Global growth, metrics and AI: What we learned at Prosper Show 2023

- Written by Jérôme de Guigné

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right? Wrong!

We’ve not long been back from Prosper Show 2023, the major US event for sellers on Amazon and other eCommerce marketplaces.

We don’t like keeping secrets, so here’s an e-Comas round-up of our biggest learnings from the show:

Metrics for the long term

We loved the opening keynote from Cody Griffin of Dr Squatch, talking about the value of TACOS compared to CPA vs Customer LTV.

CPA (cost per acquisition) vs LTV (lifetime value) gives you a big-picture metric of how effective your ads are in the long term, in contrast to TACOS, which only measures a one-time transaction and fails to give you the bigger picture of that customer.

Global expansion

Our own CEO Jérôme de Guigné shared the stage with Jeff Cohen, Tech Evangelist at Amazon Ads, to talk about global expansion strategies on Amazon.

They chatted like old friends about how to scale your business and grow for the future, by employing global branding strategies and tapping into new markets. It was the perfect blend of Jeff’s insider Amazon knowledge and Jérôme’s long experience in growing brands globally.

The key takeaway was start with logistics, making sure your products can be made available. Then content — localised when going global — and only then move into advertising. Yes, without successful advertising it’ll be difficult to achieve. But without a proper supply chain and great content to engage your customers, your advertising money will be wasted.

AI use

ChatGPT was a hot topic of the show, as sellers discussed its use for generating listings content as well as aggregating feedback from customers. Some tools like Salsify have announced their platform has integrated with OpenAI to help create product content, for instance.

But ChatGPT has another use: feed it all your customer reviews, good and bad, and get it to summarise what customers like and don’t like. This an excellent hack we heard from Kevin King (who was at the show on the…