was interesting at all
I haven’t seen anyone on Wall Street really kind of think about that and that could be kind of a little bit of a Q2 surprised that that Amazon shows here so I’ll be watching for that when we do our
Q2 summary so that’ll be fun to watch for then another one is you know.
I don’t know about you you guys are probably still in school right but you know here we are in June we’re just out of school we don’t really start thinking about back to school until late July definitely early August and I feel like the fact that kind of,
punched up in the pressure release some of those back to school items maybe they maybe they.
Kind of sucked some of the oxygen out of the room there and it’ll be interesting to see if maybe you know a Best Buy specifically talked a lot about the electronics and things I wonder if they’ve taken a little bit of the you know
the kind of led the pack on pulling that forward which could,
have a light back to school for everyone else normally I’d say they’re not big enough to do that but actually kind of are now right when you think about these billions of dollars that were talking about they could put a
pretty material done in the back to school sir especially certain categories and then the third one I would say is this kind of knock on effect is really fascinating to me because if I kind of think back to 2015,
you know.

[54:13] It was definitely an Amazon only thing and it’s pretty interesting that it’s having this this kind of pin action into other retailers and marketplaces and things of that nature so so I think that’s kind of continues to be surprised.
I would say kind of a bonus fourth one is I’m disappointed that we’re not seeing more innovation
the livestream stuff I’ve seen is pretty lame outside of startups that are doing cool things around
you know like opening Collectibles boxes and kind of Niche you know Niche compared to overall e-commerce their big niches I just haven’t seen anyone
kind of crack the livestream thing in the u.s. that yet and you know if anyone could do it I thought maybe Amazon would but I’m not sure we’re going to see it there.

Jason:
[54:57] Yeah I was I was waiting to see some cool twitch play on live streaming where they bring Twitch in the prime day and some Innovative way that we haven’t.
I thought of before and didn’t really get that or maybe even another hypothesis I had that never showed up was they should be live streaming from Whole Foods like they should be.
Having chefs and stuff doing doing deals in Whole Foods and and they actually went the other way I think Prime day was less of a big deal in Whole Foods than it was last year.

Scot:
[55:27] Yeah yeah clearly I need to hire you and I to solve this live stream thing.

Jason:
[55:32] Yeah I’m not available I don’t know about you it’s too much fun trying to help everyone else unsuccessfully compete with Amazon it would feel like cheating to would be like going to the Patriots like what’s the fun in that.

Scot:
[55:41] Yeah absolutely.

Jason:
[55:43] Yeah I do want to I feel like we’re way over time but I do think the back to school thing is interesting you I I haven’t thought about it but you’re exactly right like you know they did Prime day in October last year which kind of preempted the normal.
Holiday sales and that you know they tried to get that first dollar of holiday spending and so you know maybe in a way they moved to June to get the first dollar and back-to-school spending.
And there’s a way in which this might have been an extra smart year to do it because I you know you have much older kids I you know have a,
just graduated kindergarten about to start first grader and in our family and in many families we talked to last year felt a little bit like a lost year like we felt like our kids probably didn’t make as much.
Academic progress is they would have if the pandemic didn’t hit and so I think.
There are a lot of parents that are trying to catch up a little bit over the summer and so I think like potentially a lot of the purchases I saw I mean.
Best-selling things we’re still like.
Homeschooling tools like like educational posters to put up in your in your house you know Teaching Alphabet and geography and things like that so I wonder if.
Amazon kind of tapped into this you know parents spending more on helping their kids.
Have a little more education over the summer and and that you know tied in nicely to kind of pulling back to school into the beginning of summer instead of the end.

Scot: