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    Interview

    Interview: Navigating the Era of Profitability, with Jordan Jewell, Director, Analyst in Residence at VTEX

    As we begin the second decade of the digital shelf, focus has shifted from ecommerce and digital as a side experiment, to being a front and center part of the overall business. That means we must drive the process towards efficiency, cost control, and profitability for it to be sustainable. That’s why we have made April Profitability for the podcast, and Lauren Livak and I kick it off with analysis and insights from Jordan Jewell, former IDC commerce analyst and now analyst in residence at commerce platform provider VTEX. 

    Show Notes:

    Link to report: https://content.vtex.com/drive-ecommerce-growth-paper/

    Transcript:

    ​​Peter Crosby:
    Welcome to Unpacking The Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
    Peter Crosby:
    Hey everyone, Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. As we begin, the second decade of The Digital Shelf, focus has shifted from E-commerce and digital as a side experiment to being a front and center part of the overall business. That means we must drive the process towards efficiency, cost control and profitability for it to be sustainable. That's why we have made April profitability month for the podcast, and Lauren Livak and I kick it off with analysis and insights from Jordan Jewell, former IDC Commerce Analysist, and now analyst in residence at commerce platform provider VTEX.
    So Jordan, welcome back to the DSI podcast, and thank you so much for kicking off our profitability series for this month of April. We love to kick this off with you, thank you so much.
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here for the most wonderful time of the year, profitability month.
    Peter Crosby:
    Which hopefully will turn into profitability year and success forever. But I mean, besides your general brilliance, what brought you to mind for kicking this month off is that you recently put out some research sort of laying out kind of path that E-commerce has been going through, sort of the ages that they've been going through, the eras. And you say in fact we have now arrived at the era of profitability and E-commerce, kind of that shift from growth at all costs to adjusting to the strategies that are needed today based on where we're at and digital becoming so much a part of the business and needing to rationalize itself across an omni experience, et cetera, et cetera.
    So just walk us through a bit of your thesis of the research. What makes it true today, what does it mean and why does it matter?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah. So I'm a former analyst, I was at IDC for seven years and I wrote a lot of papers. So when I came here to VTEX about a year ago, I wanted to write a paper. I wanted to do a research paper, take that analyst approach, write a paper based off of interviews, not inherently trying to sell stuff in the paper. And I'll say, when I started off the process, my plan wasn't for it to be a profitability paper. This was like let's say even the first half of last year, 2022. The environment was very different, so what I kind of set out to do changed very quickly. It became very apparent when I was conducting these interviews, I was combing through census and other data put out by the US government about retailers, inventories and sales and stuff, that things were changing and that there was this focus on profitability.
    Essentially, we've kind of gone through three different eras, and those three eras are one, the era of the old normal, that's kind of everything up to Covid, so let's say the recession in 2008 up to Covid, there was kind of predictable growth during that period, a balance of growth and profits, there's measured investments during that period. And E-commerce was kind of viewed as a side project for a lot of organizations. And what you see if you look at... Everyone talks about online commerce when they talk about Covid, but both online and offline retail exploded in 2021 and 2020. So during that era, we really saw what I call the era of growth at all costs, and I don't know that retailers and brands were even thinking about it this way, they just had so much demand that they were just trying to fulfill that demand in a way. But every category was growing. There was a focus on growth. Companies were making moonshot investments, that's the era where things like NFTs were talked about a lot and that sort of more moonshot areas of commerce. And E-commerce was viewed as the savior, I say, during that period. It was keeping a lot of merchants afloat.
    And then the shift I found was, you could say the beginning of last year, 2022, was the era of profitability, where we are now. And inflation defined growth last year if you look at growth numbers. I can't remember off the top of my head, but let's say retail grew 9%, inflation was right around 8.8%, it's kind of that ballpark where most growth came from inflation. So the actual number of units a brand or retailer was selling was flat or even negative in a lot of cases, especially for electronics for instance.
