Data Driven Ecommerce | Friedrich Schwandt

Matt Edmundson [0:00 - 2:21]: Foreign. Welcome to the E Commerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmudson. Now this is a show all about helping you deliver e commerce. Wow. And to help us do just that, today I am chatting with Friedrich Schwandt from ECDB about getting the most out of our e commerce data. Yes, we're going to look at numbers and insights from the markets and all kinds of things like that. So grab your notebooks, grab your pens because you are going to want to take some notes from this conversation, I have no doubt. But of course, if you are subscribed to our newsletter, well, all of that information will be in there and it will come straight to your inbox, of course. And let me just give a big shout out, big warm welcome to you. If you are new to the E Commerce podcast, it's great that you're here here with us. If you are not yet subscribed to said newsletter, well, go check it out at ecommercepodcast.net to sign up and all this sort of stuff. Once a week I just email you some insights, some ideas, some thoughts from the podcast and other bits and bobs. So go check that out at ecommercepodcast.net we'd love to connect with you there. And it's free of course. All the links and all the show notes are also in the podcast app which you're using to listen to the show or if you're one of our, one of the people watching on YouTube, then it'll be in the show description. So either way I'm sure you'll get all the links to everything. Not a problem. Now let's talk about our guest, Friedrich Schwandt, a numbers enthusiast who turned his passion into a powerhouse. He founded Statista in 2007, transforming it into a global data platform with 13 offices and over 1,400 employees. And partnerships with media giants like Forbes and the financial times. In 2022, he launched ECDB, a specialist database designed to empower businesses with the data they need to thrive in the fast paced world of E commerce. Oh yes, Friedrich, great to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us. How are we doing today, sir?

Friedrich Schwandt [2:22 - 2:30]: Absolutely fine. Looking outside, I'm here from Hamburg. We have rainy weather, as we always have. Great.

Matt Edmundson [2:32 - 2:50]: As we always have. In Hamburg. The weather is, you know, I feel your pain, Friedrich, because I live in Liverpool and Liverpool, I think, is an ancient Greek word for rain. It even has the word pool in its name. So it should be a bit of a clue.

Friedrich Schwandt [2:50 - 2:51]: But you had a very good coach.

Matt Edmundson [2:52 - 3:15]: Some time ago, Mr. Jurgen Klopp. Yes, absolutely. He was, he was phenomenal for the football club. We probably shouldn't talk about Jurgen too much, but he was a genius. I wish I could get him on the E Commerce podcast. Not because I think we would talk about anything to do with E commerce, but I would love to talk to him about his man management skills because he knew how to manage people.

Friedrich Schwandt [3:16 - 3:35]: Absolutely. And I think he's extremely intelligent in picking the right club and then promoted and that is. And he's now back in Germany and we all wait that he will become of course our national coach. Right. And you have to at some point when Germany's playing against England, you have two coaches which are actually very close friends.

Matt Edmundson [3:35 - 4:10]: Oh, okay. Yeah, it'd be interesting, won't it? And I, I really, I really enjoyed. I'm really grateful to Mr. Jurgen Klopp for his time at Liverpool. He obviously did something quite extraordinary. But actually there is a bit of a link here, isn't there between Liverpool and what you do? Because one of the things that transformed Liverpool Football Club was their use of statistical data and analysis when choosing players. And if you've never seen, I don't know if you've seen it, Friedrich, the movie Moneyball though I think Brad Pitt is in it.

Friedrich Schwandt [4:10 - 4:38]: One of the greatest movies. One of the greatest movies. And so, so well played by the way. It's difficult from Liverpool to get to statistics. But 100, if you remember the. Basically the second actor, not Brad Pitt but basically his, his assistant, I get his name in a second. He studied economics and basically from there learned how to play money, how to develop Moneyball. And it's one of the best movies.

Matt Edmundson [4:39 - 5:30]: Yeah, it's a fascinating film and if you've not seen it, do watch it because like you say he uses the data to analyse players. But this I think was in the baseball leagues. Wasn't it over in the States that they started to do this? Yeah. And the link here is in the film is the character John Henry, who owns the Boston Red Sox, who tried to get the data analysis into the Boston Red Sox because it was working so well. John Henry of course owns Liverpool. And so that was the very tenuous link between Liverpool and statistics. It made sense in my head. So I'm curious for you, how did you get started in the numbers game? I mean, was that you did economics at university or was there a different route?

