On an earnings call with investors, he announced eBay revenue and gross merchandise value (GMV) grew in the marketplace’s fiscal third quarter, ended Sept. 30. EBay GMV grew to nearly $18 billion in Q3, he said. And much of its GMV in the past year has come just from collectibles.

“We generated over $10 billion in GMV from collectibles over the last 12 months, and more than one in four eBay buyers purchased at least one collectibles item over the past year,” Iannone said. “These buyers carry some of the highest conversion, repurchase, and retention rates on eBay. And they are also among the heaviest cross-category shoppers on our platform, which supports our other categories.”

In the past 12 months, eBay GMV reached about $72.8 billion, according to financials listed in its most recent earnings release. Based on those figures and Iannone’s statement, Digital Commerce 360 estimates eBay collectibles accounted for about 13% of GMV in the past 12 months.

EBay ranks No. 6 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces database. The database ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by 2023 third-party GMV. Digital Commerce 360’s 2023 Global Online Marketplaces Report includes key insights into the biggest players in the database.

eBay capitalizes on collectibles in Q3

Iannone said eBay’s goal is to remain “the world’s most loved destination for passionate collectibles enthusiasts.” Working toward that goal, he said, eBay launched direct submissions to its vault.

“This enables any U.S. resident to send in trading cards valued at $250 or higher from their personal collections to the vault, even if they were not purchased on eBay,” he said.

Additionally, in July, eBay announced what it calls Vault Enhanced Submission. It enables eBay “to gather large amounts” of valuable trading cards in person at events. In one weekend, eBay added “tens of millions of dollars of assets under management to the eBay vault,” Iannone added. That includes a signed Jackie Robinson card valued at about $1 million.

The marketplace describes eBay vault as “a secure, climate-controlled, physical storage facility for graded trading cards available to eBay customers. In addition to best-in-class storage, the eBay vault offers opportunities for seamless buying and hassle-free selling with the confidence that comes with Authenticity Guarantee.”

The eBay collectibles category includes sports trading cards, toys and figures, sports memorabilia, comic books and more. The category accounts for more than 10% of eBay GMV.

eBay revamps condition grading system for trading cards

Iannone said eBay “revamped” its condition grading system for trading cards. It improves transparency for collectibles in the subcategory, he said. New listings now carry more precise details, he added. That includes whether a card has been professionally graded and the numerical grade, or one of several predefined card conditions.

EBay will also migrate existing listings to the new standard “over the coming months,” Iannone said. “Sellers have been asking us for this feature for some time, and we believe it will drive improved trust for buyers, better and more consistent price realization for sellers, as well as more robust data and insights around individual card values for eBay.”

Making the shopping experience more interactive

Although still in beta, eBay launched eBay Live last year in response to its growing community of collectors and enthusiasts, Iannone said. The interactive live-shopping feature is available within the eBay app, and the marketplace continues to expand its availability to more sellers and categories, he said.

Using eBay Live, buyers can interact with sellers and checkout in real time without leaving the livestream, Iannone added.

“Q3 marked an inflection point as we hosted over 1,000 live events, saw our millionth buyer tune in, and grew GMV from eBay Live by 4x quarter-over-quarter,” Iannone said.

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The Beer Bat’s business model is to operate with a lean staff and put its resources behind product development and quality control. As a result, the company has about a dozen employees, which limits their ability to answer sales calls and fill orders.

“What we wanted was a platform that takes the salesmanship out of sales and enables more of an Amazon-like model of point, click, buy, and deliver, as opposed to figuring pricing and placing the order with a sales representative over the phone,” says Sam McGee, president of The Beer Bat.

The Beer Bat needed a platform that could scale up

At the time, The Beer Bat was using the WooCommerce platform, which could not scale to handle the increase in order volume and required a software developer to write code for any of the changes the company wanted to make to the platform, as it does not employ a code writer in-house.

What The Beer Bat sought was a platform that could support B2B and B2C sales and had the features to support the company’s future growth. The Beer Bat settled on BigCommerce as its new platform provider not only for the platform’s scalability and features, but for the BigCommerce support team.

The latter was important to The Beer Bat as it wanted a platform provider experienced in working with small, but rapidly growing businesses.

“We wanted a platform provider that was personal, not transactional,” McGee says. “BigCommerce does not treat us like a transaction, and we are a small business that values the human side.”

