E Commerce

“The cost of creating digital things is going to zero. There's no friction there. Actually making something physical a brand that you can just like build over time. I think that, I think that's a smart thing to do.”

“If you look at a lot of what's happened, again, in e-commerce over the past 20 or 30 years, is it got so efficient, and one of the ways to make it so efficient is to obscure who you're buying from, and obscure the ability for people to, like, build brands and …”

“And so the Visa brand and MasterCard brands are much more than just a payment rail. They're this consumer warm blanket that created e-commerce. Without those brands, you'd never enter your dark card and have Amazon ship your product.”

“We get questions like, well, isn't the chatbot going to tell everyone what to buy and just complete the transaction and no one will ever do e-commerce off of an ad again. And what that leaves a sight of is that people actually like to shop and people want to l…”

“E-commerce has never exceeded 20% of retail spend in America.”

“Industrial real estate is a huge beneficiary. It's simple things like AI as an accelerant to e-commerce growth. It's advanced manufacturing. How AI is accelerating that, particularly here in this country, as a driver of demand.”

“Those guys are all completely the ones who are crushing it, going to zero to a hundred million plus in call it like 12 to 24 months. Like all the companies that are running the same playbook is decentralized. UGC with kind of like AI backend for screening for …”

“It feels like e-commerce will see agentic shopping happening. We're getting closer. Computer use is getting better. APIs are there. MCP servers and Shopify has a bunch of tools for this stuff.”

“And if you just look at this right now, there is approximately, 50, 60% growth of condom sales online.”

“I think it can be done today, but you would do it in like e-commerce where it's like the probability of success is like really low, no matter if a human or an agent does it, but like an agent could surely manage everything.”

“So what I think is e-commerce, you want a very rich user interface. It would be agentic. You can be able to have a conversation with it. You can talk to it. I could talk back to it, but I think the point is it has to be more visual. I think a text-based interf…”

“So forms of shopping that are pure entertainment are never going to go entirely robotic.”

“There's things like price discovery. There's things like Deal hunting and all of that sort of fairly easy to imagine if you're, whenever you caught yourself thinking, I wish I had an assistant to do this for me. You will now like that. That's where it's all go…”

“My larger view is, E-commerce will operate most likely with a seller agent and a buyer agent. A buyer agent is, you know, it could be, I would define maybe Instagram is acting as a buyer agent, right? Like it could be your own personal agent tomorrow. It could…”

“And even Apple, which is innovation company, but it's still e-commerce company and most of their sales are coming from their e-commerce, from their website and from their e-commerce activities.”

“If you will look at like all the big players in this field, you will see that in their websites, they changed their jargon and now it's called commerce and not e-commerce anymore.”

“I feel like that has been the secret to success with the modern mall. There's a lot of malls that have sort of mid-tier or low-end retailers where it is actually pretty comparable to shopping online. You go in, there's no one that's really going to talk to you…”

“E-commerce was like AI as today which is everyone's doing.”

“Most of the time, at least at this point, anybody that's succeeding is typically doing CPG sales anyway. But CPG strictly would be, you know, consumer packaged goods through retail, like in-store environment, and then they would say e-com is the other side of …”

“All I'm ever trying to do on e-comm. Is I'm not necessarily trying to go build some massive brand. I'm just trying to create like what I would call like a rigged slot machine where I know I can put a dollar in and get a dollar and 30 cents out. And then it's l…”

“This just like makes me want to start an e-commerce company in twenty-twenty-six, and I can't even believe I'm saying that because the reason I, you know, I wouldn't start an e-commerce company is because it's just hard to do, but with things like this, it mak…”

“And because of the complicated fitment criteria, the e-commerce penetration rates in auto parts are very, very low. So I don't know the latest numbers, but when I was in the auto parts industry a number of years ago, the penetration rates in automotive were se…”

“I assume that the world will instead end up with a smaller number of agents that act on behalf of consumers going out and doing work. That changes fundamentally the internet. It just means that if you have a website today that sells tickets or bicycles or what…”

“E-commerce at that time, and I think still is, like, sub-twenty percent of all commerce at that time, it was close to 12%.”

“We just have learned in business to business or in e-commerce, especially those two, email is still the killer communication channel, full stop.”

“Normally it doesn't happen for food and beverage because you're hungry. You want to, you know, even if it is outside your building, you'll go out and take it. But when it comes to your e-commerce and you know, anything from, you know, B to B scenarios. It's ok…”

“We were into e-commerce very early, just kind of by necessity due to the size of the product, and we didn't have a lot of margin in the product either.”

“I mean, e-commerce, you should be sub eight percent at all times”

“In, say, the kitchenware space. Your website and the ability to purchase online was looked at as just a tool to help you sell in person. You don't buy cookware that way. You know, it's kind of like people weren't quite yet, they were just beginning to buy clot…”

“Our website began selling PCs and notebooks in June, 1996. At the end of that year, online sales reached a million dollars a day.”