Friedrich Schwandt [5:32 - 7:13]: I did economics at university then basically worked as a consultant for some time. And I don't know many consultants, but every consultant around 35 to 40, has a life crisis. It's very clear what I'm doing here. Is it really worth doing anything? How can I really change something? And I had the same. And so I decided, listen, I have to start my own company. And 2007, honestly, it was much easier than now. And then it's interesting when you announce to other people, I want to start now my own company, you realise you're not good at many things, because first I said, oh, shall I have a fashion label? And if you see me, basically my tailor is called Uniqlo, so fashion is not the thing. Then I thought about a coffee chain, et cetera, et cetera. And you come down there only two, three things where you're really passionate about. And for me it was always data and numbers. There had the right feeling. I could 100% tell you in which way companies, consultants, et cetera, would use it, what data is relevant or not. And I think if you basically have a very good feeling for your customers, then you're at the right business. And for us, and it was interesting and then we started it and launched it. And I remember the first five years, people ask, who needs statistics? Who would care? And why are you doing this? And honestly, the first five years were very, very difficult. And then by a miracle, and thanks to God, Google, actually everything turned in.

Matt Edmundson [7:13 - 7:47]: The right direction thanks to Google, so many businesses will have the same statement. Thanks to Google, we actually started to get found, which is a beautiful thing. So what is it about data, what is it about numbers that really drives you? Because there aren't many people that I've met that get excited by numbers. We all know we need the right numbers, we all know we need metrics, but there aren't many people that get excited about them. So I'm curious why you do.

Friedrich Schwandt [7:48 - 8:16]: Matt, I think you're wrong. Sorry, I wouldn't say that. But I do believe if you think about, think about an article, you read any kind of newspaper article, when you start, maybe after the second or third sentence, you heard it all know where it's going and then you see there some charts in there and you quite often will end up with the charts because they say basically with two numbers, what this whole article will tell you.

Matt Edmundson [8:16 - 8:17]: Yep.

Friedrich Schwandt [8:17 - 10:01]: Or on the other way around, of course, you can lie with statistics, and I don't have to quote Churchill, but nevertheless, I think there's so much more truth in numbers than there really is in many texts and other things. So what is. And it's really a side discussion. But what's really interesting for us, especially during the elections in the us we become at some point extremely popular. And why is it because people are so fed up with either whatever the media name is, the liberal media or the right wing media, whatever. So people look really just for facts and then they very often come to our platform and see, okay, these are the facts. And then somehow they feel it is almost. It doesn't belong to one side or the other side. So people are excited about numbers. And in many ways the. Do I feel that numbers is everything and you can run a good business just with numbers? Of course not. I mean, I do believe you need the numbers as a foundation and then the rest is execution. But for a foundation and for some kind of, or sometimes you have a feeling for it and just see, oh wow, it is so different. For instance, can I expand now? Let's go to E Commerce. Can I expand to Ireland? Is this market big enough? Should I go into product segments which are next to mine? I'm, I'm basically focusing on, I don't know, beauty products. There's. What are the next categories I can address? So I do believe there is actually quite a lot in favour for numbers. Surprising.

Matt Edmundson [10:01 - 10:43]: Oh yeah, absolutely. And it's interesting you bring this up because take something like market size, like should I go into the Irish market? Was the example that you gave. How big is the market over there? I think everybody intuitively knows to ask that question. But how do you find out the answer? Because this is where I think maybe sometimes people should. It's like, where do we go? Can I just type into Google? Is the Irish market okay for my business, whatever that business is, where do I start? Because I think people don't know where to start where data is concerned.

Friedrich Schwandt [10:43 - 12:42]: And of course my first answer is very much surprising. Therefore we started this company called ecdb.com just because people have always problems to remember four letters. I mean it is like IMDb or BCG, whatever they mean, just to remember. It's basically short for E commerce database ecdb. But there you find actually all the numbers about the retailers. What is their revenue? What is the monthly change of their revenue? What is the average order value, what's the frequency shoppers buy there, how much traffic do they have? And what is the product mix? And down to companies which have up to more than a million in revenues per year. So really small companies and all the marketplaces. And you find as well all the product categories for each country. So how big? Back to Ireland. How big is the beer market in Ireland? How big Is the beauty market in Ireland, how much is it growing and what are the three companies in this market? And I do believe that helps a lot for a saying. Sorry, that answers a couple of questions. Let's assume you have grown in September by 5% then always the question is, is 5% good or bad? We had a couple of holidays, bank holidays, so maybe that's excellent or not. So of course you need always a benchmark, A how was the market growth overall in my segment? And B, have my three competitors grown more or not? And I think for that it helps you very much to position and come to the conclusion. Oh, I do have a topic. Oh no, actually it's great. I can relax for once. Actually a month was really good.

