The Ostrich Report

Shopify went down again and nobody blinked. Salesforce bought Contentful and "forgot" to mention the price. In this off-the-cuff Special Edition of The Ostrich Report, Vinny O'Brien (Tralee) and Hendrik Laubscher (Cape Town) take apart the week ecommerce quietly started eating itself. We coin a new term for the down-round era — the Devil's Haircut — and use it to read six signals...

Season 1, Episode 1 — Amazon isn't losing the agentic AI war. It's building the toll booths. Malte Karstan (Marketplace Commentator & Analyst) joins Vinny O'Brien and co-host Hendrik Laubscher for a 50-minute conversation recorded across three continents — Singapore, Cape Town, and Ireland — that stopped being a forecast and became a post-mortem. Malte called the Amazon SP-API payw...

The Struggle Bus with Dave Morrissey: Culture, Creativity & the Irish Peak Moment In this episode of The Struggle Bus , Vinny sits down with the endlessly curious, relentlessly cultural, and occasionally feral-in-the-best-way Dave Morrissey — growth & culture consultant, ex-Meta, ex-TikTok, author of Grow Like Tech , and a man who can track the rise of Irish influence by reading festival l...

“If the first thing you do every morning is open Seller Central with a coffee… this one’s for you.” ☕📊 New episode of The Ostrich Report just dropped, and this time Hendrik and I brought in someone who actually runs the thing everyone has an opinion about but very few truly understand: marketplaces . 🎙 Guest: Jamie Roller 🧼 Brand: Dr. Squatch (yes, the Star Wars soap people with the ridiculous...

$238BN Revenue a nostalgic, number-soaked sprint through Singles Day 2025 and a preview of our biggest episode yet. There are shopping events. There are cultural moments. And then once a year China lights the ecommerce beacons, JD.com flexes its fulfilment biceps, and the rest of us sit there whispering: “How… in the actual…?” Welcome to our latest episode of The Ostrich Report, where Hendrik Laub...

Max Sinclair blew our minds last week ( Hendrik Laubscher ) and I. We welcomed him onto the Ostrich Report to have what we thought would be a normal enough discussion about AI and its productivity gains for markketplace sellers. Wrong. Azoma occupy a unique space and have a long history in this space. 2 co founders with skills and experience, one from the Death Star (Amazon) who combined to build...

If you think Temu is just cheap socks and weird gadgets, you’re missing the real story.   This is the case study in how fast commerce is mutating,  faster than we can civilize it. On this week’s Ostrich Report , Hendrik and I dove deep into Temu’s European explosion,  and the numbers are pure madness: 📈 24.7 million EU customers between April and August 2024. 🚀 By June 2025, that figure will hit...

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when an Irish eCommerce consultant, a South African data whisperer, and an Australian marketplace guru walk into a podcast — the answer is a surprisingly civil 45 minutes of insight, laughter, and just a tiny bit of existential dread about the state of retail. This week, Vinny and Hendrik sat down with Luke Hilton , Global VP of Solution Engineering at Marketpl...

15 Minutes or Bust: What Hospitality Taught Rafael Barini About Commerce The Ostrich Report has landed.  What I loved most about my conversation with Rafael Barini is his reminder that eCommerce is not just retail . It’s a discipline. A way of thinking. A toolkit for solving problems across any industry. Once you’ve learned to build and manage marketplaces, you start to see systems everywhere. The...

No one ever buys something the first time they see it… said Rhys. Wethersoons taught him alot from the kitchen to the table. Learn How How a former Wetherspoons kitchen worker built a freeze-dried sweet brand that sold 40,000 products on Temu in just two months — without spending a penny on ads. This week on The Ostrich Report we sat down with Rhys Sandford of Exploded Sweets and, honestly, it was...

🐸 It’s not easy being green…or wearing a Kermit the Frog shirt while talking about Temu. Yet that’s exactly how Episode 7 of The Ostrich Report opens: me in full frog mode, Hendrik on the other mic, diving head-first into the most polarising marketplace on the planet. Temu (yes, “Team-oo”) isn’t a sideshow anymore. It’s a $B+ engine of cross-border commerce, a logistics experiment running at TikT...

Happy Birthday, eBay 🎂. The OG of marketplaces is officially 30 years old, and we’re re-releasing our Episode 4 deep dive to mark the moment. In this episode, we unpack: The magic of eBay’s early years — when auctions, Beanie Babies, and broken laser pointers defined the internet. The one big thing eBay missed (hint: logistics + payments = Amazon’s crown, not eBay’s). The cultural highs and manag...

The marketplace podcast you didn't know you asked for (just like AI) is back. The Ostrich Report Ep 6 - JD.com Buys Into Germany… What Could Possibly Go Wrong? This week we put the Ostrich in Ostrich Report by burying our heads deep into one of the most head-scratching deals of the year: JD.com spending €2.5B to buy Ceconomy , the German parent company of MediaMarkt and Saturn. Yes, JD — the C...

The marketplace podcast you didn't know you asked for (just like AI) is back. The Ostrich Report Ep 5 – eBay Part Two 🚨The Sliding Doors of eBay: Part 2 – Electric (But Still Manual) Boogaloo 🚨 🎙️The Ostrich Report Ep 5 just dropped, and if nostalgia had a stock price, we'd all be rich… until activist investors spun it off for parts. Say his name Hendrik Laubscher - Humperdink (IYKYK) Th...

Here’s your self-deprecating, hilarious LinkedIn post for The Ostrich Report – Episode 3 , complete with a grovel for sponsors and a nostalgic teaser for eBay in Episode 4: 🚨 The Ostrich Report: Episode 3 is out now! 🚨 🎙️ Starring: Two ecommerce nerds with more opinions than hair— Me and Hendrik Laubscher . This week we tackle checks notes … whatever we felt like talking about for 25 minutes bef...

*Welcome to The Ostrich Report – Where Ecommerce Sticks Its Head in the Sand So You Don’t Have To* 🚨 PILOT EPISODE ALERT 🚨 Two marketplace nerds walk into a livestream... and the algorithm lets them stay. Hosted by *Hendrik Laubscher* (the man, the myth, the spreadsheet) and *Vinny O’Brien* (part-time ecommerce guru, full-time professional cynic), The Ostrich Report is your no-holds-barred, semi...

**Welcome to The Ostrich Report – Where Ecommerce Sticks Its Head in the Sand So You Don’t Have To**🚨 *PILOT EPISODE ALERT* 🚨 Two marketplace nerds walk into a livestream... and the algorithm lets them stay. Hosted by **Hendrik Laubscher** (the man, the myth, the spreadsheet) and **Vinny O’Brien** (part-time ecommerce guru, full-time professional cynic), *The Ostrich Report* is your no-holds-bar...