Is Black Week Still Worth It? A number-crunching deep-dive #LTM135

How can I make sure my deal finds additional traffic or customers?

There's only one right answer.

It works every time.

You take your greatest products and you give them a very good discount.

It's as easy as that.

Let's Talk Marketplace the Marketplace Podcast with Ingrid Lohmer and Van Vridichte.

Hi everyone and welcome back.

We are again at let's Talk Marketplace.

Ingrid, behind the mic today, keeping your favorite podcast running while Valerie is on her maternity break.

And I can rightfully say your favorite podcast, by the way, because several people in my network posted their yearly Spotify recap on LinkedIn last week.

And let's Talk Marketplace featured in quite a lot of those posts.

So, yeah, thank you very much for the appreciation.

That's what makes a podcast host happy.

Yeah, that and your likes and comments, of course.

Yeah, so keep doing that, please.

But anyway, I guess I have a lot of expectations to live up to and I better get started.

Started.

And I've got a good feeling that today's episode might meet your standards because I'd like to take a look back at Black Week and find out, was it any good, Was it worth it?

How many friends participated and were they happy with the results?

Or maybe to use a German saying, is it art?

Can it go?

And as I like to keep it practical and fact based on this channel, I invited myself a great guest and his bag full of Black Week stats for this recap.

So.

So welcome to Benjamin Weyrich, Managing Director, Catapult and Business Intelligence at the Marketplace Agency, Front Row.

Hi Benjamin, it's great to have you.

Hi Ingrid.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, it's really cool that I have you on the show because when I decided that I wanted to cover Black Week on the show, I quickly thought about inviting you because I do know that you've got lots of nice and juicy facts and figures from your great customer base.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about Front Row first and about your customers so that people know why I invited you for today's episode.

Yeah, happy to do so.

Yeah.

We are Front Row Europe here, part of the Front Row Group.

We're an e commerce agency, one of the leading ones in Europe.

We help mid size to enterprise sized clients in the e commerce journey, all the way from performance marketing, content creation, marketplace management, all from an operational perspective, but also from a strategic perspective.

And those topics are then supported through data analytics and our own SaaS platform, Catapult.

And maybe name a few of those customers that you're working with.

So that we know which brands we are talking about.

So we work from brands from all types of industries.

For example, with the Quality Group, with Fackelmann, with Severin, with Gustav Albert, and then up to enterprise clients like Tesa, like Bosch.

So it's quite a broad spectrum.

We manage a few hundred different brands.

And your main focus is with Amazon?

Correct.

We do connected commerce holistically.

That means all online touchpoints for our clients.

We have to say though that Amazon, even though we're not only doing Amazon, is our most important business.

And why?

Because it's the most important business for our clients.

Yeah, absolutely.

So we will be talking a lot about Blackwick on Amazon on this episode, but also touch upon the other channels as well a little bit.

But before we go into this, maybe a bit about you.

So who are you personally, Benjamin?

What is your USP in the marketplace world?

Yeah, yeah, like I said, I'm Benjamin.

I've been with front row for seven years.

I'm one of the managing directors here.

My specialty, I think is connecting the dots between the different functions that brands need to manage well to be successful in E commerce.

So connecting the dots of how does, for example, content impact CPCS in the performance marketing side, from the performance marketing, how is it correlating to retail factors such as conversion, rate optimization, stock availability and so on.

And my, of course, big focus is on everything data and analytics related.

So I love facts and I love data.

At the same time, I'm also sometimes a big fan of doing, you know, gut feeling decisions.

I think, you know, data isn't always right just because, you know, it's difficult to capture data, the world perfectly in data.

So yeah, that's about me.

Yeah, and that's why you're here on the show today, because that's what I like.

Facts and figures and a bit of gut feeling as well.

So maybe to wrap this up, a little fun fact about yourself, can we post one as well?

A fun fact about myself is I do have a twin brother.

We're not identical, but we are decently similar looking.

He works in a completely different industry in a different part of Germany.

And it happens every few months or so that someone mistakes us for each other.

So someone that works with him would come up to me and be like, hey, Gary, how are you doing?

I'm like, who are you?

The same thing would happen that the same thing happens to him.

