Amir Schlachet on retail recovery
From COVID-19 Cross-border Ecommerce Trading Implications – Interview with Amir Schlachet - Global-e · · Global-e
“This suggests that the recovery of high street retail will be slower and might never even get back to the levels prior to COVID-19, and in our view the pandemic has not so much changed people's shopping behaviors but rather has accelerated the structural shift in consumer behavior towards e-commerce and the online-first model.”
On , Amir Schlachet, CEO & Co-Founder at Global-E Online, spoke about retail recovery during COVID-19 Cross-border Ecommerce Trading Implications – Interview with Amir Schlachet - Global-e on Global-e.
About Amir Schlachet
Amir Schlachet, CEO and co-founder of Global-e Online, reported first-quarter 2023 results in May 2023, stating that the company achieved 55% year-over-year growth in gross merchandise value (GMV) to $704 million and revenue growth of 54% to $117.6 million. He described the results as "strong" and "above our guidance," and said the company raised its full-year 2023 guidance. Schlachet noted that the macro environment in Q1 was "a bit better than we expected," with solid consumer demand, but added that "uncertainty still remains" and the company remained "fairly conservative" in its outlook for the remainder of the year. He also said the company saw a "record" pace of new merchant additions and a "robust" pipeline, with no delays in merchant decision-making due to macroeconomic conditions. In earlier commentary, Schlachet discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on cross-border e-commerce. In a 2020 interview, he stated that the pandemic "accelerated the structural shift in consumer behavior towards e-commerce" and suggested that the recovery of physical retail "might never even get back to the levels prior to COVID-19." He also said that cross-border e-commerce would play an important role in retailers' recovery by allowing them to serve demand from countries that had passed the peak of the outbreak. In a 2019 presentation, Schlachet described cross-border e-commerce as the fastest-growing segment of e-commerce, growing at about twice the rate of domestic e-commerce, and noted that Global-e's average brand client sells to 72 countries and sees about a 60% jump in cross-border conversion rates. He also cited an example where increasing Canadian product prices by 25% to include duties and taxes led to a three-fold rise in checkout completion rates and nearly 400% more revenue from Canada.