Matt Edmundson [12:45 - 13:14]: It's fascinating, isn't it? I'm curious how you get that data because this has always intrigued me and I don't want you to spill any IP secrets and all that sort of stuff, but I guess how would I have confidence may be a better question in the data that you provide. Is this from readily accessible data or is this agreements you have with companies? I'm really, really curious where you get it from.

Friedrich Schwandt [13:14 - 14:43]: Sure, let's start with it because we try to solve a problem. So first I have to describe the problem. And the problem indeed is, as you said, roughly 5% of all the retailers are stock listed and not more. I mean 5% are stock listed. They publish some kind of information, we come to it in a second. Or the others in general, they don't publish information. So it is not the real data. We just collect and basically publish. What we do is we try to estimate the market data. Now how do we do that? There's a couple of sources in lingo for databases. They're called alternative data sources. But actually it's very simple. The most important one is called transaction data. So you can buy basically for all relevant countries on a single item. Credit card transaction, debit card transaction, bank transaction. So you know, method. So you don't know, Matt, actually a person bought at this [email protected] for so many pounds something, right? And. And basically we analyse overall around a billion of these transactions per month.

Matt Edmundson [14:43 - 14:45]: Holy moly.

Friedrich Schwandt [14:45 - 16:50]: So that's a lot. That's roughly 2 to 3% of all the transaction worldwide. Now, will this analysis give me direct the answer? Absolutely not. Think of the raw oil. I mean, something extremely dirty, extremely biassed. And what we do is in cleaning, matching and estimating because people use so we don't have the same amount of PayPal data, then we have credit card data and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But that's the fun part, right? I mean in a positive way otherwise everybody could copy us in. The dirtier the oil is, the more you have your own ip. But that is the basis we in addition call quite a lot of websites that help us for the product mix. We use quite a lot of clickstream data. It's called it basic kind of traffic data. It is product which goes into the traffic data. Wow, that helps and that. So think basically if you love data and if you love to play around with it and there are people nowadays they're called data scientists for them it is basically heaven. It is honestly the greatest earth place on earth to play around with data because there are very few other places where you can do as much as we with all the data points. That's really interesting and if I may say now the next question but Friedrich is the data correct and right. There is no truth when it comes to data. And now I contradict myself in a little bit. Everything, almost everything is an estimate. I mean if you want to know what is what we project the election in the U.S. we don't know yet. It's an estimate and et cetera, et cetera. I would even go so far but then many people would say the revenue of Apple which some people call real data I call even if it's published by Apple is an estimate because if you ever want worked in controlling there's so many things you could do.

Matt Edmundson [16:50 - 16:50]: Yeah.

Friedrich Schwandt [16:50 - 16:51]: Et cetera.

Matt Edmundson [16:52 - 17:13]: Yeah. There's, there's, there's no. Yeah. It's interesting. I. I guess I'd never thought about this idea of looking at credit card data which makes a lot of sense now you've said it because every E Commerce transaction has a credit card or a debit card associated credit card or.

Friedrich Schwandt [17:13 - 18:08]: A debit card or you have e wallets, they're called PayPal, Apple Pay, etc. Sometimes different. It is really fascinating. Different countries are different. In Germany you still have quite a lot of bank transfers by far more. Germany is very conservative when it comes to money but far more than you have it for instance in the UK but so you do have some basis you can work on and almost like similar to surveys. If you do normally an online survey you get quite a lot of young people who will answer and quite a lot of old people who will answer but you don't have as many people around 35. And so what you do is then you weigh the answer so that the. And we do exactly the same. We have more credit card data and debit card data and a little bit less of E wallets, but then we change it in order to get the right average order value, frequency of shopping, et cetera.

Matt Edmundson [18:08 - 18:49]: Yeah, yeah, that's very clever. Very clever. How can. I'm just thinking about maybe I'm just starting out in E commerce, you know, backing yourself, you know, back in. Was it 2007, you decided, I'm going to start my own business. Yeah. Somebody's listening to the show and they're thinking, I'm going to start my own e commerce business. I quite like beauty. As an example, I think you mentioned where would they start? I mean would they could obviously go to your site. What sort of things should they be looking for? What sort of numbers would make sense?