And it's always a little bit awkward in the beginning because that's not something I have on my mind when someone approaches me that they might confuse me for my twin brother, but it always ends up in a selfie, a good laugh and a quick text message.

That's nice.

Well then, greetings to your brother from this channel he might not be listening to because he is in a very different branch, but still, nice to hear about that, right?

Okay then, I guess we're set.

We know about Front Row, we know about you, and we can go into some Black Week figures after a very short advertising break, in which I'd like to take a look at.

Our partner ebay.

Ebay is pushing live shopping in Germany at the moment.

Just a few days ago, they launched ebay Life at the Comic Con in Stuttgart.

With ebay, live sellers can present the product in real time, engage with the community, and sell directly, all in the exciting auction format that has made ebay legendary.

During live shows, sellers can offer both immediate purchases and auctions, making the selling experience even more flexible.

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And all of this is supported by ebay's buyer protection and transparent policies.

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Interactive live moments build trust, boost customer loyalty, and help you reach new audiences.

Like Jen said and Millennials.

So if you're curious to take part in this new video shopping experience, you can find more information on it in our blog post.

We'll link it in the show notes.

Okay, then I guess we can dive a little deeper into the figures from Black Season.

As always, in preparation for a podcast, I did a little bit of digging.

And as it is always the case with figures just after the Black week, it's not that easy to get some figures because they're normally.

How can I put this?

Only companies that are happy with their figures will go out with a press release on it.

So you only get half of the story normally.

And then there's a difference between the story you get from global figures or from U.S. figures.

And it's very hard to get a European story sometimes because those don't always align.

Maybe I'll give you some of a look over what I found for the global numbers and then Benjamin, you can have a look at it and tell me if that confirms with what you found from your customers or not.

So from what I read from the US side, it seems to have been an okay ish Black week.

I read something about 1 digit growth figures + 6% Salesforce said or + 9% I heard from Shopify and stuff like that.

So it seems to have been a decent black season in a way.

But I did hear some hangover news, so to say, for example, from Germany, where the German trade association Hadi said, yeah, it was okay.

Ish, but, well, no growth if you compare it to last year.

So it's, it's hard to get a, a read on it, I think.

Is that something that you also found?

Yeah, we, we see similar things.

So 50% of our business is in North America.

The other 50% is in Europe.

So what you just mentioned also kind of reflects our numbers.

Overall, the event did perform better in North America compared to Europe.

I think in.

That's just on a general level, in detail, it is very nuanced.

Not every country in Europe is, you know, performing similar.

Not every category is performing the same.

So when we talk about this in now, I think, you know, there's always going to be the exception.

I'm trying to make like, you know, generalize points, but they will always be the one brand, you know, that beat them all or that even though they're in a category that's technically winning, that didn't win.

And we can get into some of the details as well on why or what our gut feeling is and also some of our data on why this is and, you know, what's the reason between winning brands and losing brands.

Okay, so what would you say if you look over Europe is there, what are the winning countries?

Yeah, so we see that the major countries, Germany, uk, France, Italy, Spain are the ones where there's just most of the volume to be captured.

And also traditionally where most like European brands have their, you know, strongest brand awareness.

So I want to focus on those a little bit because like the most year on year increase we see from like Belgium, Netherlands, some of the newer Amazon countries, but they're just so small that overall it has very little impact on what we would call the overall success of this tentpole event.

I think when we look at what are the categories that are winning, we see that the traditional brands like consumer electronics, household, they're of course always the one where these events make up a big part of their even yearly success of the business.

I think an interesting one is beauty.

So beauty currently is becoming more and more relevant on Amazon, especially in the beauty premium sector because those brands also start to understand the power and the sales channel that is Amazon.

And with Amazon becoming more brand friendly through protecting ad placement and prime TV advertisement and so on, more and more of those beauty and High priced brands are also starting to participate on the deal events and because they haven't done so in the prior year, they a lot of the time see significant growth.

Where we see a decline is for example in fmcg.

One of the reasons being if we look at brand, there are some brands in FMCGC sector that decided to no longer participate simply because FMCG in E commerce is a difficult business already.

A lot of the products, a lot of the brands are low price point which doesn't really allow for like high discounts for example which of course increases the number of sold units but it does put additional pressure on the profit margin.

