EP284 - 2022 Annual Predictions - a podcast by Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, Publicis & Scot Wingo, Channel Advisor

from 2022-01-07T20:51:17

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EP284 - 2022 Annual Predictions h

2021 Predictions Recap

Jason:

Made to Order apparel business > 9 figures Yes
Retailer offers viable health alt insurance option to consumers No
Grocery E-Com > 10% someone deploys(not pilots) MFC Yes
Amazon Shopify Competitor (shipping solution) No
Retail Media > $20B Yes

Bonus – More store closures in 2021 than 2020. No

Jason Total Score: 3 of 5

Scot:

Amazon move to same day prime by opening a huge wave of neighborhood DCs (near DSPs) Yes
Shipping (Shopify) – launch own DSP No
Shopify marketplace No
‘zero friction addiction’ sticks – I’ve seen 30-40% repeated a lot, I think it’s 60-80%. commerce penetration says at 16% or better in 2021. Yes
spac/ipo? Dnvb wave Yes

Bonus: post-covid anti-consumerism/materialism wave No

Scot Total Score: 3 of 5

We have a tie, including the tie-breaker. Here are some relevent links:

2022 Predictions

Jason:

NFTs, Web 3, Metaverse, and Ultrafast delivery services are all overhyped and don’t deliver meaningful commerce revenue in 2022.
Shein exceeds $30B in annual sales, disrupting apparel industry
Adoption of BNPL services slows down to less than 15% CAGR in 2022.
Amazon opens more than 100 Amazon Fresh grocery stores
Last Mile evolves Veho, X-Delivery, shipium, or Instacart gets aquired

Scot:

Amazon launches a competitor to Shopify webstore, possibly via a headless solution on AWS
Amazon wins ultra-fast delivery. Gopuff, Gorilla, or Jokr goes out of business in 2022
Metaverse gets lots of buzz but no revenue
Livestream commerce goes mainstream in the US
Fabric gets acquired

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Episode 284 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, January 6th, 2022.

ttp://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:
[0:23] Welcome to the Jason and Scot show this is episode 284 being recorded on Thursday January sixth
2022 I’m your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I’m here with your co-host Scott Wingo.

Scot:
[0:40] Hey Jason and welcome back Jason Scott she listeners happy New Year Jason and listeners it’s 2022 here we are we made it.

Jason:
[0:49] I know I feel like I’m already winning because the intern type 2021 in the show notes and when I read the intro I caught it in my head I feel like that I’m impressed with myself right now.

Scot:
[1:00] Boom yep and there that was bad timing because there is a performance review coming up so that in turn is going to be in some pretty pretty thin ice here so we’ll see hopefully they make it through.

Jason:
[1:13] Might be another year probation before he gets to start taking a salary.

Scot:
[1:18] Yeah most important question are you watching the book of Boba Fett.

Jason:
[1:24] I am I am we have to be careful not to do any spoilers but.

Scot:
[1:29] Never spoilers never a million spoiler.

Jason:
[1:31] Spoiler free pass.

Scot:
[1:33] I believe he got eaten by that giant thing in the desert oh sorry those spoiler.

Jason:
[1:39] Yeah.
Yeah there are I will let I’m not going to reveal anything but there is sand in the new episodes.

Scot:
[1:49] Yeah yeah he want he like Star Wars you get a lot of sand in some people hate sand but Boba doesn’t seem to mind.

Jason:
[1:57] No I think he’s had to adjust but yeah really well done show been enjoying it felt like there was a end of the year there was kind of a little role in television programming in our household so it’s been exciting too
Taz some of these series come back.

Scot:
[2:13] Let’s jump into it cuz this is sometimes one of our longest episode so we’re going to try to try to not go too crazy long.

Jason:
[2:20] I feel like we just lost half our listenership right there.

Scot:
[2:23] Like I don’t believe that this is gonna be a three-hour I am happy that Joe Rogan is starting to do these like three-hour heh,
episodes it makes me feel better about our one hour winds so this is every the first show of every year is been are many many year,
tradition to go through our past years predictions and then formulate our predictions for the upcoming year,
and that is this show it is the 2021 prediction review 2022 prediction Revelation show feel like we need a sound effect for that,
but.

Jason:
[3:00] I have a sound effect but I feel like I’m going to leave yours in.

Scot:
[3:02] If you can beat that you know over override it there.

[3:10] So the way we do this is we do have to show is kind of doing our predictions and kind of self scoring ourselves in Jason’s it’s kind of,
banging your head against a book typically self-flagellation or whatever it’s called and then and then we are back after the show is hopefully we learn from these predictions we made and we,
cast them forward to see what’s going to happen this year so I feel like Jason we should I think you actually won last year if I remember.

Jason:
[3:41] In a major upset I feel like I had been like over 45 the the previous app that seasons.

Scot:
[3:48] Yeah yeah so you get the dubious honor of getting to rate your 2021 predictions first so why don’t you kick us off.

Jason:
[3:54] Awesome yeah and spoiler alert we do not learn from the previous years.

Scot:
[4:00] Well part of making predictions is you yeah yeah yeah you got to kind of put it out there and that’s risky.