Friedrich Schwandt [18:49 - 19:08]: Okay, if we. Let's start with beauty, then I would first say beauty is such a big topic and of course if you want to go and I mean we both are first of all expert when it comes to beauty. Just that we. That the people listeners know. I mean there couldn't be two people which are more expert on this topic. So.

Matt Edmundson [19:09 - 19:22]: But excellent. That's totally true. The irony here, Friedrich, is I actually, until two years ago when I sold the business, owned quite a big beauty e commerce website. But you know, I'm actually 86. Yeah.

Friedrich Schwandt [19:26 - 20:05]: Sorry for that. And then by the way, just as a side note, there are two founders, me and the one who does all the work. And the one who does all the work had next to this business, a major E commerce business which had the original name of Pink Milk. And then he grew the business to 15 million and. And then after Corona had so many other people problems and basically closed it and I think for us it is so you learn more. What I want to say is for a certain sector, once you failed than once you were successful.

Matt Edmundson [20:05 - 20:05]: Yeah.

Friedrich Schwandt [20:06 - 21:56]: For us it's really helpful to know that he knows basically at what number I should look and which KPIs we want to have, etc. Etc. Now coming back to the original question. First of all, I would do more of a segmentation. Yeah. Big beauty is too big. And of course we have to split in different sectors. Next one is of course you define is it just for the UK or do I want to look at a broader picture then? Indeed, if you're young, you can. I'm sorry, our account costs roughly 10,000, so probably you wouldn't have the money you said. Listen, I have to say interestingly, us and I would say even our competitors, we, everyone Uses more, more content marketing, which is another way of saying they publish quite a lot of free content where you can find some kind of segmentations and typically that is, I feel a very, very good starting point point for, especially if you speak about the smaller companies. Then the second one is the, yes, you can go to the statistical offices and yes, they have some kind of, some kind of information. I always feel they're a little bit outdated. You do have some e commerce association and they do publish a little bit on the sector. The more you get specialised, the more I feel that is not good enough. And then probably again if you can't afford it, universities sometimes have access to the good tools. Try basically to find your half legal, half ego legal way to university libraries and get there.

Matt Edmundson [21:57 - 22:19]: Yeah, it's really my. I have a son who's at university at the moment and I've on, on occasions I've emailed him and I need you to go to the library and I want you to do a little bit of research. He's like, dad, that's nothing to do with my degree. And I'm like, I don't care, I just need you to go and test this for me. And because they have access to that.

Friedrich Schwandt [22:19 - 22:27]: I have a son who studies actually in the UK and I do the same, especially if I want to look at competitors. It's very helpful.

Matt Edmundson [22:30 - 23:05]: Universities are useful for something, let's just put it that way. We could wax lyrical about that. So obviously, I mean your, your system, obviously you have to invest in that to, to get the data out of it and the value out of it, which I appreciate. What are some of the surprising things that you're seeing in that data at the moment? I know that, I mean there's, it's a wide question because there's so much data, Friedrich. But I'm thinking in the e commerce sector, have you seen anything that's surprising? Perhaps?

Friedrich Schwandt [23:07 - 24:05]: They are of course, on a daily basis, surprisingly. Let's first start. If you talk for the moment to E commerce shops in the UK or in Germany, I would say they give the impression that overall they reach some kind of local optimum. It's not exploding anymore and seeing that. And I thought just if you look at so many other markets, you still see how much growth is there. I mean, sometimes we complain it is not growing. I mean E commerce in total is growing, if I remember correctly, worldwide, 8, 9%. I mean other sectors would kill for these kind of numbers. Exactly. So that's surprising to see how much is happening. Then another thing which Is surprising is everyone learned of course, sorry. We know that our three top e commerce market number one China much, much bigger than the US Number two the US Number three by the way the UK Go Britain.

Matt Edmundson [24:05 - 24:10]: Yes like that bronze medal still bronze.

