Cover: 025 | Linda Bustos | "The ecommerce truffle pig" on industry trends

025 | Linda Bustos | "The ecommerce truffle pig" on industry trends

13. August 2024 34:06 Min. Zu Gast: Linda Bustos
0:00 34:06

Worum es geht

In dieser Folge von Commerce Famous spricht Host Ben Marks mit Linda Bustos, einer bekannten Größe im E-Commerce und Expertin für Customer-Journey-Analyse. Sie beleuchtet die Entwicklung des digitalen Handels, den Aufstieg sozialer Medien, den Einfluss neuer Technologien wie KI und die Bedeutung von Community. Als selbsternannter "ecommerce truffle pig" verrät Linda zudem, wie sie innovative E-Commerce-Praktiken aufspürt und teilt.

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Autor: Commerce Famous Podcast

Zu Gast

Expertin für E-Commerce und Customer-Journey-Analyse

Linda Bustos ist eine bekannte Figur in der E-Commerce-Welt und für ihre Arbeit am Get-Elastic-Blog bekannt. Sie beschreibt sich selbst als "ecommerce truffle pig", die nach wertvollen Insights für die Community sucht.

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Transkript

Welcome to Commerce Famous, the biweekly podcast all about ecommerce and retail. In each episode, your host, Ben Marks, cuts through the clutter and takes you straight to the stories and experiences of those who shaped digital commerce as we know it today. While their names and faces might not be recognized on the street, each of Ben's guests are famous for commerce or commerce famous. Without further ado, your host, Ben Marks. Hey, everyone.

Welcome to Commerce Famous. This is your host, Ben Marks. I am so happy to have, someone I've been familiar with in the world of ecommerce for, gosh, about sixteen years. Linda Bustos is an expert in customer journeys and the analysis thereof. Linda, welcome to Commerce Famous.

Thanks, Ben. Great to be here. So, look, you have been, you've been there throughout my entire career. I remember when I started out in my agency days, my ecom agency days in, like, 2008. There's a guy named Kevin Eichelberger founded this company called Blue Acorn, and I was his first hire.

And and when we were it was the two of us. And so we were, we were grabbing ideas from whoever was putting them out there. And, you know, and and Getelastic blog was one of the was one of the main references at the time. And so you really built up this entire this entire property, this body of work around that. I wanted to kinda start back at the beginning.

Like, how did you how did you find your way I think I saw you had a you were you were in the marketing space a little bit, but how did you really find your way into Elastic Path and into your area of of specialization? Well, I was working at a web design company for about a year previous to joining Elastic Path, and it was I was basically doing SEO, PPC, managing all the AdWords in Yahoo search marketing campaigns, and doing a little bit of, like, UX, consulting for web design clients, so information architecture, all that kind of stuff, which forced me to, you know, read. I I sought out additional sources of knowledge, like, Jacob Nielsen had written a book about ecommerce usability back in the really early two thousands. He had, like, little set of checklists. It's a little textbook Yeah.

Thing. It's a real blast from the past. I think those make great, coffee table books now. See the old table space design and all the ways that we used to be impressed by shopping online. And, of course, Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

So, I was one of the, clients that we had was a was a was an ecommerce project at the web design company, and I was like, okay. And, you know, like, I'm I need to learn a whole bunch of stuff quick, you know, in order to be able to help them make some decisions because we're building it from scratch on Drupal. So, yeah. So that kind of, like, got me very excited about ecommerce. And at the same time, I started just blogging as a hobby.

So I was writing about social media. Social media had just kind of started blossoming. You know, Twitter Twitter was still, before the at symbol and before every business had a presence on Twitter, it was just, you know, people talking about, you know, sharing links and talking about where they were going in twenty minutes. Yeah. I mean, yeah.

And, folks, for context, again, you know, part of the part of the goal of this podcast is to tell the the history of ecommerce. And back then, Twitter was I mean, when when it started out, like, the tweet tweeting was was it was SMS based. I I mean, that's that's that's the thing. Like, you you would text you would text, and it would show up. And, so that's how far back we're going.

Yeah. It's it's a trip to think of it at a time before the at symbol was was part of its its, you know, method or mode. So like I was saying, you know, you you you kind of you seem to have created just this space for yourself, the expertise in, in the early days of of of managing campaigns and then looking at you know, really getting into interfaces, looking at ideas, looking at basically, looking at what people were doing and and and and, thankfully, having having this this gift of analysis and then and then putting it out there for people. So you became I think when you started, you know, Getelastic was, I think, was, like, two hundred two hundred subscribers, grew it up to 25,000 by, you know, by the end by the end of it. What was was that intentional on your part, or was this just just an outcome of the work that you were doing?

