Hey, Buddha, nice Tom Fords.

“Our lives are already significantly more complex than even five years ago. We need to pay attention to far more sources in order to do our jobs, to learn, to parent, or even to be entertained. The number of factors and possibilities we have to attend to rises each year almost exponentially. Thus our seemingly permanently distracted state and our endless flitting from one thing to another is not a sign of disaster, but is a necessary adaptation to this current environment.”

“In fact, the business plans of the next 10,000 startups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI. Find something that can be made better by adding online smartness to it. ”

― Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Both written in 2016.

Late Edit: This started as a normal post, I am sorry.

#ecommerce Last week, I spoke at, hosted, attended a number of events from across our industry. Having largely hibernated for 2 years, 2024 has been my renaissance back into the world of events again. I have some loose agendas - learn whats hot (moments in time), who's hot (people delivering amazing content and backing it up), socialize. As a consultant, it can be difficult to have any validation, and sense of where you are going right or wrong, wide of the mark or close to the bone. That's where teams are helpful and for many necessary. (Not 5 days a week in the office necessary, but have their place). Events now are a good barometer. Even the ones that are bad.

The above quotes from Kevin Kelley was not designed to be prophetic, but it was pretty damn accurate, his body of work largely is. Consider his quote on #AI, since its writing in 2016, it was eerily true. It is where money and attention went but it tells a story of distraction more than anything else.

And so it was a post from John-Pierre Kamel today that reminded me my duty to myself. I mostly internalize these but decided today, I couldn't.

Kevin Kelley, again reminding me of my role to myself.

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Simon’s insight is often reduced to “In a world of abundance, the only scarcity is human attention.”

2024 was to be the year of profitability. Last week I confirmed a certain bias - if Amazon are, in fact, on Day 2, it is very much Day 1 still for us mortals.

Profitability at scale will not be achieved - the model of retail selling is largely flawed. Margin is not present in a large enough way for everyone to be successful. The job of ecommerce has, as a result become harder. But, we have emerged from toddling to the teens. Getting through these awkward teenage years without any more teenage kicks would be an achievement in itself but this is not a movie. Reality, is much more confronting.

What did I take away from last weeks attendances. FYI, they were as follows:

eBay Cross Border Summit - Dublin (In person)

#TRE Monthly Mixer held by my fellow RETHINK Retail friends. A monthly expose on topics worth talking about. I was hosting the Retail Media table. No dice, no one showed. Disappointing compared to any month, but August was good. Let's move on. I went to the table of unified commerce where it was well hosted by Matt Mueller - i interrupted incessantly good talkers like Jean Pierre, and Ted McCaffrey - Omnichannel Champion ...

Bad Data, Big trouble a super Webinar where I hosted 2 excellent guests - Arv Natarajan and Joyce Mueller in a session brought together by GroupBy Inc. - Bad data screws with everything.

Second to last - the Fexco Women in Payments day - a now, annual summit, held here in Kerry (in person), where I had the privilege of sharing a panel with some fantastic panelists - Orla Bowers Rhiannon Bracey Assoc. CIPD , Hannah Fitzsimons chaired by the brilliant Elizabeth McCartney .. A thought provoking session on Payments: Needs vs Wants. Really this topic should be discussed in all tech at least once a year and Hannah should chair it. Such a brilliant framing of our industry at large.

“In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge.”

This is mostly how I felt leaving Fexco. Ignorance is not bliss. I finished the week on Friday with the Watson Weekend podcast, where I am always upskilled by our hosts and guests alike - forced to think through problems through a lens that does not come naturally to me.

The model is broken. Basics still being addressed.

“Right now we think of manufacturing as happening in China. But as manufacturing costs sink because of robots, the costs of transportation become a far greater factor than the cost of production. Nearby will be cheap. So we’ll get this network of locally franchised factories, where most things will be made within five miles of where they are needed.”

We tend to dismiss Temu and SHEIN because of our media bias. But what if their models are more right fit? Ever think about that.

The week that was.

eBays #cbt cross border trading conference. A stark reminder of a few things:

Retailers struggle with Cross Border trade - brands and SMBs fare better.

eBay still has an enormous user base who are willing shoppers.

eBay is still under estimated by so many but does not do any favours to itself.

Some people here might say who is eBay? Recently bumped from 2nd in traffic in the US (a bell weather for size).

What was striking:

EBay are in 190 markets

2.1BN listings

132m active users monthly

50% of all transactions are cross border (payee and seller in different countries)

99% of the eBay small business community trade cross border versus 5.8% of traditional retailers - missed opportunity ? I think so.