    So focus on profitability, investments are more selective during this period, and E-commerce is viewed as important, but maybe a lot of companies are not diving into it just for growth. They're focusing on, how do I make sure this is actually profitable? And a data point I highlight in the paper that I think sums this up pretty well, we work a lot with Publicis Sapient, they helped with the paper, and they did a survey finding 37% of retailers actually responded and said E-commerce isn't meeting their profitability targets. So I think that's actually been a big challenge of E-commerce all along throughout its history, but it's really come up recently.
    Lauren Livak:
    And Jordan, do you think that was a lot because of what happened with Covid and where people saw that growth and adjusted and then haven't kind of swung back to what the new normal looks like from a profitability standpoint?
    Jordan Jewell :
    So when I presented at NRF earlier this year, the National Retail Federation Conference in January with one of our customers, Carrefour. Carrefour is the seventh-biggest retailer worldwide, they're huge, and Carrefour Brazil is the biggest retailer in Brazil. They bought up Walmart's business several years ago, so they're huge. And they're a public company just in Brazil. So our CEO Mariano and myself presented with the Chief Digital Officer of Carrefour Brazil, and one of the things he said to me is... Again, they weren't thinking not about profitability, if that makes sense, but they were again just so focused on growing. They were selling more... There was a data point, I can't remember it exactly, but they were selling more units online at any given hour, any given moment than they were in all their stores in all of Brazil at various points, which you never would've seen that prior to Covid.
    But last year when they were looking at their margins, they were realizing, okay, we actually, sounds crazy, we actually need to focus on our margins. We need to look at how we make these unit economics work better and whether that has to do with inventory, promotions, order fulfillment, whatever, we have to make this work better, because it wasn't headed in the right direction with inflation and higher interest rates and that sort of thing. Does that answer your question?
    Lauren Livak:
    Yeah, I think your point about shifting to thinking about margin is really the important piece that I got out of it, where it was first we saw all this growth and we saw all the change that happened with Covid, and now it's like how do we make it sustainable and how do we build it into our overarching strategy for the next five years?
    Peter Crosby:
    And that's always the case with innovation. Innovation is never cheap, rarely cheap, and in an environment where money's no longer free, and now not only E-commerce as a way of selling and buying products, but digital as an influencer of overall sales has become so material to the business, it's absolutely right and expectable that, okay, now we have to buckle down and figure out how to do this in a profitable way and earn the right margins to make this sustainable. Otherwise, all the innovation in the world won't save you if you can't then make it part of your business in an affordable way. Right, Jordan?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah, for sure. And another thing you asked, Lauren, I didn't really answer was, I'm kind of paraphrasing what you asked, but was it because of Covid, was this going to happen anyway? How does that kind of fit into all this? And I think there's a lot of talk about E-commerce, I think, like oh, we're back to the same trajectory we had before or that it just shifted demand earlier and that sort of thing. And part of what I found is when you actually look at the numbers, just the amount of GMV product people bought is just, it's going up a lot, particularly during that era of growth at all costs. That could be because of money being pumped into the economy to help with Covid, that could have been because people weren't traveling and doing experiences, we all know this stuff. But we have seen that demand kind of continue, we're still growing quite well, but again now it's because of inflation, so I think we are seeing it go back to more normal levels.
    So there's kind of a confluence of different reasons why, but it did shift, the economy accelerated and now we're kind of in a little bit of a hangover, I'll call it, at times, because everyone's got a ton of stuff as part of the reason. But I don't know if that helps at all, that also adds to the conversation.