Just just by putting the good stuff out there, the people showed up and engaged. Well, I have to give a lot of gratitude to, to the team that hired me there because they gave me a lot of carte blanche. And Jason Billingsley, who was the CMO there at the time or VP of marketing, took me under his wing, and he taught me a lot about, you know, how to use the tools. Like, blogging is just one part of it. The second part of it is the community, engagement and using, at the time.

Right? Twitter was one of the channels, but there were things like, delicious bookmarks and, the dig. You know? And then there were certain, like, marketing niche versions a dig. I'm probably, like, bringing back all kinds of old timey memories here, but, and online forums and stuff like that.

So part of it was writing and coming up with the ideas, and, the other part of it was hanging out in the community because you wanted to, see what was breaking, all the different types of social media apps, and, like, okay. How does that how could a retailer use that? So they gave me a lot of, like, complete creative freedom and allowed me to just be curious and to be very social, on social networks and stuff, and then try and apply that to ecommerce. So I think I think that that was, probably part of the reason why it got traction was that it was kind of natively community based from the ground up. And bloggers used to we used to all, like, react to each other's posts.

I was listening to your interview with Roy Rubin, and he recounted, you know, starting the Varian blog and stuff. And we had the Varian blog even though we were competitors, We had each other on our blog roles, and I was networking with their writers, and we were writing reactions to each other's posts. So it was it was a good time back then. Commerce famous is proudly presented by Shopware, the leading open source e commerce platform for mid market and lower enterprise merchants. More than 50,000 clients already processed over $25,000,000,000 in annual GMV through Shopware.

Find out more about Shopware and the best value in e commerce at shopware.com. Gosh. It it it oh, man. I I hate to wax nostalgic, you know, really, but, man, that it really was a it was a special time because, there was there was so much opportunity. There was everything was kinda greenfield, and it seemed it seemed to me like if you you know, the the people who chose to be, good community stewards, good community participants, you could, grow an audience, grow relationships, and just really pretty easily build even a worldwide network as we were all learning and inventing this stuff together.

That's your that's your recollection as well. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, we as a species are community based.

We knowledge share. I think a lot of us in digital digital marketing, especially, had to self teach. This wasn't stuff that you could get in the early mid two thousands out of a out of school. I went to college and all the courses were outdated. By the time you write a textbook, the Internet has already moved ahead, so it's impossible.

So we've all, like, as a community, whether you're a developer, designer, business owner, entrepreneur, or, you know, VP of ecommerce, we have to learn from each other, and that is never gonna stop. I yeah. I so I so agree with that. In fact, the the education component it's interesting. We I wonder if we have a different problem nowadays, right, where where there's, you know, there are these these, you know, stayed practices.

There's there's sort of the the the formulas that we all do. But then if you wanna actually maybe significantly move a needle, or if you're doing any trying to do or accomplish anything outside or above the norm, you you there's a there's a there's a lot of noise out there, and there's I would say there's a lot of, like, procedural and, ideological inertia. It it almost feels like that to me, like, sort of you just can kind of go down a lane, not do anything interesting, and, you know, measure impacts, you know, of fractions of a percent. In this day and age, do you think you have advice for people who are working, you know, whether it's in whether it's in the ecommerce space or, just in digital in general? Do you have any advice for someone who might want to, you know, step outside their lane a bit or turn things on their side and look at them differently?

Well, I think one of the challenges, and I think chat GPT and AI and all that kind of stuff is gonna make it harder, is that there's it's kind of a low barrier of entry to put content out on the Internet and the fact checking and then and the weeding through things is the hard part. Right? And algorithms don't help that. Algorithms feed what, the algorithm is looking for, Not necessarily accuracy or value, but engagement and other types of things. So it's hard if you're on the receiving end trying to figure out, you know, like, how to get value out of the twenty minutes or three hours that you allot yourself to to surf around and discover stuff online.

So I think that's where this kind of idea of, like, having curated content or some people stepping up in the role, like, through newsletters or through, you know, kind of building up their own social profile and sharing stuff. You can kinda find people that you trust to kinda do that waiting for you. But, also, you know, everyone can create content. Everyone should. I see a lot of people who wouldn't consider themselves necessarily professional content creators creating LinkedIn content, sharing their thoughts, adding their spin on something.