Jason:
[4:07] Sure so I’m always looking forward to this episode I’m super excited about it I get
you know jazzed weeks in advance and then I like dust off last year’s forecast and suddenly I’m a gloomy because I realize I’m not near as clever as I remembered myself
so that’ll just set the tone up front so my first prediction last year was that more
personalized made to order products would be taking off this year and my specific prediction was made to order a parallel with grow to be a nine figure 9 digit,
business in 2021 and so good news bad news that happened so,
if you add up the revenue from Indochina oh and suit supply,
proper cloth and not standard you actually get now about 250 million in Revenue which is,
considerably higher than nine figures.

[5:14] In hindsight it wasn’t that good of a prediction like we are pretty close to nine figures before last year.
And so it wasn’t as stretchy as I had hoped and I had in mind a lot of more.
Well we’re in consumer products pivoting the made to order and I specifically had been watching some some Amazon Pilots around made to order and they didn’t really grow this year at also,
technically I guess it was it happened but I don’t feel very good about my first one.

Scot:
[5:46] Okay yeah well it’s a win just take the W dude.

Jason:
[5:53] Okay all right yeah well I’ll try to be more more strict going forward or just make better predictions so my second one,
there’s been a lot of initiatives around retailers weaning in the healthcare and I propose that at least one retailer would,
launch their own health insurance or offer some alternative solution to health insurance,
and while there were a bunch of investments in health care and Amazon you know in particular has done a lot in the last year I don’t think that really happened so I’m giving that a no.

Scot:
[6:29] Yeah and in fact that was like a huge loss because Amazon Unwound their big partnership that made it seem like they were going to do a lot more in this myth.

Jason:
[6:37] Yeah that there is some Nuance there they they were part of a Consortium and they bailed on the Consortium but then they invested a lot more money and did several acquisitions,
and expanded the scope of their own internal initiatives and it almost look like the the internal stakeholders didn’t like partnering with Goldman Sachs and Berkshire Hathaway but nevertheless.
I’m I’m not taking that that win that that didn’t happen so.

Scot:
[7:09] What attracted such a big L kind of swamps the W from the first one.

Jason:
[7:14] Yeah cleaner it correctly so the next one was interesting I said that e-commerce would
grocery e-commerce penetration with grow above 10% and I said someone will deploy not just pilot these micro fulfillment centers for grocery in both of those things basically happen so
bricks me clicks which is one of the more credible sources out there for tracking grocery penetration has us at about fourteen percent penetration right now.
So we definitely passed that ten percent threshold obviously aided by,
the pandemic and the various waves and then several retailers leaned into mfcs a couple small retailers did deploy them,
across all of their stores so like a chibi for example is aggressively rolling out mfcs
Walmart I want to say spent like 14 billion dollars on on MFC so real money is,
is getting invested in there so I think generally I feel good about my my grocery production number three so so.
Two yeses and a know so far.

Scot:
[8:29] Is this a bricks and clicks thing is that a can mere mortals get that or is that something you get.

Jason:
[8:35] Well there’s a there’s a paid version which is well worth it if you follow the industry but they do publish their monthly forecasts for free on their website at bricks me cliques.com.
It’s pretty interesting so there you know we get.
Grocery sales data from the US Department of Commerce and e-commerce data but we don’t get grocery e-commerce so there’s the grocery e-commerce we only get from a couple of these third-party private.
Data providers and they all do it primarily based on.
Big panels of consumer surveys so that’s what bricks me clicks does but they they have some like pretty interesting data like you can look at what percentage of those grocery e-commerce orders were home delivery versus curbside pickup and stuff like that.

Scot:
[9:26] Very cool there’s a how do they get their data.

Jason:
[9:30] Panel so they’re there.
Yeah they’re serving a bunch of consumers yeah.

Scot:
[9:38] All right I’m going to remember you you did that.

Jason:
[9:42] You make you make use with what is available.
Um and directionally emarketer published some grocery data and they kind of roll together a bunch of people’s forecast there’s another company out there called mercado’s that publish them data and it also aligns,
directionally that there we are over 10%
where they disagree more is where we started before the pandemic so some of them have us starting at like two-and-a-half or three percent some of them have as high as six percent before.
Um over 10 now.
And if you’re super interested in the interest of prolonging the show frequent friend and guest of the show Professor Dan McCarthy they he and his students just published an interesting.
Cohort analysis of,
um how the pandemic impacted digital restaurant sales so closely related to digital grocery right and obviously a lot more people ordered restaurant food for delivery during the pandemic but his interesting question was,
um

[10:49] Was that you know a pandemic Spike and it’s going to go down back down to pre-pandemic levels or is it a permanent shift and what can we suss out and the way they did it is they looked at cohorts that.
They ordering from restaurants for home delivery before the pandemic and how their behavior change versus first time users and what they found is like most of the growth was.
Households that were already using restaurant delivery increase their usage and it appears to be more sticky the smaller cohort of people that ordered from restaurants for the first time during the pandemic,
that behavior did not stick and they’re not continuing to order but still the sales are up higher.
There’s a nice long digression for you that wasn’t one of my forecast.

