Defensive Selling Strategies at Amazon, with Martin Heubel, founder of Amazon consultancy Consulterce

Transcript

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Peter Crosby (00:00):

Welcome to unpacking the Digital Shelf where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age. Hey everyone. Peter Crosby here from the Digital Shelf Institute. It was Jeff Bezos who first said, your margin is my opportunity. And the Andy chassis regime extends that strategy as Amazon continuously adjusts vendor terms to maximize profitability and win the price war. Amazon consultancy, consulters and our friends at Strata recently teamed up on a survey of brands about their Amazon relationship. Martin Heubel from Consulters Dug deep with Lauren Livak Gilbert, and me on some of the best defensive strategies that brands can use to gain some higher ground with the world's everything store. Martin, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for bringing your Amazonian brain back to our audience.

Martin Heubel (01:02):

Hi Peter. Hi Lauren. Thanks so much for having me back. Really excited about our episode today and yeah, about all of the changes that have happened in the Amazon world really since we spoke last time. I always feel like the months are flying past, but yeah, now we are right in the preparation phase before the fourth quarter, and I feel brands are still wrapping their head around how to kind of budget their 2025 and to position themselves for success also for the end of this year. So yeah, very excited for today and once again, thank you so much for having me back.

Peter Crosby (01:34):

Yeah, it's great timing because you just finished with all the holiday preparations and everything. You just finished your latest Amazon survey, so let's just dive right into some of the key learnings. What is the state of the state of Amazon right now? What are they focused on?

Martin Heubel (01:50):

Yeah, absolutely. I think before we dive into the survey results, so the survey was conducted together with Ruster and Claire McBride, also from Strat. And what we were seeing is really that of course there are a lot of kind of changes happening not only in the vendor space or in the supplier space that cater to Amazon really, but also with Amazon themselves. And I think there's still this kind of key conception about Andy, Jesse as a new CEO or not so new CEO anymore of Amazon bringing in a lot of change not only into the commercial aspects of the relationship that vendors and multinational brands have with Amazon, but also in the operational way that Amazon really performs and streamlines its business in 2024, which we've seen even at the beginning of this year and which has really been focused up until the end of this year So far the key objective remains to be everything store, but also to become the number one marketplace for grocery and especially for CPG items.

(02:56):

And we see that through various kind of changes and various ways that Amazon operates this year and has begun to operate since a couple of years, if you're being quite honest, we're seeing a lot of automation and offshoring. So Amazon remains laser focused on really automating and offshoring any kind of repetitive tasks that could block its resources from a management and full-time headcount perspective in western countries, particularly North America, but also the European Union. And we are seeing a lot of these kind of teams getting offshore to Eastern Europe and India if it's not being automatable, so to say, the process that is underlying it, which of course grows the relative profit margin of Amazon even further and paired with Amazon's low a p focus. So selling products at below five euros, five US dollars to shoppers is really a kind of key focus for Amazon to elevate its bottom line and to maintain a healthy gross profit and net profit as well.

(03:59):

Two other kind of key trends that we are seeing really unfold is that Amazon has been reducing its inventory coverage. So the kind of inventory holding that Amazon has with most of its vendors quite drastically on average over 35% year over year. Oftentimes we are seeing slight differences in the US compared to the U. So while in the us, Amazon is fairly a little bit more aggressive and only holds two sometimes up to four weeks of inventory of demand, which is actually still quite a lot in Europe, it's a little bit more relaxed here, you see between three and five, sometimes even six weeks of demand that Amazon keeps in inventory. But the key underlying trend that we are seeing is that Amazon is really optimizing its operational excellence and is a lot more focused about delivering products to end shop as faster, and of course also ensuring that vendors are going in the same direction.

(04:54):

Now oftentimes we ask ourself why is that? Why does Amazon need to improve its shipping speed, especially when we look into the US where Amazon currently offers more than 300 million items with free shipping for the same or next day delivery? Well, of course it has a commercial background and we're seeing that research suggests in the wider industry that the annual spending@amazon.com is of course increasing when they're also able to offer more and more products at the same or one day or even a two day shipping speed. So shipping speed really remains critical for Amazon to drive basket size, especially in those categories that are otherwise not really profitable. So think of grocery categories, think of sometimes even health and personal care where products are often sold at very low prices, which of course come at very high shipping speeds and shipping costs for Amazon as a result.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (05:53):

And Martin, the last time we chatted, we were talking about how Amazon is pushing lot more of the responsibility onto the brands. Are you seeing that trend continue where they're trying to automate a lot of things, they're having less inventory. Has that continued to move forward and put more on the brands?

