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The Commerce Collective Podcast
This Month Above the Fold w/ Patrick Miller - Black Friday/Cyber Monday, ChatGPT, the Warner Bros. deal, & 2025 highlights
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Foreign.
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Welcome back to the E Commerce Collective podcast brought to you by Flywheel. You're listening to this month above the Fold, a monthly series on the Commerce Collective feed where Patrick Miller, co founder of Flywheel and I cover the most important commerce topics each month. And this is technically your November 2025 episode, but let's be real, let's be honest, it's a bit late. So it's your November, December 2025 above the fold episode. I'm Emma Irwin.
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I'm a brand market marketing manager here
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at Flywheel and host of this podcast. Today we're covering Black Friday, Cyber Monday, of course, all of the announcements and partnerships related to ChatGPT, the Warner Brothers ordeal, and some fun rapid fire 2025. What really deserved to be above the fold this year. Content.
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Let's get into it. Patrick, how are you? How has your last month and a half been?
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Everybody's sick. I was sick with the flu for two weeks, but not Covid, which is great. And then spent the weekend one kid vomiting on the front end of the weekend, the other kid vomiting on the back end of the weekend. So yeah, wonderful.
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Awesome. Amazing. Well, after you sent me that message like, oh, we'll see how it goes, my dog then decided she also is going to be up all night throwing up and like needing to go out, which is not the same. But I definitely, I was like, that just felt like karma. Except I don't think I did anything to deserve that other than received that message.
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Apologies for sending it to Minneapolis.
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Yep. To my like 11 year old dog. But okay, today I wanted to. This is our 32nd recording ever of above the Fold. If I'm doing the math right, which I think that's a lot of, that's a lot of above the folds. And I was thinking about, I was like, well, he must enjoy it if he's come back 32 different times. It can't be the worst thing in the world.
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Hey, I find you charming and I love the questions and always the conversation and yeah, it's fun.
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Yes. And then my other stat for the world is that I'm currently looking at my above the Fold doc of notes and we are on page 78 currently because I just keep it running and my manager, who if she were listening would want to kill me for that. But I like everything in one place. But 78 pages of notes exist here, so just had to throw that out there for to show the people the
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dedication keeps me sharp and you know, and you know, and just digging into stuff and understanding it Otherwise you'll call me out. So.
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All right, amazing story number one. Of course we are going to cover some Black Friday Cyber Monday. What a slog. That was such a long time for a deal period. Oh my goodness. But we'll keep it right out of the gate. We'll keep it light. Did you buy anything fun or cool or anything that you just waited on forever and ever? And then my follow up question is, did you know it was the biggest event ever?
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It's always the biggest. You know, Turkey and it used to be Turkey 5. I'll show my age. Now it's Turkey Infinity. So I bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner from Walmart. Great experience. And it was, it was hard to tell whether it was they were picking out of the store or shipping out of an fc. And it was great. Like it just, you know, just showed up a day later. Worked great. I shouldn't care. And it just worked really well. Also bought a bunch of groceries like loving the Amazon Async basket building. And I was able to get cough syrup, you know, in 80 minutes. So.
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Impressive.
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Yeah, I mean it was faster than Doordash or Instacart. Um, so that was really cool. And you know, when you're ordering on Amazon, you know you're not paying a delivery fee and usually I'll get to that in a second. And you're not tipping. And so if I think about sort of long term, it's like, yeah, Amazon and Walmart are going to do real well here because of the tip fatigue that everybody has now. That said, what I find really interesting is sort of like as Amazon builds out the network, it's like, okay, if I went In 80 minutes, I can pay, you know, I pay a couple bucks and well, for cough syrup and like everybody's dying of sickness in my house. I'm like, I'm willing to pay four bucks to get DayQuil, but on other items it's like, oh, I can save, I can push it out. And so I get like, I have like the Prime Visa card. And so like I can save 7% if I'm like, eh, I don't need this for another week or so. And so it's, they're incentivizing the optimization of the network via economic incentives to the customer. And so I'm saying, oh, I need Cliff Syrup right now. I'm going to pay four bucks, whatever. I need wipes in a couple of days. Yeah, you know, I can save some money. So it's, it's really interesting to see how they're Optimizing the network and they're, they're sort of gamifying it for users, which ultimately should then decrease cost for them.