And it doesn't matter if 50 people or five people see it. You did something valuable because you added to the community and the conversation. And, I think I think there's a lot of, you know, everyone should and can create content and be part of it. That is I mean, that honestly, that could be the show right there. Get out there.

If you think you have something to contribute, do it. If you don't think you have something to contribute, you probably do. This is for me, this is this sounds very familiar. Roy actually mentioned Roy Rubin, cofounder of Magento. I was one of the people who, along with Yolf, gave me my, you know, one of my biggest breaks in my career, which is the ability to go out and train Magento developers around the world.

And I remember I remember being terrified standing up in front of these people, wondering what business I had to teach them. And it turns out after you do it for a little while, you realize that, you know, yeah, that's that's you you do have something to offer it. But most important to me, I did I learned to tell to to start every class with a directive. Like, hey. If you think if you if you think a question, ask it.

There's the the, like, the the the the only dumb question is the one you don't ask. Right? So, basically, speak up. And I see that as kind of part as part of that, contribution process, right, that that exchange of of thoughts and ideas. And you have a really good point that, unfortunately, the the the signal to noise ratio is getting a bit out of whack.

I see it as as kind of a or you I don't know if you're familiar with Brandolini's law, but this seems like a corollary here. So it's like the the the, you know, the BS asymmetry principle of, you know, AI doesn't care what it says. And and by its very nature, it's going to sound authoritative. It's gonna sound slick. It's gonna sound correct.

It may be synthesizing ideas that have no basis in reality. It could be just completely making things up and then even making up references to back itself up. So I really like your your, if you call it a rubric or a filter there of finding someone who is just saying again and again things that are true, things that make sense, and and focus on what they're, on what they're doing. And we could even point to, as an example, ecomideas.com, ecomideas.com. This is this is your, I think, your current project, that that is out there.

And and as I was going through, as I was going through the site, I really I appreciate the the way it's laid out and how it just lets people simply self, you know, take themselves on a journey into areas of concern. So if you're, you know, maybe if you're out on a run, you can't look, but but bookmark it in your brain, as you're listening to the podcast. And you basically, you just you show up, and you've got you've you've got categories with, for online experiences. You've got some articles in there, and people can drill into different areas, whether it's product display, category display, checkout, and find examples and especially analysis of these great examples. Now how do you how do you what is your experience like when you're when you're out there?

You is this is this are these just experiences that you're encountering, or do you go looking for, are you do do you go looking at different, you know, retailer sites to see what they're doing and what works well and what doesn't? Yeah. It is the latter. I I've called myself an ecommerce truffle pig. I think that's the way to describe it.

I'm out there in the forest, and sometimes it's, you know, hours and hours or days and days until I find something. But when I find something that smells good, looks good, I wanna pluck it and bring it back to the community and share. I wanna bring back a big basket full of you know? And some of them are big juicy nugs, and some of them are little throwaway ones, but let's put it all together. I my little soft spot is for product teams.

Right? Because everyone's trying to figure out, like, okay. We've got an ecommerce site, and we just wanna figure out how to take the experience that one little step further, or can we solve the customer problem in a certain way? And it comes back to that knowledge sharing thing. Like, if if another site has done this in a creative or effective or thought provoking way, you as a product team should know about it, first of all.

Doesn't mean you need to adopt it. But if you're in the moment working on a specific component on the site and you're just like, what is everybody else doing? You can go and spend fifty hours like I would, you know, going looking at 600 sites or whatever. Or you can come to one place where kind of the highlights are extracted out, and you can get your job done faster, and you can stay focused on what you wanna do. So that's kinda why I built the database.

And, yeah, you asked about my process. Yeah. I just go hunting. I have a certain amount of time in my week that I just dedicate to hunting. Just just up in the Tuscan up in the Tuscan Hills, we're gonna we're we're gonna we're gonna find the real the the real bangers.

I think that's how you call them actually, your featured ideas, the the bangers, the highlights. And and it again, it's it's a it's, I don't know if you'd call it like a a lookbook. It's it's hard to describe. I've actually never I don't think I've ever seen a you know, I don't wanna I don't wanna pigeonhole it. It's it's Pinterest y or it's just it's this idea board.

Maybe a swipe file? Yeah. I guess. Yeah. Consider that way.

Yeah. Yeah. But it it you know, if if certainly, if you're on a product team, and I'm I actually, now that I've seen it, I'm I'm sharing this with our product, the the rest of the my my product peers, because, you know, it just it it can show you it can show you some great ideas. I think it could show you what's going on. And I was wondering, actually, the question I just wrote down for myself is, you know, do you do you actually find yourself, noticing trends as they pop up as you do this on a long enough timeline, you see, okay.