“Having a two million dollar e-com business selling a widget versus a two million dollar ARR SaaS company, It's just night and day, both in terms of the profit you can pull out of it, but also for the exit multiple. That two million dollar ARR SaaS company migh…”

“Forget about moving your manufacturing, which is a multi-year process that may not even work, by the way. Just like changing your, like sourcing from one place to another is, you know, six months to a year to get it up to scale.”

“The administration for e-commerce is just Absolutely crazy, and that's where a lot of my e-commerce ventures have gone to die, but everything coming together, it was one of those ideas that if it worked, And we started a new trend and don't get me wrong. We…”

“So if you can be in the support layer, the administration, the financing layer of e-commerce, well, there's a pretty penny to be made there.”

“Now you look at it and the healthier they are, the less they're going to need your money. So now you're competing against other forms of finance and banks. So that's where things get really tough is quality deal flow.”

“And I say, if you can't ring up 200 people and get them either interested in buying your product directly or know someone who would like that product, then you shouldn't get into it. You shouldn't begin.”

“If I follow a link and I land on an e-commerce from like a large brand that's trying to really differentiate themselves and be something different, right? Like I definitely just, I wouldn't want just to have some box saying like, you come up with what you want…”

“When the cost of building an e-commerce that looks like any of the current brands today goes down to like, just Ask Bolt to do it for you. Ask Lovable to do it for you. And you have that. Those brands are going to have to come up with something much more engag…”

“If you go to popular platforms, like really good emails. You're gonna find 80% emails from e-commerce, purely curated, so you're not gonna be able to do that.”

“How you sell a product in retail is much different than how you sell it online. And so this, the box has to stand upright. The text has to be legible from say, 10 feet away, as opposed to, you know, three feet from your monitor.”

“You want to avoid also giving too much options. Because you know, like it could, your conversion rate could drop, like for, especially for econ brands, they run loads of traffic. Well, this traffic is paid and then giving someone the option to log in as an. Yo…”

“Most of the brands that we would win, it would take, you know, three months to get to a signed contract, sometimes as long as six months and did not know this before, but e-commerce is one of the, I think most challenging spaces to sell into. Because there's s…”

“I mean, it was the e-commerce industry before the e-commerce industry. Anybody could do it. It was just about aggregating demand.”

“71% is products in stores. 26% is e-commerce. Three percent is services to customers.”

“Like, we were 99% e-commerce for years. Now it's less than a third of the business.”

“It kind of takes the intersection of new functionality in terms of applications that can be built as a result of AI crossed with novel distribution tactics, largely pioneered by e-commerce people. And so when you take the two of those together, it creates for …”

“If you could afford e-commerce at that moment, and you could afford to build a site, the marketing was basically free. Now that's totally flipped, right?”

“One thing that we got wrong is a lot of things return back to pre-COVID. Humans don't really change that much or they change more slowly. And so e-commerce really returned back to the pre-COVID trend line.”

“The pain point is just the highest of the e-commerce SaaS segment, but specifically within these like one to two hundred million dollar revenue businesses.”

“We were the first to sell residential and light commercial heating and air conditioning equipment online direct to consumer, which broke open an industry and capitalized on the wave of e-commerce prior to many people even knowing that e-commerce was a thing.”

“The e-commerce company, by the time I had sold it, we had done probably a hundred million through that organization.”

“Ok, let's not confuse the fact that a person doesn't understand the intricacies of e-commerce with the person, with the fact that that person doesn't understand how to grow a business, because you can learn e-commerce. Working with distributed teams, growing a…”

“So, I always felt clear that e-com, I think for us, was going to be a surprise and delight, but that candy is an impulse purchase, and People are gonna wanna have a sweet tooth and pick up the bag in store.”

“And so at Stripe, we actually started off with solutions that were based much more on your business model. And we would create these solutions for SaaS companies, for marketplaces, for e-commerce companies that would collate together a bunch of capabilities ac…”

“80% of diaper sales in that country are e-commerce.”

“Shipping matters a lot in these things, you know, like keeping the weight, basically the weight below one pound matters a ton to keep the costs really low because of the USPS shipping.”

“The only thing that matters in EcomDude is first order profitability. It's just the only thing that matters. And if you can't be first order profitable and scale, then it doesn't matter. It's your, basically the market will tell you if the idea is good or not …”

“I mean, I think if we're going to be realistic for e-commerce It's really hard to get to 18 to 24 months. I don't have any e-commerce founders in that boat.”

“That was the, I think that may have been the first e-commerce, like the, at least the first like formal e-commerce e-commerce thing.”

“The mistake here is people try to do this for podcasters. They're like, Hey, you should be posting clips or you should do this. I'll do it for you. And then what they forget is that Most podcasters don't have any money or they don't have enough. They don't mak…”