Four Pillars of Amazon: Supply Chain Strategy

Four Pillars of Amazon: Supply Chain Strategy Speaker 1: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the Better Advertising with BTR Media podcast. My name is Destaney. Speaker 2: I am Gabi, and with us we have Rob Hahn, the COO from Pattern. Speaker 1: If you are listening to this mini-series, you know that Gabi and I are speaking at Pattern's Accelerate event, and we're incredibly excited. And the topic is, you know, the four pillars of success on Amazon. What is the main four things that we have kind of boiled down being successful on Amazon to? We talked about creative and brand building. We've talked about advertising, SKU assortment, catalog. And this topic we're really excited to dive into is operations. Speaker 2: And really to zoom back out, we are talking about the then and now of Amazon. So what was Amazon prioritizing? A couple of years ago, what did the landscape look like for brands and sellers that were trying to navigate that? And a big theme that we were chatting about, It's been largely different, but ultimately Amazon continues to prioritize being the Earth's most consumer-centric company. So what does that mean in the world of operations and their supply chain? And so again with us we have Rob. Rob has a highly, highly relevant background and expertise in this space. He came from Amazon. He is now at Pattern and Rob would love you to do an introduction of what led you to your current role and the expertise you have in Amazon supply chain. Speaker 3: Excellent. Well, thank you for having me. Yeah, I guess I could jump back. I started my career at Amazon. So I was an intern. Actually, I was part of their first internship program ever at Amazon. And this is, I don't know, a thousand years ago, it feels like. And I look 15. It's like a whole blessing curse situation. But this is like old Amazon, right? So at this time, I remember actually I got my internship offer and I came back to my dorm room and I was talking to my roommate and I was like, I got a job offer at amazon.com. And he was like, what's that? Which is crazy to think about. A time where a college student didn't actually know what Amazon was. But that's when I started at Amazon. There were eight fulfillment centers in the United States. FBA had barely existed. It wasn't even in all the buildings. We were actually still doing fulfillment for Toys R Us. At the time for their e-commerce, which like people, humans don't even know happened, but to us, like had Amazon doing all their fulfillment for them because they were like, we don't know how to do it. So like, this is like a long time ago, Amazon, back, back, back in the day. But I started there and it was just a, I was a small business major in college. I grew up in Ohio. Don't go there. But I then kind of, I just, I was an entrepreneur. Like I never really wanted a big company and Amazon wasn't at that time, even though it was pretty big at that. I mean, it wasn't tiny, but it was very entrepreneurial. It was very much like they don't care who your dad was or where a college degree was in or if you had a college, like it was just run a thousand miles an hour and we're solving some of the biggest problems in the world. And nobody had solved them before. So it was really, really fun. I was very fortunate. Some people took crazy bets on me when I was very early in my career and I got to lead some really, really big teams and work on some really big projects and Amazon actually I got to work on some of the first inbound automation at Amazon. We were in Unix-based systems when I started at Amazon. I helped create the first web UI at Amazon from a product perspective, but I was in operations the whole time. I wasn't in Seattle in a corporate position. I was in a super hot warehouse working night shifts, working 14-hour days. It was definitely a different experience than I think a lot of people. I was super fortunate. I had an enormously positive experience at Amazon. Some of the smartest people I've worked with in my life. So I was there. I got to work in robotics. In 2015, I shifted open one of the first robotics fulfillment centers at Amazon. I spent most of my time in the inbound space, a little bit in outbound, and then I got my own building, leading a giant million square foot I was in a 6,000 plus person building and I was like, you know, if I think I look young now, just imagine when I was actually much younger. It was a really cool time to grow up at Amazon and then it got big. Amazon got really big really fast and I left to join a start-up, a seven-person start-up called Whitebox, seven, eight people, and then we grew that to about 400 people, raised $50 million and we sold the fulfillment business to UPS. In 2022, and I was like, No, I don't want to go work for UPS. And I got I got a call that same week from pattern. And they were like, I need someone that knows tech operations and Amazon. And I was like, Well, I'm I'm your guy. Speaker 2: That's me. Speaker 3: That's me. I am that human. I've been in the e-commerce space the whole time. It's been a really fun time to be in e-commerce. I get to be in