Amazon Sold the Last Organic Surface
Amazon put up $200.6 billion in second quarter net sales and still ran negative free cash flow. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky work through the quarter Amazon would like read as a straight growth story.
The reported numbers: net sales up 20 percent, income of $27.5 billion, advertising up 26 perce…
Stripe wanting PayPal says more about Stripe than about PayPal
Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky work through the reported talks, and Rick lands firmly on the skeptical side. Stripe grows around 34% a year by the hosts' count, throws off billions in cash flow, and has spent years buying up pieces of the stack, including Indie Hackers, Payable, Index, and Lemon S…
Walmart's 11K Rollbacks and Who Actually Pays for Them
Walmart ran 11,000 rollbacks last quarter, roughly double the same period a year ago, and the money paying for them comes from a business most of its competitors don't have. Advertising and membership now account for about a third of Walmart's operating income and grew 38% in the quarter. Rick Wats…
Let the AI Agents Do the Shopping So They Don't Kill Us All
Anthropic has moved into commerce. On September 2 it put an open-source blueprint on GitHub for building a shopping agent and a merchant agent on Claude, with demo builds for retail, travel, telecom and ticketing. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky have about 50 years of e-commerce experience between …
How to Buy AI Agents Without Getting Stuck on One Model
Every CIO has been told to invest in agentic AI. Nobody has told them how much to spend or when.
Shawn Mandel is working through that decision right now as CTO of Dentalcorp, which supports more than 650 dental practices across Canada and, since July, the US. He joins Rick Watson for a Watson Weekl…
Amazon Isn't Your Friend. The FTC Says It Overcharged Sellers $20B
The FTC and 22 state attorneys general are suing Amazon over its ad auctions. They say an undisclosed soft reserve pushed up what 1.2 million advertisers paid and cost them more than $20 billion since 2019. Amazon says CPCs stayed flat after inflation, conversion went up, and nobody was harmed.
Ric…
Amazon Wants to Handle Agent Payments While Blocking Agents
Rick Watson reports from the Retail Club AI event in Huntington Beach, which he's calling the source of the agentic fog he first described at Shoptalk. This is the second stop in the on-location series that started there.
It's hot, there isn't much shade, and lunch is small portions from a handful …
Amazon Blocks AI Shopping Agents as Oreos Climb From 10% to 70%
Amazon is blocking nearly every AI shopping agent, starting with Perplexity. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky go through Goldman Sachs' 64-page report on agentic commerce, which opens on Amazon's blocking and includes a section on agent liability that is labeled TBD.
Rick reads the blocking as a neg…
Anthropic Has $518B in Compute Bills and $4.6B in Revenue
Amazon now lets US sellers run their eBay, Shopify, TikTok and Walmart sales inside Seller Central, free of charge. Amazon says more than 95% of its independent sellers already sell elsewhere, and each of those outside orders now sits next to an Amazon shipping button. Rick Watson thinks most selle…
Costco Runs its Own Chicken Plant in Nebraska to Keep a $4.99 Loss Leader Going
Costco’s sales rose 11.2% last quarter, and Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky talk through where that growth is coming from. Costco says members under 40 now make up more than a quarter of the base. Many of them live in apartments and order on their phones, and Costco says delivery orders arrive in u…
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