Scot:
[11:33] Always appreciate the commentary.

Jason:
[11:36] Yeah I’m here for you man so forecast number four was.
I predicted that Amazon’s Shopify competitor would be revealed,
in this is a thing that we had heard about called project Santos but no one really knew what it was I said hey we’re going to find out what it is and I think it’s going to be a shipping solution to compete with,
to fulfill orders for Shopify and take take you know a piece of the Shopify gmv.
And it was in fact revealed so that’s the good news it was not a shipping solution so so project Santos turned out to be,
a point-of-sale system for brick-and-mortar retailers that Amazon is developing,
and has still not released but is purported to be small business POS system that’s going to compete with Shopify and square and some other folks in that space so,
I’m giving that a no.

Scot:
[12:42] All right I agree on the phone.

Jason:
[12:44] Cool cool.
Interesting news and Evolutions there to talk about on one of our subsequent new shows is there some interesting patterns that Shopify and others of,
have filed in that space so we get to my fifth prediction my fifth prediction was that retail media networks were going to take off in 2021 and that they would generate more than 20 billion dollars in ad revenues,
and put things in perspective like the year before we had only seen about 10 billion and AD Revenue so that was a meaningful prediction and that.
Totally happen so according to emarketer we did 24 billion,
in calendar year 2021 in ads that were invested in retail media Networks,
um Amazon is on a run rate right now to do about 30 billion dollars a year and everybody and their brother is launching a retail media Network so the Gap is launching a retail media Network which is.
Interesting most of these,
retail media networks are selling ads to what we would call endemic Advertiser so your Duracell batteries you sell batteries at Walmart you buy an ad from Walmart for Duracell batteries to help more people find them.

[13:57] Gap doesn’t sell other people’s stuff so there are no endemic advertisers on the Gap right and so super interesting that even they are trying to monetize their traffic.
You know you name it they watched a retail media Network this year and just today I want to say Best Buy which already had a retail media Network,
launched a new rebranded retail media Network and they’re now selling ads to non-endemic advertisers as well so so that when I feel like I hit pretty well.

[14:28] So you add that up and that is three corrects and and to to mrs. and folks careful listeners will note we also made a bonus prediction and the case that we tied,
in my.
My bonus prediction was that we would have even more store closures in 2021 than we did in 2020 and I was wildly wrong,
so
caveat here are the data everyone uses when they quote store closures is this core site data and core site is kind of anecdotal data and it’s totally tracking Big Chain,
retailers but based on their data there is like 41 percent fewer store closures in 2021 than 20/20 so so we’ll call that a huge mess,
um I would argue that all the store closures that happen this year were small independent retailers that got wiped out by these big chains,
and we really don’t have a good data source for for those but nevertheless I’ll accept that I lost the bonus round badly.

Scot:
[15:28] Yeah in fact isn’t there a record number of stores opened.

Jason:
[15:33] Yeah so a separate issue from the store closings is hey where there are more openings and there,
there there were so not a record number of openings but the but from that course I data set more store opens opened than closed last year which so we would have had a net increase in stores.
That that’s interesting I wouldn’t encourage retailers to pay too much attention to that because it really matters.
The nature of the closed and open stores I get almost rather follow,
net gains or losses in retail square footage because if you have a bunch of Macy’s stores closed and you have a bunch of Dollar General stores open your closing 100,000 square foot store and opening a 10,000 square foot store.

Scot:
[16:22] Awesome and then you had all right so then if we include your bonus you’re even so three wins and three else.

Jason:
[16:35] Exactly I like to think of it as three wins and two L’s and the bonus only comes up if you can tie me.

Scot:
[16:41] Okay alright let’s see how I did so.

Jason:
[16:46] Yeah I’m excited to hear this.

Scot:
[16:48] Yeah so just to remind everyone this was done a year ago in January of 21 we were merely.
Nine months months depends on when you start depending I guess nine months into two covid.

Jason:
[17:01] That’s a calendar year ago but it was actually four years of Lifetime ago.

Scot:
[17:06] Yeah it feels like it for sure,
all right so my first thing I always like to kick off with an Amazon prediction so my Amazon prediction last year was that we would move to same day Prime by opening a huge wave of neighborhood DC’s.
And they would be near dsps and I got that one right that one,
don’t feels obvious like I don’t feel like I was making too much of a prediction but at the time I remember being worried about it because I think they they were still doing most of the dsps this is where time dilation happens during covid the four-year thing you mentioned.
They’ve just built up an incredible amount of.
They call him I called him neighborhood DC’s they call him delivery stations now I think is the official name where they have built you know just tons of these these interesting new.
Footprints where they house a bunch of these dsps Under One Roof and then they for deploy a lot of that days
things to be delivered into that out of a fulfillment center and then the the dsps just line up and deliver that stuff so it’s been really interesting to watch them build that,
so I would count that one as a win.

Jason:
[18:18] Yeah no I totally agree I’m often surprised by how many people still have this outdated model of Amazon and they imagine the Amazon is primarily doing two day shipping.

