Ep 198 - June Ecom Recap: Shorter Titles, Smaller Commissions, and Emotional Support Tacos

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Welcome to E commissource. Episode number 198. We're a podcast that focuses on small to medium sized brand owners that want to build their business online in E commerce. And we're here today to talk about everything that happened in June, including prime days, including a bunch of other stuff. My name is Tim. I have with me, uh, our whole team here on today. So quick question for everybody in your world of working in e Commerce this week, the interesting thing is figuring out how to ship mattresses and sofas, which I did some research in that. Now I can say I'm an expert in how to ship mattresses and sofas through Amazon, even though the caller that was asking me that stood me up and was a no show. But fine, I'm now a little bit smarter. Before we get into this, Parker, what an E commerce was new to you this week. Real quick.

Speaker C: I mean, I just found out about this lose, uh, or celebration outcome support. Tacos from Taco Bell. Yeah. Exclusively through the app. Yeah, they are locos tacos.

Speaker B: I don't even know about that. So it's. You thought about new tacos? That's not the e commerce news we're going to be going through. But that is new news. Taco Bell. Oh, it's in the notes. Okay, so we'll be covering that, baby. Amber, since you're already talking, what. What was new for you in e Commerce this. This week, what you were working on personally. What happened?

Speaker D: Oh, asking, uh, Amazon why they think shoving a 12 pack of cans into a poly bag is going to ship efficiently to the customer.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good question. And it doesn't. The answer is it does not ship efficiently to the customers.

Speaker D: We've learned does not.

Speaker B: A 12 pack can of beverages does not do well in a poly bag. Sunny, anything new you learned working online this week?

Speaker E: Uh, well, this week is prime week. Right on Amazon. So I've been busy with that. And what I've learned is just, I don't know if it's more learning or like, you know, I think I've said in our Slack channel or internal Slack channel that I love shopping days and I, uh, hate shopping days at the same time. So that just suggests that everything's kind of mixed bag. I'm just trying to work through everything.

Speaker B: So you like the shopping part. You hate trying to figure out what's happening with ads during shopping days because it messes all the metrics up, Right?

Speaker E: Right. Exactly. That's right.

Speaker B: Yes. Amy, anything new, anything that you encountered this Week in E Commerce that either got you frustrated like Amber or was new.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, Amazon took some or not took, paid our client for some product that they said was damaged and then proceeded to sell it on hall without saying it was damaged. So.

Speaker B: And they sold it as new on Hall. Yeah, that's the one that has us. So we got reimbursed for what Amazon believes is the cost of the product. And if that was Amazon damaged it and they reimbursed the cost. That would have been fair. But then selling it on haul during prime while we were running promotions and stealing from us. Jacqueline, jump in there.

Speaker F: Let's just say they didn't just sell it on haul. They jumped on our listing and sold it as new next to all of our new products. So we were out of stock on certain items that they had. They were unfulfillable, damaged. And then Amazon sold them on our listing. They took the buy box on our listing with the variations of like, you know, 97 variations of different sizes. And they were selling this product at, you know, this was an example. It was a $62 product that they were selling for $7.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker F: On our list.

Speaker A: And I bought it.

Speaker B: You bought it.

Speaker A: So I'm gonna see what it comes like.

Speaker F: Yes, that was mine as well, too.

Speaker B: Yeah, you can. We had some fun adventures. Yeah, you were both dealing with that all week. Okay, let's get into this here. Parker, back to you, who's the sponsor of our podcast here?

Speaker C: Sponsor of our podcast is 50 pound boson. And typically 50 pound boson focuses on helping small to medium sized brands grow in E commerce.

Speaker B: Jacqueline, when did new episodes come out?

Speaker F: Monday night or Tuesday? It did come out Tuesday this week because I forgot to send the files over to our producer on Friday. However, it was a federal holiday and there was a pool available to me that I got.

Speaker B: I'm just laughing because I got in trouble for saying they come out Tuesday one time and I got reprimanded saying that they actually come out on Monday.

Speaker F: They come out on Mondays unless there's something going on on Friday that takes priority.

Speaker B: And what was taking priority on Friday, by the way?

Speaker F: Well, it was Juneteenth and there was a pool that was available to me. So that is.

Speaker B: So it comes out Monday night, Monday late in the day, or Tuesday morning. Usually that. And then, uh, Amber, you created all our social accounts. Where can you find us on social?

Speaker D: You can find us on TikTok. Uh, soon blue sky and Instagram @ecommasourspodcast.

Speaker B: Great. And sunny haven't gone to you for this in a while. But if you want to email us, where, where do you find us there?

Speaker E: You could find us@roarcommasaurus, uh.com and that's R a W R at E C o m m M M O S A U R s dot com.

Speaker B: So yeah, if you want to find us an email roarcommasaurus.com and we'd love to chat. So. And if your first time here, the kind of things we talk about last week, uh, we had a wish list, which we haven't done this before. We had a wish list of things we wish Amazon seller central could do for us that it doesn't do right now. And I got to talk about how about how many pizzas Pizza Hut delivers per year and how they track that. And then the week before we talked about the non dollar sign metrics because everybody looks at sales and ads. But what are the non dollar sign metrics that, uh, small businesses can use to help do better, have a better business on Amazon or on Shopify? So let's get into this episode. Parker, I'm going to start with you on this.

