Growing Ecommerce – The Retail Growth Podcast
Feed your growth mindset. Ecommerce is growing, and so are the challenges and opportunities for online retailers. In the Growing Ecommerce podcast, Mike Ryan and other smec experts are joined by industry leaders in ecommerce, digital marketing, and data science. By sharing business trends, practical solutions, and best practices, this podcast helps online retailers solve the challenges of tomorrow.
Growing Ecommerce – The Retail Growth Podcast
2024 Year End Recap: Google’s Legal Challenges, Amazon vs. Temu, and Other Platform News
Discover the forces reshaping the ecommerce landscape leading into 2025 as host Mike Ryan guides us through a labyrinth of game-changing developments and strategic maneuvers. From the Department of Justice's legal challenges against Google to the emerging battleground between Amazon and Temu, Mike gives insight into how these seismic shifts might just redefine what we know about monopolies, market dynamics, and consumer engagement. Could the verdicts against Google have unintended consequences? How are AI shopping assistants poised to shake the platforms? What is going on with Temu and Amazon's I-hate-you-so-much-that-I'm-going-to-copy-you-exactly strategies?Prepare for a year-end review like no other, as Mike tracks the tectonic movements of e-commerce titans and advertisers. Witness Pinterest’s alliance with Google as it seeks to unlock new monetization avenues, and get a glimpse into Meta's latest updates aimed at refining attribution and take over account structures. With AppLovin's unexpected rise in digital advertising and Microsoft's steady pursuit of relevance, this episode brims with expert analysis and provocative questions about what lies ahead. Whether it's the AI evolution or the competitive dynamics between industry giants, Mike Ryan unpacks the strategies and potential pitfalls in this ever-evolving landscape.
Hello, this is Mike Ryan, head of e-commerce insights at Smarter E-commerce, also known as SMEC. I know it's been a while since we heard from each other, so first off, I want to apologize for that. Second off, I want to say we have a lot to catch up on, which I'll tell you about in a minute. And third of all, I want to say that I have been thinking hard and working hard on a concept for the future of this podcast, because I would like this podcast to continue and I think we're going to go for it, and I hope that I'll have some really interesting new stuff to share with you pretty early next year. But I'll leave it mysterious other than that for right now. So to the content of today's episode. I really want to catch up on several things that have happened in the third quarter of this year and this quarter as well. I just sort of look at a year in review, so we're just going to do a whirlwind real fast through some opinions on a bunch of topics, some of which are overdue, some of which are rather new. So it should be a nice mix of those, and that includes stuff like the DOJ verdicts one and two against Google and the question of their monopolistic behavior, has to also, on the Google side, deal with changes to performance. Max, microsoft I might have a word to say as well Meta, amazon, timu, pinterest we're going to run through actually all these key e-commerce advertising platforms. That's what I would like to look at with you today.
Speaker 1:So, without further ado, let's get into it. First up, google DOJ 1, I'm going to call it I don't know if that's a correct nomenclature, but what I'm referring to here is the search monopoly trial, antitrust trial that concluded, boy, like a year ago I think, and it was like last year when this was active and meanwhile the verdict was that Google is a search monopolist Tsk, tsk, tsk. And then meanwhile, meanwhile, there are now all kinds of proposals from the DOJ about what to do about this behavior, and those are sitting in front of the judge right now. As far as I know, the concern about Google's monopolistic behavior here, or the contention, is that Google is too dominant in search, that this is to the detriment of consumers, to businesses as well, and some behavior came up, like, for example, the way that Chrome and search are kind of tied together and these things benefit each other, the way that Google has default agreements with different browsers and with, for example, apple, so that Google is the default search engine to preserve their market position. And I mean, I guess one thing that I found out or found interesting, rather being pretty focused on the advertising side of things was how much advertising came up in that investigation, because the second investigation not to get ahead of ourselves, but that was specifically an ad tech monopoly trial. But yeah, you know, this had to do a lot with the search, search advertising, which is pretty close to me personally and where things stand currently, you know, one of the leading remedies proposed is that chrome should be split off from google somehow, and and also I would expect these default payments to end where I don't know. These things have knock-on consequences and so on.