Friedrich Schwandt [24:10 - 26:02]: Apparently is better than silver. Silver is here the loser bronze. But again so that is very interesting but now about China biggest market we all learned it is totally dominated by marketplaces. Correct? Yeah, yeah. Interesting is if you look at all the traditional marketplaces right now they're losing. They're losing is extremely okay against one phenomenon and that is TikTok or the name I think that has a different name but social shopping becomes more and more relevant in. In. In China it's extreme. I mean it, it exploding TikTok basically in. In China contrary to the U.S. if we look at the TikTok shop in the U.S. we heard oh they they're growing but they do have more problems because they have a slightly different approach But I think that is interesting or something else and then I stop. We're all familiar with Shane and Temu and we Shane and Temu if I hope my German pronunciation is not and of course always the question is Shane, oh, is the average order value not extremely small because it's such basically a shop focusing on pricing. Interestingly enough it's not. It has an average order value of if I remember correctly, 75 in pounds, 68 pounds per order which is for the sector actually quite high. So something which people always say it's just cheap and they don't pay any taxes etc. Etc. But there's more to it. There is actually some innovation taking place within these two companies.

Matt Edmundson [26:03 - 26:29]: Wow, that's really fascinating. I'm really intrigued about the TikTok discovery for want of a better expression and I'm, I'm curious, are you finding that people are spending less on TikTok than they were maybe through the marketplaces or are they spending more or higher on TikTok than they were through the marketplaces or is it about the same for.

Friedrich Schwandt [26:29 - 27:08]: The moment you see that it is slightly lower and that is because obviously the main shoppers are relatively young on the TikTok shop and because the budget constraints they have, although they overall use E commerce more but they have by far more budget constraints so you see that the TikTok shop is much lower than marketplaces but what you see is for the short time frame and as you know we compare here a little in. In the US they have a different market entry strategy than than in China. So huge generalisation but nevertheless, you see.

Matt Edmundson [27:08 - 27:19]: Lower but growing, which is about what I expected. But I thank you for clarifying. Do you see trends in TikTok shop here in the UK?

Friedrich Schwandt [27:21 - 27:29]: The. It is not so for a trend. How many months is it now on the market?

Matt Edmundson [27:29 - 27:32]: Oh, not many. I think it's less than a year still, isn't it?

Friedrich Schwandt [27:32 - 27:46]: Correct. I think we talk about six months and for a proper trend so that I can rely on the data, give me 12 months. Sorry for that. I know it's a bit of spoiler, but I feel that I need that data.

Matt Edmundson [27:46 - 27:54]: No, that's a fair point. And actually what it means is TikTok is still in its. TikTok shop is still in its infancy here in the UK.

Friedrich Schwandt [27:54 - 27:55]: But.

Matt Edmundson [27:55 - 27:58]: And if you're an early adopter, that's. That's a beautiful thing.

Friedrich Schwandt [27:58 - 31:34]: 100%. It is basically 100%. If you're sorry, that's a good one. Yes, you. Sorry, excuse me, I used that. But getting again overexcited. Yes, it is a chance. On one hand I've, I've. We all learned and all discussed that the profitability becomes more important for E Commerce shop than now the last two, three years than before. Okay, I have the feeling, and I know a little bit more German shops than the uk, but I think it's the same people say that all the time and of course they become a little bit more profitable, they spend a little bit less on search engine advertising, etc. But I don't think that they realise it is by far more a fundamental change than a little bit saving on personal expenditure and opex. What do I mean by that? And correct me if you say Friedrich gets so obvious. Don't go that way for a long time. Quite a lot of shops had the vision, okay, I start, I spend a lot of money and then I sell it. Not everyone, not everyone, but many. This is gone. And basically there is no market, almost no market anymore in order to sell your E commerce shop or have an IPO etc. So if that is true, basically you don't do it anymore for the growth, you really do it only for the profitability. And if that is true, again, that means basically all your actions should be questioned by do I believe if I for instance use marketplaces, I can really develop a profitable business? And I think not. And please, of course all your listener will say, this guy has absolutely no clue. But why do I think that is not the case? Because overall we know on marketplace we have more price competition than in the normal life, then we know, Amazon and all their friends are extremely intelligent, intelligent to introduce retail media. So basically the little bit of margin, what left now goes into retail media. So long story short, that it's almost zero. And we know Amazon is so clever because I think next to Google, God, Amazon is very close to them. Amazon is so close, they will basically drive it to a point where, where your margin will be zero. Because again, that means you really have. You see where I'm going. You really have to question by far more your business than you do up till now in order to say, I want to develop a profitable business. And in my opinion, that means two things. You have to rediscover a very good connection with your customers. They really use, they believe in you, they become your fans. They're not just oh, good price, buy it. And second, and that goes, is the same way and just the other way around, you have to develop a brand. And that is interesting because so counterintuitive. I think so much of the marketing spending nowadays goes into directly online marketing. So I generate my lead, I buy my new customer. And I feel maybe that is wrong because I should focus more on. I need to have a proper brand people believe in. So I create this fan base.