Speaker C: You know what you're getting?

Speaker B: Oh, okay. Uh, maybe I shouldn't have started there. What are we, what are we getting? Parker? We're going to go around, by the way, and just everybody's going to. We're going to talk about the biggest news, but we're going to take turns talking about what we think is the biggest thing for the. For June.

Speaker C: Well, we're going to start off talking about tacos. Okay, so Taco Bell, I love this. And then Amber, I think you might have put this in here. But specifically, they've always had the Doritos Locos tacos. And now to run with the World cup here in the US We've got L O C O s lose or celebration outcome support tacos. They essentially you get through the app, food prizes, et cetera.

Speaker B: So what. What actually comes, is it just tacos with a different name or what are they different? What's. I haven't pulled up my Taco Bell app this this week yet.

Speaker C: So it's basically tacos surrounded in congrats you won or sorry for your loss, which I love.

Speaker D: Um, I was the one who put this in the notes as one of Bozen's resident Taco Bell aficionados. And I downloaded the app and I was looking at it. It was really cool. It's regardless of what team you cheer for, everyone gets a taco and you have to like, interact in the app to get it. Um, um, what I found cool about this is that they're doing digital and real life activations around the World cup and plan to expand it to other big sporting events. Um, um, so I'd be curious to see what they do with the upcoming NBA and NFL seasons.

Speaker B: I might pull up that app today after this podcast when we need to. I need to get some lunch.

Speaker E: You're going to rely on Taco Bell for your emotional support?

Speaker B: I, uh, could. Sonny. It could be. We could. Been a rough couple weeks, so we could be down to that.

Speaker D: Hey, Sunny. I have emotional support Pop Tarts. So Taco Bell's a step above that.

Speaker A: She also has an emotional support water bottle. I found that out the other day.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of emotional support support things in, in Amber's surroundings here. Hey, but Sunny, I would say you're. You are the, you are the premier taco proponent on the team. I would. And then you asked me if I'm willing to rely on tacos for my emotional support. I would, I would think you'd be pretty pushing that. Promoting that.

Speaker E: Well, you know, I think, uh, Taco Bell has the name taco in it, but do you really consider those real tacos?

Speaker B: Oh, this is, this is the Taco Bell's not really not, not real.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: Not real food discussion. We'll save that. We'll get into some other.

Speaker F: I'm defend. I will defend Taco Bell because they do have good vegetarian options. They are one of the only like the first adapters of, you know, like fast foods that will allow you to sub out meat.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker E: Uh, and what's the point of tacos if it's has no meats?

Speaker B: Oh, I mean, okay, um, I'm gonna save us from this because this could be a whole. This could be the whole podcast if we let this go farther on this. But one thing I do want to bring up real quickly, we're going to talk about it more next week. So I just want to briefly hit on it that Shopify did release their. And this is matters, everybody runs Shopify store. So it's, it's very relevant. They released their spring editions. I don't know why they're calling it spring editions because it was released on June 22, which me is Summer. And every year since 22, they've released Summer editions and then winter editions. They've done this twice a year since 2022 where they put a big package to get it says here's all the new things we're adding or have added to Shopify. The theme for it is Everywhere. It broke my browser because it was so comp. They had such a huge complicated animation that my browser actually froze. I had to restart my. I had to restart the browser. They fixed that. So it actually works. Okay. Now it's called the Everywhere. And the whole theme is about how Shopify can. Now if you're a Shopify store owner, your Shopify checkout and everything can follow you or your customer everywhere for it. The quick highlights are it's all about Agentic. So there's apps that they're going to use in Shopify that help structure your data so that other apps, other agents can read it. They are taking the whole universal commerce protocol driven checkout and expanding that through Copilot is coming up soon. Meta ads and Facebook and Instagram coming up right after that. And businesses that aren't even using Shopify can now use the Shopify agent to get their shop. Get a catalog set up within Shopify catalog and use that to sell across the web. So there's a couple things going on there. Sidekick got smarter. We'll talk about why it got smarter. But you know, Sidekick notoriously didn't do a lot and was kind of a super lightweight, uh, chatbot disguised as an AI. Now, uh, it's getting smarter, they're relaunching that and campaign Autopilot is launching. So if you are a store owner, you can just say, here's what I want to get done with ads, here's my assets, go figure out where to advertise and here's my budget. And you figure out everything else. Shopify is what they're advertising. This can do. Sonny, as, uh, somebody who spends most of his time buying and planning ads, how much would you trust the campaign autopilot from Shopify? Short answer only because we'll get to it more next week.

Speaker E: But, uh, the short answer is I don't think I would trust it a whole lot. But I understand why, why it's there

Speaker B: and I think the benefit of it is if you are. Because we know a lot of people who are like standalone or it's a two person, one or two person operation. And then okay, if this is. I can press a few buttons and the adjured can kind of do. Okay then that's intriguing. How well it does we haven't seen yet. But those are the big things on that we will. We don't need to go any farther on that right now because again we're gonna. There's a hundred new items well over A hundred listed on Shopify, uh, spring editions. We'll go through it next week in more detail. Sunny, while you're up, though, what. What news item did you want to bring up this week?