Speaker 1:I'm not personally convinced that Chrome was that supportive of Google's search monopoly or search dominance. I almost rather see it the other way around, that the incredible brand that Google built up through their best in class search engine helped them to more effectively launch Chrome. And you know when I think about it, google excuse me Microsoft was the default browser on every Windows device, every like Windows laptop, for example, and I just think that consumers are not that helpless People opted for Chrome anyway. Chrome also is very dominant and you know people. They knew what to do. They knew that they didn't want Bing as their default search engine Sorry, if there are any Microsoft employees listening they knew that they didn't want Edge as their default browser, and so they went and they downloaded Chrome or whatever they needed to do, and they clicked the funny buttons and they set Google search as their default search engine, and I don't think that consumers are so helpless personally. So and meanwhile I think I mentioned the word knock-on effects earlier.
Speaker 1:If I didn't, I meant to there are knock-on effects or secondary effects of things like this, like, for example, default payments are a core revenue source for other browsers like mozilla, firefox and like brave and yeah, so the business model of these of these browsers comes into um question. You know whether this is sustainable, what it's kind of an existential threat to them, and so you know, dropping the hammer on the one side is maybe going to have these unintended consequences on the other side. But I'm not a legal scholar, so I'll leave it to the DOJ to make their case and for the judge in question to make the most prudent decision possible. I also have concerns. Ah well, let's table that for right now. I don't want to spend the whole episode talking about that.
Speaker 1:Let's quickly talk about what I'm calling DOJ2, which is the ad tech monopoly, and that trial concluded earlier this year. And the basic contention here is that Google is basically they are the dominant. They are dominant on the publisher side, they're dominant on the demand side and they're dominant on the exchange in the middle of these things and so that they just completely have entirely too much control over this and that they've been able to engage in all kinds of behaviors to extract profit from that setup to ensure that it stays that way and so on. And I actually I personally find this case a little bit more compelling than the search monopoly side. I think that I really feel that Google search is one of the most important products that ever existed in human history. I think that's true and I think that it really earned its place, whereas, you know, there were a lot of acquisitions and there was a lot that went into setting up this ad tech monopoly. That, I think, is it was not necessarily earned. They maybe did kind of use undue influence to get to that position.
Speaker 1:So sorry if my thoughts aren't 100% the most coherent. Right now I have a little cold it is December after all. Ho ho ho, by the way. But yeah, we're waiting to find out what will come out of that. I'm fully expecting a monopoly verdict and I'm just interested to see which remedies will be proposed. But it takes a long time for these remedies to get proposed, to get considered, and then there will be appeals and so on. So I guess we're in for a fun few years. I don't really know. While we're on Google, I want to make a quick detour along the way.
Speaker 1:Prabhika Raghavan, who was the head of Google search, was at the center of a lot of withering criticism, as well as some other Google personnel in the course of this, these investigations and however, yeah, so he's. You know, I saw a lot of reportage of his departure from role of head of search. I think Nick Fox took over. I can't remember for sure, but I don't know what to say. He got promoted to the chief technologist. He didn't like. People were saying like he's out, this is like, yeah, google, google had to take action here and so on, but he got promoted to chief technologist. It was like, totally not a punishment, this is, this is a hot one. This is a hot take. But you know, I'm originally from Boston and I think you know we would recognize this as kind of the Vatican treatment for how punishment gets taken care of. But if that doesn't make sense to you, then do a quick Google search or search it up wherever you like. Ask AI about it. We live, you know, in the year 2024.
Speaker 1:So I also want to just quickly mention a topic that I spoke about at length on the AdExchanger podcast. So definitely go check out. Actually, adexchanger actually has two podcasts. One is called AdExchanger Talk talks and one is called the big story. So I appeared on ad exchanger talks, which is an interview format Q and a type format Um, and I talked about all things PMAX, including what I'm calling the crucial thought, and that's what I'll speak about just quickly here to give you a little teaser of that.
Speaker 1:It was a very interesting year. I mean, it's been an interesting 18 months for PMAX, or, to be honest, the whole three years of the existence of PMAX have been interesting, but particularly there's been some acceleration on, let's call them, crowd-pleasing features. Google has done a lot to kind of show that they're listening to advertisers, and while I think these changes are always on Google's terms. There's been a lot, it has been meaningful. It's even been a lot to keep up with. So that's one thing that I'll continue talking about early into 2025. I'll host a webinar on what I'm calling for right now PMAX 2025, because this is not the same PMAX that we got to know a short three years ago. It's changed a lot. How to work with it has changed and you know, I'm generally I call this overall trend PMAXification.
