A little quicker one today because, let's be honest, I've got work to do in Claude.

 Amazon announced their third-quarter results, and go figure, they're up. Net sales increased 12%. Operating income increased from 28 billion vs.17 billion last year. AWS sales increased 39%. Their net income decreased to 20.7 billion compared to 21.2 billion in the third quarter last year, but their operating cash flow is increased by 29%.

What does all this mean? Amazon is on fire. They've signed new agreements for AWS with companies like Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Salesforce, and Oracle, they're acquiring companies like DuckDB to help them manage data better, selection from well-known brands like Banana Republic, Lazy Boy, and FAO Schwartz have increased, units sales are up, yada yada yada. Amazon's doing really well.

What does that mean for consumer and what does that mean for brands selling on Amazon?

Consumers are going to continue to win as Amazon improves shopability. Amazon's use of automation or generative AI means a better experience for the consumer because of its ability to better predict products that consumers will like and match them quicker and faster to said products. Alexa shopping will start popping up saying things like, "Hey, noticed you looked at this one item. You should also consider this other item." Maybe it even helps you remember to buy an item that you're about to run out of stock of based on your purchase behavior and the servings on the product. The sky's the limit.

They've always been customer-focused, wanting to be the most customer-centric company in the world. No surprise there.

What does this mean for brands selling on Amazon?

I actually think the same positive outcomes could be true. Customers are hopefully going to be buying more product because they're able to get on and off the site easier and keep products due to better matching of products based on intent. They're getting better recommendations, therefore they're happier.

But a wave of challenges could appear. Amazon leaning into their alexa shopping agent to give recommendations equates a new format of ads, which means more spend. And it's yet another learning curve for sellers, who are already getting new updates fast and furious.

If Amazon implements generative AI technology just to cut costs due to shareholder pressure, like automating all of Seller Support, that's only going to be one big headache. They need to be careful with how they implement new tech and how efficient they get, because at a certain point, I do believe you can get so efficient that you forget who you're serving.

What is the biggest historical complaint against Amazon for brands? They don't care about them. As long as Amazon keeps its eye on the prize of serving its customers by making sure their sellers are happy, I think this could be a big win.

I tend to be an optimist. I'm okay with that.

Let's see where Amazon takes this thing.

Amazon’s business operations falls into three distinct categories: Catalog, Creative, & Advertising. I create a content tasting flight of smaller yet no less delicious samplings of that Amazon ecosystem. Today’s Flight focuses on getting shit done.

Amazon also recently announced they're going to allow review requests through ads. Of course, people are complaining about how this causes Amazon to lack credibility from a review standpoint, especially after all the fake reviews that have been on their platform in years prior. To be fair, Amazon has done a lot to wipe out those reviews.

You don't have a lot of options to get reviews. You're either doing it illegally, or you're using something like Vine and Amazon review requests, which require a cost to automate those. Doing them manually isn't really an option.

We all know reviews affect conversion rate. I haven't seen much of a change beyond 20 to 30 reviews but the more reviews you can get that help reinforce a solid rating, the less likely you are to be hurt from a couple of bad reviews.

Like I always say, test, and see if it works. It may ultimately end up being worth the cost, and as far as I know, you don't pay unless someone leaves a review, so what's the harm in trying?

Yes, there is another AI release from Amazon. Long story short, Amazon's making an integrated approach to creative. That's always been a sticking point for brands, especially with low budgets. you can now spin up creatives right in Amazon Ads Agent, i.e. the Ad Console, from a conversation.

Test it. See if it actually works.

Amazon launched something called Full-Funnel Campaigns, which are ads that allow you to set a target and AI handles everything else like channel mix, creatives, audience, targeting, etc. Think PMax for Amazon Ads.

Amazon is claiming that “beta testers saw 67% higher long-term return on ad spend and 29% lower cost to acquire new-to-brand customers.” I'm not refuting that evidence. It just always comes back to context. If a brand is looking simply for better return on ad spend and lower CAC, which aren't necessarily goals that work together, that's one thing. For brands looking to gain organic visibility, that's a whole other thing. These campaigns can't yet set targets to "increase organic visibility," at least not yet. As always, test and learn. See if these things work, but remember what your ultimate goal is and lean into that: the strategy that gets you to that goal.

Do I seriously need to repeat myself? Test it already.

I call this a kitchen sink drink, which sounds a lot better than garbage can drink. That means I had a bunch of ingredients I wouldn’t use for their normal purposes that I didn’t want to throw away, so I found a way to merge them into something great.

It started last fall with some leftover chocolate gelt from my daughter and a huge bottle of Triple Sec. I thought, what goes better together than chocolate and orange? I soaked the chocolate in the Triple Sec and voila: chocolate orange liqueur. I’d also just finished making my house bitters and reused the herbs to make a mulled wine simple because, well, ‘tis the season. This has been a smash hit and I hope you enjoy it as much as everyone else has.

Every two weeks I release a new podcast episode that talks all about the future of retail. This is the most recent one.

Relationships are hard, right? Right. Being genuinely interested in another person, not focusing on yourself, takes you realizing you aren't the center of the universe. And as humans have become more tech enabled, we've also become more isolated. People are looking for connection. Brands that want to stand out today have to be authentically inviting customers on journey with them.