Scot:
[18:29] Yeah no it is they have really cranked it up especially I’m out I’m in North Carolina you’re in Chicago and you guys are probably getting stuff you know.

Jason:
[18:38] Yeah we we are we were in early market for same-day delivery and we’re kind of an epicenter for a lot of of their delivery products and the vast majority of stuff I order,
um my I get two offers for wind to have it delivered between 4 and 8 a.m. or between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. the next day.
So some stuff I get same day I would just tell you there were I was listening to an Amazon earnings call and someone asked them if they were were concerned about all these ultra-fast delivery services that were popping up all these VC funded,
you know 15 minutes to 1 hour delivery services that are mostly sent in one one-block radius in New York and the Amazon CFO was like.
You know those those Services deliver,
an assortment of 4,000 skews to a five-block radius we’re currently delivering about 400,000 skews Same Day to all of America we feel pretty good about our offering what’s the.

Scot:
[19:42] Boom drops the mic walk.
Haha okay sticking to Logistics which is interesting because I was poking around and Logistics a year ago and I
you know in hindsight the perfect prediction would be there’s going to be a supply chain problem but I did not
I did not pick that one sadly instead I said you know Shopify,
so my logic here was kind of looking at the chessboard at that point in time we all know Amazon’s kind of,
turning the guns toward Shopify if your Shopify you know those guns are turning towards you so one of the things you do is try to get into the delivery world.
They have tried but they pretty publicly there was Toby was in,
was it Bloomberg he did kind of a cover story on one of the Business magazines and in there he basically admitted that you know hey were.
Pretty bad at this fulfillment stuff and I think they had a customer say that they’re embarrassing really bad and you know it almost seemed like there are not going to go deeper into fulfillment so I missed on that one but Asterix.
I think they should and I think it’s going to be a pretty big strategic.
Blind spot if you’re an arm the rebels in e-commerce you’re gonna need to help them get the products to consumers in that last mile that’s going to be where the battle is and I feel like it’s a bit of a soft underbelly for them right now.

Jason:
[21:11] Yeah generally agree.
An interesting side note that the CEO of instacart just got named to the Shopify board and I inadvertently started a little bit of
LinkedIn debate about like
how soon it would be before that was a potential conflict of interest and a lot of people chimed in that they thought instacart was a potential acquisition Target of Shopify which might be one way for them to to get into the the Fulfillment business.

Scot:
[21:48] Yeah but even that’s a conflict of interest rent mean proofs proves your point not you know.

Jason:
[21:53] Yeah I mean clearly I’m right but that’s a separate issue.

Scot:
[22:07] You don’t think this will ever happen and everyone else in the world thinks it will so you know,
this one’s tricky I could make some argument that they are doing more on this and then that same article they do start to talk about it being more of a central by it I’m talking about the shop app that they have,
um doing more around that centralizing your your Shopify,
you know whole experience in aggregate including some search functionality they have added some search haven’t looked at lately but I’ve seen to Twitter traffic that they have added some stuff there,
but I’ll all I’ll take the L on this one I but I still think.
That it’s going to be something they do more of down the road probably in a different flavor than a traditional Marketplace but I think it’s an area that they have to explore it is more in their wheelhouse than the Fulfillment sign.

Jason:
[23:02] For sure I certainly agree with that and I would encourage you to double down on that prediction for Fort Wayne tonight but I will say like two things I was clearly wrong on the shop a.

[23:17] Like is getting much broader adoption than I would have expected because I would argue it’s mostly a shipping tracking app.
It has some like Merchants search capabilities it doesn’t really have product search capabilities at least in general release but it’s.
At various times it’s been the most downloaded retail app and it’s bouncing around in the top four so a lot of people are getting that app and so per your point,
you know they have a bunch of merchants they have a bunch of users with this app which is really hard to do this app has some Marketplace of like features and then you know I don’t know you I’m sure you saw but bradstone,
got to go visit Shopify and do an interview with Toby and he in his article he kind of painted a picture that that.
Internal stakeholders at Shopify were wildly divided and didn’t agree about.
If Shopify should do a Marketplace and what it would look like and so that that makes me think.
They’re you know having the same debate we are and Toby himself weighed in that he’s like.
You’re not going to see us compete with our Merchants so if they do a Marketplace as probably going to have to look.
You know considerably different than the kind of marketplace I think some people are thinking about but but it’s an interesting space.

Scot:
[24:41] Yeah,
yeah and then so we’ll see if this comes up again in predictions and then I the super risky thing I did last year was made a covid prediction I’ve learned my lesson there
remember to week two weeks and we’re done anyway we my prediction was we will be shocked how much quote-unquote zero friction addiction sticks I’ve seen 30 to 40% repeated a lot and I think it’s going to be much much higher
and then so I think there is some good data that points to that we haven’t seen a decrease in the growth of you know online
even as we’ve gotten into a post covid World we’re kind of getting back into one with with
all the Quran right now but and to your point there’s a lot of interesting data like like Dan and his group did that show that it’s been pretty sticky.