So we see a lot of FMCG brands reducing their participation for example.

That's interesting.

Let's keep at that for a while because when I read up on Black Week beforehand of this podcast and I planned on doing that before blackwheat even started so I took a look at what people wrote about how they will be dealing with the Black Week and maybe it was just my network, but I heard and read a lot of people saying that yeah, we won't take part, we, we cannot afford it.

We have been giving out discounts the whole year because it has been such a, such a difficult and demanding year anyways and now we've got nothing else to give.

So was that just my network or is that a general thing that happened?

I think there are certain like brands that over discount their products and have done throughout the year just to hit their original revenue projections and a lot of them start like stop or they hope that even without discounts for example they would participate from the additional traffic for example on those 10 pole events.

And this is a thing that we can clearly deny with data we see with our data.

Every client that doesn't participate in deals will not see significant uplift.

And again there's going to be this one listener working for a brand where this was the case.

But across hundreds of brands this is really not the case.

And I think if we think about back and going to gut feeling now instead of data everyone is hunting for a deal.

If I look at myself, I bought I think like 10 different things ranging from like 5 to maybe €50 in price point.

One of those I bought that wasn't in a deal and it was, it was towels.

You know, it's like I didn't really care if it's six or seven euro.

But so generally speaking those that don't participate won't see revenue uplift.

And then.

Interesting point.

Sorry, I have to interrupt you here because this is one of the things that you always hear like you will anyway participate, you will anyway profit from Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

So you say that this is actually not the case and it has not been for last year.

So where, where does that rumor come from?

I think what happens is a brand will not participate and then they see 10% more revenue, 20% more revenue on those days, which, yeah, you could argue saying you get more traffic.

But if we look at the brands that participate, they don't see 20% more revenue.

They see 10, 20 times more revenue compared to like an average selling day.

So this is where I think a lot of the essentially confusion comes in.

And I think it's a story some people just like to hear or like to say, you know, it's controversial.

You get a lot of reach on social media, say, you know, we grew double digits on prime day without discounts.

So I think that's really where it's, where it's coming from.

Also when we look at brands, I like to categorize them in like two, two, two groups.

There is brands that have participated on these Steedle events many times before and have really mastered the game, right.

They understood since many years how much revenue there is to make on those deal events and they've really like perfected their game.

Those are seeing not so much growth anymore because they're already getting most out of the deal events.

On the other hand, when we start working with brands, maybe that joined us just this year and they didn't have such professional setups before, they will have their most successful, you know, Black Week of all times.

And that's just because prior to it they didn't really run proficient professional setups.

They didn't, you know, maybe they just ran some initial discounts, but they didn't encompass it with like CRM activities or off Amazon marketing activities.

So there's especially those brands that can still, you know, win a lot, especially from just a year on year growth perspective.

Mm, interesting.

So there was also a lot of talk, especially in the beginning of November and there were some studies too that indicated that consumers themselves would be weary and suspicious of Black Friday, that they didn't trust the discounts anymore and so they were not really planning to, you know, go on the lookout for good deals and good offers.

Was that noticeable at all?

We do see it to some extent.

So I think after every deal event there's always again popular posts around like fake discounts here, fake discounts there.

But I think the reality shows that still Black Friday, at least on year, on year in Europe, must be around even or slightly in the plus, which means there's as many customers buying this year than they did last year.

Yeah.

From a year on year growth perspective, it's not so attractive anymore, but it's still the same amount of customers.

I think more interestingly, when we compare Amazon only deal events to deal events like Black Friday Cyber Monday, we see that the Amazon only events tend to suffer more currently.

So Prime Day, for example, was not as successful for most brands or they did higher, they had higher expectations towards how well Prime Day would go.

And I think at least from the brands we work with, this Prime Day, that was a few months ago, they had this experience in their head going into Black Friday Cyber Week, you know, already going in with a negative expectation, it's going to not perform as well, but then it performed just as well as last year.

So again, it just depends on what's your attitude going in.

So we saw a lot of our brands just being super happy with the fact that it's year and year of roughly the same or a little bit of growth there.

Interesting.

So if we go on defining successful Black Week, what KPIs would you normally use?

Because you've been talking a lot about growth and turnover, but growth and turnover just is like one KPI.