a fun part, which is the unsexy part of e-commerce, which is supply chain, which is both super important and simultaneously really boring for most people. It's a fun problem to solve. That's me. Speaker 2: I think the cool part of what you say or what I feel when I listen to you talk about this topic is, I don't consider it to be the unsexy side at all, so I might if I'm just thinking, oh, well, supply chain, right? But the passion that you have for this and the way that you've been through so much creation and innovation through the time at Amazon Whitebox and even at Pattern Now, which we'll chat about that in a little bit too, of some really cool solutions that you guys have been doing in the supply chain space. We'd love to. I mean, one undoubtable fact is you've been in the space with a decent amount of longevity here. You've seen a lot of changes. What are some of the bigger changes that you have noticed for, let's maybe put on our brand hat perspective, for brands in navigating the supply chain and operational side of Amazon? Speaker 3: If you think from a brand perspective, and I've said this for a long time, but it actually was one of the reasons I decided to leave Amazon. Brands have a really hard time navigating the Amazon ecosystem. It is extremely challenging. Actually, back in the day, I'm now kicking my own ass a bit, but I helped create some of the first FBA requirements of bringing it into Amazon because we're trying to build something scalable. Now, I have to do all those things. I was sitting there. I'm like, man, this is really hard. This is hard back then. It's become extraordinarily challenging from there. You have to be great at moving stuff and you have to be great at selling stuff, right? You can have a great product. You can have the best thing in the world. You can have incredible advertising strategy. You can have incredible marketing strategy. It could be a perfect product. But if you can't stay in stock and you lose all your margin through your supply chain, a brand is generally good, right? They're really good at creating products and they're really bad generally and moving it around the world. So watching as the complexity has come up, it's been interesting to see how brands have to navigate. I think some of the most challenging differences, excuse me, I think some of the most challenging differences that brands have had to navigate in the supply chain space is the growth of Amazon's actual network. I mean, when I started at Amazon, we had two cross-doc facilities. So if I kind of zoom out really fast, and those who don't understand, Amazon, when you send something to Amazon, they've got They've got a bunch of different, I'm going to call them networks, but two major networks. They've got a standard network and an oversized network. The standard network, which is a huge percentage of the volume that's sold on Amazon, anything that's like 18 by 14 or 8 or smaller. Under 20 pounds, right? So that is most of the stuff sold on Amazon, a huge percentage. You send it to a cross dock and then it goes to a fulfillment center. So you're not sending it to the destination. And Amazon originally, back in the day, everything went directly to the FC. Instead, they went through cross docks. And when I started Amazon, there were two cross docks. And now there are 27 and there's over 200 different fulfillment centers, right? So as Amazon has expanded, you get this increased complexity for brands. And there's good reason for that. If we want to dive in, I can give you actually Amazon's perspective. We want to talk about that a little bit. But very simply put, the biggest complexity in the supply chain space that Amazon has is Amazon's own network in its goal to get cheaper shipping closer to consumers has dramatically increased the complexity for brands. Speaker 2: So in some of our meetings, me representing the brand side, my background, which we've chatted about in another episode, but it's always been on the brand side. It's been from disruptive 3P brands to now large multinational CBG organization. But, you know, one big shift that we are hearing from our contacts at Amazon has been, you know, over the last year or two or so is the regionalization and then in the last few months. And so I feel like you could geek out on the topic of that a little bit and what the impact will be. The latest one is sub same day. So, you know, how is, as Amazon is making these, I know there's a lot going on here, but as Amazon is making these shifts, how is it better for the consumer? And then how is it that the brands now have got maybe more complexity to deal with in ultimately servicing that end consumer better, but there's a lot more going on these days. Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm I'm gonna this I'm like this is where I get goosebumps and I'm like, all right, let's talk and it's done Someone's like regionalization. I'm like you're talking my language. Let's do this thing. Yeah, so I I Amazon got very big and so let's talk about something very tactical first. Well, no first I'm actually gonna say I Placement, which is like the magic word, right? Placement fees, like the concept of placement is a very simple one. And don't throw stones. Amazon is correct. 