Jason:
[25:37] Yeah no I think that’s totally fair a lot of people are in correctly predicting that that it’s going to revert but yeah I think I think all the tangible evidence points to it being sticky.

Scot:
[25:52] Okay and then my fifth prediction was given all the heat around these specs and IPOs that we would have
20:21 would be a banner year for digitally native vertical Brands either going pilot getting Acquired and doing IPOs,
I want to made this one I felt like it was going to be much more around these facts but then the specs pivoted and started doing these really weird esoteric things that end up,
not doing very well but where I kind of snuck the win out on this one is we did have three companies that we’ve tracked in our kind of the
oh geez of digital native vertical Brands go public so we had War be Rent the Runway and I’ll Birds now they haven’t done great since they went public but they did get out and they had you know the kind of met their pricing and went public and are still out there
and so so there you go so that was a yes.

Jason:
[26:51] Yeah yeah I will certainly give that one too.

Scot:
[26:54] All right so at this point I am let’s see three yeses and to nose.

Jason:
[27:02] So we’re tied so the bonus comes up what was your bonus.

Scot:
[27:07] My
bonus was that there will be I was much more optimal another covid so I got lucky on the first one I felt like we’re going
we’re going to in 21 we would be post covid and
people would kind of stop buying stuff just generally and really focus on going out and doing things and seeing the world over the holiday I went down to Orlando for three or four days and it felt like,
there’s definitely a segment of the population that that’s out there doing that they all seem to be in Florida right now and maybe some in Texas
but I think if you look at the data there’s nothing to really support
that in fact the we’ve talked on this show about the e-commerce data and Retail data and it all seems quite robust so we have not hit a.n.t. consumer materialism wave that that I predicted.

[28:03] Cough so it turns out that I think we’re effectively tied is that I’m doing the math right on.

Jason:
[28:09] I think you are and and I think all our listeners will agree that a tie is basically a huge win for me.

Scot:
[28:15] Given our past history yes it’s the first time we’ve had a feels like soccer or that we’re in England where that is a possible outcome.

Jason:
[28:23] Exactly I think I think my high school soccer team just just tied your your Premier League team.

Scot:
[28:31] Yep cool so yeah that but you know it fun to do these things because
I would say in a volatile world like we aren’t getting half of these things right I think you would agree with me that we’re pretty awesome you know we there’s other people out there that make predictions and they throw so much junk against the wall they get like
five percent right but and they do big Victory lap so I think if you look at our records pretty good pretty solid.

Jason:
[29:01] Yeah no I agree and I don’t think we sandbag very much either I mean sometimes in hindsight they feel like sandbags but I feel like we stretch ourselves so,
so I will definitely take them.
So how are you going to like pay off that that self-congratulatory pat on the back Scott you’re gonna have to come up with some Whoppers for this year.

[29:32] I don’t I don’t what do you want to do I’m sure we lost all our listeners except for my mom so whichever she prefers.

Scot:
[29:39] I’ll go first so so my predictions this year,
so my Amazon prediction number one and this is for 2022 is I predict Jeff Bezos is going to have a midlife crisis and run around
it was in Miami with hot chicks and other exotic locations and take a lot of selfies for Instagram.

Jason:
[30:05] If you had said in dubious fashion choices than I might give it to you.
Scot I’m not sure but I think as of January 6 that’s already happened.

Scot:
[30:16] Yeah yeah yeah okay you got me that ones are what they call retcon and in the world where it has already happened alright or series prediction is
I’m gonna I’m gonna double down kind of on your prediction I’m going to steal your prediction from last year and say
I guess this isn’t exactly what you predicted but I do feel like,
Amazon is very serious about Shopify in that same article I was talking about where,
Toby was there a next Amazon you know an anonymous sex annum Amazon Source you have to take that with a grain of salt said these guys crushed us they came out of nowhere and destroyed us and where we were blindsided,
that seems.

[31:03] Pretty pretty Amplified but I do think they have their guns trained on them so I’m going to say we’re going to see Amazon come out with a serious competitor this year,
and I think it’s gonna you know,
I imagine it could even be like a web store offering even though they started this and got rid of it I think they’re going to get pretty serious about it and now I could see them come out with a,
you probably won’t have a lot of Headway in the first year but they’re gonna I think they’re gonna go right out these guys the thing that’s hard to predict,
there’s some interesting things they could do it with AWS and headless so I’m going to kind of give myself a little space there that it could be headless versus kind of a more monolithic type SAS kind of an offering but yeah,
so I think they’re going to get pretty serious about.

Jason:
[31:54] Okay yeah yeah I could I like that I can’t I see that and you could imagine bundling like AWS Commerce platform with a bunch of the traditional merchant services from Amazon like fulfillment and payment and stuff like that.

Scot:
[32:08] Another Amazon one is
and you kind of foreshadow this when you’re talking about the Amazon thing there’s there’s hundreds of millions of dollars if not billions going into these do have a name for them fast.

Jason:
[32:23] Yeah well ultra-fast delivery is the.