Speaker 1:This is why one of the reasons that I'm quite fixated on PMAX is because it's not just a Google thing, but at this point, another thing that happened this year, when we're talking here in review, is that just about every single advertising platform has their own PMAX like campaign at this point, where you think of, you know, automated targeting, automated creatives, automated bidding and so on this very high level degree of automation through these AI campaigns, and that includes Pinterest, it includes LinkedIn. Reddit made an acquisition to help them launch theirs, and Meta has been around for a longer time with Advantage Plus. Tiktok just goes on and on. Really every platform has one at this point. So that's why I think it's important that we get familiar with this kind of technology, where Google is typically on the leading edge of this, but the entire market is going this way and really, at least for performance marketing campaigns, this is just the way that these sorts of campaigns will work in the future, and I can imagine that over time, very many different kinds of campaigns are going to be fully AI steered and integrated.
Speaker 1:I said earlier that I might talk about Microsoft, and actually I'm looking at my notepad here in parallel and I didn't write anything in there. This comes off as a little damning, but I don't have a lot to say about Microsoft that doesn't have to do with OpenAI, but I actually quite like Microsoft and it's no ill will to them. But I think from an e-commerce standpoint, there hasn't been that much to talk about. This year they launched their own PMAX. It's called PMax, but by and large it's been there. They kicked off the as ads come in Google search and as advertising comes to AI overviews, and this is, to me, a slightly more interesting space to watch. Similarly, I'll just say a word about Perplexity. This is another contender in this space. If you haven't used Perplexity, I like them a lot. It's another AI powered search engine, but they've done something pretty smart. They've partnered with Shopify, they've partnered with Stripe and they are basically creating their own merchant center where structured product data, product feeds, can be submitted. And now they're still testing this, but they're putting products in line in the middle of chat so you can really use the chat as a shopping assistant and you can check out right there from the chat without leaving the experience at all. It's rather seamless and actually I've been saying for a long time that Google would have the everything that they need to do, that I actually expected this to happen.
Speaker 1:Already a couple of years ago I thought they would go in this direction. I was wrong. But they have all these assets from buy on Google. They have the ability to create a buy box. This is just kind of a building block that they have sitting around. They have all kinds of assets. They have universal cart builders. They know all about payment. They already have the Merchant Center cart builders they have. They know all about payment. They already have the merchant center.
Speaker 1:I think there are very few hurdles in the way of google having a similar experience, which, which I would have expected, because I think it's it's an obvious use case. I don't think that I'm like smart for predicting that or something. I think it's very one of the first times I ever used chat gpt. I thought, well, you can use this as a shopping engine or, excuse me, a shopping assistant. And yeah, I mean, I've already made some rather large purchases using AI in that capacity, partly as a test but partly because it actually works pretty good. You skip all of the SEO filler and the affiliate links. I mean, the model is probably still biased by reading all of that affiliate content. But I don't know, it's an awkward position for the future if you are an affiliate or a publisher or if you depend on that kind of content. But that's the direction that we're definitely headed.
Speaker 1:So I don't know why Google has been hesitant to kind of go more in that shopping assistant direction or kind of inline purchasing, and they've instead gone in this. They've gone in the direction of AI overviews. They've unveiled a new Google Shopping which is pretty cool, but it's a very different imagination of what AI shopping could look like. There's AI sort of more an enabling layer in there, but I assume that they just view it as a little too risky for them right now and too disruptive to the way that their SERP functions and stuff like that and, you know, maybe someone who has a little less to lose, like Microsoft, might jump back in and something like that.
Speaker 1:I think that perplexity has no moat around this whatsoever. In fact, I think that Perplexity has no moat around this whatsoever. In fact, I think that they're at a big disadvantage because they just don't have even if they onboard a lot of merchants and potential advertisers, they just don't have enough consumers using the product right now, compared to any of these other platforms. Like people say, microsoft is rather small, but perplexity is way smaller. So, and yeah, amazon has also gotten into this shopping assistant, ai, shopping, e-com intersection a bit as well with Rufus, which I haven't personally used yet, but I mean, I think it's an interesting idea. They have all this review data and stuff like that, and you can interact with a chatbot who has read all this stuff, so you don't have to, in effect, but I actually I think that so far, perplexity has by far the most compelling implementation of AI and e-commerce and I'm wondering, you know, when others will follow along.