Martin Heubel (06:12):

Yeah, so I think two key trends that we can certainly observe is first of all, fewer vendors have an active vendor manager coverage. So that means that vendor managers are not as hands-on anymore, as in the past, helping brands and vendors in particular on achieving their sales targets, they're mostly focused if they reach out to brands around, of course they are net ppms or their bottom line performance. And second of all, especially if you're a larger multinational brand that has a very strong relationship with Amazon, you will see a very laser focused push towards backwards integration with suppliers from a supply chain and logistics point of view. Why is that? Well, because of course Amazon wants to improve its order inbound optimization and also the opportunities that it has to kind of improve the cost to serve and shoppers, which Andy Jesse has also repeatedly stated in its annual shareholder letter earlier this year, that is a key target not only in the European Union but also in North America to kind of bring down while maintaining or even optimizing for this prime delivery speed. So we are seeing programs such as a direct vendor fulfillment out of their own warehouses or a vendor flex model being pushed far more by Amazon this year as over the past few years. And this is really kind of a testament of this backwards integration focus. Amazon tries to not even handle and store products that are very expensive for them to handle and ship to the end shopper in their own warehouses any longer and rather wants brands to kind of do that for them

Lauren Livak Gilbert (07:47):

And to the one P versus three P kind of selling model. You mentioned that a bit and I know that was a big theme of the latest survey and something that brands are trying to figure out should it be one P, should it be three p? Can you talk about what you're seeing, how brands are reacting to that? Because I know Amazon also changed some of their three P requirements, so curious what's happening there.

Martin Heubel (08:08):

Yeah, so let's dive a little bit into the survey results. The key hypothesis that we wanted to confirm or falsify was first of all to understand brands that were able to reduce their trading terms in annual vendor negotiations. What were their profile? So were they in a better commercial position because they potentially had a hybrid setup or were they not in a more advantage position because of exclusive vendor relationships, so to say? And what we saw based on the overall survey results where we had over 200 participants, 50% roughly from Europe, 46% from North America with 60% of vendor representatives being from non CPG categories and 40% from food and consumables categories, was that the majority actually had increased their trade terms as part of the annual vendor negotiations in 2024 between roughly zero to half percentage point and then 9% of those brands were able to actually reduce their trading terms year by year.

(09:17):

Now when we look at the profile of those brands that have been able to reduce their trading terms, they generally had a slightly higher investment in terms of trade than the total sample that was being surveyed. They also faced typically greater profitability challenges and they under-indexed in terms of the overall growth performance compared to other brands that were able to invest more into Amazon year by year. However, they were also more likely to sell hybrid. So not only via vendor central but simultaneously also via seller central. Now this could be due to the fact that they have strong distributor relationships, so a distributor becomes a third party seller themselves and sells on behalf of their brand to Amazon and to the end shopper via seller central or the brand as both a vendor and a seller central account themselves. And I think the key learning here really that we can draw out of it, which may sometimes be surprising but often not so much, is of course that the more options you have to kind of reduce and diversify your risk away from the kind of suppression and disincentive activities that Amazon vendor managers may enforce on your account during a difficult or gridlock negotiation, the more likely you will be able to kind of come out on the other side of the negotiation with an improved trade investment result that is also more strongly aligned with the goals and objectives that you have set yourself ahead of the negotiation.

(10:45):

So risk diversification, but also defensive marketplace strategies where a brand actively leverages certain strategies around hybrid, certain strategies around marketing investments and how to funnel these to the right portfolio segments is becoming more and more important. And when we looked at particularly how many brands are actively exploiting hybrid selling model, then the results were also quite interesting because as we all know, when you are going on LinkedIn, when you're reading articles on certain agency websites, you often think that hybrid is the only way to actually survive in the vendor space today. And this may be partly true, but it's not necessarily the entire truth. And this is why we also really wanted to dive into that. Now overall, 44% of brands were using an actively hybrid model, which can serve as a leverage point in challenging avance. In particular, the remaining parts of 56% of brands were basically not selling directly or indirectly through Seller Central.

