🏦 Riches to rags to riches on Amazon

LAST CHANCE TO GRAB BDSS 9 VIRTUAL REPLAY
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🏦 BUY YOUR COMPANY BACK for PENNIES on the $

Thrasio is one of the largest third-party sellers on the Amazon marketplace. They acquired more than 200 brands and in their heyday had over 900 employees. They over expanded, oftentimes into poor categories, and at one point they were using more than 35+ 3PLs

On February 28, 2024, Thrasio entered into an agreement – known as a Restructuring Support Agreement (“RSA”) – with its financial stakeholders on the terms of a comprehensive financial restructuring plan. Thrasio has been working with the court and lenders to pre-plan this filing for months.

As part of the deal, Thrasio received commitments for up to $90 million in new financing. To implement the terms of the RSA, the company initiated a pre-arranged court-supervised bankruptcy process in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey.

BDSS 9 Virtual speaker Jon Derkits devoured the entire 189-page filing and summarized what he found in his excellent newsletter (go subscribe now).

Some of the highlights:

• Thrasio has 376 bank accounts

• The company still employees 415 people

• Ad spend on Amazon generates 50% of sales

• Thrasio predicts $97 million in revenue over the next 3 months ($34 million less than what it needs)

• They source 24,000 products from 350 manufacturers

• The company estimates it has $425 million of excess inventory

• Thrasio has $855.2 million in outstanding debt and approximately $2.3 billion of outstanding preferred stock

During the bankruptcy process, Thrasio says it’s operating business as usual. They set up a website at ThrasioRestructuing.com where you can follow along in their process. They posted letters and FAQs to customers, the seller community, sellers who sold to them and their business partners.

One strategy the court may consider is offloading some of Thrasio’s assets. It’s not uncommon for failed buyers to sell a brand back to the original founder.

A well-known figure in the Amazon space sold his brand for about $17 million in 2019. In 2023 he bought it back for $400,000 and is now resurrecting it after the buyers crashed and burned.

Another well-known Amazon 8-figure supplements seller sold his Amazon business in 2018 for 8 figures. Two years later the buyers were back begging him for help.

Ben Leonard, who sold his fitness brand to Thrasio several years ago, offered last week to buy his brand back. He says he would make a public case study with it of how to build and manage a brand correctly on Amazon. Lots of support poured in.

Would be a great riches to rags to riches lesson for all.

🌌 ARE YOUR LISTINGS READY to JUMP into COSMO?

At MDS Inspire yesterday, BDSS 10 Hawaii speaker Vanessa Hung revealed this paper from Amazon Science that lays out what Amazon has been testing to great success in creating more sales using a new AI ranking methodology.

The problem is that your listings are optimized for a keyword-centric model and may soon tank in rank unless you change your approach to SEO and optimization.

The new AI algorithm is called COSMO, and it uses large language models and human-in-the-loop annotations to generate and serve an e-commerce knowledge graph (KG) that mines past user behaviors across a wide spectrum of data Amazon has collected from things like past orders, Prime viewership, what other similar people have done, etc. to reflect common sense in shopping contexts.

The revolutionary part is that COSMO anticipates customers’ intentions by taking the context behind a search and their previous behaviors to predict purchasing decisions and to show exactly what they would likely buy, rather than matching keyword searches to products. 

This system aims to bridge the gap between the current focus on product attributes and keywords with the actual intentions behind user behaviors, thereby improving search relevance, recommendations and navigation.

The system was tested on 10% of searches across Amazon, and it led to a 0.7% increase in revenue for Amazon in the test group (equivalent to $4.9 billion per year projected out).

Amazon sellers need to consider how their listings and associated metadata (like titles, descriptions, and keywords) align with potential customer intentions and the commonsense knowledge generated by COSMO.

Optimizing product listings to better match these intentions both in the PDP and backend should improve visibility and ranking on Amazon's platform, leading to increased sales opportunities.  

Learn more about COSMO in Vanessa’s flat file course inside the Sellerverse.