    Lauren Livak:
    Yeah, and I think it's about how do brands and retailers survive in the era of profitability and actually be profitable. I mean, to say it very simply, what does that look like for them? And it seems very doom and gloom when we talk about inflation and all the negative things that we're seeing, but you have some suggestions for brands on what they can focus on, and what do you think they should be thinking about when it comes to existing customers versus acquiring new customers? What did you find around that?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah. I mean, that's the point of the paper, that's what it ended up being about. Now that we are in this era of profitability, if I am a brand or retailer and I have to just make three bets, three investments, what are they going to be? Very big question, but we came up with three. Number one is doubling down on existing customers. So this is something I found over and over when I was doing these interviews, and basically the idea is that about at an average, so based on what we found interviewing our customers and in the industry, about 80% of marketing budgets for a typical E-com manager, E-com director, 80% of marketing budgets go towards customer acquisition, so trying to acquire new customers. And over time it's gotten more expensive. So the cost per click was going up for a while, it's steadied, but the return you're getting on that has gone down. So in essence, the customer acquisition has gotten more expensive. And meanwhile there's an 80/20 rule where about 80% of profits come from those existing customers you have, ones who've bought from you before.
    And what we found is, we kind of created a matrix, I call it the customer profitability matrix, where if you map out your customer's average order values and how many times they've had a recurring order, you can kind of see which customers are contributing to your profit. Because one of my friends in the industry at SimplicityDX, Charles Nichols, he found that new customers don't actually contribute to your profit margin. And in many cases they cost, it makes sense, the customer acquisition is expensive, but they're actually a cost and you don't recoup that until they buy from you one or two additional times. So how can we just move that needle a little bit on that 80/20 rule so that we focus a little more on loyalty over acquisition?
    And there's a couple other areas under that umbrella that are important. Collecting more first party data from your customers so you understand them better. And being channel agnostic, so the customer is the channel, essentially, in this era of commerce we're in.
    Peter Crosby:
    So Jordan, as you know our listeners are brand manufacturers, not necessarily direct retailers, but a lot of them are doing a D2C motion where they can have... I mean, part of the reason for doing that is getting that first party data, and I'm sure like everyone, we're thinking, where can we get the most revenue from? And to your point, that 80/20, I put 80% of my budget into new logo or new consumers, not flipping that maybe, but certainly reallocating, and then thinking about what that motion looks like.
    Can you bring it to life for us in an example? I don't know, maybe where you see the gaps, like this is where I've seen it fall apart. And sort of walk us through how your matrix then helps somebody, our listeners sort of think through how they might approach their motion to existing consumers differently.
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah, and I'll admit, it's a great question because this clearly is more focused on, you could say retailers, but just more focused on we call it direct and organic recurring orders. So it's based more on, I am selling stuff through my own branded site, or at least where I can have access to that customer data, which I know you may not have that luxury on a lot of retailers or marketplaces. And even on social, some give you data, some don't.
    So the challenge is, you do have to have that data to be able to do this exercise. You do need to know, okay, how many times has a customer bought from me across channels, or some metric that helps you get to that point. You may not have great visibility, but whether it's even just from a marketing standpoint, you have data about that customers come to my site, they've browsed, then they left and bought elsewhere. Just being able to know, have some customer data I think is the main point, and knowing that your customers are organically engaging with you versus, I'm buying ads on Amazon and then they buy from me. Being able to move that customer further right and up in the quadrant because I have some data with them and some interaction with them, if that makes sense.
    Peter Crosby:
    Sure. Yeah, absolutely. And let's presume for a moment that we do have access to that data, what's an example of how you can use that data to drive the profitability that we're talking about and engage that consumer in a way that drives more of that more profitable recurring consumer sale?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Sure. I'm going to give you a really super simple one, or maybe two simple ones. Like something as simple as decent email copy, like marketing email copy, you'd be amazed how easy it is to tweak the copy in your emails to boost conversion. Most email copy's really like an autopilot, really bad with customers.
    One of our customers, this is I think a very common example, this is a retailer example, but one of our customers, a sporting goods retailer, they did a lot of one-time sales during Covid. You had all those people buying bikes, buying exercise equipment, that sort of thing, and they got that customer data. Again, they did get that customer data, it was on their site. But so many of those customers, I want to say 95%, only bought from them once. They came once, and then that was it. And in the past this retailer didn't have a mechanism to go back and remarket reach out to follow-up with, personally engage with customers, but they're doing that initiative right now. It's both a customer service initiative, it's a marketing initiative.
