An interview with one of my favorite e-commerce analysts, Part 1

Good evening.

Thanks for all the great feedback on my trip down memory lane yesterday with my reflections on Jack Dorsey and Square/Block after the founder-CEO cut 40% of his staff last week. And welcome to all the new subscribers who joined The Aisle to read the entire piece. I’m going to do my very best to keep you around.

Today’s interview is a long one, even with me splitting it into two parts over two days. So let’s get into it.

On to the good stuff…

I can’t quite remember the first time I spoke to or met Juozas (Joe) Kaziukenas, but the discussion probably had something to do with the influx of China-based sellers on Amazon back in the mid- to late-2010s. For years, Kaziukenas built Marketplace Pulse into one of the most useful resources for understanding Amazon’s third-party marketplace and tracked trends such as the influx of international sellers across Amazon best-seller lists. His research helped journalists, investors, and Amazon competitors make sense of the trends shaping the seller ecosystem that now accounts for roughly 60 percent of Amazon’s merchandise sales.

But since selling Marketplace Pulse a couple years back, Kaziukenas has focused a lot of his attention on the same area I have: how AI is shaping, and may shape in the future, the way the world buys and sells. While I come at the space with a reporter’s lens, he often comes from the data or software side. To use corporate jargon, it’s like 1+1=3.

We had a lot to talk about, so I am splitting the conversation into two parts; one will publish below today and the second will run tomorrow. During our conversation, Kaziukenas offered some sharp opinions on Amazon’s strange “Buy for Me” experiment; what Walmart may be getting wrong in the early days of AI shopping; the Google/Shopify vs. OpenAI/Stripe protocol battle; and the missing indicator stopping AI shopping from becoming a real thing.

I really enjoyed the conversation and I think you will too. And in the second half tomorrow, you may even learn how to uncover new ChatGPT features before most of the world.