Of course, I heard a lot about how you have to spend a lot more money and a lot more on your discounts, on your ad spend to make it work.

So in the end, profits might be much lower than they were before.

Question mark.

Or was that not the case?

Yeah, that is, that is the case.

I'm going to say something, I say, every single year, after every single event, this is going to be the most profitable deal event of the future.

Okay.

Every single year profitability gets worse.

Yeah.

Okay, you can look at this.

It was true last year because last year was worse than the day the year before and this year is worse than last year.

But I think that shouldn't stop brands.

I think it just increases the urgency of looking at data and looking at profitability.

And not making gut feeling decisions here on, you know, what's the ideal price point I could offer?

Because yes, margins are under pressure.

And when we look at the media side, for example, on some of the categories, you know, the CPCS increase like 10% year on year.

So you do need 10% more money to acquire the same amount of revenue profit, which then of course puts again margin under pressure at the same time, I think.

And this is where Amazon wins against Some of the other channels, you know, measuring your customer and the person that bought is becoming easier and easier or there's going to be more transparency.

For example, what Amazon has done with the Amazon marketing cloud, which I'll just describe in a few words, because this tends to be more a marketing topic, is they essentially give manufacturers full access to their first party data of their customers.

So for the first time, manufacturers that never had access to anything even remotely close to customer lifetime value can now use the AMC to determine this customer that I just acquired.

Maybe the initial purchase wasn't profitable, but they're a new customer.

Previously they bought different brands and they're gonna buy like two more times within the year.

So.

And then they can also compare this more towards like D2C channels.

Right, because in a D2C channel you typically make the argument, I have high customer lifetime value on Amazon, I don't.

And we see this switch the conversation.

A lot of times what brands now find is that the customers they have on Amazon actually provide very high customer lifetime value.

And if we specifically look at customers now purchasing during deal events, one of the interesting things we find, or one of the, you know, like concerns that some of the brands have is saying, oh, they will only purchase during deal events, you know, that like the cheap customers, I don't really want them.

And this turns out to be somewhat true, somewhat not.

So what an interesting analysis we did with comparing this year's Black Friday to last year and the prior year is that we do see that the customers that are acquired through tentpole events tend to repurchase again during tentpole events.

So it is true that those customers, the new ones you're acquiring, are deal hunters.

At the same time, we also see, because they regularly buy during tentpole events, you just have more orders per customer, which at the same time increases customer lifetime value.

For example, this is an analysis that's only possible as of recently, and it helps a lot of brands find profitability because instead of looking at the initial purchase and the profit margin of a single product, they can now look at the profit margin essentially of their customer along multiple years of their journey on Amazon.

Okay, so to make that a bit more graspable, we would have a deal hunter customer who would maybe, for example, discover a brand in one year and maybe buy a hoodie and next year he goes to the same brand and says, oh, I remember, that was a nice hoodie.

I buy that one.

And their jeans as well.

Is that something that happens?

Exactly.

So when we look at customers and we look at did they buy your brand for the first time or was it a repeat purchase?

Therefore not being a new to brand customer, we see that during deal events the most of the customers are new to brand customers, much more so than during regular weeks within the year.

So it's actually a great way to find new customers.

Again, my gut feeling on why this is, it's because we tend, you know, to explore on those events things are a bit cheaper.

Maybe we buy a brand we haven't bought before, maybe it's a slightly more expensive brand I haven't bought before.

Or I buy things I didn't really need, which from a brand perspective does increase customer lifetime value, of course.

So I think this is a little bit on where it's coming from.

So can you also say from your numbers for which categories?

This is mostly true.

So in which categories might it be even more important to consider customer lifetime value than just the profitability of one sales event?

Yeah, I think in it's all the categories where repeat purchase is.

It's like a consumer, it's a consumable product.

Could be anything from like, you know, deodorants to, to beauty.

To food, where customers are coming over and over again because maybe they need your product on a monthly basis, on a quarter quarterly base at the same time.

These are also the brands that have traditionally already worked with customer lifetime value because it's so important to the business model.

Where I think there's a lot of opportunities is brands even in household appliance, for example, or consumer electronics now being able to analyze their customer.

One great analysis we do for a lot of our customers is to identify what we call like the gatekeeper products.

