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I think that if Amazon, excuse me, if Walmart offered bigger incentives, could they attract more sellers? Sure. I mean, Walmart still is bigger than Amazon in aggregate. They still have plenty of advantages. But, you know, if you ask, you know, stop somebody on the street and shake them and say, hey, I need to buy a product. Where do I go online? 98% of them are going to tell you Amazon.
I mean, they have. And, you know, part of the Jet.com acquisition was designed to accelerate that effort. You know, I think, you know, there's a bit of a network effect. It's harder to attract sellers when you don't have as many buyers and it's harder to attract buyers when you don't have as many sellers. And, you know, it's back to the fact that Amazon has the huge network of selection on the seller side and the huge number of buyers. If you're Amazon and, you know, Walmart by most counts is 5%
if you're going to release a new product, it not only has to be great by any metric, but it also has to be fundamentally different. There has to be something about it, which is going to make it more valuable to the consumer.
the bestseller badge basically Amazon has a whole hierarchy and at the very very bottom of its hierarchy are these sub sub sub categories if you are the fastest selling product in your sub sub sub category then you end up with the bestseller badge Amazon's choice is more mysterious it's an algorithm that is run and rerun every hour that takes into account conversion rate and etc etc so you can have it at 11 a.m. and lose it by 1 p.m. and have it back at 3 p.m. so the Amazon's choice one is more
in the marketplace then you don't. You probably want to though because advertising return on advertising spend is still great and it's still profitable too. If you're trying to break into a new market yeah it's almost impossible to do without spending money on marketing because at the end of the day before you're showing up in search results the only way to start generating sales on Amazon is is through that marketing function but people it's presented as nefarious as in as in it's a pay-to-play
if you read Amazon's terms of service, which is a document that if you print it out is about an inch thick, you'll discover that there's 17 legitimate ways to remove a review
Today, is there black hat activity? Yes. It's almost impossible to keep up with. The reality is it's a little bit harder than you're sort of making it out to be.
there's sort of two kinds of mistakes they could make, right? They can make a mistake where they don't eliminate enough of the reviews and they can make a mistake where they eliminate too many reviews. And no matter which one they make, they're going to have people who are unhappy. And I think that, you know, they have sort of taken the view that you need, you know, really hard evidence that somebody has done something fraudulent or wrong to remove them as opposed to simply saying, hmm, this doe
I mean, again, the thing about Amazon's system is that the consumer votes. And so if you're trying to break into an ecosystem where somebody's got 3,000 reviews, can you do it? Yes. Is it going to be fast and cheap? No. But if you've got a product that's materially better than what's out there, you'd be surprised how fast you could move up and usurp somebody.
And so what tends to happen is that products that do well get sort of towards the top of search results. As they sell more products, they generate more reviews. As they generate more reviews, people are more likely to buy them because they feel safe doing so. And you have this flywheel effect where all of a sudden you are number one and you've got 4,000 reviews.
So conversion rate is what matters. If somebody clicks on your product and buys it or if they're more likely to buy it, that's the signal more often than not that tells Amazon, you've got a product that deserves to be higher in rankings. And to your point, if somebody returns it later on, it essentially undoes that signal. So there's no string signal signal that is stronger than what has the consumer done? Did they buy the product? Did they give a review afterwards, et cetera, et cetera.
From what we've seen, I think they're favorably inclined towards us.
Amazon is interesting. It's still very much a search-driven ecosystem. About 70% of all revenue comes from search. And when you think about the way in which search works, Amazon has a very strong preference for doing what the consumer wants, which means that search results are designed to favor products that consumers like.