Speaker E: Well, I was looking at the. The AI shopping, and we have to talk about AI in every podcast nowadays, right?

Speaker B: It's a rule. It's an actual rule. Yes.

Speaker E: But I don't think this is anything really new or surprising. But according to Forbes, a new Pew research study suggests that despite the surge in AI adoption, users just don't trust it.

Speaker B: They trust it for. And the research I've read, because this is. And this is probably where Instant Checkout and OpenAI fell apart when they did that, was that users do trust it for product research. Like, I need to go find. Help me compare things and everything else they don't trust the shopping agents to buy is what most research is coming out. So, uh, the typical user pattern right now, um, is use AI to compare products and use it to talk about what I need and then go to the stores and then go buy it yourself. But don't. It's. There's, uh, not a trust in AI to say, go buy this for me. There's a. There's a. That's. That's where the dream, I think, of where people thought this was going a lot quicker has not happened. Like agents to go actually do the purchases. But that's. That's consistent with the research report that you read.

Speaker E: Right, Right. But there's another interesting twist to this, and I think it's a little bit bigger than just shopping, and that is that according to the research, something like 40% thinks that AI has a negative impact on society. So that's speaking more not just so much in E commerce, but as, like a just broader, uh, yeah, I don't know. Philosophy, if you want to call it that.

Speaker B: Well, there's a huge reaction against it for art. There's a huge reaction against it for. It's going to take jobs. We don't know where places that. So, yeah, there's. There's a. There's an absolute AI backlash, and that's. We'll see what happens with that, too. Okay, so, Jacqueline, give me. Give me a news item that popped off for you.

Speaker F: For sure. I had two, um, big things that stood out for me this month. The first One was that TikTok shop has changed its affiliate compensation setup. They've actually capped it across, um, several of the major categories, including blue beauty supplements, home and kitchen and wellness categories, which is, I mean, if you're on TikTok at all. That's a lot of the ads that you're pushing and a lot of what these creators are, are selling and what they're doing is dropping their commission rates in a way that could potentially, you know, negatively affect people's participation in TikTok and push them over to like, TikTok or, or, uh, excuse me, Amazon and Walmart and things of that nature. And this was something that they didn't really tell people that they were doing. They just kind of like did. And then people were looking at their checks and being like, this is cool, quite a bit less what's going on. And then they looked at the structure and it is significantly less. Some people were making 20% plus, um, I think probably on the higher end for some of these larger content creators. And now it's 10 to 15% capped on a lot of this. So I think that this is kind of big news that quietly went out and we could see it effects across the board.

Speaker B: And the dynamic will be interesting because we know a lot of, a lot of small businesses that are using TikTok to grow right now. Because you can get on there if you can do really good creative, you know, dollars you still need to spend behind your stuff. But, but if you can get really good creative and really good videos about your product, that can, that can multiply your dollars. And that's something that gives a smaller business sometimes a chance to have leverage on it. But part of their model has been their fulfillment costs or their, their, you know, what they, what they take as commission compared to Amazon is lower. So to sellers there's been this, hey, my costs are, uh, my cost structure is better on TikTok. And that's been an encouragement to go there. But part of that's been because all these creators and all their affiliate fees have been kind of, that also helps boost the system and boost traffic and demand and then, you know, that gets reduced. And it's just going to be interesting to see the push and pull of all this. If you reduce the creator commissions, are they less active? Does that make it, that mean you got to spend more as an advertiser? Because the creators aren't doing as much to get the same kind of traction. Does that take away some of the advantages that TikTok has created in terms of fees that they charge to sellers? It's a great thing to point out because, uh, TikTok's been a big success story the last six months or so for a lot of sellers on this. And beyond that for others, but really kind of coming to the mainstream. But I don't know if this changes the dynamic or not. It could.

Speaker F: I was kind of reading between the lines on this and I almost wonder if this has something to do with that. You know, our TikTok takeover and the push within that. You know, it's, it's now owned by an American company and they're kind of trying to shy away from it. Is this them slowly trying to push people to other platforms? And is. Are we. Maybe that's me being a conspiracy theorist.

Speaker B: I don't think there's. Yeah, I think that might be, that might be a big reading between the lines here.

Speaker F: I think it's de. Incentivizing these creators on Tick tock slowly or fast.

Speaker B: I think they're trying to squeeze more margin out of the system now. They've gotten people in, right? Get people in first, create a really uh, high margin for your customers, low margin for you, get them in and then change the margin structure, which is a pretty standard American startup entrepreneur kind of model to do. And I think that's what we're seeing happen here right now.

Speaker E: Right. It's moving from entertainment to more transaction.

Speaker F: Yeah.

Speaker B: Amber, since Parker stole your Taco Thunder, what are you coming in with here?

Speaker D: I uh, want to talk about DoorDash and Uber Eats. They're becoming ad networks. Delivery apps are the new ad Networks. Uber and DoorDash have decided to expand and use the first party data they have to buy ads and sell ads to people. Um, Uber for example is going to target you on Meta and Google shopping using your 1P data. And then DoorDash did it first at a larger scale to try to bring in brand new customers. They're now selling verify purchase intent off the platform. So the races, they now are able to sell your off platform behavior to people looking for ads. Sunny, I was going to ask you about this to see how you feel about it.