It essentially says what's your product that makes a shopper fall in love with your brand.

Because falling in love with your brand is the reason why they keep repurchasing.

And at the same time every, I tell this to every brand that we work with.

Like straight up, I tell you you have products that every that your customers love.

These are the products like the customers associate with your brands.

And then you just have shitty products too.

Every brand has products that are horrible.

And now in the data we can prove that you really shouldn't be selling the horrible products.

Because once a customer comes by those products, maybe because initially they bought the product they really love, they then never go back to your brand again or it's really hard to win them over because they had such a negative experience.

So I do think that again the brands in electronics, household appliances can use this data because most of the competitors today won't yet be using it.

Oh, that's an interesting point because after all, Black week and also other sales events are often used by brands to sell off the stock that won't sell.

Now you're actually telling me, yeah, that's the wrong thing to do because if you sell out your crap then people won't come back to you.

But if you really go in and give.

Some good deals on your high quality products or your love products, as you said before, then that might turn customers one time customers into two fans.

It's an interesting point.

You mention this like I want to sell overstock during deal events.

The question we get quite a lot and before every deal event is like, how can I make sure my deal is, you know, finds additional traffic or customers?

And there's, there's only one right answer.

And it works every time.

You take your greatest products and you give them a very good discount.

It's as easy as that.

And there's a good reason for it too.

And you can prove this with data too.

The reason or what differentiates a deal where you maybe sell 10% more units from 10 times as many units.

And the answer is you want to be the featured offer on the deal page on Amazon.

The deal page on Amazon on every given day is the second most visited website.

Like essentially part of Amazon after the homepage.

But especially on deal events, it is the most visited website.

Of course everyone is there looking at deals of the day.

I think they completely reworked it this year, looked very cool now.

And you want to be a top feature deal and you can see this in your data because your products all of a sudden are exposed to 50 times more traffic and we can measure this.

And now is the question like how do I get there?

Well, if we think about Amazon has one goal in mind.

They want to show their customer the most relevant product.

And it's really about relevancy.

So relevancy is.

You can calculate too.

But to make it simple, it's determined by how likely is the shopper that's currently on Amazon likely to buy this product.

And when Amazon now gets, let's make up a brand.

I'm a household appliance brand.

I sell pots, you know, cooking pots.

And I have a different range.

I have 50 different sets and you know, most of them are horrible and have bad reviews and five of them are really good and have a good price point.

Which one is Amazon going to show on the featured page is going to be your best selling product, the one that loves that the brands or the shoppers already love the most.

So it's really about again, taking your best products, which are typically again the ones that make your customers fall in love with your brand, giving them a decent discount.

And that's how you acquire a customer that falls in love with your brand and therefore keeps repurchasing afterwards.

And again, with Amazon Marketing Cloud we can now make this measurable too, which just simply wasn't possible like a year ago or two years ago even.

Yeah, that's really a very nice source of data that has been opening up over the last year.

I did want to touch upon different sales channels with you as well, and so I think I'll close down the Amazon topic here, even though I think there's lots more to say.

We should just meet up again with your numbers on Amazon, you know.

But we should turn now to other marketplaces after another quick short break in which I'd like to look at Bool, which is another great marketplace place by the way.

As we're talking about deals at the moment.

January might feel like a slow month to you in many markets.

That's true.

No deals anywhere there, but that's not the case in the Netherlands and in Belgium.

There, the Sale, or Solden as it's called in Dutch weeks kick off the year with a real momentum boost for brands and sellers.

And it is a good idea to take part in this if you're active on Boel, because Boel plays a very central role in this seasonal spike.

We took a closer look at what actually happens in January in our neighboring countries and why this is a period of such exceptional growth for international sellers too.

In our new blog post, we break down the mechanics behind the January effect, why demand is so high, how Bol's campaign structure amplifies visibility, and why stable logistics after Q4 can give you a real competitive edge in this very special time of the year.

Plus, we outline the five steps that help you make the most of January sale from localization and assortment strategy to timing your campaigns and positioning your brand for the Netherlands and Belgium.

And we highlight why German brands in particular perform so well during this period.

You' link to the full blog post in our show Notes.

Take a look and get ready for one of the most underestimated growth moments of the year.