👛 WHY BITCOIN RALLY is JUST GETTING STARTED

Unless you have been tied up in a basement, you know bitcoin is on a tear right now. For the last few days it has been floating above $60,000 (up 40%+ this year so far) and is nearing all-time highs.

Highly respected commodity trader Peter Brandt believes BTC could go as high as $200,000 by Aug/Sept of 2025.

It’s well-known many successful Amazon sellers invest some of their profits into crypto. This is not financial advise, but here is why you may want to pay attention if you own crypto and why the rally may just be getting started:

1. For the first time, BTC has consistent inflows.
   Where’s it coming from? Institutional investors buying EFTs.

2. ETF issuers are buying up more BTC than miners are producing.
   A lot more BTC is being bought than is being mined daily.

3. Gold is losing its shine.
   The 14 leading Gold ETFs have experienced $2.4B in outflows this year.

4. Institutional investors are promoting crypto.
   Franklin Templeton even changed its Twitter profile pic to Benjamin Franklin, with Bitcoin-laser eyes. 

5. Retail investors aren’t at the party yet.
   We’re still in the pregame.

6. The next bitcoin halving is coming in April.
   During a bitcoin halving, the rewards paid to miners are cut in half. The prelude to this has caused the value to rise prior to all previous halvings.

   
   

   Rewards are cut in half after every 210,000 blocks mined.The first bitcoin halving happened in November 2012, at which point per-block rewards fell to 25 BTC. The next one is set to occur in mid-April. At that point, per-block rewards will drop to 3.125 BTC.

🤳🏽 WANNA STOP LIVE STREAMING? That’ll be $42K

Live streaming and short videos have become integral to China's digital economy, but the industry's rapid growth has led to exploitative practices by talent agencies. Many Chinese influencers are finding themselves in precarious situations.

According to the 2023 China Online Performance (Livestreaming and Short Videos) Industry Annual Conference report, e-commerce live streaming is deeply integrated into the Chinese economy and society.

There are more than 10 billion content creator accounts in China generating $280 billion in annual revenue. There are around 24,000 MCN (Multi-Channel Network) agencies that manage most of the influencers.

These agencies promise fame and fortune, but often leave influencers trapped in contracts that demand excessive work hours and impose hefty fines for those who wish to exit early.

The case of Liu Fengyang, a 58-year-old calligraphy teacher, exemplifies this dark side. Promised a lucrative career on Douyin, TikTok's Chinese counterpart, Liu found himself entangled in a lawsuit for breach of contract, facing a fine of 200,000 yuan ($28,104) after failing to attract viewers and earn as promised.

🛒 AVERAGE CART ABANDONMENT RATE is 70.19%

Mobile users experience the highest cart abandonment rate, averaging 86.7%. Tablet users follow at 80.7%, while desktop users are at 69.8%.

Telecommunication, home furnishing, and automotives have the highest cart abandonment rates. Conversely, groceries and electronics stand out as the categories with the lowest abandonment rates.

🖥️ STAY ONE STEP AHEAD of TRENDING PRODUCTS

Here are seven websites to spot trends before they take off on Amazon:

1. Google Trends

2. TikTok Creative Center

3. Exploding Topics

4. Trends & Research

5. Trendwatchers

6. Etsy Hunt

7. Pinterest Trends Report

🎉 WHAT HAPPENS in VEGAS, STAYS in VEGAS

If you’re in Las Vegas this week for MDS Inspire / Prosper, here is a list of all the after parties and how to attend them.

Use code Kev40 for 40 percent off the final blowout party (open bar, food & more) in the MGM Barbra Streisand suite below:

One of the things a lot of event promoters do is ask attendees to post photos on social that they are attending events to help get the word out.

But this year perhaps not everyone is having FOMO. Joshua Porter decided to have a little meme fun with the “I’m going to XYZ posts” …

✌🏼 Holler at you again on Thursday …

The answer to today’s STUMP BEZOS is
seven banana stands