Speaker E: Uh, I have actually have something to add to what uh, Amber's thoughts on that. And that is extension of ads in your non traditional like let's say you sitting in front of your monitor, computer monitor or on the phone. But like Amazon is, they're starting a robo taxi called Zoox.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker E: I think that's what it's called. And it wouldn't surprise me if one day all you see is like ads place inside the robo taxi, like screens or whatever. It kind of just knows where you're going, where what you're doing and they're just able to sell to you like, pretty much anywhere, anytime.

Speaker D: So, yeah, it's a fascinating topic. As someone who had, um, had my hands in programmatic ads for a while, that they could sell that space based on your purchase habits. Like, these companies know, like the last four of your credit card. They can't. They know, like, your foot traffic, like going into the grocery stores. Like, it gets kind of weird. I don't know how I feel about DoorDash and UberEats having that type of hold on my data.

Speaker B: Yeah. The question's also going to be how relevant are those ads going to be? And that's relevant because there'll be, you know, time and place, but how often are you going to see them? So are you going, you know, you got to the grocery. Are you going through the grocery store, looking at your phone and experience any ads in that case? So there's going to be. My question is just how wide all those play and how much of this is. How much is. This is really kind of a PR play by Uber saying, hey, we have some new shiny thing versus is it going to end up being 1% of their business? Not that big a deal.

Speaker D: The fact that Both Uber and DoorDash are doing it now.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's part of their partnership on things.

Speaker F: So, uh, they're in bed with each other. So that makes sense.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker E: So imagine this, Tim. Uh, that you're taking an Amazon Robo taxi and it knows you're going to your grocery store. All of a sudden all these ads are popping up. That's relevant to where you're going or, uh, what you want to do or what you want to buy.

Speaker B: Where are they popping up, though? Because that's.

Speaker F: Do you have to be in DoorDash or. I have to be actively in Uber.

Speaker D: No, off platform. Yeah.

Speaker B: But if I'm just on my phone, I'm going through email, I'm looking at things. It's not like they're. It's not like they can pop up on my phone without me being on some other. Is it a push notification that allows for ads? Right.

Speaker E: But if they get you into an. A Robo Taxi, you're like, yeah, that's it. You're. You're in the taxi and it's going to show you.

Speaker B: I understand that. I just think the use case is much more limited than what they, what they tried to make it out to be.

Speaker D: Think about it like a display ad. And Uber has. They know where you shop for food or groceries or takeout. They have your payment information and they, they're not the ones taking out the ad, they're the ones selling the ad to other people.

Speaker B: Yeah, I know.

Speaker D: So they're acting like a demand side platform, which is.

Speaker B: They are. And they've been trying to figure out ways to leverage that data that they have about you for using their services for a while. I think this is the latest one. I, by the way they described it, I just didn't think it was going to have that many use case. I mean it'll get used and it has certain use case where it's a highly valuable space. But I think in the overall ad scheme it's going to be a relatively small thing is what I kind of took from that.

Speaker D: Fair enough.

Speaker B: Because it has to be, you have to be in the app, you have to be doing certain things. You have to have. So a lot of things have to add up for it. Amy, haven't called you yet.

Speaker A: Uh yeah, I just saw this one and, and I clicked into it. Bath and Body Works. It's coming to ulta and ulta.com Then I clicked into it and I didn't realize that Bath and Body Works is now available on Amazon.

Speaker B: Yes, that was a big change. Earlier this year they were one of the brands that said we are never going to be on Amazon. They were very. And then they finally said oh nevermind, we're going to be on Amazon. We can make a lot of money there and we aren't. And most of Bed Bath. Bed Bath and Beyond products or Bed Bath and Body Works. Sorry. Uh, most of their products were already being sold in Amazon. I think that was a convention for them. I'm just, I'm just so, yeah, I'm confusing all the store names all of a sudden. So somebody gimme the correct store name I guess.

Speaker F: Bath and Body Works.

Speaker B: Bath and Body Works. Thank you. I said, Did I say Bed, Bath and Body Works? Okay. Bath and Body Works.

Speaker A: Yeah, they were in the news this week too, just FYI.

Speaker B: Yeah, the other ones were in the news too. So they're, they're also down in the notes here somewhere. But yeah, they found most of their products are being sold on Amazon by third parties. And that was the. Why aren't you just taking control of that space? And their whole thing was we don't want to be have our products on Amazon because it makes us feel dirty and lessens up. Uh, well you're already there and you're being your product being presented in a way that uh, that you don't control. And so if you're worried about leaving the wrong impression You've just kind of, by not being on there, not controlling it, you've made it worse.

Speaker A: The reason that that struck me is I buy hand soap all the time, but usually what I do is I put an order in and I go pick it up because they charge for shipping. Well.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Guess what? If you're on Amazon, it's coming to my house.

Speaker B: It's coming to your house. You're not going to go. You're going to drive around for it, right? Yeah.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker F: I will call out that. Um, Bath and Body Works is known for their coupon, like in store coupons you can stack on them. So I think that's where you still have your value of going into the store. You're not going to be.

Speaker A: They haven't done that in a while though.

Speaker B: They've been backing off.