1000% correct. That getting things closer to consumers is actually better for the consumer, for Amazon, and for the brand. It is hard to do that thing, but at a very conceptual level, it is mathematically a certainty that it is the best thing for all three groups of people, stakeholders in this scenario, is to get things close to consumers, period. It's like a very easy argument. Now, how to do that is An extraordinarily complex problem. So let's talk a little bit about what's happened to Amazon's network and why originalization has been such a push. Here's what happened. Amazon started with cross-stocks, right? We already kind of established that. Amazon originally was like, all right, we're going to expand the cross-stocks. We've kind of this kind of Gen 2 cross-stock. It's really fancy. It's got lots of conveyance and automation. It's got new pieces of inbound automation we've never had before and outbound automation, etc. The problem is there's a physical constraint on the number of dock doors, for example, or sorts that happen in a building. So when you have a crosstalk, you're like, we're going to connect all the fulfillment centers in the network. Let's say 50. That's not an exact number, but it's an approximation. If each crosstalk can connect to 50 fulfillment centers, if you have 50 fulfillment centers, that's fantastic. It means you can get from one crosstalk to all 50 FCs. And you're good to go, right? You've got close. But what happens when you have 200, 250 FCs? You can't do that anymore, right? You physically have constraints and you start having to make trade-offs between where I'm placing inventory. And I'm going to absolutely get it wrong because the only thing about forecasting Amazon is every single time it is incorrect. Every time. It's wrong. It's the only thing that's always true about forecasting, right? So if they're going to be wrong, they're going to be wrong and it's going to be across the country. Now they're going to be shipping things at increased costs. It has worse consumers. So they came up with, let's try to regionalize. That's not even a word. Let's regionalize the network. So sellers end up sending into each region and then I can connect 50 fulfillment centers in each region from that cross-doc, right? So now I have a two-tier cross-doc. I have national and I have regionals. The national cross-docs are a two-leg system, right? So it goes to a national, then a regional, and then to an FC, which takes a very long time, an extra 11 days, by the way. Very expensive, not great, but the point there is how do I get those things to the end FC when I have so many of them? And so that is what is, that's like the core problem that they've tried to solve is by saying if we get to the regions and we get to the FCs that are close to the population centers, which are close to the consumers that buy this stuff the most, That will end up being someday. Now, the sub-same-day network, we can dive into. I have opinions. But the point here is, regardless if it's in the sub-same-day network, if it's in the standard kind of robotics network, if it's in the traditional FC, whatever that is, getting closer to the consumer is better. And that's what they're trying to chase with regionalization. And I'll say it pretty poorly, but the concept is right. Speaker 2: Right. Yeah. This is a big issue that I run into on the brand side is often the concepts are smack bang. They are trying to solve a problem. My favorite one, you spoke about the bane of my existence, that is forecasting, especially forecasting in the world of Amazon. On the vendor and seller side where you've got less control on the forecasting, and so One solution that they had there is they had the flow ordering and I think that that was one element that at least the attempt was to give brands more insight into what would be ordered over time. That's now been entirely deprecated. Speaker 1: We can go back to Rob's initial comment here which is Amazon acts like a startup. They fail incredibly fast and they also move a thousand miles an hour. I think all of us have been in a million different beta tests and you know if it sticks, we're going to run with it. If not, you better move on and transition quick. Speaker 2: I mean that's a huge tip for the brands and the sellers is you've got to stay on the pulse of the changes that Amazon is doing. I always love to be in the betas, but it's hard not to be pulled in 50 different directions and your team focus on so many different things. So choosing a partner, choosing a solution that is going to be able to test these things and fail fast along with Amazon's notion of trying testing. It's always day one failing fast and then moving on to something else, maybe not being too entirely reliant and having too many eggs in one basket of one solution at Amazon because it's probably going to change in six months' time. Speaker 3: I think that's right. Let's talk about flowerting, for example. Amazon does this thing where they're trying to say, what is optimal for Amazon? I'll say I don't want to just throw stones at Amazon entirely, but Amazon does generally operate on their own behalf as frequently as possible. They're not optimizing for brands. They're optimizing for consumers and then themselves, and then maybe they'll think about brands. Flow ordering, for example, is actually good for Amazon too. So when brand and Amazon and consumer incentives are aligned, things work really well. But anytime that you can feel and think this is better for me than it is for Amazon or better for me than it is for a consumer, just some advice. That generally has a very short shelf life. Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. I'd love to probe on one more thing, at least from my side, sounds like you have thoughts on sub same day. Now, in many of the categories that, certainly all the categories that I play in, but seems to be a really big push on the consumable side. Of having this, maybe not necessarily as many products as possible, but certainly the range of selection. Now, you don't need 12 toilet brushes close to your house zip code to get within a few, but you need one or two. And so how is this impacting brands? Speaker 1: Let's zoom out really quick though on that conversation. So COVID happens and you're not going directly in stores to buy toothpaste and toothbrushes. And we get used to two-day shipping. My grandma uses two-day shipping on Amazon. She uses Amazon a ton. That wasn't necessarily a thing I feel like during COVID. Everyone else is caught up, I would say. I think that was some of the most recent announcements from the Walmart earnings report, right? Walmart is doing a pretty dang good job at getting products into customers' hands faster when it comes to online. So now, I think Amazon's trying to carve out the newest competitive advantage of like, how do you get people to not go in-store to buy toothpaste? Well, you don't need to wait 48 hours. If you're out of toothpaste, you typically need it now and most people should be using it daily. So I think that's like Amazon. Amazon has to figure out that edge because that is such a big competitive advantage. I know for me, it takes me five minutes to hop into my car and go buy something. In COVID, we didn't have that as a concern. We as in Amazon connoisseurs. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: But now we're at a place where Walmart has caught up a ton. They're doing an incredible job in that area and Amazon's having to figure out product discovery a little bit better, skew diversification as we chatted about because that is their competitive advantage of an unlimited shelf versus a retail shelf. And then this, how do we get products into the hands of customers much, much quicker in a comparable fashion to getting in your car and going to get it yourself from a store? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. That's it. Amazon's competitors are doing pickup and delivery and that's a whole different scenario, right? At least I get the entire experience. I don't have to deal with people, but I just have to... Unknown Speaker: No, thank you. Speaker 2: I just have to sit in the parking lot and have... So SSD is their solution to that, I think, you know, but there's going to be limited... There's a lot of limits with that as well from an operational perspective. What are your thoughts? Speaker 3: If I can, I want to throw out some thoughts on Walmart. I have this thing that I say, and the two most disappointing things in the last five years for me have been season eight of Game of Thrones. Speaker 2: Don't get me started. That's a whole other podcast, Rob. Speaker 3: And Walmart's e-commerce. I also got divorced somewhere in there, but that's another podcast as well. But the two top, I've changed my tune a little bit as they've invested more and more. I think that there's such an incredible opportunity for Walmart to be something super, super interesting in e-commerce. They're very siloed and they're very big and they've been traditionally very, very slow, right? So, I mean, what is it, for what the status right now, like almost 90% of the US population lives within 10 miles of a Walmart or something along those lines, which is obscene, right? But they don't use those for e-commerce as much. They do kind of, you know, the pickup and deliveries as you've said, but they don't do it. And actually, it's a pretty fractured experience if you use like Walmart's app. I have to pay $10 for delivery from that thing, but I don't have to pay if it's online and that's from Walmart itself. They've got a lot that they need to figure out, but operationally, Amazon is significantly ahead. Like, significantly ahead. Walmart has the opportunity, but it will only be when they decide to kind of break the mold of what they have and start focusing on how do they not care about how it gets into somebody's hands and try to figure out, like, that's what matters most. I don't care what network it comes from. I don't care. I just want to get it to a consumer who wants a thing. And so far, they've really struggled to do that. I think the opportunity is huge. I think they will be a big player in the