What's happening in e-commerce

welcome to the balance sheet where you rise above the noise and learn about the most important business issues of our age I’m your host and fellow student conr cha every time you want something you just go online search look at reviews and click in one or two days a package magically appears on your doorstep to tell us what happens behind the scenes in this entire process is sesh DTI sesh is a top LinkedIn e-commerce voice with extensive experience at industry giants like Amazon Google and recit currently he is the director of global e-commerce for health and medical at sity a global health and hygiene company welcome soes hello conr thank you ding me soes you’ve been breathing and living e-commerce for years now what is one big thing that people don’t realize about the e-commerce industry yeah I I I think what I personally get really excited about which probably is yet to so spill over into a lot of the other players within e-commerce is what’s happening in the east in China especially on e-commerce uh because a lot I expect a lot of the e-commerce Innovation and growth to come from there and one of their uh business models is what they call Super apps which is treating e-commerce not as a channel which is how traditional businesses sometimes do but actually as a way to drive a great customer relationship by delighting customers and what I what I mean by that specifically is if you look at southeast Asia or China there’s this concept of super apps where it’s not a specialist app to purchase then another specialist app to play a video games another one to watch uh streaming videos like Netflix there are these apps which are all in which provide you with e-commerce with payments with ride hailing food ordering video game entertainment call it what you’d like and what that drives is a big lockin for the customers and it also prevents the customer from looking over their shoulder to other uh sort of ecosystems uh because they all of their needs are cated to and I think that is one Trend that we’ll increasingly start to see come into the Western markets as well where traditionally in e-commerce there has been great specialism Amazon for e-commerce Facebook for social media uh Google for advertising but I think those worlds will come together get Consolidated more and more into the super app uh mechanism in my view of course in places like China and Southeast Asia where you have these super apps like WeChat in China uh in Singapore in Southeast Asia this grab they all started from a particular position I think wead started in messaging social media bit of games grab started just like uber in fact they bought over Uber’s operations in Southeast Asia and then they progressed so why did they succeed in becoming a super app whereas in the west Facebook started with Marketplace they didn’t get very far uh Uber is still very much a delivery company yeah now that’s an excellent question Conrad and there’s a few factors at play one is the general uh reception of e-commerce and digitally native audiences is greater in countries like China then say a a country in the west so there people spending a lot more time on their screens their people where a lot of the entertainment uh of in their lives comes from the screens that they uh choose to spend time in uh so one is that the audiences tend to be a little bit more digitally penetrated and advanced than some of the other audiences in other countries so it’s a favorable uh Tailwind second is the network effects so even though you’re absolutely right grab started with a ride hailing in V chat with instant messaging but they very quickly realized and started sort of experimenting with the idea that you can you can sort of add on in a modular way in a jent need of the customer so someone’s instant messaging about a tub of yogurt to buy how about you show them a yogurt advertisement so suddenly you’re trying to pull away digital advertising from the likes of search engines into the instant messaging and it’s a lot more topical because you having that chat now uh similarly if you look at grab it started with uh ride hailing but then very quickly realized that whilst the C whilst my delivery drivers are out there how about I get them to start delivering product uh that consumers want to buy as well uh so you would have a driver go into a doorstep with a bag of lettuce and meat which is your daily shop so I think they were those apps were little bit more creative about exploring adjacencies and then use the network effects whereas some of the other companies you mentioned like the Facebooks of the world just focused on milking a lot of their revenue and margin from one specialist uh targeting uh one specialist offering there’s nothing wrong with that uh but increasingly they are locked in and finding additional revenue streams is harder now because the positioning of the offering is with one thing so when Facebook Marketplace is launched a lot of people still use it but it’s not a big e-commerce uh player for sure Brands aren’t uh sort of desperate to be on their their questions of security and regulation so I think Network effects receptive audiences uh and just more creativity I think are probably the factors that play do you think we will see a global e-commerce company uh or do we are we going to see this bulcan isation where you have these large Regional champions for example uh in China you might have pin war teu teu going out in Southeast Asia shopy and Lazada yeah