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Got it. Okay. This is one of the first years that I've actually made some Black Friday Cyber Monday purchases, which feels kind of crazy, but I generally like all my clothing and things come from Gap, which is basically always on sale or just secondhand and that's never on sale. So it's the deal periods usually don't really impact me. But anyways, I appreciate it. I had like 98 years to decide on the products that I was going to buy, but I felt bad for advertisers who were trying to get me to convert because per the amount of ads I saw, I definitely cost more to acquire that for that purchase than the actual purchase was worth.
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Think that maybe, but I bet I don't know. We'll see.
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Okay. Okay. But on that. With the continued extension of events, do you have any advice for brands or advertisers when it comes to planning for how much to invest heading into these incredibly long deal events? Like, you invest in the lead up, but now the lead up is like 14 days before the 20 day event and then at that point you're just investing in the entire year. Like, what's your advice for brands? Trying to figure out what to do with this?
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Yeah, so I think on a, on a, on a selection basis, thinking through sort of as you release a new sku, like what's going to be a promo heavy sku, what's a promo light and what's a never shall I promo and, and being discipline, discipline about that, you know, increasingly we're seeing, you know, things like Keepa are being baked in on site, you know, by Amazon and so customers are going to have more and more visibility to pricing variances. So I think for brands like sort of knowing which items you want to promo, which ones you don't, to create some of that scarcity effect. Even though sort of like there is, you know, we're in an inflationary period, there's a lot of fatigue, there's a lot of deals and people are going to look for that impulse. But if it's not a sincere deal, you're going to have trouble there. One thing I did find really interesting, sort of like I was doing some digging around this morning and sort of like backend data and for me, like ASP on Amazon continues to moderate sequentially and it's not necessarily on an ASIN by ASIN basis, but it's driven by mix shift which makes total sense. You know, they've talked about leaning into grocery and leaning into household essentials. So also like sort of not surprising that conversion rates are up, right? Especially because a lot of these items you don't have to hit the pdp, you know, to buy grocery household essentials. Like every time I check out it's like, hey, you know, do you want to add carrot juice or wipes or whatever? But glance views are also up sequentially. And so like that's really surprising me if a growth factor, they said only as earnings is CPG and it's growing at twice the rate of everything else. But I don't have to hit the PDP to buy a lot of those grocery items. But yet glance fees are still up. So that then tells me that like they are then taking share and then at the same time it's sort of like. And I'm also seeing, and I think driven by the network is that procurable out of stock, you know, continues to decline. So items are in stock, they're closer to customers, faster to get it, and they're also then decreasing cost. And so like I think when they, when sort of when everybody does like the postmortem of this holiday, we're going to see that Amazon took a lot of share from Target and Regional Grocery. However, it's still a little bit of a hot mess. Like when you go to order the stuff and it's like the fresh stuff is showing up in one by one truck and then you know, sometimes like a gig worker and then like the core items are showing up in like the regular truck. And so that then tells me that Amazon longer term has an ability to breach the profit here as they sink those warehouses.
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Gotcha. For the sake of time, I'm going to keep us moving. And I was like, okay, think of a question, think of a question. Got nothing. Next.
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You don't want me to keep talking about my grocery ordering. Come on. I can, I can go even deeper.