With the BigCommerce platform, The Beer Bat has implemented a customer portal for buyers to place an order, typically 10,000 to 15,000 units at a time, upload their artwork or logo to be printed on the Beer Bat, and automatically receive an invoice once the order is complete. Buyers can also see pricing specific to their account. On the B2B side, The Beer Bat sells to food and beverage retailers and distributors, and concessions operators.

“Manually processing orders of the size we typically get is a lot of work. Now, the ordering process is a lot more efficient,” McGee says.

Beer Bat’s origins

The idea for The Beer Bat grew out of McGee’s business philosophy that there is a product for every market and a market for every product. At the time, Green Egg Design LLC, a manufacturer of plastic bottles owned by McGee, was producing branded drinkware for the Hard Rock Café’s outdoor casino in Las Vegas. When the Hartford Yard Goats, a minor league baseball team, announced it would begin playing in Hartford, Connecticut, where Green Egg is headquartered, at the start of the 2017 baseball season, McGee saw an opportunity to develop a new drinkware product unique to the team.

“I did some research and I learned that the [Yard Goats] baseball park seats about 8,000 people, and everybody is drinking, 48% drink beer, and the other 42% are drinking non-alcoholic beverages,” McGee says.

The goal was to develop a product that not only fit the fan experience inside the park but enhanced it. McGee pitched several ideas to Yard Goat management, including The Beer Bat. In the end, The Beer Bat won out. The product debuted at the Yard Goats’ stadium in August 2018.

From minor leagues to major leagues

The company continued its focus on signing minor league teams for the next year until Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves franchise came calling.

“We initially focused on minor league teams as there were more than 300 of them in towns across the country at the time. That’s a good foundation when it comes to potential markets,” McGee recalls. “When the Braves saw our product in a promotional video that went viral, they called.”

The Braves debuted The Beer Bat when their new stadium opened in 2020. In 2021, MLB’s San Diego Padres signed as a client. The Beer Bat supplies its product to stadium concession operators for five MLB and 27 minor league teams. And the company has established online storefronts in several countries including Canada, Japan, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan. The company also has licensing agreements with all 30 MLB teams, as well as the Negro League Baseball Museum to sell The Beer Bat featuring their respective logos.

“The multi-storefront functionality of BigCommerce allows us to go global locally with a single back end,” McGee says.

Business is growing fast

In 2023, The Beer Bat expects to deliver about 470,000 units, compared to 235,000 in 2022. Since installing the BigCommerce platform, The Beer Bat has increased orders by 71%, increased revenues by 115% and seen 98% increase in visitors to its B2B and B2C storefronts.

Always looking for the next great product idea, The Beer Bat plans to introduce a cup shaped like a hockey stick later this year. The cup will be based on the same business model as The Beer Bat.

“I think hockey has the potential to be bigger than our baseball business,” McGee says. “It could be our Mona Lisa.”

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The launch into Target stores was 1.5 years in the making, Holloway says. Since the start of 2023, Bala has sold its products online at Target.com, which was a key component to the in-store launch, Holloway says.

“It’s the reason we are not launching in 200 stores but almost every store,” she says.

Overall, Holloway is excited for Target’s large audience, which will give Bala a reach that paid online media would not allow the brand to achieve, she says.

“For us, Target was always the North Star,” she says.

Overall, for Bala’s businesses, roughly a third of sales are wholesale. A third are from the Amazon marketplace, and a third are from its direct-to-consumer website, ShopBala.com.

“With such a big partnership with Target, next year could look completely different,” Holloway says.

Target is No. 5 in the 2023 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000.

Influencers promote Target launch

Since Q2 2022, Bala has worked with influencers to promote and sell its products. It calls them ambassadors. The brand has more than 400 ambassadors who use Bala products in their workouts and post about the products on social media.

“We reach audiences we otherwise wouldn’t have,” Holloways says about working with influencers. “It directly impacts our growth. It’s a mini machine of sales people and marketers.”

Influencers receive a coupon code they can share with their followers. Then, the influencers receive a commission on those sales. The commissions range from 5%-10%, says Brooke Konzelmann, Bala’s head of public relationships and partnerships.

For the Target launch, Bala contacted 10 of its highest-performing influencers to post about the launch and promoting the three SKUs that Target will sell in Target’s exclusive color, Ocean. For example, a mom posted a workout routine of how to use Bala’s products for a post-partum Pilates workout, and then linked to the products to buy on Target.com.

Bala’s profit margins are typically higher if shoppers buy directly from them versus a wholesaler. But this isn’t always the case, Holloway says.