    And that was actually one of our findings overall, that when we think of marketing we think of buying ads, we think of email campaigns, that sort of thing. But customer service, if you do it right, is actually one of the biggest channels for acquiring new... Or getting customers to come back I should say, sorry, and marketing in general.
    So again, it is more focused on retailers or at least brands that own that customer data, whether it's a direct to consumer site. But I think the focus... If you just change the way you're marketing so that you're focused on bringing customers back more than once, whether that's SMS or live-streaming, live shopping, emails, whatever it might be, on bringing customers more than once because you know that will contribute to your profit margins, that's the approach to take, if that makes sense.
    Peter Crosby:
    Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And let's move to, so much of what's been driving unprofitability and E-commerce has been that backend of all of this, the inventory and fulfillment strategy and being able to do that while still meeting consumer expectations. What are some of your recommendations in that area?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah, so one of the next big findings... I mean this is investment number two, which is make inventory and fulfillment your strength. The finding was that all too often, fulfillment, inventory is kind of viewed as an afterthought, particularly if you think about shipping, it's viewed as a cost of doing business. A lot of retailers think about, okay, my SLA, how fast am I going to get a product to a consumer? That's a afterthought. If you're selling on Amazon, obviously Amazon's handling that burden, but in general, it's not thought of necessarily as a strategic differentiator. And what we've found is it should be. The way customers buy, whether it's on a marketplace, a retailer, your branded site, they're thinking of inventory and fulfillment kind of on the same pedestal as the product itself in many cases. So what if we focus on that more?
    And so what we did for the paper is I, again, former analyst, I developed a maturity model for, I call it the omnichannel maturity model, and mapped out five different stages of maturity that a brand or retailer can have when it comes to inventory, order management, fulfillment. And what I found is, based on our research, and we're working on additional research, but 55% of the organizations typically in retail and brand manufacturing are in those first two stages of maturity. So they've made some level of investment in some cases, but they haven't crossed the chasm to get to level three.
    And not every company I should say, need to be at level five. Level five would be Amazon themselves or a really big retailer with many fulfillment centers and that sort of thing. But most companies would benefit from being at stage number three or stage number four, where you're fulfilling quickly out of a bunch of different warehouses, or at least your site has updated inventory, the marketplace you sell to has updated inventory. And as a lot of brands know, if you don't have access to that, if you're not providing the marketplace updated inventory, that can really hurt your search rankings and where you show up on the site.
    So bunch of different things there, but we found that's really important and kind of one of the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to improving profitability. So the three under that umbrella are, treating fulfillment like a product, it's kind of at the same importance as the product itself, unifying inventory, making sure that how you fulfill to customers, you're thinking about that as a whole. And in some cases harnessing marketplaces, so selling your own marketplace, selling on different marketplaces, specialized marketplaces, we're big proponents of marketplace models at VTEX. But those are kind of the three we found.
    Peter Crosby:
    And Jordan, when you think about that, because being uneducated in inventory and fulfillment beyond luckily some experts I've been talking about, but I don't have direct experience with it, stage three and four kind of sounds like it would be expensive stages to me to invest in. And I'm wondering where you, assuming that that investment is needed to get to those stages, what is it that happens in the business when you're doing that right, that then makes it profitable? What are the outcomes that it drives because you're doing this in the right way, and do you have any examples of that?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Any investment you make in E-commerce, like at any level, ultimately you need to boost traffic or conversion, or else it doesn't matter. If your site looks amazing for instance, just one example, but you're not improving your conversion rates, then it kind of doesn't really matter. So just looking at it from that highly simplistic point of view, you're trying to boost conversion, you're trying to get more customers to click buy because your inventory is accurate, your fulfillment SLA is quick or again, just accurate. I think that's something that's really-
    Peter Crosby:
    It's meeting expectations, right?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah. I mean ultimately it's all about meeting expectations and then in some case, actually not under traffic or conversion rate, but reducing returns. The more accurate we found that your inventory and fulfillment is, the less likely a customer is to return a product because maybe it arrived too late, they didn't need it anymore. There's a bunch of examples about returns as well. And actually having a good return policy, you have to find the right balance, but having a good return policy also means that that'll boost your conversion rate as well. Does that make sense?
