Manish Chowdhary and Sabir discuss what's shifted most in ecommerce over the past 18 months. AI is reshaping organic traffic and SEO strategies, forcing ecommerce businesses to rethink their marketing foundations after the pandemic boom.
Last 18 months, a quick stat. Everybody thinks that E commerce has boomed. And in the COVID time you must have heard that E commerce accelerated by a decade and one year. Have you heard, did you all feel that way, that E commerce was just booming? And today we got the data which is E commerce penetration as a percentage of retail is right now, as a percentage of retail is at the same exact level as it was five years ago. Q2, 2020. So it's about 10%. So this is live data that is fresh that it's so easy to get lost in the stories of yesterday. And so Sabir, since you've been there, since the birth of E commerce, let's talk about what has changed in the last 18 months specifically.
Well, everybody talks about AI, right? So that's AI definitely has created a dent in traffic, right? If you look at organic traffic, where you focus so much on Google search engine optimization and other things like that with AI, with AI mode, that has started taking a lot of traffic away from those kind of strategies, if you were doing it. Because the frank truth also, Manish, is that even though I'm saying this, I do want to balance it with the fact that the reality on the ground is that most brands, they're so obsessed with paying meta ads and Google Ads that they're not focused on the organic strategies where they need to be developing. Especially AI. SEO is a thing right now where you can, you can package your content and actually feed it so that it can get discovered by AI engines. Because that's where we are going, you know. And if you are optimizing your business based on what worked in 2022, that that was a different part, different world at that time, right? It doesn't exist. That world doesn't exist right now. You know the realities of that. You're coming out of the pandemic. It's a different environment, right? And the fact that AI adoption has become so prevalent, you really need to focus on what's, what's real today. But the fundamental strategies for business don't change that. You still the foundation, you still need to focus on your foundation. Because if your foundation is not right, if your gross margin is not right for your business and you're discounting to hell, you're not going to succeed. You're going to go bankrupt. You know, most, most e comm businesses go bankrupt. 90% of them by like the e comm businesses that exist today, 90% of them are going to go bankrupt by 2027. 90%.
So right before this, were you going to say something. So it is true. And we were talking earlier.
I have a question to follow what you're saying. So how do you feed it into AI with your organic content? Or.
Let'S say if you're on Shopify, there is an app builder that has built an AI, you know, a plug app in the Shopify store. You can just install it. What it does is it collects your product catalog, blogs and stuff like that to package it so that the LLMs txt gets pulled up very similar to what robot Txt or sitemap XML works very similar to that.
That and you can also just go into the different AIs and actually put in the prompt. So like let's say you were your customer and you're like, hey, what is the best skincare for dry skin today? And see what's coming up, ask for the sources and then look what AI is pulling from. And then from there like either build an affiliate model to work with those publishers or build lists similar to those and put them on your website in like an affiliate link so that you are also being tracked and searched in that way. Cool.