I think for a truly Global e-commerce company my personal view is going to be hard you might have a similar model uh take a foothold in a lot of these regions but there are so many different nuances so if you look at say marcard lib in latam that is a very different operation uh due to the nature of the third party trade and commerce there than operating Amazon or Alibaba uh or Lazada in Indonesia so my my view is whil it’s the model of super app e-commerce plus entertainment plus everything else will probably start to become more prominent uh but they might still be a few different players dotted around the world for it to be truly Global e-commerce company it’s going to be very hard because the digital incumbents that grow out of nowhere uh Walmart paid what was it 16 billon million dollars for flip cart in India uh something like that and and you would think that Amazon coming into India would make uh probably would put PID to the competition but it didn’t happen Amazon is still uh India is a key market for them but they know they have to fight for their lunch versus the local native flip cart and there are similar examples everywhere Latin America Amazon Mexico uh is is whilst a key player it’s not going to become the marketplace of choice over night because there are really strong digital incumbents locally available that’s very interesting I know you’ve spent time at Amazon and Amazon is the subject of large numbers of case studies in Business Schools about their Logistics practices but one new player seems to be succeeding by almost throwing out the Amazon Playbook that’s teu can you tell us a bit more about timu very different business model yes uh I find this uh whole teu is challenge to Amazon very fascinating personally Conrad we probably need to take a step back into the historical context of marketplaces over the last 20 years e-commerce especially the e-commerce outside of Click intellect so any e-commerce which is which involves product being shipped to your door has worked on three Central tenets and they come from Amazon but they’ve been widely deployed on marketplaces online pharmacies everywhere and the three Central tenets are that consumers will always want wider selection they will always want lower prices and they will always want faster delivery and then comes teimo and Shane by uh by extension who are challenging not just the business but also these Central tenants especially the one around consumers always wanting faster delivery teu has said well maybe not all always if there is a big price tradeoff involved and if it’s not an urgent sh permission So for anybody listening in new and Teo is a new word for you it was the highest downloaded free IOS app in the US in 2023 um and it is an e-commerce company and what it does is you would it links uh you as the Shopper in US UK uh to Chinese factories directly so what that means is if you were to buy a pair of shoes in the US let’s say 20 USD you might find it on teu for 5 USD and you would scratch your head thinking wait what the hell’s happening this seems dodgy but if you try and order it and if you if you don’t care too much about the delivery window they can’t ship it to you within two days or 24 hours like Amazon or Walmart marketplace can but they can ship it to you within say a month or so at 5 USD so what’s now happened is timu uh is becoming a pre preferred uh online e-commerce company of choice for a lot of people who are questioning whether I really need this so fast sure there’s some things I need tomorrow but there’s some things which I’m willing to wait for uh like a flipflops uh that you might want to wait for for a month to get it at 20% of the price so yeah Timo and Shane versus Amazon it’s going to be a great uh fascinating battle in my view Conrad one that will probably spill into geopolitics and things like TS Etc as well so you mentioned flip-flop so I have to show this show you this pair of um yeah of sandals that I bought of timu and uh I wanted something to wear in the gym when I go after a workout I want to take a shower so as you said this thing cost me like3 uh I have no idea how long it took because I completely forgot about it one day I come home and there’s this very poorly packaged lots of tape uh on my doorstep I open it and this pair and it looks all right but once you start to look in there closer there’s all this very strange lettering the color is already fading after um about 2 months uh but actually as you say for 3 lb I didn’t mind the poor quality and I didn’t mind waiting as well do you think that more and more the the merchants or the manufacturers uh will think actually it’s better to work with teimo than to work with Amazon uh potentially because a lot of the teu trade happens currently with merchants or manufacturers based in say China uh if you are a us-based merchant or manufacturer in most cases that takes away the pricing Advantage because if you’re building it locally chances are with your margin requirements you may not be able to sell it at in this case let’s say3 P if it’s a UK based manufacturer so I I I personally don’t foresee a big cue from merchants in say countries like us and UK to start trading on Teo uh but what’s going to happen is because of the increasing traffic to these uh websites like teimo uh Merchants will start to question what is a way they can compete with that if it’s not pricing what is it does does this spill over into categories so for instance you showed your pair of slippers could