space. I think that they are still very far behind operationally, behind what Amazon is. But I think they're heading the right direction. They've hired a ton of people. I know a bunch of people at Walmart, unsurprisingly. They've got some great people over there. I'm excited to see where they're going to go, but they're just not there yet. Let's talk about Subsame Day really fast. Subsame Day Amazon wants things that are fast to consumers, period. You see a lift on conversion. You see a lift on sales. It's the flywheel. It's nothing different, nothing new, but specifically when a consumer sees something, there's a conversion lift between two day and one day, conversion lift between one day and you know, and sub same day, right? So next day delivery or same day delivery matters a lot. They can do same day delivery in a couple different ways though. And that's the thing that I want to poke on a little bit. The thing Amazon does really well is it doesn't have to be in the sub same day network to get sub same day Coverage, it just guarantees it in the highest density areas, right? So you are correct when you're saying like, what's the selection? How do I do that thing? But the problem with the sub same day network in my brain is how big do you make the building? We talked about forecasting earlier. You know what Amazon's also not great at? Forecasting. They suck at it. Because it's super hard. Imagine doing forecasting for 125 million SKUs, right? That's insane. We've got a lot and we're pretty damn good at it. And they have, I don't know how many hundreds of times more than we do. It is very, very hard. And so to think about getting the right number of things into the right network, Amazon is going to say, hey, we want to focus on fast. And there's a couple of different ways we can do fast. We can do it through a specific sub same day network. But what they care most about is as they expand their FCs and their standard sized FCs get a little bit smaller, by the way, their new generation buildings are smaller, they can get closer to population centers. It's like I don't care how it gets there. I can offer same day delivery either from sub same day or from a standard FC. With a subset of things that I know I can deliver. So yes, sub same day network matters and they're pushing it because they're pushing it and like they're trying to get that thing. But I would expect that not to be a long living thing that's forever. They're trying to figure out how do we get faster stuff. And I think it's a stopgap overall. The intent is how do you get better coverage? How do you get better local in stock? How do you get the things closer to consumers across the board? That could come through Same Same Day, but it also has to do with your strategy of how you're splitting your inventory. Don't go through a national cross-doc network. You should be going to the regional network. It's faster. It's more reactive. You shouldn't be doing big shipments. You should be doing smaller shipments because that will get you more frequent opportunities to get replenished to the right spot. So there's a hundred things outside of the Sub Same Day network that are going to have just as much, if not more impact than running into the Same Same Day network. So it's not wrong. I just don't think it's the most important thing for most brands. Speaker 1: So we've talked a lot broadly about Amazon's kind of transition, what they're trying to accomplish. If you're speaking directly to a brand, where are the key areas where you see brands either messing up or leaving money on the table? Like where do they have opportunities to absolutely improve in this area? Speaker 3: I think this is complex. It's very hard. It's very hard to do. And as the complexity goes up for a brand, the dumb tax gets higher. And I don't mean that to be mean to brands, but learning what it costs, the cost of figuring it out for brands is very, very high. And it leans more toward finding a partner that is an expert. It pays to work with the best. The people that have density in this world matter. My cost structure is dramatically better than most people's cost structure because I have density. I'm sending in millions and millions and millions of units every single month. I'm getting full truckloads, fluid-loaded full truckloads into Amazon's cross-stock network. Last year, for example, we averaged four and a half days into Amazon's network when the average was like 34 days. That's not because we got special treatment. That's because We are focused on getting the right things at the right place at the right time. We're strategic. We've got an entire team of people. I talked to a brand two weeks ago and they were like, our entire e-commerce team is like seven people. And I was like, my logistics team is seven people. All they do, they don't even work in the warehouse. All they do is make sure that we get things as fast as we can into the Amazon, Walmart and other networks, marketplaces, right? That's their entire job. So as it gets more complex, brands are trying to figure out what's the lowest cost option or what's the easiest thing, but that is definitively