“These days, customer acquisitions costs are so high,” she says.

In fact, 59% of retailers rank costs/profitability of campaigns as their biggest marketing challenge, according to a Digital Commerce 360 survey of 97 online retail marketers in May 2023.

So, while shoppers may spend more money on Bala products when shopping directly on shopBala.com compared with a wholesaler, Bala still has to factor in the cost to get that shopper to its direct-to-consumer website. It doesn’t have to factor that cost in for its products sold at Target.

Balancing sales channels

But to survive as a business, Bala needs both wholesalers and direct-to-consumer, she says.

Digitally native brands have historically focused on sales through their direct-to-consumer websites. But like Bala, more have diversified into selling in other channels. Of the 80 digitally native, vertically integrated brands Digital Commerce 360 ranks in its Top 1000, 42 of them sell on a marketplace.

Overall in 2023, Bala plans to sustain the large growth its had during the pandemic. Its goal is to continue to have sales growth in 2024, Holloway says.

For sporting goods retailers in the Top 1000, online sales as a category grew 0.04% in 2022. That’s well below the Top 1000 growth rate of 5.1%, according to Digital Commerce 360 Research.

“Target is going to play a huge role in that growth because if the partnership goes well, Target will easily be our biggest retailer,” she says. “And then, sky’s the limit.”

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Aritzia Inc. (No. 209)

Aritzia reported new revenue grew 13% year over year to $463 million in its first fiscal quarter of 2024. The largest area of growth for the Canadian company was in the U.S., where revenue grew 22% year over year on top of an 81% increase last year, the retailer said.

Aritzia has a “long runway of growth” in the U.S., CEO Jennifer Wong told investors in a Q4 earnings call.

Active customer base has doubled, and conversion is also up, the retailer said, without adding more.

Net revenue for ecommerce grew 12.5% in the period to $135.1 million. Online orders made up 29.2% of net revenue in the first quarter.

Gross profit was $180 million in the quarter, down slightly from $181 million in Q1 of fiscal 2023.

Levi Strauss & Co. (No. 187)

Levi’s reported revenue was down 9% year over year to $1.3 billion in its fiscal second quarter. 

Ecommerce net revenue grew 20% over the period, the denim company reported. The growth was due to higher traffic and conversion rates, per CEO Chip Bergh.

The retailer just completed a digital fulfillment center for East Coast orders in Kentucky, with plans to begin shipping from it by the end of July. 

“Overall, our digital and ecommerce businesses remain under-penetrated versus peers, and the channel represents a tremendous sales and profit opportunity for the company,” Bergh said. 

Nike Inc. (No. 9)

Nike grew fourth-quarter revenue 5%, to $12.83 billion. Online sales grew 14% in the quarter, and 24% in the year. Nike ecommerce sales made up just over one-fourth of sales in fiscal 2023 (26%).

Read the full story here.

Rite Aid (No. 123)

Revenue was $5.7 billion in the first quarter of 2024, down from $6 billion in the year ago period. Net loss was $306.7 million during the period, up from $110.2 million in fiscal 2023.

Retail pharmacy revenue grew 3.4%, and same-store sales were up 8.4%. 

Rite Aid did not share any specific information about ecommerce sales.

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“The scales fell off,” Decker says about realizing the potential of using AI in its business.

ChatGPT, which became publicly known in 2023, is a chatbot developed by research organization OpenAI. The bot uses generative artificial intelligence and natural language processing to answer questions and create content.

“It seems to understand any language you throw at it,” Decker says.

And that means there are more scenarios it can handle, and retailers can be confident the chatbot could grasp the nuance and complexity of language, he says. Evo is No. 455 in the 2023 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000.

Chatbots vs. generative AI chatbots

Traditionally, most retailers and vendors build customer service chatbots with backend architecture, similar to a decision tree, of all the scenarios of what a shopper could ask and the appropriate responses.

For example, retailers could program a bot with 200 questions a shopper could ask that could be mapped to 200 answers. And each question has 10 variations of ways it could be asked, says Christina McAllister, a senior analyst at research firm Forrester Research Inc.

But that only gets retailers part of the way there, which is why Evo doesn’t have chatbots now, Decker says.

“You’re never going to know every path; a human being can just do it better,” Decker says. “What’s amazing with this new AI is it can handle anything new, can just interpret language and understand.”