Scot:
[32:25] Ultra-fast slurry okay these companies so there’s like go puff and there’s one that has like an animal name like.
Gorilla yeah Joker yep
yeah I’ve been I don’t know how DC is letting them do that one but anyway you know so these guys have raised billions of dollars and it’s a hot Market but I think Amazon is kind of going to train their guns on that and I think they’re going to put a real hurting on them,
I think we’ll see I’ll be pretty risky here and say one of them will close their doors one of those so I’ll put it here in the notes so to keep me honest so,
go puff gorilla and or Joker one of those three big ones probably doesn’t make it out of 22.

[33:19] Okay,
so that’s 1/2 so this is my third one I realize I’m actually short protection will have to do one on the flyer the Bezos wanted kind of counted in my head but that was early prediction you know the at the end of
21 we had Facebook changes name to metaverse and since they did that you can’t throw a rock without reading a thousand articles about the maneuvers.
In fact today on Twitter there was a big Walmart video you know kind of showing an metaverse shopping experience mock-up kind of thing that was kind of fun,
the I think there’s going to be I think there should be a lot of hype and 22 I’m actually kinda already burned out on it and a lot of you know what does metaverse shopping look like and there’s going to be lots of excitement and smoke but no fire and no Ray.
So I think it’s going to be the flash in the pan when we look back on 22 so I think it’s going to not a lot of activity there I think it’ll be like,
you know chat Commerce and social commerce and a lot of these things that had a lot of buzz in their era AI Commerce machine learning Commerce all these things that had huge amount of Buzz and then turned out to not really have substance.

[34:37] Okay and then the inverse of that is I think one of the things that there’s been a lot of talk about that
is going to have substance is live streaming of kind of video live video e-commerce integration so I think that one is going to be more mainstream there’s there’s a little.
Amazon has tried this and failed it’s big and Ali Baba I’m I’ll qualify this and say in the u.s. too so I’m not trying to be sneaky here and you know,
there’s not a lot of I’ve seen some startups trying to get traction here but they’re in like supermicro verticals but
that’s how I things get adopted is you kind of build some habits in these small behaviors and then they can go mainstream so I think we’ll look back on 22 when we do our
20:23 show and we will see live streaming has gone mainstream so that is one and then let’s see,
I may have to come back with another.

Jason:
[35:35] Yeah I’ll let you you can make fun of mine and then you I’ll let you cherry pick after hearing my.

Scot:
[35:41] Okay any reaction to my my for so far.

Jason:
[35:44] No I so a I should have come to rehearsal because I feel like we’re gonna get off the right off the bat with some potential overlap but.
I definitely.

[36:00] I think we’re going to see some way Amazon very seriously competes with Shopify I think it’s not going to be the way most most people expect that your your description seems totally plausible is we’re about to see I have a,
an opinion on some of these ultra-fast delivery services and The Meta versed both of which you touched
and then I got to be honest I am nervous about live streaming like I could I definitely am not bearish I could see it going either way
a ton of Commerce happens via live stream in China and we’re starting to get a lot of Commerce.
Video content get consumed in the u.s. what’s not working very well at the moment is the buy now button at the end of those videos and so you kind of have,
indirect livestream commerce’s is already starting to happen in pretty high volume here in the US and a bunch of people are investing in in.
Trying to take it that that last click.
And I have reasonable confidence that it could work so at the very least I know a lot of retailers and a lot of my clients are going to be trying it pretty pretty heavily this year so we shall see.

Scot:
[37:15] I came up with my fifth.

Jason:
[37:17] I knew if I just rambled that I would give you enough room for one.

Scot:
[37:20] Yeah this one is a risky one but you know our friend Faisal started Fabric and I’m going to predict that that company has so much Buzz they’re going to get acquired in
this year so that was risky because they’re super early stage where is it it’ll it’ll it’ll have to be a big number to take them off the table at this point but I think someone’s going to going to,
pay that number.

Jason:
[37:45] Yeah to fun ways that could go I feel like he’s pretty – on Shopify so it would be awesome Shopify acquired them but you could also Imagine AWS acquiring them and and making two of your predictions come true.

Scot:
[37:59] Yeah or or adobe or you know IBM IBM’s kind of on the sidelines lately they’ve got a whole.

Jason:
[38:07] Yeah yeah they kind of got out of the those software platforms I would be I mean but not to say they couldn’t pivot and come back in for sure.

Scot:
[38:14] Yeah yeah and then let’s see I said Adobe I’ve and Salesforce.

Jason:
[38:20] Interesting okay well I’m going to jump into mine and again we did not dedupe these I bundled several of yours and made them more negative,
so my first prediction is what’s not gonna happen and I lumped in a bunch of very trendy things that people are super hyped about and
I said I don’t think any of these are going to be economically meaningful in 2022 so it’s in ft’s which I know,
are near to your heart than mine I I do believe there’s some Niche use cases where in Ft is totally makes sense and I know you play in some of those,
those Niche cases but there are so many people that just think crypto in general and nft is in particular are going to be,
a huge part of Commerce I don’t think they’re going to be very economically meaningful and in 2022 even more so I don’t think web 3 is going to have any impact I’m starting to get a lot of questions about,
how Bigcommerce is going to change because of web three in my answer is it’s not,
I think the metaverse is going to fail pretty miserably as a Commerce,
play and I’m also going to say all of these Venture funded ultra-fast delivery startups are going to fail so that’s not to say that.