not the right way to chase it, right? You got to figure out what is actually the best thing for your brand. And sometimes the best thing for your brand becomes something that they physically can't do in their building. The building's too small. Splitting to five different cross-docs is like, okay, but now my LTL cost is five times more than it was a full truckload before. It takes 12 more days to get an Amazon's network if I'm going to do a national cross stock. So I think what people are trying to do is either the cheapest thing or the easiest thing instead of taking a step back and being like, if I'm going to take 12 extra days to get an Amazon, I'm going to be less reactive to demand. I'm going to have worse in stock. I'm going to have worse cash flow. And then they're like, okay, cool. I'll do regionals. But now my cost has ballooned and now I can't make money on anything. So I think that weighing that option without the knowledge of what happens in the Amazon supply chain is the most common thing that people are struggling with right now. It's not easy. Do I pay placement fees? It's cheaper. Should I do it? Not necessarily. If it takes 10 extra days, don't. Pay the premium and get to regionals. So it's hard for brands, for sure. Speaker 2: Look, if the first variable in the e-commerce equation is variability or availability rather, it's probably not the right place to be cutting your corners. Exactly as you say. We're in the world where things are moving so incredibly fast. Demand is shifting so incredibly fast. The influence of TikTok and what that is doing on Amazon and how search terms are changing. Speaker 1: Even generationally. It's psychology at this point. The younger generation moves so quick. Speaker 2: If it's going to take you an extra 12 days, well, you've just got to miss the boat then. Speaker 3: Exactly. In this scenario, literally, you're going to miss the boat. I mean, like it's unfortunately with all the supply chain. Supply chain is actually not a chain, it's a wave. And like that's the thing that people don't really understand. Like you get these bullwhip effect, right? You get this, it takes time, right? So even stuff like all the tariff and everything going on right now, right? It takes a while for things to get like 50 days or whatever, right, to get across the ocean. And then even in the United States, it's a wave. It takes time. And so you either have this giant wave that is your inventory and it hits and smashes against and whatever it hits at that time, it smashes. Or very practically speaking, this is like really deep down, if you do smaller waves, You actually reduce your risk, right? So if you send in more frequently, you send in smaller shipments, you spread your... How many times have you talked to a brand? I mean, you've been in this space for a long time. How many times have you or someone on your team or a brand you've talked to said, I got a full truck or a pallet that stuck at Amazon, it won't get unloaded and now we're running out of stock? How many times that happened? Unknown Speaker: Because you went with a giant wave. Speaker 3: You went with a giant wave. If instead you do smaller shipments that are more frequent, but you can't do that if you don't have density. You have to have density or the cost balloons, right? And you can't do that if you don't have density. I'm a partner that can do that with you, right? So this is super complex. This is like the guy that runs my global supply chain, used to run Amazon supply chain. He's top of class MIT. Like this is not a random dude in a group. This is like Bill in your warehouse is not going to figure out, right? Bill's great, but he's not going to figure it out. This is extremely complicated. Unknown Speaker: We love Bill. Speaker 3: Bill's fantastic. Actually, I have a Bill in my warehouse. He actually is great, but Bill's not going to figure this out, right? It's super hard for brands to do and there's like, this isn't one big light switch. There's no silver bullet. There's no hacks. There's no workarounds. It's a million light switches that you need to know what to pull at the right time in order to get in and it's impossible for most brands to do that. Speaker 2: So I think you kind of led us up there in the last few minutes. We had teased it a little bit, but you spoke about having the density to be able to do this a lot. It's, you know, with the frequency, with the depth and the scale that you have, and in particular, that pattern has. So let's just chat in the last few minutes. We'd love to wrap this up with Why is Pattern the preferred solution in this space? What is it that Pattern can do to help solve this problem for brands? And I think you've kind of touched on it a little bit. It's a highly complex thing. Speaker 1: We're not surfing big waves. Ripples. Speaker 2: How is Pattern helping us with the ripples instead of the tsunamis? Speaker 3: It actually starts with knowledge, right? There's some very practical things we do, but also stuff like, hey, we don't struggle with that problem because we're sending a bunch of small shipments, we're going regionals, we're not going to a