Speaker 1:Since we just said Amazon, I'm just looking around my notes here and, yeah, let's talk about it. Amazon launched a new offering called Amazon Haul and this is a low cost store that is designed as a direct competitor to Timu, so it operates in a very similar direct from China model and there are some interesting parameters in there. Right now it is invite only and in terms of which sellers want to participate or are allowed to participate. So, ironically enough, it's arguably the most exclusive spot on the platform right now, because otherwise it's very kind of open and more or less unregulated about which sellers are allowed to participate on Amazon. But I think they've done a couple of things smart here. So I think the maximum cost on an item is allowed to be like $20. So we're really talking, you know, dollar store type prices, and it's quite possible that this will hurt dollar stores more than it hurts Timu. Who knows? I also think it's really smart.
Speaker 1:They don't sell kids products on there. They don't sell like topical things, like cosmetics or skincare or stuff like this. There are different kinds of categories that are off limits and I assume that they do this to just completely bypass these kind of safety topics that have been plaguing Timu. That's my assumption. I think they do it to limit their liability. They also like that you can't pack in batteries or anything like that. That's probably for insurance purposes, so it's a bit more tightly scoped than the way that Timu is. But I think that's all smart and well-advised, because Timu is only opening themselves up to scrutiny Because of that stuff. There are many investigations open against Timu about safety and topics like this. So I think Amazon is well-positioned there topics like this and so I think Amazon is well positioned there. But in general or let's just talk about Teemu for one second because meanwhile they are onboarding local sellers, in the US and UK at least, and they're trying to bring on some higher quality sellers. They've been signaling this for a bit longer and they're yeah, they're really doing it now.
Speaker 1:I just I'm not convinced by either of these strategies. It feels like I just feel like Amazon has blinked here. I don't think that they needed to launch Amazon haul, but let's see. Maybe it's going to be a big success. How to say this? Like they, there's this desire of them. Each one is sort of envious of the other one and they're just trying to simulate each other's offering and position and things like that, and I don't see this as convincing at all. I feel like the best timu can hope for is to be an ineffective amazon, and the best amazon can hope for is to be an ineffective timu.
Speaker 1:Timu's value proposition was the fact that the stuff is cheap, that they're, the sourcing in the supply chain is dirty as it is. That was their proposition, and by going like upmarket or something like that kind of I don't know coming clean or I don't know how to quite say it I don't think that's a differentiator for them. I think it just makes them more like, more comparable to Amazon, and people are more comfortable shopping at Amazon already and I don't know how well. Likewise with Amazon. I just think having Amazon haul is potentially dilutive to their brand or their market position. Again, it's smart. It's not mixed into their, the rest of their search results or anything like that. It is an entirely separate quarantined store. On Amazon, you're really you're leaving Amazon and you're going to Amazon hall. That's a different property. So I would also keep it in quarantine personally, because I think Timu's business model is toxic, excuse me, and now, since we just said the T word, let's just keep following the the you know note assisted flow of consciousness here.
Speaker 1:I've been watching Timu's advertising spends, or proxies for their advertising spends, all year long and I just want to say that, yeah, they continue. From what I can tell on Google ads, they're just continuing to kind of retreat from the channel. And the way that I measure this, I look at the percentage of advertisers that face Timu as an account level competitor, and this is based on hundreds of accounts all over Europe. And, by the way, similar data comes out of the US from analysts like those at Tenuity. They also are seeing Timu getting softer or weaker. So it's not just Europe. But yeah, I mean they skyrocketed. I've never seen a rise I've talked about this before. I've never seen a rise in prevalence and visibility like Teemu's ever, and they were unprecedented in many ways in theirlating ever since then. And even they had a pretty sharp drop in November and Black Friday was even really weaker Only 40% of advertisers. I put some scare quotes up there because 40% of advertisers is still a lot, but compared to 80% who faced competition from them in the past on different days, Only 40% of advertisers saw competition from Teemu on Black Friday. So they're definitely I don't know if I should say ghosts of their former selves.
Speaker 1:But I'm just wondering what's behind it. Are these general costs cutting measures? Is the channel just not working for them? Have they figured out that it was oversaturated. Are they putting the money somewhere else? Is it going into retention marketing? Is it going toward meta? I don't think so, but what is happening here? So that's a question to me. Can we learn something about it? Because the most comparable thing that we have to this is with Wish before, and Wish it was part of an implosion that was happening at that company.
Speaker 1:Now I'm not saying that Timu is imploding, but I think that their prospects are not good going forward, and I don't really mean that from the demand side. I think things could continue onward Largely as they are. I think gravity would start to take effect, but I think that there's just so much regulatory pressure coming from the US, from Europe. They were designated as a very large online platform by Europe, which is code word for we hate you. They recently released their first Timu, recently released their first transparency report, which is a consequence of being designated a VLOP. I haven't read it all the way through yet because I just found out earlier today that it's there, but it's going to make for some good reading with a coffee one time. You should check it out too.
