Amazon reported a strong first quarter with better-than-expected earnings and revenue.  The company also announced that it will move its annual Amazon Prime Day  sales extravaganza from its traditional mid-July setting to unspecified dates in June.  (The only other two times Prime Day occurred outside of July were 2020, when it was pushed to October due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2021 when Amazon hosted the event in June as the economy was still in recovery from the pandemic.) Amazon's first-quarter performance was helped by strong growth in its cloud business, with its AWS (Amazon Web Services) segment’s revenue rising 28% year-over-year to $37.6 billion. Amazon said it was the segment's fastest growth in 15 quarters.

In the last two blogs written by Michelle Houston, she covered the importance of using Contribution Per Order (CPO), instead of ROAS when evaluating the performance of marketing programs. At the end of one of those blogs, she talked about the importance of also assessing and understanding the significance of lifetime value (LTV) as part of the equation. I wanted to continue that thread and take it a step further by incorporating LTV as the last step of the proper analysis into the equation. As covered in past discussions, LTV is an important metric to track as it will vary widely by acquisition source. When applied to the first order for a new customer, CPO is the equivalent to cost or profit per customer acquired. This will vary by acquisition source as well. When CPO is combined with LTV, those metrics are a powerful tool in driving your company in the right direction (or wrong direction if you’re not careful). In the analysis below, we can evaluate the total effect that CPO and LTV have on the current and future business.

Consumers continue to show their resilience as retail sales rose for the eighth consecutive month in May despite high gas prices and ongoing inflation. Total retail sales (including restaurants, but excluding automobile dealers and gasoline stations) increased 0.42% month over month and were up 7.19% year over year in May, according to the CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor released by the National Retail Federation. That compared with increases of 0.34% month over month and 5.73% year over year in April.