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I know you can. Okay, story number two. We are of course talking about ChatGPT. That's isn't that crazy? But this time I can bring that. Per some recent retail flywheel Retail Insights reporting, we're forecasting that ChatGPT is likely to become a top 10 global e commerce retailer by 2030. Which of the top 10 varies? But still, that's up there with that. In the last month or so, we've seen Walmart, Target, Instacart, all partner with ChatGPT in different ways. Really kind of leaning into the partnering with, with not building against. Do you have any, I know we've talked about this many times but like, do you have any new takes, Any additional takes? And let me guess, you're going to
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say time and signal always.
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Is there any two vectors that matter? You know, ChatGPT has both in the sense that people are dwelling on it, you know, longer and longer and there are different sort of queries, typically more intent based. Like you go there with the job and it's, I just look at it as sort of assert, you know, until it's hands off the wheel and it's actually doing the thing. For me, this is just a different type of search and it intends to be spending a little bit more time. I always get back to though, it's like, okay, well like whether it is like me doing the shopping or if I hired somebody to do the shopping or if I use an instacart shopper or if I use ChatGPT. Well, how do they choose? Well, price selection, convenience. So who wins? You know, it is, you know, it is Costco, it is Amazon, it is, it is Walmart. And so for all of them it's a matter of like, yeah, this thing is sending in a bunch of signal, but sort of like what, what are they going to Send back to ChatGPT? And so like things like return rates, you know, unit economics, where are the items within the supply chain? Those metrics are actually, I think the key and sort of do they expose that to ChatGPT or do they not? And how much of ChatGPT is just a Google shopping, you know, 2.0 in the sense that it's just all about the feed and then sort of, then the aggregation. And so until it's hands off the wheels, it's sort of like meh, interesting but not TBD. And you know, ChatGPT, at the end of the day it has neither distribution nor moats. The models are close to commodities at this point. And we saw sort of the recent Google release of a new version of Gemini. I keep on my screen at all times of ChatGPT and Gemini and I just run both queries through it all the time so I can compare them. And Google made a huge step and it's, you know, certainly reflected in its, in its share price over the last few months.
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What makes Google's Gemini better, in your opinion, for how you're using it? I, I am curious, how does Google really fit into. I know Google fits into this entire picture but like going forward we're all talking about ChatGPT but like, what are your thoughts on Google there?
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I'm old enough to remember, like searching on AltaVista and Yahoo and sort of like when Google first started, like it was the thing that it did better than anything else, speed. And you know, it would say how fast it was running queries. And that's what I'm seeing with Gemini. Like, it works really, really fast. And so I think that's number one. The quality of the output is great. It's certainly on par with ChatGPT. I think ChatGPT is a little bit better if I'm like uploading docs to it. But at the same time I'm like, okay, well I use Google Docs and I have Gmail and I have my calendar. And so if I can start syncing all of that into Gemini, well then these are the points of distribution that Google already has. And so it's like, you know, so making that easier for me and decreasing the friction, I think is a advantage for Google. And I certainly wouldn't bet against them.
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Got it. All right, I'm moving us into story number three. Netflix tried to buy Warner Brothers. Paramount came swooping in, trying to also buy Warner Brothers. Consolidation isn't new, but twofold question for you. Like, what makes this chase for Warner Brothers different than others? And then two, is too much consolidation a bad thing? The thread slash Twitterverse that I live in is not about this level of consolidation. But I'm curious your thoughts.