Speaker A: Not in the last couple years. They've kind of done away with them.

Speaker F: I've. I haven't bought since they took away the white tea ginger scent which was my favorite. And that, that happened in like 2008 and I'm still.

Speaker A: Yeah, they've taken, they've taken those 2008.

Speaker B: That happened like 18 years ago. And you're.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker B: You've been carrying this grudge ever since.

Speaker D: Yeah, I like this for you.

Speaker F: I'm sorry. This is a grudge. It's coming out.

Speaker B: I mean they took it out and Facebook wasn't even available to most people.

Speaker F: White tea ginger was the best body works and they took it away and I will never forgive them for that.

Speaker D: That's how I feel about the apple juice lip gloss. Uh, they took that from me too.

Speaker B: We're getting into taco land here.

Speaker C: I just sent it to Amber yesterday

Speaker F: about the girl that was trying to get the candle.

Speaker C: The Green Bay.

Speaker F: I've been there. I get it, girl. I get it here for you.

Speaker B: All right, all right, back to stuff that is immediately relevant here. Um, I do want to bring out the thing that got everybody talking earlier this month that we seem to have kind of drifted away from, but is still coming here is Amazon is shortening their product titles from 200 characters for most categories, shorter for a few, but 200 for most, down to 75 characters and then adding an extra field of 125 characters for highlights that may or may not show on your listing.

Speaker A: Are they really like we've already experienced what it's going to look like and it's not really that big of a change.

Speaker B: Uh, we've sprints it in some formats. Yeah, I've seen them do what Hitler looks like in mobile. And mobile. Yeah, it's going to be really restricted to the 75 characters most of the time.

Speaker A: Um, but it already is.

Speaker D: It already is always that way.

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker D: So.

Speaker A: So is that a big change? I'm curious if they're going to change something when it actually changes.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker B: So you, you think this is all smoke and they're not actually going to put the change in place or what? What do you.

Speaker A: No, no, it doesn't look that much different. There's a pipe in between your title and your product highlights. It's not that big a deal.

Speaker B: Uh, well, also accompanied with this is they said, hey, uh, what you write is only going to be what we show 25% of the time. The other 75% or 30% of the time, the other 70%, our AI is going to rewrite it based on what we think is most important to the user on things. So it may not be a big thing. You may be right, but this is what the whole E commerce world was in a panic about. Like, every single commenter and every Single authority on LinkedIn, for example, is writing their posts about what you need to do with the coming apocalypse or product styles. Um, are we now saying the apocalypse is just kind of a poof? I don't know, it's a little bit of a smoke cloud and nothing else.

Speaker A: Tbd.

Speaker F: I think so. I kind of said it from the beginning. Just saying.

Speaker B: It does mean though, that everybody does need to get in there and change their backend listings though, on Amazon, because if you don't, AI will rewrite it for you and you don't want that.

Speaker A: I mean, if Amazon gonna be the next two weeks, because everybody's doing that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker D: Oh my God. I didn't even think of that, Amy.

Speaker B: But I think, I think the key thing here is going, if you just want to do it, and if the apocalypse is averted like Amy says, and it's just, you just take your Twitter characters and put the first 75 in the product title and the other 125 in the highlights. Fine, but do that. Otherwise Amazon has said on, um, the 27th, starting, uh, or after the 27th of July, they're going to rewrite the product titles for you. And it may not be anything like your current product title. In fact, we've seen some of the AI rewritten ones and they look clean visually, but they are very, very generic in what they. They take your brand out, they take any differentiated things about their. They kind of genericize your product as much as they can. So I still think it's important for that there's still an action you need to take, whether it ends up looking vastly different or not. Apparently a subject of heavy debate right now. Parker, give me something else here.

Speaker C: We haven't spent much time talking about Prime Days this week.

Speaker B: Uh, that's one we have to bring up.

Speaker C: Yeah. So Prime Days is going on as we record this and it's the first one in June that I can remember in the summer since I started my career. And uh, you know, Amazon was trying to switch it up. They got the others, uh, the other platforms, Walmart, Target, et cetera, on their heels. You know, Walmart pretty much started their deal as they announced it. Like what was it? Same day, day after, do we know it?

Speaker F: Very short, 22nd. 22nd through the 28th. So they're going kind of book ending.

Speaker C: How long did it take for them to announce that? Ah, after Amazon announced a couple days.

Speaker B: Every other platform within a couple days had launched that they were changing their times as well.

Speaker D: For I have a beef with Amazon though. Why did they announce it three weeks before the event when they start pushing out, hey, make your deals, set your stuff up back in like April.

Speaker B: I fully believe that Amazon was trying to move their time and give late notice so that every other retailer couldn't copy them. So they could. So Prime Days could be a bigger deal. And at the end though, everybody copied them and put their big summer promotions on the same dates.

Speaker D: Right, right. Well, when they have their rules around pricing. So how are sellers supposed to prepare if they just know vaguely what it's supposed to be?

Speaker B: So the Amazon response to that, though, Amber, is we always prioritize the customer, not the seller. Um, why that was better for the customer. There's no real reason for that. Right. I think it was better for their good.