it be that pair of slippers becomes a category where you’re happy to wait three weeks and then that probably piece of the e-commerce sits within temu and there are others like your uh go back to tub of yogurt that you want later today which Amazon Fresh can still deliver to you so I think it probably would go into a category differentiation um uh but Merchants for now I don’t think within say us UK would start lining up on temu in a big way the manufacturers in China that uh timu relies on I think that they would find it quite advantages to work with teu because they have this almost direct relationship now with the customer right uh and they don’t have to spend much money having warehousing uh they don’t even have a brand in many cases is right so is that how again the cost can be lowered compared to something from the West that’s being sold through Amazon 100% Conrad uh this isn’t so if you just go into T if you look at the app uh anyone listening it’s it’s it’s more of an entertainment app really there’s a little bit of a rette up top and there countdowns there of lightening offers Etc and it isn’t a brand building exercise really for now it is as much trade at as an optimal price point as possible so exactly where consumer purchases more and more commoditized they actually would play a bigger role the likes of temu where it’s more brand orientated so for instance if you are particular about the brand of shirt you wear or about the brand of phone you carry uh that they will still struggle to the likes of Tim will still struggle to because there’s this reputation of oh is it dodgy is is this this doesn’t sound right what’s happening what’s happening in those factories what’s the end to-end procurement process I’m not even confident uh are these sweat shops in in some cases in so um so you’re 100% right uh I think where the purchase is more commoditized and you care less about the brand uh that’s the trade that teu and uh is taking at the moment uh brand trades is still very much within the local marketplaces or or uh other sort of e-commerce points of sale I’ve heard that because the prices are so low people actually just order multiple items right so someone who wants a bicycle Bell and because there’s no brand loyalty on this there’s a couple of varieties they’re like okay let’s just order three and pick the one that they want but timu even says if you don’t want it we refund you don’t even bother shipping it back right um has this returns you know this very different way of thinking about returns does that uh affect the existing e-commerce players who have made returns so easy so free and cheap how has that affected them yeah I think it’s an excellent question returns is really the Achilles heal of any e-commerce operation um in 2021 I think this 21% of all online orders bought in the US were returned 21% that that is a lot um and in a lot of the cases uh the customer the retailer can’t just take your product and sell it onward that’s not how it happens in fact I was reading a data point that only 5% of the orders that say Amazon receives it can straight away repackage and sell it all uh so it’s it’s a big it’s a big challenge also if you look at the inefficiencies it creates e-commerce models are built on Speed and Agility and this includes the warehouse workers picking product at speed so uh just for context an Amazon worker in a warehouse can pick about 30 products in a minute but it takes them up to 10 minutes to process the return what what I mean by that is if I bought something off Amazon I don’t like it I wouldn’t put it back as neat a box as it’s supposed to be I just do a ha hasard job of it the post office takes care of it postage is paid for I don’t care I just need it back and I need my money so for Amazon to receive it and then do something with it that takes on average 10 minutes it’s inefficiencies then also they then compare between oh is it just cheaper to liquidate it and now I think because the retailers have had enough really uh they are trying to come up with some solutions so you’re starting to see some Brands like unlo or Zara especially on the fashion side they now have a small return fees uh for for you uh there’s also the refurbished item sale now so if you go into Amazon most marketplaces now you would go into Amazon refurbished where Amazon says listen this product was returned we think it’s fine there’s a couple of chips here and there we’ll sell it to you for 30% of the previous trade are you interested so they’re trying to sort of make a market for refurbished Goods and thirdly I think there’s also the use of technology so if you look at a lot of the these places like Walmart Amazon Alibaba you can try things like augmented reality to try clothes on or your shoes on or Furniture in your living room so I think it’s a combination of those things creating fees using technology making a market for refurbished products to really counter this big Challenge and I think temo I think just is not in a place where it’s challenged for profitability at the moment it is heavily subsidized through local Capital so I think it’s just trying to gain a critical customer base and will’ll then take it from there um so yeah it’s it’s a big challenge but retailers are coming up with creative ways to manage it of course this whole thing about returns it’s not just added inefficiency and cost to the e-commerce providers but there’s also uh sustainability angle to this because if I didn’t if I didn’t like this pair of