Small business is about survival for the most part. The behaviour I’m interested in is cross border selling. Minding your pennies so your pounds take care of themselves ..your survival/growth is a series of increments. And you cannot afford margins to be wrong. Why can they get this mentality so easily and retail does not?

Offering offsite ads is a smart move. Small businesses don’t have the skills, but eBay are asking for a lot of trust on a platform that is still quite infantile. Where is eBay It feels like the have a positioning problem still and do not take off the blinkers much when it comes to advertising and marketing.

Recently they boasted their stats -40% of GMV is not delivered through pre owned or pre loved products. These strategies are being adopted by brands the world over. In 10 years this feels risky, same for collectibles - Walmart muscling in here and Fanatics will try it before long. P&A will evolve with electric vehicles etc. EBay (the business) is healthy.

It has acquired its way into survival and divested (not always by choice) to their detriment. It needs to find its place again because being happy to be second best is a strategy that only lasts so long. It has a special place in the history of e-commerce and needs new direction (brand wise) to be part of the future too.

My experience with them was littered with people who were passionate about eBay and its role, I don’t think those people aren’t there today. But in a consumer market that is pretty damn fickle, I can’t help but shudder slightly when I think about its future. Pre loved May just be the moniker that comes back to haunt the brand in the not so distant future

#TRE mixed where we discussed #unifiedcommerce - what does the holidays hold? How does/should unified commerce support this. Unifiedcommerce for all its pomp and ceremony boasts a coulda/woulda/shoulda view on commerce.

Coulda - not fully unified. Was utopian in its mindseye

Shoulda - poorly implemented or scoped insufficiently

Woulda - if we knew then what we know now..

Lots of promise in Unified but it needs greater consideration and highlights some long held truths about silos, not understanding data, cultures being wrong and the wrong people pushing the agenda - agencies or platforms.

I don't ever remember a retailer saying Unified commerce is the way forward. They have been sold on the concept since. What holds true is requiring a single view on customers, single view in inventory - trading and marketing collide. Many risks exist in a fully unified world at enterprise level. For a 10 person #DTC brand, Unified makes sense. Like PB and J.

It is easy to say horse for courses. Unified, headless whatever your brand of ecommerce platform poison is yours to enjoy, but even the most gifted architects cannot fix the problems at scale.

The riddle of the model.

Big Trouble in Little China. Sorry, Bad Data, Big Trouble - When I hastily accepted the invite to host, i thought it was a nostalgic look at 80s movies we loved. But, I was not to be disappointed. In my quest for something interesting or confirming my own bias (feeding my ego), It was confirmed to me again, our basics are brilliantly flawed, at source. LLM and AI can only exist in harmony when good data is fed in to them. But when we have a perennial "shit in, shit out" play action, it is hard to see why we blame the tech when it is the human endeavors at the start of the chain that mess it up before it begins. The existence of this as a subject matter, in 2024, asks more questions than provides answers.

Women in Payments - thank you Fexco

I first attended this 2 days before the first lockdown. 2020. Fast forward to year 5 of this event aimed at, well a number of things. I would love to tell you I could add more to the discussion, I cannot. I left feeling perplexed and rather reflective on my role in gender bias, challenges and more - not just in work, but even at home. There was an incredible diversity of topics and care put into the curation of how they would work together. In fact, there was more energy in the afternoon and a sense of something more to follow. It is rare to create that kind of enthusiasm. There were actual real questions, not planted ones, with some very authentic stories included as part of laying ones self bare to get an honest answer. There was no shortage of either.

Our topic is my closing view. It was Hannah who said it in our preparatory call. What are we trying to fix - more so, is there a problem to fix.

Much of what we do, sell, learn is designed around problems that are not there to fix. Doesn't mean people have nefarious aims, quite the contrary. Many tech companies are designed to change the world, just ask OpenAI - that is the OpenAI of 2 weeks ago. Last week Sam Altman confirmed he is not quite the humanist we all thought he was here to be. No, he is a mere mortal, just like the rest of us.

2025 is going to shape similar, but I fear with less consumer confidence.

In fact it is a prevailing technology of the last few years that sums up the risk we have brought to 2025.

Buy Now, Pay Later - a prophecy for the years ahead.

Solving problems we don't have - It is estimated that $18.5B will be spent using #BNPL products for the Christmas ahead, in the US alone. Some 40% of those surveyed by Adobe said they would be spreading their payments over 36 months.

Christmas 2024, the Christmas gift that keeps on taking.

Retail 2024 - the year we BNPL.

#strategy #retail #retailstrategy #whatilearnedat5eventslastweek