EP137 - Amazon Prime Day and Listener Questions

Industry News

NRFTech Peter Schwartz GetSpiffy Fund Raise Google Express Traction

Amazon Prime Day

Amazon Press Release  USA Today Recap Target results on Prime Day

Listener Questions

Joan Abrams asks: How important are progressive web apps going to be for retailers? Any retailers doing this really well yet?

West Elm Example: https://mobile-beta.westelm.com/

Julie Acosta asks: Any updates on multi-touch attribution models/partners - who’s doing online/offline (brick & mortar) right?

Upcoming Events

Jason is doing retail visits in Australia July 21 - 29.  Ping him on twitter if you’re there. Jason and Scot will be doing shows from eTail East (8/6 - 8/9 in Boston)

Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes.

Episode 137 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Thursday, July 19th 2018.

http://jasonandscot.com

Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at SapientRazorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing.

Transcript

Jason:
[0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 137 being recorded on Thursday July 19th 2018 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 show listeners Jason how is your summer going.

Jason:
[0:48] It is going traffic I am just starting sort of a.
A heavy travel session for me so I just got back from San Francisco and I leave on another trip tomorrow but I I feel like the big news this week is I read that spiffy got some new fun thing so congratulations.

Scot:
[1:08] Thanks yeah so for listeners that may not know so I started Channel advisor 2001 move to exact chairman in 2015 moved over 250 full-time I kind of,
experiment with it in 2014 and overlap there and yeah it's been fun so we are on demand Car Care started with car wash with added oil change and now even have some products on the market so we have a cool iot device called spiffy blue that you
plug into your vehicle and there's a companion app that tells you all that's going on with your car.
A passionate about
Digital Services I think that's kind of where the future is going so decided to put my money in time where my mouth is and we just raised our second round this week so it's good to get that behind us so we can keep servicing customers.

Jason:
[2:03] That's awesome and you keep expanding in the cities to right right right you where are you now.

Scot:
[2:09] Get 1/5 we're holding firm at 5 right now cuz we have this explosion of Fleet business so e
we started out really with optispark with consumers at office parks and Residences and then we added oil change it unlocked Fleet so we we've been
kind of adjusting as much Fleet as we get on our plate and it will be adding more City suit store in Raleigh Charlotte
Dallas Atlanta and Los Angeles now.

Jason:
[2:35] Awesome I'm kind of sad because I am assuming that the climate in Chicago means I'm not going to be next on your list.

Scot:
[2:42] Yeah we've identified our first 50 cities and unfortunately Chicago is not in the first 25 but will eventually get to you.

Jason:
[2:51] Not I will be waiting or I'll just move I'll just get so frustrated at my lack of spiffy then I'll move.

Scot:
[2:56] Yeah yeah there's stairs five markets for you to retire to that maybe we'll get you there.

Jason:
[3:02] Nice I like the thought of retirement.

Scot:
[3:06] Couldn't you just in San Francisco at the NRF retail Tech any interesting things you want to give us a trip report on there.

Jason:
[3:14] Yeah you'd be happy too so there's an interesting show interruptus had this show for a number of years and it's mainly been focused on the CIO and CTO.
So they sort of had a private party for a number of years I think for a long time it was.
Permanently located in Half Moon Bay then it may have moved around a little bit so it may have gone to Laguna Niguel one year and San Diego last year.
But there was also a digital merchandising show that that that shop.org put on,
MN that shows been retired and see what they kind of done with interests Tech is they've expanded the temp to include all the,
the digital Business Leaders and have more more overlapping content for cio's and business leader so I would,
I'm not sure if that interests agrees with this definition exactly that I would characterize this is sort of the second year.

[4:10] Where this the show has a broader scope in and I think it was interesting content and I think I think all of us that attended.
Got a lot out of it so it was two and a half days.
In San Francisco of pretty jam-packed content and it's a you know it's a smaller venue with smaller group so it's much more intimate like you basically have an opportunity and network with everyone else that attends and.
You know it's it's it's more what I would call a a conference then like a big exhibition show it.

Scot:
[4:47] What were some of the key takeaways.

Jason:
[4:49] Yeah it's a different number different topics that they're too many speakers to go over everyone one that I was practically looking forward to is Katie Finnegan,
so she runs a store 8 for Walmart which is Walmart's incubation lab and.
She I think she she was the founder of the couple startups that Walmart Acquired and she kind of laid out their methodology and it's it's interesting to me because they're there been a bunch of retailers that I've had internally incubation labs in.
I think it's fair to say on the aggregate that they haven't actually been that successful.
And the Walmart one you know is is these are wholly-owned LLC so if you Walmart is essentially going to acquire you and then incubate you and sit in there all kinds of.
You know questions that come out you know what is the exit look like for the the founders in the management team and you know how to define answers work and what are the success criteria and all those sorts of things so it's kinda interesting.
I think Katie is like pretty realistic about the track record of retail incubation Labs insert you know she she was pretty candid about.