(11:51):

So they were in what we would call one P vendor central exclusive relationship with Amazon. What we need to keep in mind, even if we are talking to and about diversified brands that have a hybrid model, then of course Amazon is not just standing by and just looking at brands opening a seller central account, especially if you're talking about the US market here. Amazon deploys their Amazon standards for brand policy, which can effectively force brands to exclusively sell via vendor central to Amazon, especially if you a manufacturing brand. So it's less necessarily an issue for distributors or wholesalers, but if you're a manufacturing brand and three PS or seller Central also not automatically guarantee and guarantees higher margins. Why? Well, because of course the selling model and the requirements are significantly different as well as the hypothesis that a lot of brand leaders typically have that you can simply sell your products at MSRP levels is often not holding true because Amazon's pricing algorithms will still orient the pricing bands in which you can price your product as a seller based on how the product is being sold at which price point in the wider market segment.

(13:07):

So for example, if the product is sold at 10 US dollars elsewhere and you want to sell it all of a sudden for 30 US dollars, chances are that Amazon will simply suppress the buy box stating that this is not a competitive price that they would like to display to end shoppers. And this really comes back to their flywheel business model that we are all accustomed with where Amazon says that of course selection paired with a good customer experience, creates customer trust and really spins this flywheel that then enables shoppers as well as more brands to onboard and drives economies of scale. And a key core element of this is to build customer trust and this trust Amazon doesn't want to jeopardize by allowing our manufacturing brands to simply skyrocket prices to uncompetitive levels that do not compare well to the offers that you would find as an end shopper when you would just do a price research yourself and you would find the product significantly cheaper at let's say for example@walmartortarget.com.

Peter Crosby (14:08):

The complexity of all of this, just as I'm thinking of our listeners who are deep into these negotiations and trying to get the best terms possible, and yet you saying that there are still, I think it was 56 or 54% of brands, forgive me for not remembering that are one p only. And then you talk about some of them being forced to be that. What does a brand leader do right now? What's within their control to be? Is every brand potentially able to run a defensive marketplace strategy or is it just, is sort of those? Well, it depends kind of answer,

Martin Heubel (14:51):

Argue. Every single brand must design a defensive sales strategy to protect their own vendor margins from Amazon In the end, because we all know that of course vendor managers today are employed and tasked with one goal only to drive profitable growth, and that means that they want to of course improve the operations and the operational efficiency that they have with brands. So really kind of looking at this backwards integration among the supply chain to drive potential cost savings and to remove also variable cost structures out of their own p and l, moving it over to the vendor worst case, but then also to of course improve their own bottom line through incremental trade investment. And if brands do not follow suit, they're often confronted with disincentive measures where Amazon may at least temporarily suppress the buy box or where Amazon will potentially not accept the cost increase that the brand wants to kind of push through with online retailers such as Amazon, where effectively when both parties cannot find a solution, you're finding yourself in a trade stop where Amazon does not order from you or you even as a manufacturing brand, you have to kind of deploy a trading halt where you do not fulfill any purchasing orders any longer because they're coming in at the old cost prices that you do not want to serve Amazon with any longer.

(16:13):

So it really raises the point that yes, if you are basically completely dependent on your Amazon sales in a time where e-commerce is of course dictated by Amazon, when you're looking at it from a p and l perspective, then you better start thinking about how you can diversify your risk dependency from vendor central itself. And there are a couple of ways to do that. And they typically surround of course a hybrid selling model simply because during times of trade disruptions, it allows you to continuously sell these items and to not lose your bestselling rank because you can kind of capture these sales during times of a potential trading hold. But it's also worth really to kind of entertain three other areas that are maybe not as obvious to brand leaders oftentimes when I speak to them. Because when you're thinking for example about this backwards integration focus, then this does not only improve the bottom line for Amazon, but chances are it'll also save you costs because you no longer have to ship goods via trucks to Amazon.

(17:20):

You do not have any kind of backlogs in their fulfillment centers doing peak quarters. So I think it can also reduce your risk and also your dependency on programs where otherwise you would back almost your vendor manager or your a VS brand specialist to order new items and where you can now, if you're selling, for example, via vendor flex model, decide to onboard a product from day one without having to raise or get Amazon to raise a more expensive order. Another area that I think is very underutilized in consumer goods is the subscribe and save program because experience is showing that or shows us that if you're in a difficult trade negotiation and Amazon is not willing to purchase goods from you any longer, subscribe and save customer orders are usually exempt from that. So Amazon will continue to sell and to honor the sales towards subscribe and save customers.