Speaker F: Oh, I was just saying I think they were trying to hit it around the World cup and then also associated with some of the Straight or Hermuz stuff. I think that there's, there's some things associated with all these international people being in the United States where they can get same day shipping if they're in an Airbnb and they need, you know,

Speaker B: whatever, maybe straight of Hormuz. I don't that that feels a little conspiracy theory like to me because listen,

Speaker F: I'm on a ramp.

Speaker B: They announced it was going to be in a June way before the. We had a war with Iran.

Speaker F: But not the dates though. I think that that's why I just, I feel like there's a little bit of a leg there.

Speaker E: I, I like that. Jackman.

Speaker F: I think this is the latest that they've.

Speaker B: You're welcome to, you're welcome to your conspiracy theory if you want.

Speaker F: Thank you, Sunny. I appreciate you.

Speaker B: Sunny probably will back you up on it. Knowing, knowing how this dynamic works.

Speaker E: I have a question. You, as a consumer, would you rather have all of the sales stacked in like, let's say one weekend, or would you prefer Amazon to, to have the sales one weekend and then let's say Walmart two weeks from now and then whoever else like, or would you rather just have everybody offer the same, like,

Speaker B: I don't know on that because I

Speaker D: think it makes me want to turn my phone off.

Speaker B: Well, your phone's going crazy. But, but I think from one aspect I can say, hey, I want there to be a summer sale going on all the time, all summer long. And that'd be nice. But on the other hand, if you talk to most the consumer research says that what consumers do on this is everybody has their sales and the consumers compare prices across all of them make the purchases. So I think from a consumer standpoint, having them all stacked, that's probably the behavior most people want. So they can compare all the deals. So you don't feel like I bid on Amazon's deal because they were first, then Walmart had a better deal three weeks later and I feel like I got burned. Right. Is that where you're going, Sonny, with it? Or are you going, you'd rather have them all spread out?

Speaker E: Yes, but what you said, it could still happen, right? Even if it's, let's say, over this, uh, a sale for every retailer, major retailer over this coming weekend, one could offer a 10 discount whereas the other offers a 20.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker E: So you could still feel like you got burned.

Speaker B: I think the driving mentality, uh, among all the retailers though, is they want to be. If there's, if the dates are all spread out, they want to be the first ones because the first one's going to make the most money.

Speaker E: Right.

Speaker B: And if they can't be first, they just want to stack. And so that's, that's kind of turning everything on this. Okay. And anything. Every, every retailer moved their dates. They were all either exactly on Amazon's prime day dates or like overlapping one day earlier, going to one day later kind of thing. So it was all. It didn't move. I think as consumers, I think consumers would rather have it right after July 4th started, July, because that's also back to school. And the big Back to school shopping thing. I think a lot of consumers use that as a. I have to do all this back to school shopping. I can get a discount on a lot of it. And I don't think they were in the mode for that coming up this early. I think that. So I think that may have been a. That may be, from a consumer standpoint, a little bit of an inconvenience that it'd be easier to have it when I'm in my back to school mode.

Speaker D: I'm gonna join Jacqueline and Sunny on the conspiracy theory train.

Speaker F: Welcome.

Speaker D: I think they put it up there because they have like a big partnership with Cannes this year, the film festival. They have like a massive partnership with them this year. And so, uh. And it's the exact same dates of prime days.

Speaker B: What is, what does the film festival have to do with the straight of Hormuz? Help me out. Help me out of this conspiracy theory.

Speaker F: It all comes back. Do you know, start from the beginning.

Speaker D: They're hosting like some big thing like the Amazon port, where they're talking about ads and things. So I think they just put it for strategic, big events like Jacqueline was saying, the World Cup.

Speaker B: If we let this go much farther, it's going to be tied to the Kennedy assassination and the man and the landing moon landings pretty soon.

Speaker F: So I have something that is related, does not have to do with related,

Speaker B: but is not part of the conspiracy. Yeah, let's, let's go with related then.

Speaker F: Well, specifically to Walmart trying to piggyback or take away, um, Amazon sales, try to capture some of that market. I don't know if anybody knew this, but on July 22, Walmart reduced their marketplace referral fees on some categories. So instead of doing a subscription like Amazon, Walmart does, like on every sale, they take a percentage of the sale. And they reduced their referral fees on a couple categories, which I think was interesting.

Speaker C: Ooh.

Speaker F: Yeah. Specifically apparel and consumer electronics. So if it's under $15, they're only taking 5%. If it's 15 to 20, they're doing 10%. And then 20 and over is the traditional 15, which was kind of the base across the board on Walmart. And then electronics, they dropped it down to eight across the board.

Speaker B: Yeah, no doubt Amazon did a while back on lower priced apparel because they needed to compete with TAMU and she. And. Right. Um, they did drop the referral percentage.

Speaker F: I don't think it's down to 5%, but it's like.

Speaker B: No, I think this is, I think this is Walmart. Looking at what's happening on TikTok as the other kind of immersion because Walmart wants to be at least, if not the leader, because Amazon's the leader, Walmart wants to be the strongest follower. And TikTok is kind of TikTok starting to threaten that position right now. So I think they're, I think they're looking more to what, how to respond to TikTok than how to respond to Amazon by doing some of that. But yeah, that's good to point it out. And it's one of the things that makes um, from again, tying it back to what's important to small businesses that makes Walmart a more attractive than it was at the same time last year. Right. They've made some nice improvements. They're giving some better rates. There is. You can. Your margins used to be worse at Walmart because their fulfillment costs more. And ads, ads cost more, to be honest, because they're. They don't convert as well. But some of these things kind of make that difference, make that look a little better right now.