sandals I just throw it off because it was three pounds from timu uh people and timu almost says almost encourages that at the moment by saying don’t return so we have a question from the audience and the audience please uh put in your questions in the comments field uh this is estefania from LinkedIn who asked there are emerging Trends in consumers who want sustainable e-commerce so soes what are your thoughts on how they might shape the future strategies of companies like shien yeah I think it’s such an excellent question the tradeoff between sustainability and the price advantages I think I was reading a was it a hbr study which said a lot of the Shoppers while they want green they not yet a lot of them this is not this not everyone a lot of them are not yet willing to pay a price premium for it to be a green s purchase with zero carbon footprint um I think uh you you’re absolutely right the likes of Shane fast fashion uh all of them will need to possibly reconsider how do they drive sustainability but at the same time acknowledging that a lot of their top line is driven by this whole idea of fast fashion quick turnaround quick inventory CHS uh fast designs fast launches um and I think what might happen is you would see different attitudes by market there are some markets where the Shopper might be really focused on sustainability um and where the likes of Shane will probably need to completely revise their strategy from going in going from Fast fashion to focusing on uh more premium uh product or product that last longer but then there are other markets to be honest where sustainability hasn’t quite come up as the big uh Criterion yet um and in those markets the likes of Shane have a long Runway ahead of them of growth so a lot of the cash growth they’ll probably try and get from these markets but then they’ll try to use that cash growth to try and make tailored offerings for audiences in different countries which care more about sustainability uh so it’ll be a fascinating trade-off to watch over the next few years I think and we have some questions from the audience I know soes you were Keen to talk about Ai and Ed from Atlanta ask can you provide examples of how AI is being used to personalize customer experiences on e-commerce platforms yeah I think it’s such an excellent question AI is truly the rage right now right and e-commerce is the perfect place for it to be experimented and leveraged and different companies are using it uh absolutely differently if you look at just picking on one of the examples U uh from a conversation we were having on returns there are companies now that are using AI to predict the return probability by customer segments so you account for that in your uh trading so that’s even at the back end I think on the customer experiences piece it is so if you look at Netflix right and use Netflix because there’ll be Amazon video is an example Where It’s Entertainment meshed into e-commerce uh there’s already conversations of how do you use AI to drive product placements which could look different for Conrad versus me within the same environment there are also a video games uh where it’s you have more agency than just watching content and in there what is AI is trying to predict which type of gameplay are you willing to interact with it little bit more then you have the likes of Alibaba Amazon Walmart what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to personalize what you see on their websites one of their biggest assets is their real estate the digital real estate and right now if you go in there’s one store Banner for all of us by country so in US it might be a pair of shoes in the UK it might be something else and what these markets what these companies are looking at is how do you use AI to get something in there which will be dynamic and and so they are also able to add a revenue stream because they can get uh different incomes from different brands for the same real estate at the same time and show it to different people uh as well then if you go on to the simplest example if you go on to Amazon detail page if you scroll down they’ll also say you might also be interested in and that’s called Automation and personalization and that accounts for a large part of the sellout on Amazon nearly a third so there are very different ways uh that this is being used with I think AI combined with the likes of meta wore will really uh sort of uh shape the future for e-commerce personalized experiences in my view so M you talk when you talk about AI it was very much about the analysis and the insights and not just about the generative AI aspects which has dominated public imagin uh discourse and Imagination right now we have a question from Katie who actually I know took a online course on AI with me uh KT asks how will AI impact the need for agile fast Supply chains when an AI assistant could manage Our Lives reduce last minute buys for school work and home and could a move away from app purchases to AI orchestrated purchases change and influence brand loyalty and maybe reduce that kind of impulse buy yeah I think that’s it’s again such an excellent topic Supply chains are already even before AI came in Supply chains were reeling from what happened in covid right e-commerce Supply chains if you work in e-commerce you probably spent 2020 becoming a supply expert I suddenly knew everything about a truck Dimension so I think Supply chains were recovering postco and then came in Ai and you’re absolutely