[6:06] Where where they felt like they had the problem solved and where they thought like you know they're still open questions to be answered and she she kind of painted this maturity model and you know she highlighted several several.
Companies that are in the story labs and where they are in that maturity model and so the.

[6:27] If they're six stages of maturity you know,
the most mature thing they have is this jet black which is kind of at the third stage of maturity.
Which is this kind of um concierge personal shopping service and delivery service in New York City and some most of what they have is even earlier than that.
So that was interesting was interesting to hear her thoughts about incubation in general and then some of the specific initiatives Walmart had.
You know a bunch of gas from the show we're speaking they're so so Billy May who's the the CEOs or the table was on.
A panel talking about.
How how to prioritize technical initiatives within the company Rob Schmaltz who's been on the show from Talbots did a did a couple of channels.

[7:25] The John Nord Mark has been on the show for his iterate.
Incubation lab he brought in a couple of the companies in in his lab to kind of talk about new.
New companies and there was also some the VCU that had some of their companies and so.
There is kind of some interesting startups that we got to hear from and chat box there's a company called Shadow research.
And there's a ton of newer Marketplace aggregator called hinge to which you may be more familiar with I wasn't super familiar with them.

[8:09] As you well know you know tons of interest in traction in the in the marketplace space going on.
And in the very last speaker sound pretty interesting and.
I think I think we need to get him on the show so it's a it's a guy named Peter Schwartz who's a futurist.
And I think he's got like a boondoggle job for salesforce.com so he's the head futurist for salesforce.com.

[8:40] The listeners may be more familiar with Peter Schwartz his work he's the main character that the Matthew Broderick character was based on in the movie War Games.
So he was like literally a young hacker that broke into some government databases and he was a consultant on the movie War games and several years later he as a futurist he partnered with Steven Spielberg to do.
Paint a picture of what the future would look like for the movie Minority Report so all those famous scenes of.
You know facial recognition triggering customer have ads inside the Gap in The Minority Report where ideas that that he put together.
It's got a ton of fascinating stories he said when we were brainstorming Minority Report we thought we were,
we are thinking about what the future would look like in 2040 or 2050,
and he's like basically everything that we had in that movie like is now here and it's 2018 so he's like you know we may have gotten some of the ideas right but we were way wrong on the.
On the timer iser.

Scot:
[9:48] I love those two movies Joshua spoiler.

Jason:
[9:54] Exactly exactly so he was interesting and it was silly but he's like.
He's an older gentleman and he's like I'm 72 years old on the oldest employee at Salesforce and the irony is not lost on me that the oldest guy tells horses responsible for the future.

Scot:
[10:12] What did he predict.

Jason:
[10:18] Yes so he we talked about a bunch of things.
We talked about Ai and that's an interesting one because I feel like there's kind of two camps I think there's people and maybe Elon Musk is in this Camp to think.
The AI is super dangerous and that the Killer Robots are coming and Peter Schwartz was like that's not what's happening with the AI that we have now and heat you know he made his Arguments for why.
We we like we really aren't making very fast progress on General AI that has sort of generalized intelligence that could become sentient.

[10:52] But he did talk about a bunch of the risks with the kind of AI that is emerging and he talked about like,
you know in the near future when all these AI,
algorithms are deciding like what medicine what Medical Treatments we qualify for and whether or not we get credit and all these things you know will there be.
Transparency about all those decisions and what rights are we having and things like that so is his POV on on.
Hey I was a little less like.
Daunting and then some folks and we talked about the future of work you had a lot of folks that think that like all the jobs are going to get eliminated by all this Automation and that you know we're all going to be sitting around without anything to do and again he kind of felt like that.
That wasn't likely to be the case cuz he kind of talked about how hey you may not have a lot of people sitting in truck driving trucks around that he envisions is future we're just like we have all the Air Force drone pilot sitting in Las Vegas.

[11:53] Fly the planes over Afghanistan and then go home to their families in Las Vegas that you could have a ton of.
Truck drivers that are moving trucks on it you know through the commercial residential streets and then getting them on the highway where they drive autonomous way and you know it.
Some some data points to support his his hypothesis is that.
Lots of New Jersey jobs emerge to replace the jobs that tend to go away.

Scot:
[12:20] Nursing school any other highlights.