Well, wait. I saw, you know, I saw, like, a a button tray over here in this checkout experience, and now I see it over here. Do you see that do you see those trends emerge? Probably the first one is organic. Right?

Someone has a great idea, then, of course, people people will copy that. If they think it's good, they'll hopefully test it. But I'm wondering if you see those trends, among, like, you know, within verticals or among even competitors, like, them watching each other. A thousand percent, and I love to see it because I'll think that I found something so novel, and then six months later, now I'm seeing it everywhere. Perfect example of that is, like, being able to toggle between galleries, image galleries based on, like, gender or, body type or, you know, some other type of context.

So when you're at the category level or on the product page, being able to swap in and out a gallery based on, you know, user preference or something in one shot. And at first, I saw that on one site, and now I can probably rattle off 10 or 15 in the apparel space that are doing it. And visual search is another one of those two. Yeah. So I could probably list a bunch of them.

And that's why I started the newsletter because you can organize it in the database, like, in a certain structure, but I'm starting to see it across categories where, like, this is one thing that it doesn't necessarily have to be, like, in the buy box on a PDP. They're also doing it on the home page or embedding it in checkout or something. So, yeah, you start to see patterns emerge. And and like I said, you know, one site does it and the community gets a whiff of it, and then people start building it into their products, and it becomes Yeah. The new normal.

So, you know, I think you you of all people would be qualified, maybe most qualified to say that, the an interesting thing about, certainly about the ecommerce space is we are in no danger of solving ecommerce once and for all. There will not be a point at which we get to the end of the road and say, that's it, folks. We've we've finished this off. So it is it is, always iterative and and pretty much derivative, I guess. Not necessarily a bad thing because this is the this is the world we started making.

I mean, you you you've been around this business long enough. You probably remember the days of Urchin Analytics that became Google Analytics and the the the really early days of AB testing, with with with Google. And and and what was curious to me, I think I mentioned this on the podcast before, is that, you know, you you we could take something as simple as button color, you know, add to cart button color or placement or, you know, the the the words in there, the words of the in the description. And once we, you know, once you find something that converts and, again, folks, this was so much easier back then because it was all greenfield. Once you find something that works, oh, well, cool.

You do that, and then you're copied. And then all of a sudden that that spreads like wildfire, and the process repeats again on something else. And I feel like we're in this we we've been in this, you know, ever tightening spiral of of, interface and experience iteration. You know, you probably see that, as well in this day, but I'm I'm I'm probably missing some some grand picture there. I'm probably missing, you know, I'm I I actually don't even know.

I don't know if I can really I'm not the one to say how AI, for example, is going to iterate on this. And I'll explain where I'm going, which is that, you know, on in your your LinkedIn page. Right? Like, so so if you and you should. If you're interested at all in this conversation, find Linda on LinkedIn.

It's just her her handle is just, Linda boostas. And you have some you have, you have some posts highlighted featured. And I think one of the if I remember correctly, one of the posts that I think you had featured was this the ability to swap out the the model of of of of of of a fashion brand. And, and then I think you were the you you simply you you basically say, hey. You know, this is I could see this really with with with AI and image generation.

So particularly generative generative AI, I can I can say, oh, wait? No. This this looks good, but that is not my body type. You know? I'm I'm taller.

I'm skinnier. I'm I'm bigger. I you know, whatever. And you can you can prompt users to, engage with that product in a way that has not been possible sort of before generative AI and say, like, no. No.

No. No. No. I'm I'm five three. I'm I'm, you know, I'm petite.

I'm curvy. I'm let let me see let me see something more representative of of of who I am and how this how this product is gonna fit in with my life. And it doesn't have to be clothing. It could be, you know, lifestyle, geography, whatever. What are the what are those trends?

What do you see coming down the pipe when it comes to this this sort of new frontier in in, the customer experience on the web? That's a really nuanced one because I even remember going to, like, IRCE. They'd have this innovation lab section of the conference, which would be all the emerging tech. And even back in, like, 2016, 2017, they'd have these apps where you would take a selfie, and it scans your body. And then still seven years later, we haven't really seen that, you know, kind of be solved with being able to match it to real, like, trustworthy experiences where I think part of the big missing piece is brands and product data.