[39:36] Amazon,
instacart or even go puff couldn’t win but like all these these Sand Hill Road back startups that are delivering in Manhattan I don’t think any of them are gonna change consumer Behavior enough to really matter economically in,
so that’s my Chrome Legend hey all the cool things that talking has like to talk about aren’t very important one.

Scot:
[40:02] Well I don’t think that overlaps too much no no I I disagree but we’ll see.

Jason:
[40:09] Knox awesome those are the.

Scot:
[40:11] What’s your specific prediction like there will be less in ft’s and 2022 and is in of T volume.

Jason:
[40:19] Yeah yeah.

Scot:
[40:20] Let’s put that one down oh that’s that’s the prediction last in a $50 transacted.

Jason:
[40:26] Well so like I don’t so full disclosure I can throw out a number but like I don’t know of a credible source for tracking in Ft Revenue dollars.

Scot:
[40:40] Yeah there’s some there’s gmv trackers so open sea and is the biggest Market Place than there’s like three or four others.

Jason:
[40:46] Okay I was mostly thinking like the there’s there’s not going to be meaningful revenue from the US Department of Commerce retail sales data that’s enough.

Scot:
[40:57] Wow that’s there it’s going to take them 50 years before they can spell it.

Jason:
[41:02] Well I know they’re not going to report it that’s what I’m saying but I’m just saying like there’s an Amazon Walmart the the top 10 eCommerce sites in the US are not going to have any meaningful revenue from in FTS.
Yeah but nobody’s going to do anything with webbed three in Commerce and nobody’s going to buy anything with a virtual reality headset.
Or from gorillas outside of one block.

Scot:
[41:40] Okay.

Jason:
[41:42] So
I’ll try to get less – now a company that we’ve talked about on the show a couple times that people don’t talk about enough and I’m kind of using them as a surrogate for a whole new trend but is the the.
Ultra fast fashion brand Chien which is a apparel brand the.
The they’re estimated to have sold about 10 to 15 billion dollars worth of Apparel in 2021 and I think they’re going to exceed 30 billion dollars in apparel sales and 2022 which is going to make them.
A top 3 apparel retailer in the US.

[42:24] And I said they’re kind of a surrogate for a trend this is democratized merchandising so this is,
instead of Mickey Drexler deciding what the cool kids should wear in high school instead of easy deciding what the cool kids should wear in high school this is,
algorithms watching what the cool kids post that they are wearing in high school on tick-tock,
and then making it in two weeks and selling it to all the kids that want to be cool,
and so it’s kind of the perfect manifestation of what Amazon called hands off the wheel where they stopped having Merchants pick products and instead kind of use data to,
to drive their catalog and I think she is gonna continue to have great success there and it’s,
it’s disrupting the fashion industry more than a lot of people in the fashion industry realize but I think,
it’s going to become extremely evident in 2022 that it’s disrupting the apparel business.

Scot:
[43:23] And then are you are you putting a specific number on it and if so how much is that over last year.

Jason:
[43:27] Sorry I thought I said it yeah so I think they’re going to sell more than 30 billion dollars of Apparel in 2022.

Scot:
[43:34] What they do in 21.

Jason:
[43:36] The estimates they’re not public but the estimates are between 10 and 15 billion so more than double.

Scot:
[43:42] Okay all right.

Jason:
[43:44] Again not trying to sandbag.
So third one and I guess I’m going back to my my negative Nelly so one of the hottest trends of 2021 and the prediction I have seen the most people do and I fully expected you to do so I’m,
totally bombed is that buy now pay later services are going to continue to explode,
and in 2021 by some estimates they grew 30% in their you know wildly adopted,
it’s the fastest-growing payment type in in e-commerce in 2021 you’re starting to see it expand from just e-commerce to in-store purchases as well,
and it’s moving down Market to you know from from
expensive High consideration items to a lot of lower cost more impulse items so by all accounts the future of payments and credit is buy now pay later in my prediction is
that it slows down and 2222 I’m not saying it’s necessarily going to flop,
but I think you’re going to see only about 15 percent growth over 20.

[44:52] One versus the 30% that they had this year so I think the rate of growth Cuts in half and I think there’s a couple reasons behind that,
I think the bill is going to come due for a lot of these products and a lot of these consumers are not going to be able to pay for the products they purchase,
and I think you’re going to start to see a ton of writedowns and the financial reality of renting money to subprime lenders without like significant collateral is going to kind of start to,
catch up with some of these companies I think the Credit Agencies are going to start to lean into this more and that’s going to take away one of the competitive advantages that they had and I think we might even see some some regulation because like there’s some,
some very financially responsible companies in the buy now pay later ecosystem but there’s also some,
some kind of rebranded payday loan players in that space and so I think there’s just going to be a lot of erosion of trust and and some- stories that will slow down the rate of growth.

Scot:
[45:59] Gaap negative or positive on the next.