Jason:
[12:24] Those were some of the stuff that they jumped out to me there are a lot of like sort of topic-specific stuff so you know topics about Big Data topics about how.
To hire how to structure Innovation and companies you know so there there was a little something for everyone in their butt butt.
I feel like those are those are some good highlights and I was a little distracted through the whole thing because I feel like there's some other e-commerce stuff going on at the same time.

Scot:
[12:57] Yeah it's been a busy week in the world of e-commerce and and since we're coming off Prime Day 2018 we thought we'd jump in the news and start off with.

[13:25] Yes let's start off with the prime day got off to a rough start with I know you were tracking that and I saw you at least quoted two or three times out there in the Press what what did you make of that.

Jason:
[13:36] Yeah so I mean I'll start out by saying I was completely surprised and caught off guard I feel like
Amazon has had a shockingly good record of reliability on all these peak days and so if you would have asked me up front to like make a bed on,
on which retailers were likely to suffer an outage during up a peak event I would not have picked Amazon so I was,
someone surprised that they had this outage right off the bat while to talk about like what the impacted the outage was and forms of hurting,
the revenue hurting their Prime subscriber is hurting sales of there their first party products.

Marker 01

Scot:
[14:16] Yeah what when does Herzing is it on Twitter

Marker 02

[14:21] people discovered that if you use the smile you no interface where you anything you buy donates money to a charity and I had previously set that up and I was able to go through smile I was are down for
are the first four hour but I was able to go to smiling and get it to work which
to be made it feel more like a networking thing I never know what happened but it was unusual to me that there were were little slices that were working.

Marker 04

Jason:
[14:46] Yeah for listeners that haven't been responsible for sort of peekaboo ability like I'll highlights.
Prime day is is perfectly designed to be the worst case scenario for a i t system standpoint right like you're number one we have,
all of this traffic coming at the same hour right like so you had this huge Peak which if you're really worried about up time you would try to do something to spread out that demand more but even worse.
With all of these short-lasting deals and all the personalization on the Amazon site very little of the of the Amazon Prime day experience can be cashed,
so you know they're all these things that you like where you would kind of compromise the customer experience.
To make it easier to load on the servers if you were really worried about availability and and Prime day is a perfect storm of like all the all the best customer experience practices that are you know.
Extra challenging for the it guys and so so obviously you know it it did come to bite them somehow this year.

Scot:
[15:54] Yeah well we'll see if they'll get better that's the thing you weren't about Amazon this when they take on the stuff that they learn a lot and then they they get better.

Jason:
[16:02] So I'm one thing that I'll be curious about him hopefully some of some of our friends that are.
Marketplace hours on the site maintenance may be able to share some insight here but if you were a prime deal that had one of those early slots and you were disrupted.
Like I'll be curious to see if Amazon does any kind of make good for for those vendors or they just missed their window or or how they're handling that.

Scot:
[16:27] I tried it with three or four people not specifically about this outage thing and they had deals going at that time and they said that there are deals sold out in,
but even faster than I thought they would so so it's weird it does seem to be and I saw a heat map that showed there was only certain cities were impacted so it's it's kind of an anomaly to me,
to my knowledge AWS itself wasn't down so,
yeah it's definitely specific to Amazon's phone usage of their infrastructure which kind of points do your data thing or some kind of an internal just their Network
just there their slice of the whole AWS Network it is kind of a mystery.

Jason:
[17:07] It'll be interesting to see if any more info weeks.
A side note I think we're also some reports from Amazon Flex drivers that the flex app was down which I like also sort of boron my my theory that maybe there is some product data problem.

Scot:
[17:25] So despite all that they estimates are out that they did about 3.5 billion
and I believe that's up from 2.4 last year Amazon doesn't release date the Allies frustratingly give you like little clues of how the day went,
I'll talk in terms of
growth in unit numbers ish kind of things so those are all estimates of how big it was it was 6 hour
first longer this year social apples and oranges and that comparison and then you and I were kind of talking in the
pre-show in The Green Room the virtual Green Room that it's in more countries this year for sure Australia is its first year at Prime day so hopefully they had an exciting time down under you can go so I report cuz you're going to Australia soon settle be exciting you can kind of
tell us how they felt about prime day.

Jason:
[18:14] Exactly just to answer your question I booked a trip tomorrow.

Scot:
[18:18] Good good thinking my advice is to make sure you download a lot of movies.
And then yeah did you happen I know you like live on top of a Whole Foods or something like that did you happen to go into a whole foods during the prime day excitement I know a lot of people were
we're trying to take advantage of some deals are there something where you could on Prime day you got $10 off in the store and online if you wanted that day.