McAllister warns, however, that a generative bot could answer any question a shopper asks it, which is not necessarily a good thing. The retailer is still responsible for designing the bot not to answer questions unrelated to the business or ensure the bot has the ability to route certain questions to the correct department, such as a recall or warranty issue.

“The design barrier of entry of having all answers is lower, but the onus is still on the business to make sure the business logic is good,” McAllister says.

Evo hired artificial intelligence vendor Alby to build the bot for the brand to handle customer service questions. Evo provided the vendor with its customer service training materials and additional information about its brand to train the bot. It will cost the merchant less than $1 million to develop the bot and will cost the retailer an annual fee that is within a reasonable range of what other vendors cost, Decker says. For example, some vendors cost $20,000 a year and some are a few hundred thousand, and this is within that range, he says without disclosing the price.

“It’s not more expensive than the most expensive chat feature,” Decker says.

A customer service chatbot could help Evo during its busy season

Having a bot handle customer service inquiries would be a great help for evo, which receives an influx of traffic, sales, and customer service inquiries during the winter months. 40% of Evo’s sales are in November and December, Decker says.

“Every piece of the business has to scale up dramatically for the deluge of inquiries that will occur when we have the compounding effect of Christmas and snow,” Decker says. “The intersection of those two things creates the perfect storm.”

Plus, customer service inquiries continue after Christmas, as shoppers may need to return something or buy additional accessories. What’s more, the ski season continues until March and Evo’s sales remain elevated through the first quarter of the year.

Typically, Evo hires 40 seasonal customer service employees for a total of 80 agents during the busy season, Decker says. It starts hiring in August to have enough time to adequately train employees, which could be two to six weeks.

“Our team has to grow significantly, and we need human beings who can answer phone calls who are competent and who are able to help a customer solve their problems,” Decker says.

Evo’s AI chatbot to launch in July

A bot, however, can handle a lot of the lighter customer service questions, such as, “What is your return policy?” Or, “What are your store hours at a certain location?” The AI bot could also aid with sizing questions, such as asking a shopper her measurements and recommending a size based on a product’s size chart. The bot can also read customer reviews and on-site Q&As and quickly surface relevant information for shoppers, such as if shoppers say a shirt fits small.

“What is your warranty policy and navigating those self-help items, let the bot do that. Those are things that are solvable and don’t require our amazing staff to intervene,” Decker says.

Evo wants its agents to help shoppers with more complex questions, such as, “Which skis are right for me?”

Evo plans to soft-launch the bot in July, during its slow season, on some of its higher bounce-rate pages.

After testing the bot and seeing how it reacts to real customer inquiries, it will then add it to higher-traffic areas, such as product detail pages or search results pages.

To start, Evo does not want the bot to have access to any of its backend software, such as order management, that could see where orders are. That may be down the road, once Evo can test the bot for a while, Decker says.

Evo also plans to allow its in-training human customer service agents to use a version of this bot to look up answers to some service questions when they are first getting started.

Measuring a bot’s success

Evo plans to measure the success of the chatbot both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, it plans to A/B test shoppers with a hold-out group that does not have the opportunity to interact with the bot compared with consumers with similar levels of engagement who do interact with the bot. It will measure bounce rates on those pages, conversion rates of the groups and dollars per session of a shopper that interacts with a bot compared with a shopper with the hold-out group.

Qualitatively, it will evaluate if it feels like the chatbot is creating a good experience for shoppers based on overseeing the interactions, shopper feedback and feedback from its staff.

Decker hopes that having that bot will mean it will not have to hire as many seasonal agents. The retailer will still plan to hire in August, but it’s hoping that once it gets enough customer interaction with the bot, it can slow its hiring. While he doesn’t have a hard goal, Decker says reducing its hiring by a quarter, or about 10 fewer agents, would be a good goal.

This sounds about right, McAllister says, saying a bot can reduce contact volumes by about 25%-30%.

Decker doubts a chatbot would ever replace human agents, who may have the depth of experience of using the products and how they feel on the slopes to help shoppers looking for nuances between different brands of equipment.

“It would take a long time to displace our knowledge or staff,” Decker says.

Human customer service agents are still among the most effective method of getting shoppers to convert, according to a Digital Commerce 360 and Bizrate Insights survey of 1,060 online shoppers in January 2023. 40% of shoppers say they are most likely to make an online purchase after a customer service interaction via email, followed by live chat with a human being at 37%. Live chat with a chatbot was among the least likely to have shoppers convert, at 14%.