    Peter Crosby:
    Yeah, absolutely.
    Jordan Jewell :
    There's a few examples. We're working on a paper right now, a follow-up just on that topic, it's like it dives into the levels of the maturity model, goes into shipping, distributed order management, inventory, warehouse. What does that look like in each stage? And we have a few examples that we use, like Carrefour, the one I mentioned before, they moved from stage three to four for example. So again, the largest retailer in Brazil, seventh in the world, but they're one of the companies that made the move.
    An example of a smaller retailer that has done that is AL Sports, they're a sports retailer, and they moved from stage one to two. They still probably have a little ways to go, but to your point, Peter, I don't think they need to move to four or five, but I do think three might be a sweet spot for them eventually. They talk about how they want a Home Depot experience when you're online. They want you to be able to go on the site or on another retailer's site and see, where's the product? Is it in my local store? How fast can it ship to me? And that to be pretty seamless, and things like buy online, pickup in store, for that all to work similar to Home Depot as well.
    Lauren Livak:
    And I think the really key theme here too is that organizations, brands need to take a look at their fulfillment strategy and it needs to change, because the E-commerce world is different. It's faster paced, there's different types of strategies, you need more real-time data. So being able to look at that, deep dive, see where you are and see if you can manage the fulfillment that you need to be successful online is really important.
    And Jordan, when you think about how brands should be thinking about engaging with customers, so we talked a bit about part of the backend, inside the organization, how they think about fulfillment now. When they're engaging with customers, how should they be thinking about doing that in unique ways and what did you find were ways that were really helping?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah. And I think I even talked about this a little bit last time I was on your podcast, but one of the findings was that a lot of E-commerce looks the same, I would say. It's kind of become ubiquitous. And I would define-
    Lauren Livak:
    And by that, Jordan, you mean the experience of the consumer?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah, sorry. Mike Black, I think you know him pretty well, the CMO of Profitero, he says that there's been a homogenization of E-commerce essentially, and I interviewed him for this paper, but essentially, this is how I think about it. Amazon kind of defined what E-commerce looks like, so they defined that this is where the picture of the product goes, this is where the description goes, this is where content is. It's gotten better, much better over time, Amazon itself has, but I would say pretty much every site and retailer has kind of taken that mold and not innovated on it a ton, which I don't think is inherently that bad. I don't think you need to have a flashy looking site, whether it's on Amazon or your own T2C site, but I do think there is a desire, a hunger from consumers to engage with them differently.
    So the three I pinpointed was to lead with video, prioritize product pages themselves, I think they're overlooked, and having a more API first approach. And I want to talk a little bit more about the video aspect, which I think, again, I did last time. But a video's just more engaging. Customers are more likely, your conversion rates are more likely to be higher the more you use video on your product pages or on your homepage or whatever, and thinking creatively about how to enable that.
    So one of our customers, a retailer named FARM Rio, they do live shopping events. And what they found is the customers that are on those events, they have a twice as high conversion rate, the customers that show up on those feeds are twice as likely to buy from them.
    And I don't necessarily believe that any company who does these more interactive video events is going to see a huge boost like they're going to boost a certain cohort of their customers in conversion, but I will say there's a cohort of your customers who want more information about your products, they want to see it, they want to talk to someone about a product. I run a lot and I buy way too many running shoes, and I watch a ton of YouTube videos about running shoes, so that's a way that you can get those customers who want to see more, who want to engage more, to be able to do that with your brand.