Jason:
[18:44] Yeah yeah so I did not get to take advantage of myself I do live in very close proximity to A Whole Foods but I was of course down in.
In San Francisco so I didn't get to experience it first-hand but all the reports that I've seen is,
it probably was very favorable in the whole foods that like you know the the month leading up to it that they had really like done a good job is starting to roll out Prime benefits and so they kind of trained a bunch of the.
The whole food choppers that would also Prime members till I get the Whole Foods app for Eddie and you know
arguably some of the best financial deals that they offered work you know you you if you gamified everything at Whole Foods you essentially could get $30 in extra.
Extra cash which is you know on I'm not significant amount of purchase it so that you know that that was pretty substantial.

Scot:
[19:35] It's like 2% off my average Whole Foods check out.
A couple of observations from my side on Prime day.
You know that the sales every noise focuses on the sales but I've kind of come to believe that that yeah that's part of what Amazon is going for there but they're real benefit you know they're probably out ways so it say it is three and a half billion
the real benefit comes from the the juice that flows into the ecosystem elements that Amazon has because of.

[20:08] Prime day so it's the first of all you have a bunch of prime sign up so they don't reveal that obviously but they in the past they said things like you know
tens of millions of sign-ups for Prime day in those kinds of kinds of numbers this year there, as you point out leveraging that Whole Foods intersection so so if she reports that say prior to that position there's only 40% overlap there between Whole Food Shoppers and Prime
members so that that's like a huge audience that they can get over in the prime they're obviously focused on that
I also saw a report that they they announced a million connected home devices were sold on the show here a week then I would.

[20:47] Pat ourselves on the back with an early on this that we felt like,
Echo and all of its Associated devices Alexa power devices that were really big opportunity for Amazon and now they're selling a million units in one day
36 hours is pretty amazing another one that we've been pretty early on it is talking about the ads that that we think,
Amazon ads are going to be pretty big and we're seeing you have cpgs and Brands really spend a lot of money there everyone I talk to at a brand head
really dialed up their ad spend during Prime day so so that's a really,
kind of cool Catalyst that Amazon has for getting people to really come on to that platform experience it on a day that's pretty crazy and hopefully you know from the Amazon site at least get addicted
kind of tangentially do that before Prime day one of the when I think the smartest Wall Street guys on this is John Blackledge accountant he has raised his ad number for Amazon just add number 236 billion in Revenue over the next five years.

[21:53] So that that's almost like the quote on Facebook
I am a size scale business that he believes Amazon will be building over the next five years obviously that's Facebook today in 5 years Facebook will be bigger but just trying to get a little scale to it
because that's a just kind of insanely big number.

[22:11] There is some last couple things kind of around this idea of the ecosystem the benefits and aside from the sales third-party sales were reported to grow 89% this from cnbc's numbers and orders were up 69% so
how it was you know it in some years we seen Amazon,
Prime day the traffic gets absorbed by kind of the Amazon first party and owns products and private labels and that kind of stuff this year they did a really good job of splashing it all through the marketplace so
so we saw anecdotally talk to a fair number third-party sellers that just had a very robust Prime day and there's that CNBC data
and then singing Brands it was interesting to see the brands that participated so you had by participating.

[23:00] Spotlight on that home page of deals so you saw a lot of this around
why is offline so it was Under Armour Wrangler Champion Columbia Calvin Klein Adidas and Reebok and then interesting Lee it's also who didn't,
play so Nike to my knowledge I never saw them and I've read a lot of the the reports of folks that track
this pretty closely they did not participate in Prime day in a meaningful way Skechers Haynes Converse and Ralph Lauren so
so those are some other interesting kind of aspects of prime day to think about is yeah the sales are good and you can't sneeze it over 3 billion dollars
but I think they're real benefit it was probably another 5 or 6 billion comes from these ecosystem impacts.

Jason:
[23:48] Yeah for sure and I don't know if you saw it I thought it was actually from the Amazon press release but one of the things that they did claim is that it was the biggest day,
single day ever for Prime signups so they added more people on Prime day than they ever had before which isn't surprising.

Scot:
[24:06] Yeah so your guess the last highest was last Prime day.

Jason:
[24:09] Oh I think they did say that again that last year so I think they they exceeded last year's already good numbers on Prime signups just sort of highlight in your point.
Another thing that they put in the press release it's also kind of fun is they like,
the Highlight the best selling on Amazon products and every country which hours I think it's always interesting to just look at the trends there,
so I think I'm almost across the board in every country that the prime products the Amazon products are the best seller or so the fire in the.
The echo stuff but not on Amazon stuff in the US and Canada the instapot is the the best selling item,
and there's a bunch of other countries where,
the best selling item is kind of high ticket consumer good so you know there's some countries were TV sold particularly well the video game platforms were really good sellers in a bunch of countries.