(18:13):

So if you're increasing your subscribe and save revenue share, especially now during the fourth quarter, that usually positions you fairly well during your negotiations and in the first quarter to not lose all of your sales and not all of your revenue whenever you're in a trade dispute with Amazon about your overall vendor negotiation and you at least have a baseline revenue that you can rely on, which typically also helps you to kind of make the case towards your senior leadership team that no, not all of your revenue is lost, but you can actually continue the sales going forward.

(18:46):

Another way that I always look with especially my clients to deploy is to withstand the pressure of accepting larger bulk volume orders towards the end of the fourth quarter because you will have seen it if you're looking into your ordering patterns as a vendor, usually towards the end of the fourth quarter, Amazon orders a little bit more than it needs to meet its first quarter demand. Why is that? Well, often because Amazon knows that they have quite difficult negotiations ahead of themselves and then stocking up on goods helps them to kind also sustain a trade stop or a difficult vendor negotiation where they do not want to accept your cost price increase right away because they have more inventory in their fulfillment centers than normally. And so the first strategy here is really to kind of prevent your operational teams to simply just accept these larger orders.

(19:43):

But even if you have a larger inventory position, and it comes to the case that in the first quarter you are in a difficult negotiation spot, potentially Amazon is stopping to order from you or you are no longer accepting orders from Amazon. The intuitive way that a lot of brand leaders act and decide about their retail media spend is to simply to hold it because they're saying, okay, we do not have an active trade relationship, so let's not spend on advertising. My recommendation in some cases, and it's certainly something that you deal listener want to potentially evaluate, is to actually accelerate your advertising spend during order suspensions. Because if you're stopping your advertising, that means you're extending Amazon's inventory coverage even further and demand that they are holding in inventory that would otherwise last for two weeks now maybe last for four weeks. Well, that also means that your vendor manager has no interest for at least two to three weeks to return to the negotiation table. If on the other hand, you're accelerating your ad and media spend, you can shorten the time that Amazon has inventory in its warehouses and thereby force almost your vendor manager to return through the negotiation table much more quickly. And all of these little tactics really can come together to a wider defensive selling strategy that brands really need to entertain, especially if they're really targeting and having as an objective to rightsize their investments with Amazon in the 2025 annual vendor negotiation cycle.

Peter Crosby (21:16):

And so Amazon has, in addition in this period, they've also introduced new selling fees right to three P sellers over the last 12 months. First of all, do you want to just lay out what those fees are and then again, how can they use their defensive selling strategies to try and counteract some of this?

Martin Heubel (21:43):

Yeah, of course. I think we've seen a lot of different new fees that sellers have been subject to in 2024 from the inbound placement fee where Amazon aims to incentivize sellers to send goods to multiple fcs instead of just one to the low level inventory fee, which kind of penalizes sellers for under stocking Amazon, leading effectively to slower delivery speeds If that happens, and of course as we discovered Amazon wants to avoid exactly that to also returns processing fees for Amazon now targets products with higher return rates. Now these fees often apply first and foremost to the US markets. We expect that they're also being rolled out in European markets later onwards. But also goes to show that seller central is not a safe haven when it comes to protecting your margins with the online retailer because while you at least can negotiate on vendor central, this is not necessarily the case in seller central, right?

(22:40):

You just have to deal with whatever Amazon introduces in terms of search fees or new fees in order to rightsize its own bottom line. And that can directly affect your competitiveness in the category if you are trying to of course also sell your products at competitive rates. So as we discussed in the past in our ad results where I was on, it really comes down to distribution control and distribution strategy and not addressing a symptom that is effectively not the root cause of your low margins that you return with Amazon. Because effectively it comes down to Amazon being a marketplace that simply reflects and is a mirror of your distribution strategy. So if you're selling your product to everyone everywhere and you give a lot of bulk discounts to wholesalers and distributors, that is then being used by these wholesalers and distributors to pass these discounts onto the end shopper, you're not doing yourself a favor.