national where that entire thing sits in a truck. For a while, right? It's actually very consultative. I took a bet on this. We built a big business, right? This is like AWS style. We built the infrastructure. We've spent tens of millions of dollars in software and hardware in our warehouses in order to be able to sell. It is hard for people to fully understand the volume that we are doing until they put their feet on the concrete and actually see the thing that's happening. We're sending in dozens of full truckloads every day into Amazon networks. When you get that type of infrastructure, it's like, we actually can solve this problem. I think the foundational thing that we believe and that I went to, you know, Dave, our CEO and our team, and I said, Amazon's not going to solve this for us and us not being patterned, but us being the entire Amazon ecosystem. We should figure this out. And Amazon is not going to hate us if we give them full dense trailers. I've run inbound at Amazon. I have a strong desire to get dense, great trailers that are going to not destroy the LTL network. That's a good thing for Amazon too. So we started saying, hey, we can actually create shipments and send stuff in under other people's accounts or our own accounts. And so we're pretty agnostic to the seller, to the marketplace. We can do it for Walmart. We can do it for Amazon. But effectively, they can ride the rails of what we've built. So we've got a couple different flavors of that. One is just the transportation. We call that product Middle Mile, where you do everything you're doing right now. You can operate through a 3PL even. You do all the labeling. You create shipments. You label the cartons. It's ready to go to Amazon. But instead of having to split to five different regionals, you're going to put it in one truck and you send it to my facility and then we get it into Amazon on our trucks. So we've seen that be significantly faster and at least cost Neutral for the vast majority of sellers, if not cost savings, but certainly speed, right? Dramatically faster than you are going to do through the LTL network or if you've ever done Amazon carrier partner program where you want to like stab your eyes out. That kind of stuff, it's all taken out of that, right? You send it to us. It's kind of like the olden days, right? It's like you just get all your stuff on one truck and that goes and then it gets into Amazon. So we've got that and then we also can actually create shipments. We'll connect your account and create shipments. We can do labeling. We can do multi-packs. It's kind of a full prep thing. It's a great kind of process where we prep all your products, we ship it into Amazon. We also do D2C fulfillment. You talk about TikTok shop, right? Our partner with TikTok shop and we do a bunch of Shopify fulfillment, whatever that is. So we're really, really good at D2C. We are the best in the world at moving things into marketplaces. We have the fastest supply chain in the marketplaces in the world. So we work with brands of all sizes. We've got other top 10 Amazon sellers that we do their entire supply chain for. So it's been really fun to be able to like, Take the thing that we've built and be able to kind of spread it out to the Amazon world. It's been a lot of fun. Speaker 1: You also host an incredible conference. Speaker 2: We do. If brands want to learn more, then they should have, hopefully, both their tickets by the time they're listening to this podcast. Yes, hopefully. But if not, make sure you get your tickets for next time or the recordings, if nothing else. Last minute or so, anything you want to wrap up with? Speaker 1: I think that was fantastic. I mean, going back to that core point, Amazon's always trying to do what's best for Amazon and the end customer. We can see that through all of their micro changes. Every time you log into Seller Central, Vendor Central, there's going to be something new there. So staying core to the fundamental vision of the marketplace, I think is incredibly important. That helps you make much less reactive decisions when you see something new that's rolling out. But also, you know, staying in tune with the experts in the space who are the tried and true people that are doing this frequently, whether it's, you know, checking us out on a podcast or, you know, taking a look at pattern. That's really the balance that you need to succeed because it's not going to slow down at any point in time. So staying up with the changes and having the right partners can make all of the difference in the world. Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I think you said it best. Knowledge is the thing. You've got to make sure that you're staying on top of, and it's really hard to do it by yourself, so make sure you've got a kick-ass community of folks that can help you fill in those knowledge gaps. Rob, thank you so much for your time. We're really excited to see you in a week, and thank you for shedding some light on this highly complex wave, not a chain, but a supply chain of Amazon operations. Thank you so much. Speaker 3: Thanks for having me. We'll see you next week.