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Total Under Armour revenue for the quarter grew 8% to $1.4 billion, the retailer said in a May 9 statement. Revenue from sales in North America increased 3% to $862 million, and international revenue simultaneously increased 16% to $526 million.

Under Armour ecommerce growth

Furthermore Under Armour ecommerce sales grew 6% year over year in Q4. And for the year, Under Armour ecommerce increased 3% and represented 42% of total DTC business.

“From a digital perspective, we will continue to work to reduce promotional activities in our ecommerce business,” said Stephanie Linnartz, president and CEO. “However, in short order, ua.com must become a showcase for our brand. So we are investing in improving the digital experience, including better product presentation, streamlined checkout and faster mobile site speed.”

She also added that Under Armour’s wholesale business includes relationships with sports specialty stores, department stores and pure-play ecommerce companies. Under Armour wholesale revenue increased 10% year over year in the quarter.

In North America, she said, Under Armour’s “DTC business was flat during the quarter with solid ecommerce growth offset by softness in our retail stores.”

Under Armour Inc. ranks No. 102 in the Top 1000. The database is Digital Commerce 360’s ranking of the largest North American online retailers by web sales.

Under Armour earnings

For the fiscal fourth quarter ended March 31, 2023, Under Armour reported:

• Revenue increased 8% to $1.399 billion from $1.3 billion in the year-ago quarter.
• Under Armour ecommerce grew 6% and accounted for 46% of direct-to-consumer sales.
• DTC sales grew 3% to $454 million.
• Wholesale revenue increased 10% to $909 million.
• North America revenue increased 3% to $862 million.

For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023, Under Armour reported:

• Under Armour revenue increased to $5.90 billion. That’s up 3% from $5.727 billion the previous fiscal year.
• Wholesale revenue increased 6% to $3.5 billion.
• Direct-to-consumer revenue decreased 3% to $2.3 billion.
• Under Armour ecommerce increased 3% and represented 42% of total DTC business for the year.

Percentage changes may not align exactly with dollar figures due to rounding. Check back for more earnings reports.

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Adobe produced the report based on 100 million SKUs across 18 retail categories including groceries, personal care, and appliances.

The biggest price declines

11 of the 18 categories monitored by Adobe recorded lower prices in April 2023 than in the previous April. The largest year-over-year decline was flowers and gifts, with prices down 27%.

Electronics and computers saw significant declines in April, Adobe found. Electronics decreased 11.6% year over year, and computers decreased 15.4% over the same period. Both saw slight increases month over month of 0.5% and 1.9%, respectively.

The appliance category also drove the price decline, Adobe said, with prices down 7.1% year over. That was the largest annual decline for the category since Adobe started tracking them in 2014. Appliances prices were down 2.1% month over month, marking the seventh month of price drops following 29 consecutive months of price increases beginning in May 2020.

Sporting goods, toys, and home and garden were all also down year over year. Sporting goods marked a 12th consecutive month of year-over-year price declines. Before that, prices increased for 28 months beginning in January 2020. Prices peaked in September 2020 as consumers invested in home exercise equipment during the pandemic.

Grocery price increases slowed

Online grocery prices increased 9.3% year over year in April, more than every category except pet products (11.32%). Though prices were up, the growth rate decreased for seven consecutive months. Online grocery prices increased 10.3% year over year in March, and 11.4% in February. Growth peaked in September 2022 at 14.3% year over year.

Grocery ecommerce sales grew 10.8% in 2022 over 2021, according to a previous Adobe report. With prices steadily increasing, more consumers turned to buy-now-pay-later services to purchase groceries, with usage up 40% in 2022.

“The rise of buy-now-pay-later usage for groceries tells us that consumers are likely making bigger purchases online to take advantage of special promotions and stock up on staples, thus managing living expenses in more flexible ways,” Adobe Digital Insights lead analyst Vivek Pandya said in a March press release.

Ecommerce prices diverge from overall retail

Adobe says it uses the same general methodology that the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to track prices in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The agency hasn’t released its April numbers yet, but in recent months the CPI has diverged from Adobe’s Digital Price Index. In March 2023, ecommerce prices decreased 1.7% per Adobe, while the CPI grew 5%. In February, Adobe recorded a 1.4% decrease, and the CPI grew 6%. Both measured year-over-year price changes. 

Ecommerce prices have largely risen more slowly than retail prices as a whole, or even decreased. Online groceries are an exception to this, and generally move in step with the CPI, Adobe says.

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