(23:37):

And I think a lot of brands that are seeing a rise in their e-commerce revenue through Amazon and their overall p and l over the next couple of years will have to reevaluate, okay, how do we actually reduce our trade investment? How do we ensure that we are becoming more sustainable in the way that we pass on discounts to our retail partners that may actually not retail partners anymore on Amazon, but potentially we are funding here our own competition because they are just passing this discount onto the end shopper diluting our own brand image and brand reputation. And I think this is really where it goes above and beyond defensive selling strategies such as the ones that we've discussed, but also really having honest conversations internally to understand, okay, what is the product flow? Which kind of retailers or retail partners upset our trade relationship with Amazon? And then to effectively work with minimum advertising policies as well as selling policies to enforce the kind of guardrails as a brand and to ensure that you're not diluting your brand from a pricing perspective that then effectively lowers your bottom line outlook and thereby increases the pressure on Amazon's net PPM.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (24:48):

And it speaks to the fact that if you don't have an omnichannel strategy and you're just focusing on and looking at Amazon in a silo, you're not going to be able to catch all of the issues that you might face when you're just putting all of your eggs in one basket. So I think this is proof to any brand that's listening who doesn't have an omnichannel strategy that you have to just because of the way that Amazon is selling with their price matching and just their focus on their profitability. So I just want to call that out for our listeners because I think it's a great proof point to be able to expand your overarching strategy. Yeah, absolutely. One of the other updates that I think has created some noise in the space a bit is that Amazon is going to be creating a marketplace that's similar to tmu, which has disrupted a bit some of the profit and how consumers are interacting and shopping. So how do you feel about this and what do you think this means for brands?

Martin Heubel (25:53):

So I think overall it's an expected move by Amazon. They have to respond to Asian-based competition that has seen such a huge rise in market share and relevancy in a lot of the countries that we are operating in. They cannot simply ignore it. It's quite interesting because if you're looking at the likes of Temu, they're trying to build more domestic warehouses now in Europe and as well as in the us. So they're trying to become more like Amazon, whereas Amazon tries to kind of create a team-like storefront that really aims to kind of cater to discount oriented shoppers. And I think here the key place for Amazon to of course also segment shoppers between its main marketplace offer and offering and the storefront that will kind of mimic the team-like store experience. So I don't think that most brands, especially in CPG categories will be affected by it.

(26:46):

I mean, of course we will see some probably more affordable beauty and HPC brands flooding this discount store, but I think if you are having a lot of brand equity and you are utilizing that not only offline but also on Amazon through all of the available levers that Amazon gives to you through retail media as well as the right PDP representation, I don't expect that it will be massively impacting your brand categories that it will however impact of course fashion and apparel as well as accessory categories. So you can think about consumer electronics, you can think about fashion brands. If you can get a T-shirt for a dollar or even $50 cents on Amazon, yes, there will be certain, I would say shoppers that will certainly purchase that. Now, will it kind of really eat away your sales and margins from your key kind of marketplace offering with Amazon?

(27:46):

That is, I think the key question that we do not have the answer yet for, because we don't know how Amazon will support brands in the discount storefront to advertise their products. And as long as Amazon is keeping almost like a Chinese wall as we call it, between its marketplace offering as well as the team-like storefront, I think the impact will be moderate. However, from a monetization point of view, it'll make certainly sense for Amazon to offer brands the opportunity to also then plug their advertising and media placements on those PDPs of established brands. And I think this is where it becomes much more interesting because if Amazon opens those floodgates, well then of course you are facing a question as a customer, do you want to buy the branded product or the 90% discounted non-branded equivalent that may serve the same purpose, right? I mean, think about certain computer cables like USBC cables, do you need to spend $10 on it? And how do you kind of communicate that to an end shopper that this is better than the non-branded equivalent that is sold for less than a dollar, for example. So I think the messaging of brands will have to evolve. And also the profitability strategies when it comes to NPD selection, it offers new opportunities and I think every brand has to evaluate for themselves whether they see it as a threat or whether they're utilizing this opportunity to potentially also launching a separated discount portfolio, which can cater to different shopper segments.

Lauren Livak Gilbert (29:17):

And I think the interesting piece about temu and potentially this new marketplace is on temu, you might have a lower cost, but it might take you 14 days to get it. So consumers are weighing the price to time ratio. So I'm wondering, will Amazon close the gap in terms of how fast it is that you're going to get the product and have the cheaper price and how will then that impact consumers that were going to Team U versus Amazon? I'm just curious what that dynamic is, would love your thoughts on that.

