The Great Unbundling

- GTM efficiency: How efficiently can the marketplace grow? How much does the marketplace spend to acquire and onboard a new buyer or seller?

One of the most important companies in making both of the non-Amazon value-chains work is Shopify, which is a platform, not an Aggregator. Google and Facebook may collect the customers, but it is Shopify (and WooCommerce, its open-source competitor) that provides the infrastructure for merchants to actually sell things online.

There are several big trends impacting consumer brands. New brands like Dollar Shave Club that are skipping traditional retail and building their own relationships with consumers are threatening traditional brands in categories they never thought possible. At the same time, while brands need to sell through Amazon because of its reach with consumer

... See more

In 1995, if you had said “should we open stores in that state or just run TV ads there?” that would not have been a meaningful question, but now all of those budgets are merging into one TAM. Do you get a better ROI on Instagram ads or faster shipping? If you open a store in that city, do your returns go down? 

Brick-and-mortar grocers have built in geographical demand, but online grocers must pay “rent” to Google, Facebook and other top-of-funnel acquisition tools—and that rent tends to rise over time

The Internet RevolutionI already explained what happened to newspapers when distribution erased local newspapers moats in the blink of an eye; as I suggested at the beginning, though, this was not an isolated incident but a sign of what was to come. Back in July I laid out how the acquisition of Dollar Shaving Club suggested the same process was ha... See more