Speaker 1:From here, I feel like it's natural to head over to TikTok, and I don't have much to say here. Tiktok has been doing well. They've been acting like nothing is wrong, even though they face serious legal challenges in the US. But you know they're also fighting very hard against this from a legal standpoint and, I think, the conventional wisdom right now. You know this is just what I'm getting from reading some headlines and stuff. I'm not deep into this, but I think it's expected that the Trump administration in early 2025 might lift them out of the fire, that they might be a bit more favorable than expected, and so they're buying time to at least see what the new administration is going to be like, because it can't be worse than what has happened so far. I don't want to foray too far into politics here. I can't read the mind of that administration. I'm not sure why they would be threatening tariffs against China on the one hand and then potentially showing leniency or cozying up to TikTok on the other hand. I don't know. Maybe someone in that administration enjoys watching TikTok a lot in the evenings with a little bag of McDonald's. It's possible. I don't know Very well. Let's move right along.
Speaker 1:I just have one note about Pinterest. I've mentioned this before. That Pinterest actually, for about a year now, they've had an advertising partnership with Google and the basic idea is that they have a lot of under-monetized markets, basically everything that is not a core market of them. It's kind of this big rest of world bucket where, yeah, a lot of the world falls, and they are trying to deal with that under-monetization situation by kind of seeding or borrowing demand and borrowing advertisers from Google Ads. So the way that they do this is that if you are advertising through PMAX in one of these target countries, you can assume that you can and will. You can assume that you can and will advertise on the Pinterest app and you can view your placement reports to see if this is indeed happening. But in the past, I detected, I think, like 10 to 12 markets where this was occurring, and the thing that I'm saying right now, the add-on to this story, is that Pinterest is happy with this arrangement so far and they are going to expand this to like 30 markets, I think. So that's something I'll be watching in 2025. And I have mixed feelings about it because I think it's probably pretty premium app inventory. As far as things go, I think it probably performs well, but the way that PMAX is, you don't know. You just know if you got impressions and you don't know what the performance is like at all.
Speaker 1:Now we've accidentally stepped over a big advertiser named Meta, so let's go back to Meta, and then I think we've almost done everything here that I wanted to do. Yeah, a couple of things that just come to my mind about meta from the second half of this year. They had some changes to their attribution which have been very favorably received. For example, imagine you have seven day or 28 day click conversion attribution in meta. Before this would have counted all conversions in that window, and so I mean, I guess it depends on what kind of a category you're in, for example. But if you're in a high repeat category, for example, all of that would get attributed to meta ads, and perhaps some of it should have been attributed, for example, to your retention campaigns or whatever, and so it was considered a bit too generous. And now there's the option to just have that the first conversion or first purchase is attributed back to that click, which offers a more grounded or realistic view.
Speaker 1:So, and I think they are taking some steps in their attribution to kind of increase the maturity of that and make sure that they're not giving themselves a little too much credit. Another thing that they're doing is they're opening up a bit toward third parties, for example, google Ads or Google Analytics. This is quite notable that they're allowing a more direct integration with data there, and also this includes some of these what I call magic pixel providers that are quite popular with the direct-to-consumer brands like North beam and triple whale, also other significant platforms like Adobe. So they're trying to really play nice a bit better with some of these big measurement platforms, and I think that this is a net benefit to everyone, because it's you know, the platform reporting can is just so siloed and it's so unaware of your other channels, and so I think that the more these channels talk to each other and the more of a mature view they take on attribution, it's all to me, pretty positive.
Speaker 1:Another note I'll add about Meta, which probably has been a little less well received. What I've seen so far is that they have increased their level of automation and I think, even their default level of automation. So this again goes back to that PMAXification theme, but it gives them more control over a budget automatically and also probably the most controversial they can restructure campaigns and restructure the account really using AI, and I'm also not a fan of this and I hope that Google doesn't really follow suit here, because campaign structures when a lot of promotional controls are gone that used to be there in campaigns and so many things are automated already, like bidding and stuff like that, targeting, et cetera. So your budgets and your structure, these are, then, important signals. They are some of the last signals that you can kind of use to steer AI and to steer these algorithms and steer these ad platforms, and they might seem like blunt instruments or simple tools at first, like well, how much can my, can my structure really do? But actually a clever and well-implemented structure can do a lot, and I wouldn't want, right now, ai just jumping in and meddling with that, because if you have a good intentional structure, then it doesn't belong tampered with. So, oh, and you know I also heard meta getting some flack around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. That performance wasn't really there.