    So there's a bunch of different ways. I mentioned live shopping, one-to-one conversations, conversational commerce that might be in a messaging app. Basically the summary is that brands and retailers can step outside of that traditional experience box and just enable their customers to interact with them and buy from them differently.
    And one of the points I made earlier was about collecting first party data. Some of those methods are really good for collecting first party data too. So if a customer goes to your live shopping feed for instance, that's data you can collect about how they interact with you there. If you're contacting them on SMS marketing, that's another channel you can use to collect data about them. So there's different ways you can do that.
    And then one final example is that that same retailer, FARM Rio, they do these live shopping events. And I mean frankly, doing these events is not cheap, you have to have the labor to film it and everything. So they then take those videos that they filmed where they're answering customer questions and then they stick it on their PDP. So they're getting more use out of that content. And that's often I think one reason customers scroll way below the fold on a product page is because they want to find out, answer some of those questions about a product.
    Peter Crosby:
    And Jordan, are you finding that... I'm just focusing on live shopping for a second just because we've seen some pullback around that in North America, and I'm wondering, how do you think about the future of live shopping in this next, say the next couple of years in North America? Are you seeing opportunities for it that it's sort of an undiscovered gem that might be worth leaning into, be ahead of the market? Or is this culturally... What are the roadblocks that you're seeing with that mode right now?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah. I mean, we're really bullish about it at VTEX, and I think part of that is we're originally a company based in Brazil, and a lot of our customers are out of LATAM, and it is more popular there. It mimics China a little bit more in that region. But my thought on the US and let's say Europe as well, which also hasn't caught on to the same, nearly to the same level, it needs to be different is my thought, and I know that feels almost like a cop out answer, but the idea is that-
    Peter Crosby:
    Do you hear that folks, it needs to be different. Go be different.
    Jordan Jewell :
    Well I mean, yeah. I think Amazon's a great example of this. On their Prime Day they did a, Amazon video I think it was called or Amazon Live, I can't remember, they've rebranded it a couple times. And it probably was the biggest live shopping event, at least in North America for sure, but probably outside of China ever. And if you scroll through those videos, they're okay. They're not great videos and I don't think they were super successful. And there's a few reasons for that, but I just-
    Peter Crosby:
    Sorry, can I ask you, when you say the biggest, you mean the most number of viewers attending?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yes.
    Peter Crosby:
    Okay. And then when you say it wasn't successful, it didn't drive the revenue they were hoping or?
    Jordan Jewell :
    I mean, I'm assuming. I unfortunately don't have access to their planning for those, but I would say... I mean, you can tell based on their press releases about the Prime Day, and then they did a second Prime Day, they called it something else. But you can tell by the press releases that it wasn't as successful as Prime Day itself. I mean, they were trying to unload inventory, that was their goal, and I think they somewhat succeeded.
    But there's a few reasons I think it didn't work, and a key aspect is if you look at live shopping, and obviously I don't live in China, I'm not fully engaged with their live shopping there, but if you've look at how it's evolved a lot even in two or three years and how it occurs there, it started more, as I understand it, on retailer sites and has transitioned more towards some of these super apps like WeChat or Alipay, those super apps where you can do everything in one app. And that's part of the reason it's been successful there. There's also a much bigger live-streaming culture.
    But we haven't really done that here. A lot of retailers, and we think there's a lot of opportunity for retailers to do it, but the point is I don't think people were going to amazon.com to watch a stream, that's not typically why they go there. So I think we need to have, like if you think of... Like my dad used to buy tons of watches from this guy named the Watch Commander on TV, to give you an example, way too many watches, and I've been surprised we haven't seen more of that to give you just one example. I'm surprised we haven't seen Amazon, who owns Prime Video, kind of stick shopping on there. Listen to this example, Amazon.