right KT what has happened is um there are decisions that used to take much longer in terms of inventory planning in terms of uh the stock orders in terms of uh planning your career to show up for a delivery Depot Etc they used to take a lot longer and sometimes in traditional Industries it still is sort of quite manual people getting around in a meeting to discuss how should that work but a lot of that is becoming algorith as well and what that means is Supply chains need to cope quite quickly so for instance instead of a simple example is instead of having to speak to a manager at say Walmart or Amazon or Alibaba you probably have a self-served portal now where you go in book in uh and then plan your uh purchase uh plan your uh inbound uh stock accordingly um but some companies are not great with it just now because it’s a different skill set so I think there’ll be a lot of work required on upskilling our supply chains uh and investing significantly in getting existing Supply chains to speak to the AI systems I think the piece you mentioned about brand loyalty and uh reduced impulse purchases it it’s an interesting one you’re right if AI could predict most of our needs and get that into our doorstep great I still think there’ll be room for some impulse purchases I think not all shopping is need- based uh a lot of is is as the words used retail therapy as well um so I think there’ll still be uh need there’ll still be a need for impulse also sometimes especially in healthcare it is an impulse-based purchase if you’re not feeling well you suddenly need a paracetamol from your Pharmacy but you’re not in a shape to go uh go pop over so you need your delivery app to uh send it to you so I think especially in the world of healthare sometimes in sports uh they’ll quite there’ll be quite a big piece for impulse buys but overall you’re right AI predictability and predictive analysis on shoppers means it’s a great opportunity for Brands to drive sticky relationships on the converse I guess that Brands will have to pay a lot more to have their products serve to customers when they uh customers ask AI well I want a pair of sandals or I want toothbrush or toothpaste right uh as compared to now where they actually a lot of times you go on a desktop at least in the west look through you can scan you can see stuff how will that happen when all you do is you just ask them an AI assistant yeah and this throws into question the objectivity of AI so you don’t you don’t want your product recommendations uh biased by commercial considerations of say one or two BR which might be the dominant forces in that category U so it is a very real risk Conrad and one that I I don’t think there’s a great answer for today different AI sources uh are um sort of working through to reduce overall biases whether they’re commercial they’re human and I think on the commercial side you’ll see one of one of the big biases that could be built in is the people building AI today are the dominant uh Brands today uh and then that would mean they could drive really entrenched relationships with customers and reduce some of the competition uh going forward so it is a very real risk and and one that I think there isn’t in my view a silver bullet answer for but I think there are non uh sort of corporate initiatives to build responsible AI ethical AI as well where uh it should be sort of consumer Le consumer needled uh as opposed to a brand Le uh uh narrative um so yeah we we’ll wait to see how that evolves in the near future Frederick from LinkedIn asked could you please elaborate more on AI and metaverse as that extrapolation perspective for customer experience and different revenue streams yeah 100% I think I’m really passionate about this I think when AI came in a lot of us are probably guilty of closing the door on meta um uh and that doesn’t sit right with me because in my view a lot of these Technologies need to be explored with and we currently don’t know what will come to Define web 3.0 AI is a very good bet will form a Corner Stone of it but there’ll be other Technologies and I personally think meta wore might be one uh we need to prepare for all of them some will fail one or two will stick and the way way I think Ai and metor can really come together is to in Rich uh customer experiences so what I mean by that is whilst AI May predict your purchasing Behavior right so here’s something that you’d like I let’s take an example you like uh music uh you like to play the piano uh AI knows you’re taking piano lessons and AI knows when is a piano purchase probably a good recommendation for you which is all done by AI then there’s the meta worse side of things where instead of just sort of going into a shop and looking at uh the few things available you could look at what are the experiences you can drive with a piano in your hand so you could set up local work local live streams uh within the uh sort of metaverse so this is where instead of people coming in from just your uh country you could try and think about how do you make tailored experiences for all of these different people who might be interested in some sort of piano music um the other way to think of it is in terms of collaboration AI is great uh in terms of you providing us with the tools things like co-pilot Etc but there’s probably still a need for better virtual collaboration so you have of course in person but how do we make virtual collaborations better and I think meta wore has a really strong role to play there