You need to get a critical mass of brands on board that are submitting exact precise measurement, probably scanning, if I can play futurist for for you know, or imagine a jet scenery world where every brand, every prototype in every size variant gets scanned through an an X-ray machine or some kind of thing that that does the exact same scanning that you would do on a body because fabric is another variable of that. Right? A cotton garment, even with the exact same cut and everything, is probably gonna lie differently than a pure polyester, you know, she in grade, she in grade material. So I think it's so complex that even if we have some of the foundational elements there, like body scanning, like being able to have algorithms and generative AI that can kind of give you an augmented reality superimposition of stuff. Like, I don't know if you've ever tried on sunglasses or glasses in a in an augmented reality.

They're pretty good, but you can tell it's stimulated. So you're not quite sure. Yeah. So I think that's kind of the the gap between what's possible and I think what we all can, kind of envision being possible versus the reality of, does it really translate into reliable preview of things? And I don't think we're there yet.

Right. Now real I I'm gonna pick on, you know, one one element of what you were just saying, and I think it and it comes back to it's the it's sort of the honesty honesty, accuracy, reliability. I think we are I agree we are we are a ways off from from these things presenting in a way that feels or appears genuine. And, you know, but but I can imagine that there's a point in time there will be a a cutover. It's it's it's much slower to to come around than we all thought it would be.

I remember playing with, three d models back when, you know, years ago at my former employer. But you're right. We're not there yet. But I I suppose at some point, there will be that we where point where we we will know it when we turn around and we go, oh, wow. We really have moved on into a new era.

And then, of course, we'll be looking forward onto the next thing. So, you know, as the as the tech continues to evolve and I think we're seeing we're seeing a little bit of this. I know, you know, at Shopware, we're indexing pretty heavily on, on spatial and, augmented reality. But, you know, the reality is, like, people are people are not walking around. They're not really entering a buying journey with VR goggles on.

Right? This is not this is not the this is not gonna be a normal or, you know, really it's a novel but probably not meaningful consumer experience. So it's really gonna be I think it really is gonna happen in the interface and and and the the example that you you posted on LinkedIn, along with your analysis, I would have missed it otherwise, is, is is it's that seems like a evidence of of us taking a step forward, like saying, hey. You know, we can synthesize, a model who represents, you know, either ourselves or someone that we wanna see and and the the product, you know, relative to that model or relative to that environment that we that we wanna see them in. And I suppose once that happens, especially in competitive verticals, it's going that will become kind of an arms race unto itself.

Now you have so you have a news oh, go ahead. Because Walmart Walmart bought I think it was called Zkit. They bought a tech company that does this kind of, you know, generated their whole thing was, you know, you would create an avatar of yourself Yep. And basically superimpose the entire catalog on yourself and that kind of thing. Yep.

I do I do that's right. I do remember, this was a few years back. Like, you they actually gave you instructions with, I think with the Walmart app, and you would you would scan yourself. And then once you did that, you could actually you could essentially have a virtual fitting room, and and the app seemed to do a decent job. I've honestly, I don't know I don't know how how well subscribed that that functionality was or is.

There's remember Magic Mirrors? Remember that big thing, like the Rebecca Minkoff and budgets, and, you know, where did those go? Those are the thing that nobody like, everybody does let's not talk about that one. Right? It was such a flash in the pan.

So Yeah. I I in fact, that was I never I was back in New York, in the, yeah, the late twenty tens. I remember going I I'm I'm probably was not Rebecca Minkoff's target audience, but I remember I knew I knew they had the experience. And you go in, and it's cool because everything had RFID, and the the fitting room knew what clothes you had with you and knew what was in stock. And it was all there on the mirror, and I thought this was the next evolution.

And what do we have? We still go to Target, and we have boring old mirrors. Yeah. There's a lot of tech solutions out there looking for a problem. I think it's very important to always make sure that it's something that there's actual customer demand for.

That's a now that you you definitely qualified to speak to this. Now, how do you especially now that we're past the zero interest days and and and capital has to be deployed a lot a lot less capriciously. How what what what is your advice to product teams for you know, when we think you know, when when when these good ideas come around and then these new capabilities again, we'll just throw out generative AI because that's still the hot topic. How do you what what kind of advice do you offer to product teams for, indexing on the right thing and to the right degree? So I I borrow, you know, how we all talk, especially we we've been in the ecommerce platform space for a long time.

So you know how there's that adage, no one ever got fired for for buying IBM? Yeah. What I would say is no one's gonna get fired for not adopting AI early. I think, you know, if you wanna be a first mover and that you're experimental and willing to take risks, just don't don't invest in AI what you're not willing to lose right now. It's okay to sit back and let other people take the big risks and then shake out what works and what doesn't.