Speaker F: Yeah.

Speaker B: And I think Tik Tok giving people such good margins, that would make sense

Speaker F: because it's apparel and electronics, which is kind of what Tik Tok's doing right now. So that makes sense.

Speaker B: Yeah, they're going right at what, you know, Walmart was doing in response to what T and Sheen were best at, which was apparel and gadgets. But really the apparel was where it was hurting them. And then Walmart, I think, is doing this to TikTok and where TikTok is responding to what TikTok's doing in those categories. Sunny, do you got us? I haven't come to you for a second, uh, news bit here yet. Right.

Speaker E: Uh, yeah, I, uh, think another big news was the Anthropic, um, launched the, uh, Fable 5 and they shut it down a few days after the very

Speaker B: bad week for Anthropic. Yes.

Speaker E: Yeah, well, okay. Fable 5, I think it's going to be a very fantastic model, but there are serious security threats, so Anthropics is in the process of fixing it. Hopefully they'll be able to relaunch it soon. Now, it took the government's intervention to prompt Anthropic to shut it down, but I think the solution is in the middle. Just get it fixed and relaunched.

Speaker B: Yeah, the actual news stories, it was actually, um, Bezos's team that said, here's the security flaws we've exposed using Fable 5. You need to shut it down. Government, they're the ones that brought the case to the government and pointed it out. So that's kind of interesting because Amazon kind of attacked it and that got the shutdown. But how much are they the threat of also just their own hype, right? Because Anthropic had earlier said, they will never release this model to the public because this model is too dangerous. And they made a big. That was headlines everywhere and they made a big deal about that. Like, this model is too dangerous. It cannot be released to the public. We will. We will never release this model to the public is what they said. And then they released it. And then was it three days later. They released it on June 9. They shut it down on June 12, saying, we had to shut it down because it's too dangerous. So, because the government says, so is it really too dangerous or is the hype of saying this is too dangerous and then they release it out there and the government says, wait, wait, you said this is too dangerous. We believe you shut this thing down. What do we think?

Speaker D: Do you know the Microsoft part of that?

Speaker C: No.

Speaker D: So Microsoft's employees started using Fable when it launched. And Fable's like, uh, Anthropic was like, hey, you have to send us how the data you're putting into it to make sure you're using it the right way. And Microsoft's like, nope, none of our employees can use Anthropic products right now because of that. Um, um, they pulled the. I'll send a link in one of our chats. But it's something. It came out right around, um, the second week of June, I believe, the day after Fable dropped. Microsoft's like, hey, no, I think, to

Speaker E: answer Tim's question, is that I think it is dangerous. And I'll tell you why. Because Anthropic knows about the issues and they've designed guardrails to prevent that from happening. But if a user comes in at jailbreaks it and say, able to do nefarious things, then yes, of course, it's a very serious threat. I mean, you and I, we're not going to be able to do this.

Speaker B: Yeah. The dangerous things are, you know, maybe, maybe not. Uh, we don't know. Right. But the dangerous things for perspective for everybody is that it could break through encryption. It could go in and, you know, it could. From an E. Comm standpoint, it could go into your Shopify account and change your change where, what bank you're sending stuff to, for example, or. Right. It was that because it could break through the encryption that was sitting there. Um, there was. That was why it was pulled. It wasn't pulled back because of Shopify Things, but that's the application to a small business. Would be. Would have been.

Speaker E: That's right.

Speaker B: Okay, what, let's go around. Let's quick hits here. Any last hits of things we want to bring up in here. Parker.

Speaker C: So we have an Internal Amazon Prime 25 and under gift hunt. And then we try to figure out who can find like the best deal that's on prime days. And uh, I feel like it just gets harder and harder each time. Like either the deals to find them or the products that are offered. Like it's kind of what I have on my other screen over here, kind of just looking and you're trying, you're

Speaker B: trying to get your contest winner in there because this is your last day.

Speaker C: This is my last day and I still don't have one.

Speaker F: So, uh, I struggled with that last night as well too. I think the 25 and under bracket is saturated with products that are. Should maybe be $10 and under.

Speaker B: I know I found mine. I found mine in there. So, and so everybody, for context, for anybody listening, we have an internal contest where Everybody gets a $25Amazon gift card. You're defined. Your goal is to find the best product, the best thing you can that's on sale during that. And then we all present next week we all present to each other and we give the winner, whoever has the. We vote on who got the best product out of that. So one more thing. So Parker, on this, here's what I thought you were going to bring up because you're the big subscribe and Save person on our team pushing that.

Speaker C: We did kind of touch on that in one of these episodes, but it wasn't long.