Matt Edmundson [31:35 - 32:13]: What fascinates me, listening to you talk, Friedrich, is you're a numbers guy and here you are talking about brand. And it's a really interesting thing, isn't it? I totally get what you're saying about marketplaces. And if your aim is to build a profitable business, then you would avoid marketplaces and focus on building your own brand. I mean, there's. I understand the arguments both ways I do. And I. I would say for my own E Com businesses, we are predominantly like 90% of our sales come through our website, 10% through marketplaces.

Friedrich Schwandt [32:13 - 32:15]: But that's an exception, as you know.

Matt Edmundson [32:16 - 32:51]: Yes, it is. Yeah. And we. I'm a believer in this idea that a rising tide floats all boats. And I know that we get the beauty I have, I suppose with my products is they're repeatable products, you know, like in the supplement space, for example. So people will buy them on Amazon, then they will come over to the website and look. And so I know that as long as I'm breaking even on that transaction on Amazon, that ultimately I'm okay over here. But if I was just relying on Amazon for profit, it would never happen. It would take way too long to create profitability.

Friedrich Schwandt [32:51 - 33:20]: If a marketplace is basically the channel for new customer acquisition, I agree. And then work on it. But if it's basically for Your day to day business, I don't think it will work. And even if it works now, be absolutely sure because their interest with retail media, they have, I mean retail media is almost as profitable as aws. So they found a way in order to squeeze out the. The remaining part of the margin.

Matt Edmundson [33:20 - 33:46]: Yeah, it's a really interesting point. I mean I have a company, we invest and we acquire ecom businesses. I tend to avoid companies that are heavily reliant on marketplaces for their income for a number of reasons. One is profitability. Two is at any point Amazon can turn you off just because they want to and you've got no recourse. Right.

Friedrich Schwandt [33:46 - 34:19]: And so by the way, sorry, another point when I feel if you focus more on profitability, how you look on existing customers versus new customers changes. I believe really the main source for profitability comes out of existing customers. And you should think far more. How basically can I develop then what I can do? New customers, which in the past were so important in order to feed all the growth, actually become less important.

Matt Edmundson [34:21 - 35:28]: There's always this sort of tension with new customers and returning customers. And we've found this. Like I know for example how many new customers we need every month to reach the growth targets that we have. I also know that out of those new customers we get, a percentage of them will become the returning customers. And so my profitability comes from my returning customers. My future profitability comes from my new customers. Otherwise I won't have returning customers in the future, if that makes sense. And it's this really interesting tension that you have to find. And I was talking with a business that's struggling at the moment, looking at the customer return customer breakdown. And the trouble is they're not getting in the new customers that's fallen, but their returning customer rate has fallen by 70% year on year. And you know, when your returning customer rate has fallen by that amount, you've got a fundamental problem because your customers that know you, that know your brand are not wanting to buy your product. Right.

Friedrich Schwandt [35:28 - 35:51]: I mean basically you should close. I mean, I think, I mean that's a tough decision. But, but. So long story short, I do believe that when we believe in profitability, it is more than we do right now and we really have to rethink our entire business.

Matt Edmundson [35:52 - 36:45]: Yeah, it's a really, it's a. I think it's a really valid point is like, I mean I do acquire E. Com businesses so. But I also know that it is. And I've sold econ businesses but I know that it's not straightforward. I know that just going I'm going to build a business, grow it to 15 million and then sell it. It's not actually as easy as you think it is. You've heard a story maybe of a company that's done that but there's 10,000 stories that didn't happen and that's what we don't hear really. And so in the meantime you've then got to go well how do I get this business to grow in such a way that is profitable for me and the lifestyle which I'm in that makes the most sense for us. And I agree wholeheartedly that actually you cannot over rely on other marketplaces to do that and do that well unless it's very short termism. I've seen it work occasionally or unless.

Friedrich Schwandt [36:45 - 36:48]: You have overstock and you use it for that channel. That of course makes sense.