where you get together in forums with your customers uh from across the world or you get together with your teams as well in terms of different revenue streams I think it’s experiences so for instance if you’re a sports-based brand you could drive completely new experiences on meta works so you could have tennis matches with big stars avatars streamed in into meta War as opposed to just waiting for weblon Cent coat and that could uh create a revenue stream uh imagine jovic versus fedra long after fedra is retired but you get to watch that in metae uh and sort of that could be a ticketed event so I think there’s there’s many many creative ways in which these two technologies can come together in my view so the uh predictors of Facebook Marketplace being dead are probably a bit premature they can they can still re reemerge then um sish I wanted to ask you something more personal for you what is the difference when you worked in Amazon where there’s lots and lots of categories versus now with ESS yeah um so I was involved entirely with the tech industry up until five years back so Google Amazon what I am what I would like to call sort of a disly native really passionate about all things Tech and I think five years back I switched to fmcg and part of the reason was taking the challenge of digital transformation what I mean by that is at the at the likes of the other organizations you mentioned Google and Amazon everyone’s pulling in the same direction um in in terms of Technology advancement uh the narrative is pretty clear is consistent uh everywhere uh whereas when you move from that sort of environment to a another organization which has fantastic Brands and I’ve been really lucky with s and my prior prior employer as well at recet with some absolutely gorgeous brands that they have and how do you then try and work with the organization and take the organization along on the journey where sometimes there might be entrenched ideas or apprehensions about say digitally activating Our Brands so I’ll give you an example what if this is not this is not an example from a specific organization but generally in the fmcg industry you might sometimes find that e-commerce expansions are sometimes associated with category value dilution what’s going to happen to my price when there’s so much transparency uh I used to Drive Great pricing with say the pharmacy sector but now that all the pricing is available online I’m not able to charge the same price premiums so it’s a big challenge in how do you as the subject matter expert expert take the entire organization along because that is the future so working with them to understand to help them understand that consumers are shopping there so it’s not a question of whether we should do it but it’s a question of how we should go about doing it in a way that both holds value for the category and the brand but also drives long-term really sticky customer relationships so I think the digital transformation and the organizational challenge was one of the reasons I made the switch sat sort of is focused on the healthcare side uh of things uh in my view and and so that’s that’s really sort of thinking of or also being showing the humility to learn about health care and then using the e-commerce expertise to marry those worlds to accelerate growth um yeah so that’s that’s the motivation for for the switch I think is it easier for uh a category like healthcare where presumably you want customers want more trusted Brands right to make that switch into e-commerce where you have your own website people uh trust when they go there versus other categories where you probably have to rely a lot more if they go on e-commerce through the likes of Amazon yeah I think it’s an excellent question Conrad you’re right that a lot of the healthcare Brands tend to have great pedigree behind them and have a lot of trust and it’s a category where trust is Paramount um and Brands really work very hard uh and invest a lot into driving that trust um so so that is absolutely right it’s not commoditized in in a way some of the other categories might be um and and that is uh that’s certainly helpful but at the same time healthare as a category itself is sometimes harder to convince people to do online so people might be comfortable buying their uh standard clothes or consumer electronics a laptop online they might be less comfortable buying a medicine online uh which they have’t sort of they want to have a chat with your local pharmacist hey I’m not feeling too well what do you recommend and as opposed to buying it online so I think there are advantages for sure it’s not a commoditized space but there also some challenges uh where uh how do you sort of how do you make sure that there are some of the consumers who might still be apprehensive how do you activate it for them uh in in a trustworthy manner where you can’t have a chat one-on-one like you can in some of the other environments you mentioned the cases where you have established Brands they’ve got relationships to sell through bricks and mortar establishments moving into e-commerce but we also see the reverse where people like Amazon dipping its toes into physical shops uh shien has physical shops what is the motivation for these e-commerce native uh kind of companies to have bricks and motor um shops yeah this is again this is so fascinating um one of my highlights of working at Amazon was visiting their uh prototype Amazon gohost store which is their cashierless convenience