Okay, so as I said, let's look at the other marketplaces and the other platforms because there's lots more sales channels in Black Week and also involved in Black Week.

Aside from Amazon, what are your insights there?

What platforms could you look at?

How did your customers do there?

Was it even relevant?

Yes.

So other platforms off Amazon are interesting because there is a lot less competition on them.

So they're interesting not because there's a lot of revenue to gain, it is because Amazon tends to win more and more market share.

But on those platforms there's very little competition.

And it could be the one you mentioned, it could be traditional wholesaler that now has a webfront as well.

And the lack of competition is especially coming from like the lack of Asian brand markets, which are now pulling more and more into Europe, for example, and making life also difficult on Amazon.

So what we see is that those other players can be very profitable for brands.

So it is definitely worth not ignoring them and actively participating at the same time because the traffic tends to be very limited compared to maybe what they're used to.

Because most of these other marketplaces only exist in one country or maybe two.

And even then they have a small segment which in their like known for.

So there's not so much total upside to be gained at the same time.

Something we noticed with our, a lot of our brands that we work with is about like last year, many brands still had the focus on after Amazon.

I want to capture more and more other marketplaces and retailers and they pretty quickly again realized there's only so much you can do.

There's not so many buttons you can click.

You cannot just give them 10 times the money to make 10 times the revenue.

So maybe your first €10,000 you can invest quite profitably.

But it has a, the, the incremental ROI goes down pretty quickly afterwards.

So we do have again a few brands where they had very successful events outside it is, I, I think it's not a winning strategy though.

It might protect market share and profit for a little bit.

But I think going forward, if brands think about, you know, what should they be doing to be successful in five years, that is not the winning strategy.

I think the winning strategy is going to involve a lot more brand building, especially on the traditional manufacturer side.

So a lot of the traditional manufacturers, historically speaking, they identified themselves through great.

Manufacturing.

They say, I have a product that no one else can buy.

I have a true USP in the quality of my product.

Let's be honest, almost everyone produces now in China.

It creates this environment where manufacturing becomes commodity.

And if we look at other markets that have been commodity for a really long time already what we were.

For example, water.

It's the most commoditized product.

Everyone has water at their taps at home.

In most countries, you can drink it.

Yet water brands pour billions of dollars into creating the brand.

And it's very simple.

The more commoditized a product is, the more you need to invest into brand.

Because if your product had a true usp, you wouldn't have to do it anymore.

And now this is happening to a lot of industries where this was previously not the case.

So manufacturing is becoming a commodity, especially like in household appliance.

Let's just stick to this example.

So what we find is that the manufacturers that realize it's no longer about manufacturing, it's about creating a brand, are the ones that are winning.

Because on all of those marketplaces, the number of generic searches is decreasing.

More and more shoppers are starting their search with a brand in mind already.

So this is really the market you want to capture.

If you're not playing in the brand game, you're only competing for like 20% of the people that you know look for generic, or maybe in some categories, it's 30% that look for generic solutions.

At the same time, it offers brands a clear path to growth.

Because it's.

Once you start building a brand, you can launch a lot of adjacent categories to the one you're traditionally in, because the customer all of a sudden doesn't think of you as a brand that produces, you know, pots.

You know, they start associating you with, you know, like all types of motion things you load the brand with, which allows you then go from, you know, from, from pots into the next thing that's close to it in the kitchen, for example.

So one of the strategy we see working really well for a lot of the brands is essentially, you know, realizing they're not a manufacturer anymore, they're a brand and acting as a brand.

Which, for example, includes launching a lot of new categories, which there's growth there just by entering new categories.

Interesting.

I have to look a bit at the time, but I wanted to raise one question that we haven't talked about before.

But it just came up to me when I did my research for today's episode and I found a study saying that by Fox Intelligence, I think that reported some 800 plus increase in traffic during black week driven by AI recommendations.

And I find that one interesting because at the moment, at least, if I'm not mistaken, Amazon is shutting out AI agents, so it's not possible to use ChatGPT whatever to really go through the Amazon listings.

So is that something that you think might change in the future or might affect how Amazon is working?

I do believe it will have an impact, but not for.

Different reasons.

So when we look at these year on year numbers like 800%.

The math piece of my head says, well, the base is very low.