[25:13] Yes I'm like.
Expensive SD memory cards were big sellers in a bunch of countries but then what's interesting is there's another whole set of countries,
that have like 3 different shopping behaviors and you see like.
Everyday essential consumer consumer packaged Goods being the big sellers right so so like you know some some food item or something like cleaning soap or something like that right and so you know there is
kind of bifurcation of the countries where where I feel like you know their grocery shopping is still predominantly.
Brick-and-mortar and they use e-commerce for all these these high-ticket items and then there's you know countries where all the shopping is it shifted to e-commerce until you see things like laundry detergent being the,
the best prime day item in Japan for.

Scot:
[26:09] Yeah they sold over 300,000 of those were they called cooking pots that's crazy.

Jason:
[26:14] Yeah the instapot is a crazy phenomenon in and of itself online and offline but but yeah it's up it's a fast mover on Amazon.

Scot:
[26:24] It was also interesting to see what other retailers John Prime day there I think it's kind of funny Amazon has them kind of Anna
a check kind of a medium Checkmate kind of position do they ignore it or do they participate do they mention Amazon what what did you see there.

Jason:
[26:40] So tender retailers have sales and to me it's a no-brainer that you should have a sale on Prime day like I think it's it's so in the ethos of e-commerce Shoppers now that it's a shopping day
that you really missed out if you didn't have some promotions to push people over the edge and I would argue especially since that first hour had this outage if you went to Amazon and you had a glitch,
you're one click away from buying something somewhere else and so you know I think other retailers could definitely,
not to the same level as Amazon but you know there definitely is a halo effect for the whole whole e-commerce industry and you know without naming any names I can tell you,
I had probably half a dozen clients that had their their top sales day of the year on Prime day and so.
It is absolutely a big shopping day that has a broader effect than just Amazon I think the interesting strategy is.
Do you call the back to school sale do you call it you know Cyber Monday into like you know do you just have it be a promotional day or do you overtly.
Yum Soda counter program.
The Amazon and call it Prime day like you know that potentially could help you from an SEO standpoint but you know you're also sort of.

[28:03] Promoting your competitor and acknowledging their success in and you know psychologically you're celebrating their birthday ironically enough.
So I think we saw some retail delivery over it we had prime Day sales and some details though it'll more more subtle about it.
And then when the outage happened I think you know what's going around on Twitter that like Office Depot sent out sort of.
A smart aleck email you to telling Shoppers that is.
They're tired of looking at pictures of dogs that they could come shop on on Office Depot and I have to be honest that just feels like tempting fate and in sort of kicking a monster that you don't want to kick.

Scot:
[28:47] Yeah yeah it's like doing live demos it just Murphy's Law is just begging begging for attention when you do that.
Call any other Amazon things you want to cover before I move on.

Jason:
[29:02] No I think those were all the sort of big things that jumped out at me.

Scot:
[29:11] Cool so it was a couple of weeks dominated by Amazon but in the anonymous on side you know one thing I wanted to talk about is kind of the biggest news and marketplaces that's really gone unnoticed
we talked about a little bit on the show but I wanted to try to Circle back is in
you know some confusing marketing but the Google within the Google Express system they have
this new offering called a c I forget about it shopping action and it's essentially where you can buy things so to mobile kind of AD unit.

[29:46] We're supposed to be at Marketplace we can check out right on the Google page so so that's interesting and you know they are adding a ton of retailers to the program and I guess it's a little self-promotional but but
side of the channel visors are partner of theirs and a large number of those folks are coming through our connections into that new market place so
I know Google is Steve always been flirting with the marketplaces and she feels like they've got a little more religion on it this time I kind of feel it this is the time of year one
everyone's really kind of ramping into you know
Q3 obviously but then you know here as we get into the end of Q3 will be Full Throttle talk about holiday so that's going to be I think one of them interesting things to watch this holiday is how serious does Google get about this
plus we seen some retailers like Urban Outfitter has launched the marketplace you know there's there's a bunch of other things that are going on out there so
why really interesting things going on under the radar in the rotor marketplaces that I think they're just getting
hot not not like covered or talked about because of all the exciting stuff Amazon's doing with things I promise.