store in Seattle um at their headquarter building um and I think there are many motivations Conrad to be honest one is Amazon especially it’s a master in disruption it is a it is great at identifying a market cap and the market cap it has identified is retail shopping is inefficient so you go in layouts are changed every once in a while uh you wait in cues for very long uh it’s just not a great idea a great use of anybody’s time even though people might like shopping on uh shopping in the store what they don’t like is standing uh in front of the tills forever or just constantly having to look for products so Amazon firstly found an opportunity that it got thought it could disrupt uh so if you look at it now they have uh sort of 100 or so stores I think uh 500 I think in the US most of that is through the Whole Foods acquisition uh but then there are others which are Amazon go as I said the convenience store there’s also Amazon Fresh uh stores the grocery store uh and so they they found a way to to disrupt this uh I think the second is it’s a acknowledgement from Amazon endorsement that future of e-commerce is Omni Channel or the foreseeable you’re not going to see an end to brickin morar just yet so this is why I think e-commerce leaders need to be very uh clear about the fact that they want to activate for the total consumer not just e-commerce there very few people who exclusively shop online there many people who exclusively shop in store but exclusive online is still a smallest subset so you need to as e-commerce people we need to acknowledge that reality and be humble about it so this is an Amazon’s endorsement of it and I think there’s also the piece around the revenue stream as I like to go back to that word Amazon wants to crack efficient retail shopping so that it can license its technology off to other customers and it’s already doing it it’s licensing its uh scan technology and they have something called Amazon Palm which just reads the vein structure under your palm uh to let you in and the idea is to take these Technologies and then license it off to uh third party retailers uh and do up their stores which adds a new Revenue stream for Amazon so those are the uh big reasons I think Shane specifically it is if you’re a clothing company it always helps where people can come in and see your Styles and it’s grown to a point where it can afford the capex to open a few stores bring people in Amazon did something similar with Amazon fourstar stores so so this had products which were rated four and above and you can come in and physically touch and feel it was a branding play as well so I think there there’s many many factors but it also is a reinforcement that the future is Omni channel for now it’s not e-commerce exclusive and the last question comes from Frederick again on LinkedIn from a neurop physiological perspective the trigger stimulus to initiate a purchase decision uh when it when it comes to augmented reality would presumably have a lower threshold to surpass so what’s your opinion on this perspective yeah I’m just reading it again just to understand it fully so the trigger stimulus to initiate a purchase decision in relation to existing customer profile in relation to augmented reality would presume uh I don’t fully understand Frederick is this maybe you could sir ping in or send me a note on LinkedIn is this just saying that that uh because it’s always on there could be more purchases and because there is no active decision being made it’s just lower thresholds in terms of predictability and more and more products coming in so I’m happy for to take it up uh over over LinkedIn if you send me a note just so fully understand if I can reframe that question a bit uh I noticed on teu that it’s gamified the whole shopping experience is gamified and there’s all kinds of bells and whistles and sounds which to my uh older self I just can’t stand um I I hate this this whole Tik Tock ification of everything but do you see that um eventually there will be e-commerce that’s gamified that’s going to be live streams which I’ve seen in China do very effectively with and does that kind of environment drive more more purchases yeah yeah I think the opinion is split you’re right I personally The View that yes there’ll be more gamification of things going forward as more and more people start shopping especially sort of in the East you have this younger population that are coming into their own and have jobs and have uh larger disposable uh purchasing power and they they don’t want to just have a purchase transaction they want uh it to be greater than that um and that includes entertainment that includes gaming that’s not to say there won’t be places for a simple transaction but I think in this especially the super app model would mean there’s a lot of the adjacent benefits rather than just Commerce um is is my view really conr well I dread the day when my daughter takes my credit card and goes on to me and starts playing games while shopping but thank you so much for that uh overview uh we’ve learned so much about e-commerce it’s exciting and it’s some parts of it can be a bit distressing but thank you so much thank you for having me Conrad appreciate it and and thank you to our viewers the balance sheet will be back 24th May next Friday same time when we continue to look at the impact of AI this time in the m music industry so till then stay well stay safe see you next time …

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