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Okay, so first, I knew nothing about the content business and studios and have never been invited to any of those parties. And I have the long standing as being the worst dressed person at Cannes and I wear it proudly. That said, as somebody like, you know, he's just got like all these damn subscriptions everywhere. Like, if we're playing Survivor here, like, last two on the island are Netflix and Disney, right? And so it's like all the other ones like Max, hbo, Max, whatever the hell it's called. Like, yeah, it's got some great content, but like, you know, like I've unsubscribed to it. I'm like, why the hell am I paying this? I don't ever watch this thing. And so the, from, from a customer perspective, I feel like it's a good thing and being able to sort of, you know, smush them together and you sort of be able to sort of find more content, you know, on one app and then that then creates operating leverage. And so like, if I use these various apps, like, you know, like, Netflix always works and it's zippy and like you find the thing that you're looking for a lot of these other apps. I'm like, love a God. Like you just like you hit the remote and it doesn't do anything and I'm like, I have a screaming child and I'm just trying to stupid minions, like just like lure the damn minions and like they don't because they can't like invest enough into the technology. So like, I think it's good from that perspective. And then lastly, you know, looking at, you know, sort of from an advertising perspective, like, yeah, you have more users, you then have more reach and then you then have the ability to plug into more retailers and see sort of deterministically, you know, the efficacy, you know, of these platforms. So I think it's good. I mean, there's been some signal of, you know, hey, this is bad, you know, there might be antitrust. Let's see what happens with like a federal review. And guess what happened? I guess. I don't. It's a. Last night, maybe iRobot, you know, shut down or is like bought for scraps by a Chinese company. And like remember when everybody was like all hot and bothered that like Amazon was going to buy iRobot and then they were going to then, you know, use that to map out your rooms and it's like surveillance capitalism. And like all these people are like, you know, saying that this is like, you know, I was like, I never thought. I was like, why on earth is Amazon going to buy a robot vacuum cleaner? Company made absolutely no sense and they got off easy and they just had a breakup fee and now this thing is, you know, totally out of business.
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This damn hot take there.
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That's not a hot take. It's true.
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Like, it's just, it was said with hot force. That's what I meant. We got one minute left. I'm gonna have. We're gonna do some 2025 slash leaning 2026 rapid fire, which is still subject to additional questioning because I'm in charge. But just to have some fun, this is the last episode of the year. So I want to know, in your opinion, in 2025, what was the most innovative launch announent and announcement. Launch announcement, product service, et cetera.
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Amazon supply chain and grocery by far.
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Why one sentence.
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It's just so damn fast and it works well and the pricing is sharp and it's just saying. They're just, it's, it's like they're a supply chain company. They didn't just make huge advantages.
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Got it all right, most overrated story in the news.
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ChatGPT. No moat, no distribution. Yeah.
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Boom. Okay, if you had to pick a retailer of the year, who would it be?
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Walmart. They keep picking up affluent customers. They are leveraging Instacart to pull those customers in and then they will then build out additional identity and then, you know, create more value. They're doing great.
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Huzzah. Okay, one thing advertisers should leave behind
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in 2025, Instacart, personalized pricing. Like, I find it absolutely insulting. And it reminds me of like Staples a decade ago. And it's like. And so I've then gone and like built out baskets for myself and comparing a regional grocery store compared to Walmart and it's like a 20% variance. And so, yeah, I think that just. Just bad.
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Speak your truth. Okay, last one. As if you haven't already.
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But this is what happens. I wake up at 4 o' clock in the morning, I have kids vomiting all over me all weekend.
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Fired up for the day and, and
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just for fun, hosted family. My, like Baltimore Catholic family in the middle of it, like 45 people, you know, on Saturday night. So like Friday, child vomiting. Saturday, 45, Baltimore Irish Catholic. Sunday, another child vomiting. Then here I am, charming as ever.
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I know the Irish Catholics well. Okay, very last one for you. Any preliminary thoughts on what the big shift of 2026 will be? Because, like, I want to get started writing yesterday. So what are your thoughts?
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I think the big, I mean, it's sort of like as much As I think ChatGPT is at times overrated, you know, the LLMs in general are not. And so, and to me, it's sort of what I'm really curious to see is like, where do the retailers, where do they build themselves, where do they partner and what data are they actually feeding into the various LLMs? And then how does that then change the customer experience? I mean, it's kind of nuanced, but that's what I'm really looking forward to seeing.
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And that's it for this month's and year's commerce news. We'll be back with this series at the end of January, covering everything you need to stay on top of it in commerce. And from all of us at Flywheel, we hope you have a very, very happy holiday break. I'm Emma Irwin and we'll see you next time.