Jason:
[31:00] Yeah yeah for sure and I do think the Google offerings are
there still is a little confusion out there because there are kind of a couple different Commerce statuses that you can have with Google so so obviously you know Google still has this Google Express system where they at where you get they'll accept orders from.
A bunch of retailers and then like a Google employee will actually pick up that order from that retailer and deliver it to you and I think as you pointed out there's been some recent traction with new retailers joining ecosystem.
Like separate from that other they can they can be married together is this Google shopping actions which is like.
The most low-friction way Google has ever had to actually buy a product out of a Google promotional spot right and so you know I think.
Originally launched as a pilot and and you know it was kind of hard to get in the program now they've opened it up.
And I think we're seeing lots of people for certain types of products.
Take advantage of those Google shopping actions I still feel like the industry needs a little more expertise around that.
Offering um I'm always surprised how unfamiliar people are with it and then there's this even weirder status there are.

[32:21] Unique Partnerships from retailers with Google to be able to sell products through the Google home device and so Walmart and Target for example,
are not in Google Express at the moment but they are selling their products through the Google home Echo System until.
You know between all that your you know I think there's more Commerce activity in the Google echo system than we've ever seen before.

Scot:
[32:47] Yeah yeah it's largely not getting talk about Skylanders I guess in some ways it actually gives Google some space to go and experimenting and I have like a thousand spotlights on them
well well all this Amazon stuff happening so we had what we have been
I had a very busy summer so we are a little delinquent and getting to some listener questions so we have a little bit of time here on the podcast and want to jump into a couple of them that have been lingering out there and
Jason I get to kick back and relax on these cuz they're both for you
so first we have Joan Abrams and Joan ask how important are progressive web apps going to be for retailers are there any retailers doing this really well yet so maybe,
let's make sure we started the Top Gear what's the progressive web app how does that differ from a native web app or a responsive site and all that kind of stuff and then you can jump into the importance and then any retailers that they are doing a great job.

Jason:
[33:47] So great question so Progressive web app is a slightly unfortunate name cuz it makes it sound like.
This is an alternative to a traditional Native app.
And well it potentially can be that I would argue that it's much more than that essentially it's a set of standards for a way to build a mobile web experience that runs natively through the web browser.

[34:14] And they been supported by by Google Chrome which is very important mobile browser for some time.
But they were very poorly supported or not at all supported in Mobile Safari which is the next usually important mobile browser,
and so what exciting is as of the last iOS released there's now. Port for Progressive web apps in both Chrome and Safari,
which is essentially the bulk of Shoppers on mobile and so there's a bunch of.
Tools that you can use to build a website and then there's this feature called remote workers which essentially gives you,
the capability to add.
Native app like functionality to the web experience and have it even function offline so have it work even if you don't have,
I'm connectivity so for example.

[35:19] Google can have a Google Maps or Gmail experience that lets you,
you know. Calculate directions in in Google Maps or or you know reading compose emails even if you're in airplane mode,
by leveraging use these remote workers and what's super important and unique about Progressive web apps is,
did the really designed to be performance efficient and so by following the the the the pwa standards you end up with a mobile web experience,
it's much faster and much more responsive than.

[36:04] Traditional responsive mobile web designs were into the site performs much faster and it can have a richer future set it can essentially have,
almost all the features that you can have in a native app and so one thing you could do with it is build a native app that didn't require the App Store and that.
That is a huge thing because a lot of customers don't know how to download apps from the app store or they have app fatigue and if your retailer and your bill all these cool functions in your amp,
Nobody ends up using them because apps have such a small reach but you have you put the same features in your mobile web experience using pwa,
you know anyone that goes to your url like instantly has access to all those things and so it's a great alternative to spending a fortune on building a native app,
but it's also just the best way to build a mobile web experience and because the performance is so much better.
We're seeing that the early retailers that have adopted Progressive web apps are are really killing at their their mobile site so much faster they're getting much higher conversion rates.

[37:13] And so it's I would highly encourage any retailer to put on the road map right now that they should be.
Redoing their mobile experience as a progressive web app and I have to be honest because most is building a proper response to.
Mobile site and they feel like they did a bunch of work and they want to feel like they're done now and not too many of them are thrilled to hear that they need to start a new project to build it over using a new set of Technologies,
but the but the retailer the early retailers that are,
are are getting really good results and so you know it it really should be kind of high on your on your your roadmap particularly as all your customers are shifting the mobile.

Scot:
[38:05] How do you,
so I know we obviously write a lot of this stuff at spiffy so we have you know you have Swift and Objective C for a native app and then there's a lot of interesting JavaScript,
turn based libraries for writing kind of a responsive sites that were even app so I react in those kinds of things what what do you write a progressive web app.