Matt Edmundson [36:49 - 36:56]: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So well that's super insightful. I mean any other insights from the data that you've discovered?

Friedrich Schwandt [37:01 - 38:50]: The what I think is so what what I recommend because the for I I feel there was for the last two years the the phase of international expansion has stocked. Stopped a little bit. Meaning yeah people talked about a lot about it but if you look now how many companies are really properly going abroad and how do they do that? They don't do it that often and for me that is once you found your niche, once you are absolutely sure it's something which I would always recommend to others And I do this because not only because of the numbers where you can look and how much more growth is in other markets and basically you can profit from but as well for my own business. So when we start statistics typically you start in your own company but in your own country. But we had 80% of all our revenues were international revenues and it is so nice because you know we all have situations where a market for a country for 12 years is basically not growing and if you basically are international in the same segment but internationally then you can focus on other market and helps you so much than to develop that market. And on the other hand you do learn more from your business if if you're international and then I feel it's the same I so let's not talk about Brexit. That was not really a favour for expanding your E commerce business but there's so much more if you for instance if you're specialised on lamps or whatever than to aggregate and learn from all these local markets because it is almost like test fields we have everywhere around here. In Europe. That makes sense.

Matt Edmundson [38:51 - 39:48]: It does, it does. I would say what you're saying about international markets, I think is really fascinating because there are opportunities there. But I think I can only speak for people in Britain. I think Britain got with Brexit when that all happened. Actually, international shipping became a lot harder and a lot more complicated. Trying to send a product from Liverpool to Spain is so much more complicated and so much more difficult than trying to send a product from Liverpool to the US or even to New Zealand. You know, it's, it's further away, but it's just, it's just an awful lot easier. And so I think, I think people. I can understand why the sort of. The international markets fell a little bit, but I'm. I'm hoping that we're sort of coming through that and we're growing up a little bit and, and there are opportunities there, like you say, internationally, which I, I think are super, super promising for many ecom businesses.

Friedrich Schwandt [39:49 - 40:37]: Plus obviously, once you buy a business, let's say in the Netherlands, of course you have your, your own logistics centre there and you basically can go around all, all the problems you have. If you ship it directly from the uk, you basically can, because many people want to buy certain product from the UK and then, then you can distribute it to there and again you learn more for your own business being in the other markets. And it is really on everything, on marketing, on product mix, on sourcing, probably even finding employees because both in the UK and Germany have the labour market getting more and more difficult and there are certainly other countries much easier.

Matt Edmundson [40:38 - 40:59]: Very true, very good, very good, Friedrich List. I'm aware of Time Brother and I've thoroughly enjoyed. I've got so many more questions, but if people want to reach out to you, if they want to connect with you, if they want to find more about ecdb, what's the best way to do all of those things?

Friedrich Schwandt [41:01 - 41:25]: I would say there are two things. Number one, obviously the website ecdb.com again, short for e commerce database like IMDb. And second, reach out via LinkedIn. I do actually like to connect and answer everything and you find me on Friedrich Schwandt LinkedIn. There's only one. It's a very strange name, so.

Matt Edmundson [41:29 - 43:16]: Very good. We will of course link to Frederik's very strange name in the show notes that will be there for you to connect with him on LinkedIn and obviously cheque out the company website as well. ECDB. Friedrich, listen, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for answering my questions. Very, very helpful and I loved the insights around TikTok. I love the insights around marketplaces and international markets. I thought it was all very, very helpful. So super encouraged. Lots of possibilities in my head, which is always a good thing. So thank you. Thank you so much. So there we have it. What a great conversation. Huge thanks again to Frederik for joining me today. Now be sure to follow the E Commerce podcast wherever you get your podcast from, because we've got some more great conversations lined up and of course I don't want you to miss any of them. Why would I? I wouldn't. And in case no one has told you yet today, let me be the first. You are awesome. Yes, you are created awesome. It's just a burden you have to bear. I've got to bear it. Friedrich's got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now, the E Commerce podcast is produced by Pod Junction. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favourite podcast app. Theme music was written by by Josh Edmudson. And as I mentioned, if you'd like to read the transcript, the show notes and all of that good stuff, you can do a number of things. Cheque out your podcast app, cheque out the website ecommercepodcast.net and of course, sign up for the newsletter. All amazing places to get it from. But that's it from me, that's it from Friedrich. Thank you so much for joining us this week. Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I'll see you next time. Bye for.