Ecom Influence

TL;DR

Let’s talk Temu, Bezos cashing out, robots and more updates in D2C funding and M&A.

Stock Prices

Quick Hits

Irobot and Amazon Break Up - Amazon has abandoned it’s purchase of the maker of the popular Roomba, paying them $94MM termination fee. Regulators are stopping more and more M&A.

WalMart Managers Get a Pay Bump - Managers at top tier walmarts can now make up to $400,000 per year.

Tiktok Goes Silent - Universal Music & Tiktok fail to reach a deal, so the bulk of popular music disappears from tiktok (including existing videos)

Is Prime Still Worth it? - A regular prime subscription now costs $139. Fully loaded we’re talking $320. Still worth it?

Amazon Launches Rufus - Are you ready for AI powered conversational bot on amazon to help you find the right products?

Listing of the Week

What we like:

Incredible net margins, 300%+ and in house manufacturing can make for a big win for the buyer of this company.

This is the first brand we’ve come across that manufactures in Turkey, which reduces a lot of the risk of Chinese tariff’s under the next administration.

Big opportunities to add an in-house brand of candles.

Caution 

Make sure you understand the risks of manufacturing in country that isn’t typical for most e-com buyers.

Thread of the Week

China now noted in the Amazon 10-K right along with Facebook.

Bezos Cashes Out BIG

Bezos is in his “best life” phase. No longer running amazon day to day, remarried and rolling around on his yacht (plus building rockets).

It’s not cheap to maintain that type of lifestyle and and he’s been cashing out big. $2 BILLION in sales now. Check out this awesome chart on the history of his cash outs.

Temu Advertising Blitz

According to a new study by MediaRadar, Temu’s ad spend jumped 1,000% year-over-year.

Temu has resorted to a digital marketing blitz to acquire new customers. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate Temu spent about $1.2 billion on Meta in 2023, and Meta calculated Temu ran 8,900 ads on its platforms last January

It’s not all dark on the M&A front for Ecom and D2C brands. Honey Pot (founded in 2012), the feminine care brand, was purchased by Compass Diversified for $380MM ALL CASH with revenue of $121MM and $29MM in EBITDA. 13x EBITDA is quite a payday for D2C these days.

From Marketplace Pulse, Amazon Aggregators raised over $16B in capital (mostly debt) and then pretty much lit it on fire. There is only a handful of aggregators still standing and most are limping along and trying to cash flow enough to pay their debt.

Robots Need Wranglers

According the WSJ, robots aren’t always labor saving and sometimes take a lot of hand holding. There’s now an entire class of amazon workers that simply fix/maintain and deal with problematic robots, some even ending up with their own nicknames.

Do you use any automation or robots in your warehouse?

Rufus - The Amazon AI to Help You Shop

Per amazon, “Rufus is a generative AI-powered expert shopping assistant trained on Amazon’s extensive product catalog, customer reviews, community Q&As, and information from across the web to answer customer questions on a variety of shopping needs and products, provide comparisons, and make recommendations based on conversational context.”

How do we design listings to take advantage?

Money Still Flowing into Personal Care & Consumables

2 headlines caught our eye this week.

Unilever Ventures leads $6 million series A investment in Perelel Health, the prenatal and postnatal vitamin company, now totaling over $12 million in funding.

Amazon aggregator Forum Brands acquires organic period care brand Lola, the period care brand known for its organic and cotton products.

@