Because, like, I just posted this. I had the interview with the chat PDP company, right, that put the chat GPT embedded on the EVO website, and all that kind of stuff. And they spent six months to a year actually testing a bunch of stuff, and a lot of their internal stuff failed. Right? They took initially, it was a little, chatbot that was proactive.

Can I help you with something? They thought it would be a sales assistant. And what they learned was that users treated it like a chatbot. They were asking, where is my order? You know, they didn't want it for the use case that it was initially thought that this is gonna be a great game changer.

And because they had the courage and the discipline to go and test it in, like, 800 different ways and really learn from users, now they have something that they have data that proves that it works. What I'm seeing a lot with products coming to the market is they stop at the we have this great idea and, like, let's push it into the market as is. And they don't do the hard work of actually testing it with pilot clients and working out the kinks to make a solution that customers will actually use. So I think that's the big shakeout that will happen in the next couple of years is a lot of AI solutions are gonna go away. And and and this sounds to me like we have we we are just doing what we've always done.

You know, we as a species is, you know, in being innovative in tech is great idea. Don't actually check for product market fit. Don't actually test your idea with your target audience and find out, you know, okay, great. We we knocked it out of the park right from the beginning, a rarity. And, you know, at the very least, you know, probably every good idea, you know, bears some kind of iteration or, you know, needs some kind of iteration to really find its home.

That's a really that's that's a really good that's a really good point. So as we as we wrap things up here, I do wanna remind everyone, Linda's got ecomideas.com, and it just I'm I'm citing it. It's a great resource, regardless of your role in, in the world of ecommerce. It's great to see what other people are doing and to benefit from decades of of analysis and and, just, I don't know, just just dogged fascination on your part, Linda. And then you have the weekly ish newsletter, that can, that people can avail themselves, of in your on your website.

I have one last question before we part, because I saw it. Saw it in your in your CV. And because I think there there are there there certainly in my world, there there are people who went to the x dot commerce conference and people who didn't, and you got to speak there. This was at the Moscone Center in, in in San Francisco. This was back in the days of eBay trying to kill Amazon, which we all know how that ended.

What was what was that experience like for you? Because that was kind of a that was a real heyday for for ecomm. Well, yeah. You know, it's funny because the ecommerce industry has taken so many twists and turns. Yeah.

And, yeah, it's like I used I I still do sell on Etsy and stuff, but I remember, you know, you you just, like, against PayPal. You know, PayPal, everybody has problems, but then they, like, buy you a ticket to San Francisco. So, like, now I can't hate on PayPal. I don't remember too much on that conference, but I just remember being, you know, like, being very grateful to, been been invited to be a part of it. And, I think I was speaking on a panel about I don't even remember what.

But, yeah, it's just that was the era of, like, companies like eBay buying, I think, GSI GSI Commerce and eBay and stuff, you know, try there was just a a wild west of, you know, solutions, and it it's yeah. You you're just jogging my memory. Sorry. I'm blabbering because No. No.

No. I I I I bring it up. And I bring it up because there's so many there's so many people. I was actually just telling this to my my producer, Hendrick, that, you know, there's so many people from that time. It was.

You're right. It was it was this wild west of of of eBay just saying like, well, hey. You know, we've got this great market position. Let's let's buy, you know, this enterprise solution GSI. Let's tag on Magento, which we've invested in because it was doing a lot for PayPal, and let's just see what happens when all this goes together.

It turns out, you can't just mash a bunch of good ideas together, and and have have it work. But but but in what what they did was I think at the time they put in they put together in in this crucible of commerce, a lot of great people at a great time. And the the the outcome of that may not have been directly beneficial to eBay, but I think, years later, people still bring this up like I just did to you. And, I think we can look back and say, it was a good time when all of us could get together and we've all enjoyed long and illustrious careers ever since. Well, Linda Bustas, a real pleasure on my part, to finally to finally meet you here, on Commerce Famous, and I look forward to running into you out and about in the world.

Well, I just wanted to say, you know, like, every, ecommerce conference is kind of like a high school reunion. You go walk around Habootka Booth, and it's like it's old faces. And so, yeah, hopefully, we, cross paths again in the future at a booth or otherwise. Well, keep on keeping on. I will be, I will be subscribing, posthaste, and I recommend everyone else does.

Linda, thank you very much for being on Commerce Famous. Thank you, Ben.

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