800 means nothing if your base is one person.

And if we look at Rufus last year on Amazon, for example, it didn't exist yet.

And ChatGPT, yes, it did exist at the time, but no one was really using it for shopping because it just launched like the online research feature.

So in my mind, 800% increase from nothing is very little.

I would have expected like 10,000% increase just because the base is so low.

And again, I think to the point that you mentioned in the beginning, all of these AI companies want to make it look very positive at the moment, so they will always overinflate.

These numbers will never be lowballed.

I think the only company that's lowballing the AI numbers is Google.

Yes, I think so.

Yeah.

So.

I think if we look at ChatGPT, for example, it's still very early adopter.

I think there's a, there is value in, you know, spending time on understanding how it works and how you could make sure your products are Rufus optimized or, you know, gen AI optimized to some extent.

I think those that do will also realize pretty quickly that it's not that different from traditional SEO.

So you don't have to reinvent the entire wheel.

There are some things you might want to change in the content, but you don't have to reinvent the entire wheel.

That's a very good point.

Maybe as a wrap up question, because you said before that each.

Deal event that just happened has been the most profitable deal event forever, so everything that comes later on will be less profitable.

So how long can we do this?

I mean, where are sales events going with this constant decline in profitability?

That is a good question.

I can't predict the exact year this will happen in, but I think.

There'S going to be.

Brands will have to become smarter because I think the importance of deal events from a shopper perspective are just increasing for brands.

It's again going to become more and more difficult to maintain margin, so they would just have to become smarter.

And we see some brands that went into this year with a much smarter profitability strategy.

Maybe compared to previous year, they only achieved 90% of the revenue from last year, which is still up a lot.

But Their Profitability was like 30% better than last year.

So I think this is important as something every brand essentially has to figure out for themselves.

But it's difficult to predict.

I have the fear that it will never stop.

As long as there are shoppers, there will be brands offering discounts.

Well, there have been.

I think when the first store opened somewhere some half year later, we had the first sale event.

I would like to have one last number I think that every brand should take away and that's around this increasing length of deal events.

So Black Friday, Black Week, Cyber Monday, forgot the exact number.

It's like 10, 11, 12 days now, depending on, you know, what days you count into the deal event.

And a lot of brands.

There's two types of brands.

There's the one that say you should do everything in the beginning.

You want to be one week ahead of Black Friday with your deals.

And then there's others that say I run my deals on Black Friday or on Cyber Monday.

And with this year, we have pretty clear data on this too.

And it's like this.

The deal event revenue per day is like a U shape.

You have most of the revenue in the beginning and then most of the revenue in the end.

The difference is though that at the end, so Black Friday Cyber Week is a Cyber Monday.

It's much lower than the initial day.

So what we found is that most of the brands that had an amazing Black Week, they participated with their deals straight from the beginning.

We had some brands noticeably large that made 70% of their entire revenue on the first day.

Because again, if you think about it, a lot of the products are commoditized now.

You just can.

You're buying the.

If you see the product you want on the first day, you're buying it on the first day.

And then all of the deals that came later are lost, no matter how good the deal is because the shopper already purchased a product.

So for those brands that are thinking about should I participate in the full length, should I only stick to the last days clear recommendation, Participate in the first days of the deal event.

This is where most of the revenue these days is made.

That's an interesting figure, especially if we consider how the deal length, as you said before, has been increasing and increasing over the last years.

And I think we are not far away from Black Month basically, so not just from Black Week.

So let's see where you can place your deals next year.

But anyway, for this time, thank you very much for your insights and your thoughts, your great figures.

Benjamin.

It was a pleasure having you.

Thank you for having me.

Right.

I hope you also took away a lot of interesting information for the next deal event to come.

And next week you can listen to the final episode of let's Talk Marketplace for this year at least.

And we covered the and exciting Marketplace year and reveal some figures about the year we had at Marketplace Universe.

And also turn to a very personal recap of two female co founders and how they deal with major changes such as a pregnancy, basically.

So lots to unpack and make sure to tune in again on next Thursday.

And for daily, thank you for joining us.

Bye bye.

You listened to let's Talk Marketplace, the Marketplace podcast with Ingrid Lommer and Valerie Dichtel.