EP015 - eBags co-founder Peter Cobb, Google SERPs and Amazon Peter Cobb, co-founder of eBags and e-commerce pioneer shares his insight and learnings from 17 years of growing a profitable pure-play e-commerce site Our discussion includes, the founding of ebags, shop.org, the future of pure-plays e-commerce sites, brands going direct, private label and the evolution of mobile. Google has made changes to it's SERPs which will effect many e-commerce sites. Amazon opened it's 11 fulfillment center in the UK / Amazon increased FBA prices Amazon raises shipping threshold for non-prime to $49 Amazon private label apparel is already live (Franklin & Freeman, Franklin Tailored, James & Erin, Lark & Ro, North Eleven, Scout + Ro and Society New York) http://retailgeek.com/podcast Join your hosts Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg, SVP Commerce & Content at Razorfish, and Scot Wingo, Founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor as they discuss the latest news and trends in the world of e-commerce and digital shopper marketing. Full Transcript: Announcer: Welcome to the Jason and Scot Show, your source for the latest news and trends in the ecommerce industry, featuring host Jason Retail Geek Goldberg, SVP of Commerce at Razorfish, and Scot Wingo, founder and Executive Chairman of Channel Advisor.     Here is Jason and Scot.   Jason Goldberg: Welcome to the Jason and Scot Show! This is episode 15, being recorded on February 23rd, 2016. I'm your host, Jason Retail Geek Goldberg, and as always, I'm here with your cohost, Scot Wingo.   Scot Wingo: Hey Jason, how are you doing?   Jason Goldberg: I am doing terrific. I am out here in beautiful Palm Desert for the eTail West trade show.   Scot Wingo: Awesome! I could not make it. We have a lot of folks at Channel Advisor out there. Give me some highlights.   Jason Goldberg: Yeah. A bunch of interesting speakers. The CEO from Barnes and Noble, CEO from US Auto, there's a great presentation from Lane Bryant. One trend that we've talked about a little bit on this show that kind of rubbed me the wrong way is always the case in these shows. There's a lot of conversation about Amazon as the great enemy and how folks can compete with Amazon. There's guys up on stage suggesting that we all move off of AWS, because that's somehow going to make them less competitive with us.     Frankly, I felt like I heard from multiple CEOs at this show that tried to put Amazon in this pigeonhole of primarily being a dominant price competitor and their only competitive advantage is price. Therefore, their solution to competing with Amazon is to compete on customer experience or customer satisfaction or curation, or all these other things. As I'm hearing those things, I want to throw something at the stage because I feel like that's way oversimplifying how significant a competitor Amazon is. I feel like they're excellent at a lot of categories of business that the CEOs are taking for granted.   Scot Wingo: Yeah. Yeah, I run into that a lot. A lot of people feel like, sure, Amazon does compete on price, but what about the shipping infrastructure? The other one I don't think people bring up enough is selection. Amazon has over 400 million items available. I would challenge any of those CEOs to kind of think about that, and how do you deal with that level of selection, because if you want it, pretty much Amazon's going to have it.   Jason Goldberg: Yep. Frankly, I don't think they do exclusively compete on price. I think they're very strategic about price, and they compete on price when it's in their economic interest to do so. They recapture margin when the opportunity presents itself, and I think we have a couple news items this week that sort of highlight that.   Scot Wingo: Yeah, absolutely. What else is new at eTail?   Jason Goldberg: One thing I did want to mention, not necessarily eTail news, getting a bunch of buzz this week is that Google has made