Guest Lecture - eCommerce and Data_Shopee
In this week’s seminar in business management course hosted by IBMBA, a special guest Mr. Aaron Kuo deliver an inspiring sharing. It is an honour to have Aaron again, this time he is sharing about e-commerce and data with over 50 students in the classroom. With the practical example and data of Shopee and Aaron’s career life.
To start the sharing, Aaron introduces his team in Shopee and lets the students know about his background. His career aspirations are on digital transformation, hyper-automation, and fin-tech. His wide background helps him build a non-conservative mindset to deal with the up-to-day industry.
Everyone has a basic picture of e-commerce, but not the detail and mechanism behind it. Aaron breaks the whole e-commerce world into three parts, information, logistic, and money. Besides, Aaron introduces the trend of e-commerce. There are various ways to open e-commerce stores and product search moves to the e-commerce site. Nowadays, e-commerce is not that hard anymore. Not only companies, but customers also rely on search engines and e-commerce platforms. As an example of Amazon, they successfully change the search on the web into their sales value.
Next is about the logistic, expansion in category and service level needs ops enhancement. The e-commerce industry has to deal with the logistics overload problem. The placement of new inventory, picking efficiency after Wearhouse grows, packing solutions for different categories, delivery expectation from customers, and cost transparency after scaling up. For Shopee, they introduce Shopee Xpress into the market. It is a different way to tap into the market, more than 700 stores were opened in one year. Besides, there is a trend that logistics tech and startups popping ups. AGV warehouse, paperless integration, on-demand delivery, and fresh & cold chain are the solution to enhance the logistic overload in the e-commerce industry.
To create confidence and security, third-party payment is commonly used in e-commerce. Aaron explains the detail and mechanism behind it and introduces a new business that pops out because of it. The money accumulates to give out opportunities, a money pool of the third-party payment is more than a deposit. Ant Group the fintech eco-system based on e-commerce to inclusive financing well shows how the business works. However, the legislation, regulation and supervision in Taiwan are the roadblocks. It is hard to function on the new idea. Shopee still tries to serve the under-served by introducing the Shopee seller loan. With a platform operation data for a credit assessment to grant small-medium business (SMB) opportunities with higher loans and lower interest rates.
‘Data is the new oil’
In the second part, Aaron introduces the values data brought to e-commerce. Users create huge data at contact points and it is very useful. A functional business intelligence team is to analyse the data for internal users and benefits decisions. To oversee how the business operates and provide decision optimization based on quantitative analysis. However, there are difficulties on refine data to explore values that Aaron's team still learns to work on. Business intelligence and data science are supplemental, each providing different value sets. To put these into real life, a test drive of push notifications is needed optimization for higher sales.
Creating a highly cohesive and loosely coupled team is important to fully utilize the data. Project Management for project or program management, analysis and insight team for the business, data analyst and data scientist, and developers: front-end or UI-UX Design, back-end or data engineer, machine learning engineer. Results done by different teams will influence others, team works help turn business requests into data solutions.
To tackle real-life requests, Aaron provides Shopee Express stores as an example. In order to find out the best locations for Shopee Express, Aaron demonstrates how his team works together with other teams. Turn business requests into data solutions, bringing out 6 Steps for optimized service points.
At the last part of the sharing, Aaron set up a Q&A section. Students are welcome to ask different questions to have some advice or feedback. Here are some questions asked by students:
Which program do you use for data analysis?
We use python, it is more friendly for us to share with different teams.
Why Shopee express?
To serve the under-served, encourage the offline seller to drop into the e-commerce world. Expectantly work in an underdeveloped country. Also, to solve the logistic mess caused by 1111 or other campaigns to the convenience store. The cost will also decrease because of it.
What is the next step for Shopee express?
First, I think we will focus on the logistics work now. Enhance or improve the efficiency, it is to must package now. So it is a bit early to expand to other functions.
Is there another way to cut down the cost?
If it is a new business, you should think about fast growth instead of cutting down costs. For Shopee, we will do balance and try low-down admin and unnecessary marketing costs recently.
