2025: The year of the bitsa mongrel schnauzer mutt 🦴

How did everyone enjoy their 27-week-long January? Honestly, this month should be measured in dog years.

And how’s that perfectly planned 2025 Ecommerce Strategy holding up? Yeah… me too.

We take a few weeks off, come back fresh, and immediately get smacked with:

• A new US President who is likely to slap a 25% tariff on Australian goods. Fun.

• Legacy retailers are crumbling—Mosaic Group is gone, Catch collapses, and Myer grabs a merger lifeline. But don’t worry. Godfrey’s is coming back.

• TikTok gets banned in the US. Then it doesn’t. So... carry on as usual?

• Meta gives up on fact-checking. Elon… no words. And we just keep handing over our marketing budgets (and data) to the tech bros.

• A new AI player, DeepSeek, shows up and makes OpenAI look like it runs on dial-up. Cool cool cool.

If January were a dog, it’d be a schnauzer mutt charging at its own reflection.

And yet— I feel the mood in ecommerce is positive. Ecommerce folks aren’t panicking. Inflation dipped last week. Retail sales were up 5% in December. ASX retail results had a few bright spots. Brands have surged into the year with new projects and big RFPs.

The reality? It’s not bad, it’s just chaotic. But chaos creates opportunity—if you’re looking for it.

So maybe let your schnauzer mutt eat your 2025 strategy. If January is any indication, this year’s gonna be a ride. Buckle up.

Cheers
Bushy

PS. I added five extra off-season news highlights at the end of the newsletter. Keep scrolling!

ECOMMERCE NEWS (from the past week)

📺 Amazon Just Ruined TV
Amazon just unlocked Brand+ video targeting for all advertisers via their DSP. The offering combines first-party data and shopping intention signals to serve ultra-targeted TV advertising on channels like Amazon Prime and Twitch. It follows an announcement at CES that Amazon will extend the look-back window for advertisers from 13 months to 5 years. Mr Beast has not stopped frothing.

📊 CMO’s Rejoice. Google Cracks MMM
Those three magic words that make every CMO nod wisely: Media Marketing Mix. Google has just made their media mix model, Meridian, publicly available. You can download the code on GitHub or connect with a Meridian Certified Partner.

🏆 TikTok Ad Awards: The Shortlist Is In
While the US scrambles, Australia parties. TikTok announced their Ad Awards shortlist with Princess Polly, Bonny and Aerre, showing how it’s done alongside the big corporates. A good list for inspiration… or new agency recommendations.

🔑 CVS Loyalty Perk: Unlock Cabinets With Your Phone
Forget waiting for an employee to unlock the medicine, razor blade or deodorant cabinet. CVS now lets loyalty members use their phones to open locked cabinets. What could go wrong? Imagine if Woolies could use this feature to reset the self-service registers when they bug out.

🍹 White Lotus x Bloomingdale’s = Luxury Drowning Apparel
You know the holiday conversation is getting tired when talk turns to the TV series everyone is watching. But it is proving to be a great connector. Bloomingdale’s just released this collection to celebrate the new season of White Lotus. Perfect for those elegant falls off a boat.

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NEW EPISODES

ECOMMERCE NEWS (from the past January and a bit)

💪 Big Off-Season Website Gains
SimilarWeb’s Digital 100 report is out, and no shocker: Temu, Property .com.au, and ChatGPT were the biggest winners. Locally, big ups to Knobby, Pepper Mayo, and The Dom for nailing it with double-plus growth.

🤖 The Traffic Bots Are Delivering
While we are measuring website traffic, have the chatbots made a big impact for you yet? Adobe found that traffic to retail sites from AI-powered chatbots shot up by 1300% during the holiday season. This story of how AI chats around sustainable period products led to a 400% traffic spike for Viv’s is eye-opening.

📊 Get To Know Your Neighbourhood Redditors
Reddit’s advertising maturity continues with the release of the Reddit Trends Tool within Reddit Pro. Unfortunately, it’s not openly available like Google Trends, but if you are a brand. You can create a Reddit Pro account to access. Be careful what you wish for. They‘re a strange bunch.

🛍 Walmart’s Bringing Customer Testing to Suppliers
We all love feedback, right? Walmart now offers suppliers access to real customers to test products at home before launching. Locally, BazaarVoice’s Influenster sampling platform just hit 100K members. Feedback is a gift, apparently. And also a great commercial model.

🚗 Add To Car…t (stoooooop it)
It was only a matter of time. You can now buy a car on Amazon. Hyundai has listed its Santa Fe on the marketplace, with users able to research, review and add to their cart a new car. Heaven forbid they cut the dealers out - you still need to go to a dealer to collect. No Prime delivery… yet.

I'd love to hear from you! Got an opinion on today’s topics? Have a suggestion for future newsletters? I’d love to hear from you. Hit reply and I’ll get back to you.

WORK WITH NATHAN

Nathan Bush is an independent Australian ecommerce transformation consultant, with expertise in marketing, technology, and team leadership. If you're looking for fresh ideas, facing key decisions, or implementing significant investments, I'd love to work with you. Learn more and get in touch.