Speaker 1:Meanwhile, the new darling in town, at least by market cap, is app loving. If you haven't heard about app-loving, yeah, crawl out of your hole, or no, you're probably just not on Twitter. Good for you, but it's a platform that's been around for a while and it's quite interesting because, yeah, it's basically these app inventory that, in theory, google Ads has the same inventory or similar. The Trade Desk should have very similar inventory, and yet the performance of Applovin seems to be really great. And the question is why? How can it do better than Google Ads or the Trade Desk? What is the secret here? Or is there no secret? Because it's very black box, what's going on in there? And there's some unusual preconditions, like I think you need to spend at least 600k a month or 20k a day on Meta in order to participate. That's for some people a little alarming or a question mark, but I assume that that's the secret, though there must be something about what's happening on meta that that transfers to what's happening on app 11 at the audience layer, or I don't know, but, but people have been raving about it lately and just look at a chart of app 11 stock at the market cap. It's crazy. I can't wait to see if it still looks that way in six months or what happens to it all. I'm just making a last look at my notes here and I'll throw in one last thing, I think, unless something else comes across your brain, but Shopify, they have their shop campaigns, which is, I mean, these are what they used to be called.
Speaker 1:I can't remember what they used to be called, but it's. It's just a rebrand of a preexisting campaign type. It's been around for a while just a rebrand of a pre-existing campaign type. It's been around for a while. But one of the main things that they've done with shop campaigns now is that they've started to advertise on brand's behalf in a highly automated way across Google and Meta. At first it was Meta, but since at least September, they've been advertising on Google as well. And I mean, what's interesting about shop campaigns is that they're they're not sending this traffic to your website, um, they're, they're sending it to like their. Their goal is actually to activate people with shop cash that can be spent in the shop app.
Speaker 1:If you use shop pay, getting a little cute with the word shop, shopify, it's a little. There's a. There's a point where enough is enough. We get it. You're called shopify. Everything has the word shop in it. We got it.
Speaker 1:But anyhow, I'm just not particularly convinced of this campaign type because the, the, the gmv, the gross merchandise volume of the shop app is pretty small. I mean, it's like maybe a billion, which, okay, who am I to say? Maybe a billion? But there are like 2 million Shopify merchants. And let's just, for the sake of a laugh, let's just imagine that all 2 million Shopify merchants would be opted in because the campaign type is now generally available, would be opted in because the campaign type is now generally available. Then I think that's 500 bucks. If you take a billion revenue by two million, I think it's like 500 bucks for everyone. So I just think that it is. And, by the way, that's the total GMV, because now we have to think how much of the GMV was processed by shop pay. It'll be less. So let's imagine there's 250 bucks on the table for everyone. So this is my thing.
Speaker 1:I think that shop app is way too small to be attractive as an ad platform and, and also there's there's a huge conflict in making it bigger because Shopify is whole promise. Back in the day, I think they changed their mission statement, but it was always armed the rebels. The point was to help e-commerce brands succeed on their own websites that are created with Shopify. And yeah, so I'm just. I think there's a huge conflict there to then try to make your shop app big and to drive traffic to the app instead of toward people's websites. So I'm a little bit of a skeptic on that, but yeah, I'm sure there's something that I missed here. I'm going to be kicking myself when I hit the end button, but, but most of all, the one thing that I definitely I have to say before I go is thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you to everyone who listens to this podcast. Thank you for a wonderful 2024. I'm looking forward to seeing you next year in 2025. I'm telling you now where I'm really planning on mixing things up a bit, and I hope that that will be okay with you, and I hope that you'll like the direction that this goes in, but I'm going to leave you in suspense until then. So thanks again. If you enjoy this podcast, please recommend it to a friend or a colleague or, I don't know, your grandma. Maybe she's on, you know, candy crush soda. Maybe she's on Candy Crush Soda Saga. Looking at some app-loving ads right now, are my takes too spicy today? I hope my takes are not too spicy. And yeah, this podcast is produced by Smarter eCommerce. All opinions are my own disclaimer. To learn more, visit smarter-ecommercecom. Thanks again, I had fun with you. I hope you did too. Bye.