Global Digital Marketing & Retail by Alex 141

Goodmorning everyone! Another edition of my newsletter on everything I find interesting. Mostly on Global Marketing & Retail. Go check out this edition.

Hope you are all good! Thank you for reading my newsletter! I have booked a ticket to Istanbul. Soon, I will go for a week, and try to dig into Turkish e-commerce and retail and at the same time follow an AI product management course on Coursera, while enjoying the great city of Istanbul, so stay tuned!
Now let’s get on with the newsletter!

🧐Amazon average traffic per seller: Saudi leads

I thought this metric is quite interesting: “average traffic per seller”, from Amazon. It also fits this substack as it compares countries.
I think -as a marketplace- it’s very important to have a “seller strategy”. Everything I read about marketplaces, always comes down to a healthy balance between demand and supply. This fits perfectly into that.

Higher visits-per-seller can reflect stronger shopper demand (more people visiting product pages) or improved discoverability/search ranking, and can benefit (all) sellers.

Amazon’s average traffic per active seller climbed 25% in the past year to 3,544 monthly visits, accelerating sharply from the 31% rise the metric posted across the prior four years combined.

When the metric was first established in 2021, the U.S. stood alone as the marketplace where sellers received the most traffic relative to their numbers.

That same pattern of rising traffic per seller now extends across nearly every Amazon marketplace, and the steepest gains have occurred outside the U.S., with sellers in Brazil, Mexico, France, Poland, and the Netherlands all seeing traffic per seller grow by 40% to 57%.

Note Saudi Arabia, a country I tend to follow more and more (lot’s of nice things happening there) This is a special case where traffic per seller is extremely high, but the total market is small, so it can be attractive for niche categories and opportunities to start selling there?

Source: marketplacepulse.com

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/amazons-least-competitive-marketplace-is-now-everywhere

🎥 All In Pod: Marc Benioff on AI and innovation

I saved some snippets from the ALL-IN pod from a week ago, that I thought are interesting to see in which direction things are heading.
This time Marc Benioff from Salesforce was as a guest in the pod.
Unfortunately capcut removed the auto caption feature from the free plan so I cite it here below, as well (thanks NotebookLM)

Back in the days, crossborderalex with the “no software mascotte”

• 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE and Auto-Escalation to humans: "If you call 1800 no software right now for the first time in 27 years you talk to agent force... after it authenticates you and you get in the system and it doesn't know who you are then boom it'll auto escalate you to a human being who says oh I can see everything you've been doing”.

• Slackbot Business Insights: "We can tell you more about your business than you know because Slackbot is reading stuff that you know, nobody knew what was happening... I can ask it any question about my company. What are my top five deals? What are my employees upset about?

• Decision Tracking and Personas: "I wrote literally before I got on the show a new prompt that is every two hours in our Slack tell me what decisions are being made, who's making those decisions... if you were my chief of staff, if you were a CEO or if you were a board member. And I created personas to now evaluate decision-making going on

• Scaling Outreach via Agents: "In the last 27 years, we calculated somewhere between 20 to 30 million people. We didn't call back... because we didn't have the people to do it. So, just this week, I called back 50,000 people, you know, just through agents."

• Core Business Focus: "I just tell them, hey, you got to focus on your revenue, focus on your customers, focus on your cash flow, focus on your profitability, focus on your innovation."

Full pod here

🇳🇱 Coolblue: great personal experience again

I bought a new phone (hoezee). As always with more expensive electronics, I do this at Coolblue, I wrote about Coolblue many times before. Just wanted to highlight these experiences today:

• The smart queue, so upon entry of the store, I scanned my QR code from the coolblue app (I came for a pickup of a phone that I purchased online), I could choose my name for the display and boom there it was on the screen. Now I think about it, I should have written as a name “crossborderalex.com” 😅
  The cool thing is that it’s not a normal queue, it’s a smart queue, so you will be helped by the employee that can best serve you.
  Also I noticed the staff behind the counter, sees your language preferences.
  My Coolblue app is in English (because of my phone settings) and the staff behind the counter started talking in English and not Dutch, I asked later why and it was because they can see the preference, small things but helpful.

• The AI product expert, the second thing I want to higlight is the AI product expert on the PDP.
  That makes sense! Many companies think about it, but Coolblue already has it.
  I am sure when setup right it will boost customer satisfaction, (what coolblue focuses at) retention and conversion.

• Email at the right time, I picked up the phone that I ordered online in the physical store. At the moment the handover took place, I got an email from Coolblue informing me how to use my phone. Exactly the right time! Improvements would probably be to also send the info via the CoolBlue App and/or some AI assistant that helps me even more with installation questions.

Just wanted to share it because so many companies in Europe can learn from this.

Coolblue doing a great customer oriented job!

I wrote more on Coolblue for example (but not limited) here:

🇦🇪 Very nice: UAE home center —> growth hack idea

This is a nice one, a bit older but nice!
I see it as a growth hack, and I always like these things, being creative withouth much budget.
UAE Home Centre noticed their furniture kept appearing as background in other brands commercials. Instead of creating new videos, they ran YouTube pre-rolls that flag when their products show up in someone else's ad. Very smart and nice!

I think with AI and automation, this is now much easier for retailers to do themselves. It can even be part of your growth hacking or social strategy, even if you do not create pre-rolls, a basic product tag changes the role of the content from “branding” to “conversion path.” (hence my “performance branding preference)

Regional furniture and home accessories retailer, Home Centre has launched a new campaign with an unconventional twist: turning other brands’ commercials into its own advertising platform.

Each time a Home Centre item is spotted in another brand’s ad, viewers are greeted with a cheeky pre-roll message drawing attention to the product’s presence, followed by a playful note: “This ad may not sell this table. But the next one will.” The campaign simultaneously hijacks attention while tipping its hat to the brands whose production efforts unintentionally doubled as Home Centre showcases.

Details:

https://campaignme.com/home-centre-hijacks-other-brands-ads-with-there-we-are/

Another great growth hack campaign against low cost is the Makro South Africa campaign, I wrote about that earlier, check it out here⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

🛎️Meanwhile: growing pains on AI tools for major tech companies

Also worth noting: Major tech firms are hitting short-term growing pains with explosive AI coding tool adoption. Microsoft is dropping most Claude licenses by June 30 and switching to its cheaper in-house GitHub Copilot CLI. Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget by April.
Might boost innovation in cost-efficient solutions like local/open-source models, I can imagine.

🔍Google IO : biggest Search update in 25 years

I don’t write too much on Google I/O from last week as on Google IO everyone writes about and most things that are announced where for me alread in the line of expectation.
Just I will highlight this important change:

• This will be live very very soon in many countries so you really need to act, I think.

• Multimodal inputs: Users can now search with text, images, files, videos, and even open Chrome tabs as context.

• AI Agents: Users can setup agents directly from search (e.g., “Alert me when this product’s price drops at MediaMarkt” or “Monitor and compare this item across retailers”). So imagine “coolblue” where I wrote about earlier, they are in a very good position, they might be a bit more expensive but AI agents will still advice Coolblue for their excellent (pre and aftersales) services.

So yeah I think, the real competitive edge will come from superior customer experience (CX) and tightly optimized pre- and post-sale processes, just like Coolblue does. So both on and offline. I think that’s also part of an AI strategy and you can use AI to optimize those processes.

Check out the details here: https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/

Thanks for reading Crossborder Alex : Global Marketing & E-commerce! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Interested in more? Checkout my archive!

Or use my vibe coded search engine to find content tailored to you

https://www.economist.com/business/2026/05/17/ai-super-apps-are-remaking-chinas-internet