Jason:
[38:31] Yeah. So it is a JavaScript like framework,
much more constrained and specific set of libraries so so often when you're
you're jumping JavaScript you can you can pick you know all these different development Library sets and only you know small subset that have been Highway optimized not allowed to be used in npwa is but it's it's mostly sort of JavaScript style development environments.

Scot:
[39:03] Are there any retailers doing a really awesome job at it that you want to highlight.

Jason:
[39:09] So there are they like again,
it it hasn't for the most part been the huge retailers that have completely embraced.
The pwa jet like there have been some retailers that have done a pwa,
like as a separate stand-alone site in a in a
replace an app in addition to a mobile website but says some of the retailers that have gone full pwa and got some really good results one of the biggest retailers out there to my knowledge this done it is is West Elm
and then there's some in a smaller specialty retailers I think Tommy Bahama I think Snapdeal is full Progressive web app now,
I think Payless has a progressive web app some of these are fixed it Sweet Frog so they never had a good mobile site before and this is the first one Willie Pulitzer Lancome,
some some folks like that and so if anyone any of the listeners have a favorite Progressive web app retail site I would love to hear about it as well.

Scot:
[40:17] Yeah so what's up pic on West Arm so just to be clear you don't just download their app right you just go to their website and you're going to have a much more responses or how much more
mobile friendly experience then then if you there previously shipped is at.

Jason:
[40:35] Exactly you go to westelm.com right interview go to West Elm,
dot-com on a desktop browser you're getting a desktop experience if you go to that same URL in the mobile site you're getting a mobile version of that experience in the mobile version you'll get from West Allen is a progressive web app and I,
I'm compelled since you're calling me out on it to highlight that.
The West Elm one may not be in full deployment yet so I think there's some may be testing going on so if you go to westelm.com you may or may not get the progressive web app version.
There's a different URL you can do to guarantee that you get the the West on the pwa version which is I'll put the link in the show notes but it's.
Mobile - beta. Westelm.com and that kind of bypasses the testing guarantee you get the pwa version but they shared some some public data from there,
they're beta version that that's in this A B test and the.
That the folks getting the pwa version of The Experience are spending 15% more time on the site and there are spending 9% more Revenue than them folks that are.
On the traditional responsive-design version of the site so so pretty meaningful.

[41:53] Non retail sites there's a ton of of big sites that have moved to Progressive web app,
and across-the-board the performance metrics though the page weight and the load times and the time the interaction are wildly better for Progressive web apps and whenever we see those performance numbers go up,
bounce rate goes way down and engagement goes way up so you know I think there's both.
A big lesson about performance from the General market and I think you know we're now starting to see some some pretty tangible retail results.

Scot:
[42:27] Colt Express or some super-secret Insider information there what do you when you go to a Retailer's site on mobile is there some kind of way that you're seeing its Progressive web app is there is there some tell her or are you just speak he's going to have to know.

Jason:
[42:41] Not a very convenient one like I mean the old but you literally have to either go view the source and you could there some Telltale headers that would tell you that it's a progressive web app.
Or there are now a set of tools on their companies like ghostery and built with their frankly not that convenient to use on mobile that they're much more convenient on desktop Adele sort of,
scan the site you're on and give you a report of the the underlying technologies that are being used for that side and they'll both tell you if you're if you're on a pwa site like the only the big user experience tell,
is if you're not in an app and your your get your given like a full interactive site even without,
activity then it's a pretty safe bet that you're that you're benefiting from the pwa site.

Scot:
[43:35] Coop's so last question in this comes from.
Julie Acosta and the question is a two-parter any updates on multi-touch attribution model Sim partners and who's doing online offline right.
Gold attribution question.

Jason:
[43:53] Yeah I do love a good attribution conversation so so pretty like there are you know and ever increasing number of,
specialized tools that that do multi-touch attribution models,
but what has me most excited is much better tools for doing multi-touch attribution are,
starting to evolve in our standard analytics packages so I to my mind I apologize to my friends that I've met him in a w I feel like the,
Google analytics implementation of multi-touch attribution is maybe a little further ahead but,
IBM Adobe and Google all have multi attribution models built in in Google's case that used to only be available in their expensive premium paid product and now it's,
it's made its way down to the free version and the big evolution in these multi-touch attribution models is,
you used to have to come to pick a model so you can say.

[44:55] Hey I'm interested in a weighted model and this is how it works or I'm interested in first touch or I'm interested in last touch or I'm interested in that decay model where every subsequent touch gets less weight.
And you had to kind of manually specify model and then you could use the Analytics tool to look through the data with that lens now multi-touch has become sort of machine learning enabled,
into a century the two will tell you which multi-touch model from which amongst the the.