Martin Heubel (29:50):

Yeah, I think, look, nobody will be able to answer this question other than Amazon themselves. When we are looking at the actions of Andy J, we are certainly seeing that shipping speed domestically is prioritized. We're also seeing that vendors across direct import supply chain models are vulnerable to all of the kind of conflicts that we've seen in the Red Sea, for example, over the last few months and years almost now. So of course Amazon is not invincible and they will have to kind of operate in the real world, but I don't think it's necessarily the ambition to become faster than a Timor. I think it's primarily a defensive selling strategy of Amazon themselves so that they're not losing these shoppers to other platforms and they need a competing offer. And I think once Amazon is opening this store towards the end of the fall, I believe of 2024, we shall know more worth pointing out that this store will also be available to us customers first and then potentially later to other markets such as in the European Union. And I think this will also tell us a lot about how serious is Amazon about the expansion plan of a discounter like storefront because we do not yet even know, okay, in which countries will Amazon launch it or if it's just us only for now. But as we know, if you're looking at the previous patterns of behavior from Amazon, typically when something works in one country, they're fairly quick to then expand it elsewhere as long as legal and other regulations do not come in their way.

Peter Crosby (31:23):

Martin, when you think about Amazon, clearly we talk about it often enough on the program about money being no longer free, et cetera, et cetera. And so profitability being the driver, and now with the introduction of this offering and if it is prime eligible or something, it just seems like you say it's a defensive strategy, but we won't know whether or not they're just sort of, alright, we'll put something up here just so that we can capture and sort of keep some of it. But in some ways it's interesting because everything store, but now it's sort of there, whatever quality, whatever the sense of quality is that comes with the Amazon brand. And I'd love your thoughts on how strong that is as part of Amazon, their sort of promise to their customers. Does that change in this environment where, I know recently my husband bought some stuff for the first time off of temu and it came and wow, it's not what the pictures say. It's not the quality that, I mean, I suppose when you're paying that kind of price, you're putting yourself out there. But I'm just wondering about the fit of this approach with the Amazon brand. Do you have thoughts about that?

Martin Heubel (32:57):

For sure. I think what we are going to see is that Amazon will put much more emphasis on product safety and compliance. And also that ingredients in a lot of the products are probably more accurately reported than what you would see on stores like Sheen or Temu, which are of course pretty much expansion focused and not necessarily concerned about a lot of regulations and safety. I mean, in fact, they're trying to exploit all of the loopholes that exist. So I think it'll eventually come down to a mixture of regulations from governments and antitrust regulators as well as of course, also Amazon's involvement in past lawsuits where they're trying to now paint a picture not only to end shoppers, but also to regulators that they're doing. It's a little bit better than their Asian-based competition. And a lot of regulations in the US, as well as in the U of course, require retailers to ensure and marketplaces as such to almost guarantee the kind of safety of products.

(33:54):

And I think this is where Amazon will put much more emphasis on. So I would not be surprised if we see a much smaller assortment in the beginning on which Amazon is then expanding over time, which is also why Amazon has announced, I think this news about a discount like storefront very much in advance and it wasn't really ready to be launched to end shopper simply to kind of please shareholders and to ensure that they can get the customer experience right, because as you rightfully say, if you are messing up the customer trust that you've built over the last 20 or so years, I mean this has gone in a matter of seconds and could harm Amazon's established vendor as well as seller marketplace business significantly. So this is very likely something that Jesse, as well as his leadership team are trying to avoid, but they will also find different ways to cater to the customer experience. So I wouldn't be surprised if they're able to drive similar to what they do in their established marketplace business discount events such as a Prime day or also Black Friday and Cyber Monday specifically cater to more price sensitive shoppers and trying to differentiate themselves to the selection that they're offering as well as the safety aspects that they can kind of combine it with.

Peter Crosby (35:12):

Well, as always with Amazon, it won't be dull, and we'll always be keeping our eye on really the e-commerce leader around the globe. So more to come. Martin, thank you. And to your partners at Strata for putting this survey, and I believe on the partner section of the DSI website, our members and others can access a copy of that report. Am I saying that correctly?

Lauren Livak Gilbert (35:41):

You are. Peter. Go to the partner section of digital shove institute.org and you can view the results.

Peter Crosby (35:47):

Fantastic. Martin, again, so grateful for you coming and sharing this depth of information and just all of the moves that Amazon's making to try and get their profitability up and how vendors can respond. Super valuable.

Martin Heubel (36:05):

Lauren, thank you so much for your time and thanks for having me back. Really looking forward to the next time as well.

Peter Crosby (36:10):

Thanks again to Martin. For all the latest insights on an Amazon defensive strategy, head to our partner resources site at digitalshelfinstitute.org for their report and become a member. While you're there, thanks for being part of our community.