Speaker B: Yeah, but there was a lawsuit. So there's a big lawsuit around subscribe and Save right now. The lawsuit is over. It's a class action lawsuit. It was covered in the Seattle Times, but other places as well that consumers are complaining. They sign up for subscribe and Save, here's the price, and then the price moves up and they don't get notified. The price is increased and they signed up on a discounted price or like a first purchase discount and then they're getting baited and switched. And so that's a, uh, big deal. We talked about a lot internally. I don't know if we've talked about it on these, but that's something to watch out for. We do encourage subscribe and Save for most, for most Amazon businesses if it's repeatable at all. Repeatable Purchase at all because we've seen that grow businesses. But yeah, this could lead to major changes in how Amazon handles Subscribe and save on it. Jacqueline, give me your last topic here.

Speaker F: I'm good. We already talked about my.

Speaker B: You have no other news that you care about?

Speaker E: I have one.

Speaker B: Give me some quick.

Speaker F: You're shutting me down. I can't talk about conspiracies, apparently. So I have nothing else to talk about.

Speaker E: I have one.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker E: And that is, uh, in the gnosis, the question is, is AI making shoppers more deliberate or less impulsive? I think that's an interesting question. And my response to that is yes.

Speaker B: Yeah. There was a study that was released.

Speaker E: Yeah. So I spent 15 minutes researching a floor mop on Amazon. At the end, it was just too much information and too many products that, uh, I couldn't make a decision, so I didn't make a purchase. I don't know how you guys feel about.

Speaker B: You got information overload to just stop you from purchasing. Yeah, yeah. And the study was about how with AI now are people are doing less. What decided was there's less impulse buying happening. There's still a lot of impulse buying, but it's less. And there's more kind of consumer. There's more research being done by consumers before they purchase. And that was. And that was the. What came out of the study there. And it was the. It was bizarre voices. 20th edition. They do an annual shopper experience, uh, survey. And this was. Came out of that. But it makes sense. I mean, it inherently makes sense that people can become more deliberate and they're still going to impulse buy, but not as often. But Sunny, you're saying you just didn't buy. Right?

Speaker F: Right.

Speaker B: You were deliberate to the point where you just didn't purchase at all.

Speaker E: You know, I'm not used to reading like five paragraphs of bullet points to buy a mop. You know, you just go to this market or something. It's a mop. You know what it does. That's it. You buy it.

Speaker B: Well, maybe you shouldn't have been doing the deep research on that.

Speaker E: Well, that's the problem. It's making me more Amber.

Speaker B: I think you were your own worst enemy here, Sonny. Amber, you had, you. You had the mic ready to go and you had the. I can see your expression of this is Amber with something she needs to say.

Speaker D: So, um, the only thing I was going to bring up is that meta, specifically Instagram introduced the ability to put dual captions per picture in a carousel image. And from a someone whose focus is on influencer and affiliates and like organic social, that's actually huge for people to be able to caption each image with relevant content for it. So you could post like an entire product line in a carousel and give details for each product line for each product in that product line. So I think that's interesting and it could be cool to see how that plays out in the paid media space on those platforms as well.

Speaker B: The last ones, I'll bring in a couple last ones then just to close this out. One is that there's now a Reddit integration in Shopify. So within Shopify you can turn on ads and Shopify will track all the purchase metrics all the way through on Reddit. And for small businesses, again with niche, certain niche products, Reddit can be a really good place to advertise. And it's gotten notably better lately as well. So that one's interesting because the integration makes it much simpler and much easier to track how well you're doing. And there was one other I uh, wanted to bring up. Oh that's, that's the. Amazon had an experiment where they started putting images so you, if you search for product in the search bar you would start to see images appear that were what Amazon thought you were looking for. These were all AI generated images. So they were things that you couldn't actually buy. They were just made up things. And Amazon put that assess the reactions were horrible about this of uh, basically on lines of. And I say it's horrible but Amazon did a test, they could bring it back. Um, they often do this but it was showing uh, what's the reactions of. Why would Amazon show me products that I can't purchase that are just AI fake, you know, fake images on things. They tried that. So and we had another one saying this is the uh, what was it, nine to five Google. This is the, this is now the dumbest use of AI we've ever seen. Uh, was the headline in some of the problems. So if you've done the search. I didn't get any of those. Amy, you were nodding your head. Did you get any of those? The search rolled out. That beta rolled out to a lot of people.

Speaker A: Yeah. And it's not just Amazon doing it. Walmart's also doing it.

Speaker B: Walmart's doing the same. I didn't realize that. Okay, so we'll see. I mean what they're trying to do is if you're trying to put in a vague search for something, they're trying to say, well you like something like this or like that and then guide you to it. But people got really pissed off because they images, things pulled up and they said, oh, that's what I want. And then they couldn't buy that because that's not an actual product and it was a pretty negative, uh, test that they had. So we'll see more things coming out on that. Okay, um, we will stop it there then. There's a lot more in our notes, uh, that we didn't get to here. But in the meantime, thank you so much for joining us on, uh, the ecommsource podcast. We're going to be back next week and talk about Shopify spring editions and what it means, particularly the pieces that aren't the big enterprise pieces, but the pieces that matter to a small business running their store off of Shopify. So we'll be back again with that next week. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feedback, if you have episode ideas, feel free to shoot us a message@roarcommasaurus.com that's R A W R ecommasaurus.com and if you are a small to medium sized brand owner that needs help growing your e commerce sales channels, you can find us@50pound boson.com that's five 0p o u n d b o s o n dot com. Thanks.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker D: Sam.