    Peter Crosby:
    Yeah, like live shopping show where the consumers are to have that experience, not trying to inject it into something where that's not their expectation.
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah. And I mean, it's going to be more expensive here than it is going to be in China. The labor is just more expensive. So I think we need more creative ways to use that video to make it profitable. So that example of-
    Peter Crosby:
    Oh, I'm sorry. No, keep going.
    Jordan Jewell :
    I'll finish really quick. That idea of putting it on PDPs so you're reusing the video, or you could even put it in some sort of a frequently asked question section, or I think there's a lot of opportunity in the US for one-to-one engagements. Live shopping's usually talked about as one to many, it's someone presenting to, I don't know, a thousand people on the stream. But actually going a one-to-one sale and walking a customer through buying that product, probably more aligns better for luxury goods or at least higher ticket items, but I mean, if you can make that sale and boost the conversion, I think there's a good opportunity there as well.
    Peter Crosby:
    Yeah, I think when we think about profitability, we'll be talking about this more this month, so much of it is around automating the manual and automating the expensive.
    And just to close, I was wondering if you have any analyst style insights into the possibilities of video generative AI? Are you tracking that at all? And do you feel like there's... Because we're starting to see that in content creation for PDPs, not that you can take humans out of it yet, but being able to create a lot of great starter stuff. And I'm wondering if you're seeing that in the near term where that might work?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah. I mean, to your point, I mean I don't think our customers are doing this, not that I know of, but with some of the generative AI, you can create pictures of the product from AI. I mean, you don't want hands in it or else it'll look really creepy, but otherwise it'll do a pretty crazy job. Yeah, I mean I think the idea of some of live shopping and that sort of thing, and a lot of these examples is, it's things that it's to replicate what it's like to go in a store largely. So part of the problem with E-commerce is, there's a few problems, but one of them is that product discovery is kind of broken online, or if they have questions, it's hard to find information, that's why people go to YouTube to look up information about products quite a lot. So it's to close some of those gaps.
    I think, certainly with things like chat bots, AI can answer a lot of questions and do so very efficiently. That's probably the lowest hanging fruit I imagine, and you talked about writing the product page content, copy, that's definitely an example. And I think even so far as, or the example of creating different versions of the copy so you're not reusing the same exact copy on Amazon, Walmart, and another retailer, because you understand that slightly tweaking it might work better for a different set of customers.
    I think there's a lot of opportunity there. Specific to this kind of engagement models umbrella, I don't... Most of the examples are kind of... And I will say, this is the investment that's like the more... I don't think any of these are moonshots, but this is the one that's like the more hopeful I guess I'd say, in that you're trying to boost conversion and it's going to be more manual by definition in a way.
    Peter Crosby:
    Test and learn until you can scale it. Yeah, that makes sense.
    Jordan Jewell :
    Exactly.
    Peter Crosby:
    So Jordan, there's so much more in your report and the matrix to dig into and a bunch of other stuff. Is there a way that we can send people to a page so that they can download the full report?
    Jordan Jewell :
    Yeah, I don't want to read out the URL and I think it'll be in the show notes, but you can also reach out to me, Jordan Jewell, I'm on LinkedIn or jordan.jewell@vtex.com, and I'm more than happy to just share it with you. But yeah, there's like a landing page and we'll be sharing it elsewhere, but I definitely highly encourage anyone interested just to reach out to me and I can share it.
    Peter Crosby:
    Yeah, it will be in the show notes for sure, so go there or connecting with Jordan on LinkedIn is just a good idea to do anyway, because he says smart things.
    So Jordan, thank you so much for joining us and for bringing this mindset to our profitability month on Unpacking the Digital Shelf, we really appreciate it.
    Jordan Jewell :
    Of course. Glad to be here, thank you both.
    Peter Crosby:
    Thanks to Jordan for kicking off profitability month on Unpacking the Digital Shelf. More wisdom to come, stay tuned. Thanks for being part of our community.