Jason:
[46:04] Yeah we’re going positive again I’m yeah I’m alternating I’m and I’m going to throw an Amazon one to you I think Amazon opens more than 100 grocery stores in 2022.
Not whole food so Amazon Fresh doors,
um and that you know again that that would be about three times as many stores as they have ever opened Amazon book stores or five star store so.
It’s not the thousands of stores that some people have talked about but it’s also a much faster pace of brick-and-mortar growth than we’ve ever seen from Amazon.

Scot:
[46:41] Yeah that I will be excited to see this one.

Jason:
[46:46] And you know most of them will be in Chicago so that’ll be fun for me.

Scot:
[46:50] Of the 500 stores they’ll be like 75.

Jason:
[46:54] Yeah exactly I’ll be surrounded,
yeah so I think that’s a super interesting space I’ve talked about it a bunch it was you know the growth of digital commerce was one of my grocery commerce was one of my big ones and I think it’s just the big category of consumer spending that Amazon.
Doesn’t play meaningfully and Whole Foods is very Niche and I just think it’s a moonshot imperative for Amazon to win Grocery and I don’t think you can win digital grocery without having brick-and-mortar grocery as well.

[47:29] So that I think gives me 4 so my last one,
is I think there’s going to be a lot of interesting Activity one of the categories of e-commerce I’m most interested in watching in 2022 is Last Mile,
there’s going to be a lot all kinds of different Evolutions but the specific prediction I’ll make is one of these new,
um I’ll call them FedEx UPS competitors is going to sort of get get acquired or have some meaningful liquidation event and so so there’s a couple of startups that are kind of,
Next Generation parcel delivery services like vejo index delivery ship IAM is a bunch of X Amazon guys and I’m going to say that,
instacart original business model could even slow down and instacart could get acquired,
primarily to be a last mile delivery service by someone so so one of those companies gets acquired,
as part of the buzz around owning your own Last Mile in 2022.

Scot:
[48:38] Yep and does that include so there’s all these like ship Bob Shapiro those kind of guys your that’s not.

Jason:
[48:45] I think there’s going to be a lot of I think they’re an interesting space to in most cases they’re not actually delivering products they’re they’re facilitating delivery of products or tracking delivery of products and so I tried to keep this pure to the,
guys that have access to trucks and are driving products to people’s houses but.
Yeah so no I’m not I won’t call it a win if it’s if those are the only ones that get acquired.

Scot:
[49:13] And then any other bonus prediction so I kind of had to stretch to get my 5 but anything else you want.

Jason:
[49:20] So
so yeah you know I do all my best thinking on dog walks and so I you know I might thinking about all these cool predictions and I came home with like 40 of them and so I struggled to narrow it down to these five
and so then kind of the next class of predictions that just sounded.
Too easy in a way but you know last year digital Commerce kind of slowed down a little bit compared to Brick and Mortar Commerce it was a huge year in brick-and-mortar growth.
Because e-commerce had grown so fast the year before so I think that that.
That Paradox gets inverted again this year so I think we see way faster e-commerce growth than we do brick-and-mortar growth,
I think curbside which was a big thing in 2020 and 2021 becomes even bigger thing in 2022,
I think you’re gonna see a ton of stores redesign their parking lot I noticed H-E-B just opened a new store and as 26 Bays,
for curbside pickup so I think those those are the big things in the you know the big macro story that we’ll see in 2022.
I recognize that less controversial than my official five predictions.

Scot:
[50:34] Yeah okay cool I think that’s a good set of 10 predictions there any anything else you want to just let people marinate on that for little bit.

Jason:
[50:42] No I if folks strongly agree or disagree I’d love to hear about it on social media and if you have different predictions,
throw them our way on Twitter Facebook and we’ll be happy to debate them on our next show.

Scot:
[50:59] Yeah yeah maybe we could introduce some listener predictions as part of this going forward that would be kind of fun it also reminds me we need to we haven’t done a deep dive in a while and maybe you know we touched on in ft’s web 3 meta those are
pretty good topics for deep Dives maybe even buy now pay later so usually we hit a new slow down in the e-commerce world,
kind of in that March April May time frame after we get the q1 results so maybe we’ll throw some deep Dives in there so that,
if those topics are interesting we’re happy to kind of go deep on those I guess looking back the live streaming when I don’t think we’ve done a deep dive on that either so those are all areas where between the two of us we have a pretty good bit of domain knowledge that we could
make sure that is out there and available if you want to go deeper on one of those topics so let us know think about your preferences on 20-22 content around that type of a topic as well.

Jason:
[51:56] Yeah I will look forward to all of that.
And of course if you did find this show fun at all or you learned anything the best way you could reward us as jump on iTunes and leave us that 2022 five-star review all those reviews you wrote in 2021 don’t count anymore
so you need to get back on iTunes and leave us up fresh review and feel free to make fun of Scott in the review that’s always appreciated.

Scot:
[52:22] Or Jason’s title.

Jason:
[52:24] One of my many titles.

Scot:
[52:25] All right thanks everybody.

Jason:
[52:29] And until next time happy commercing.

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