[45:30] The pool of multi-touch models the name given to a support,
best fits the data set that you have so you can actually use machine learning to sort of refine the multi touch model that you use for your particular data,
and you know you can you can Embrace that for your Enterprise and so that's pretty cool.

[45:51] Multi-touch is a slightly complicated word because I would argue there's kind of three versions there's there's online to offline which is.
You know hey I saw some digital ads on Facebook and Google and then I walked into a store and bought something so how do I you know attribute that in-store purchase to those those digital touch,
I'll call that multichannel,
there's multi-touch like a I saw an ad in Facebook and then I saw an ad in Google and then I saw add-on,
Abercrombie & Fitch and then I bought the shirt like how you know which which of those three marketing Vehicles gets all the credit or most of the Creditor how do you do that that's kind of.
The most traditional version of a multi-touch that the tools are designed to support.
And then there's Multi-Device like hey I started on a tablet and then I moved to a phone and then I will definitely made the purchase on a laptop.
How do I do a tribution across those devices and So my answer before it was mostly based on.

[46:55] Digital multi-touch for multi device we're starting to see some interesting Solutions.
Adobe in particular has this interesting Co-op model where they they're building a shared database amongst all the people that use Google Analytics.
Of all the device ID that they ever see and when you have a user on a particular device you can go to The Coop and say what other devices does that same user use and so you can use this kind of share.
To identify the same user across multiple devices historically only the.
The digital tools that are most likely to have the user authenticated can kind of recognize the same user across devices and so Google and Facebook have a huge advantage over the rest of the world.
In Multi-Device attribution.
And then online offline we're also starting to see so much better tools interesting Lee both Facebook and Google that want to you to spend more money on digital advertising.

[47:56] It's very important to them that you be able to understand online and offline attribution because,
a lot of the purchases that you make after seeing or digital ads are in a store and so they've actually built some pretty good tools that you can upload your offline data into,
and then do online offline attribution so we're starting to see that a lot more commonly but when you ask which retailers are.
Are the kind of best-in-class doing it right it's the retailers with an unfair advantage.
And so it's REI that has 95% of their purchases coming from Members so they have.
Capture of that that email address of that member number every time you do a transaction online or,
in-store it's Sephora where 95% of their customers are in that customer Affinity program,
and they're able to do very effective online and offline attribution it Starbucks where we high percentage of the transactions are being done with their Mobile payment at go system,
they're doing the best job of online to offline,
and you know that the more traditional retailers wear a lot of the in-store purchases are not Animas you know that they're all getting better at doing online offline attribution but they're only able to do it for a much smaller set of their data.

Scot:
[49:11] Well thanks to John and Julie for asking those questions I think we're caught up on listener questions we we regularly post he's over on our Facebook page so just go to Facebook and search for Jason and Scott show or go to Jason and Scott. Calm and you'll see a direct over to there
yeah.

Jason:
[49:30] Awesome I got before we sign I did want to highlight a couple upcoming opportunities to meet some listeners.
So we we looted to it earlier in the show but I am leaving Saturday for a week of retail visits in Australia.
So I have a bunch of meetings booked with retailers in Sydney and Melbourne but if you're a listener that happens me in Australia be sure to ping me on Twitter sometime in the next weekend if it's schedules permit I would.
Love to meet up but I'm I'm really looking forward to learning a lot more about that market and sharing some of.
The warnings that we've had in some some more mature Amazon markets that maybe we can share with.
With Australia which is the newest Amazon market so I'm looking forward to that trip that's going to be fun and I know my family is looking even more forward to having me be gone for a week.
And then early next month August 6th through the 9th you and I are going to be live and in person together at the eat a least show in Boston.

Scot:
[50:40] Yeah it's going to be a lot of fun we will go and I plan on wearing since we'll be in the the the Founding Father home well I'm going to wear a white wig for that one side of the exhaust.

Jason:
[50:52] Yeah and it's and it's made me a person knows I just wear a white wig anyway so that'll be the normal for me.

Scot:
[50:56] Look for the two founding father type of sport or triangle hats to.

Jason:
[51:03] Exactly and with that it's it's happen again we've used up our a lot of time,
but if you have any further questions or we got something wrong on this week show we'd love to hear about it so,
let's keep the conversation going on Facebook or Twitter and as always if you got any value out of this show and you want to reward us the best thing you can do is go to iTunes and give us that 5-star review,
if you really didn't enjoy the show the best way to do that is visit Scott in person at his home and give him your feedback that's appreciated as well.

Scot:
[51:36] Yeah absolutely will thanks for joining star Buy.

Jason:
[51:39] Until next time happy commercing.