Page 2 of 2 649 words In my previous job, I worked in a company where...

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Page 2 of 2 649 words In my previous job, I worked in a company where we focused on helping brands to implement their direct-to-consumer E-commerce strategies. I was involved heavily within the advertising department, specifically on Amazon marketplace. The overall goal was to help this particular brand to gain market share, increase revenue while sustaining net profit margins, and be one of the top "Best Sellers" within its product category (within this product category, there was one other top competitor). Upper management implemented a top-down approach of setting financial goals such as revenue, which is based on Units Sold * Unit Price. Due to the seasonality of product nature, our operations and sales and marketing department had to collaborate closely to breakdown historical sales to two main different categories, consisting of organic sales and advertising sales. Then produce a few different forecast model estimates of future sales based on factors such as advertising dollars spend; for example, assuming unlimited budget for advertising, what would be the upper limit of revenue be prior to observing diminishing returns, and what would sales be given 'X' amount of dollars to spend, etc. Our organization had to dive deep and understand how advertising efforts affect total sales for this particular brand product offering; while also segmenting on which advertising efforts are the most cost-effective to produce the greatest return on advertising spend (ROAS) due to potential budget constraints. On top of that, our organization also have to factor in the inventory aspect due to shortage from supply chain and unexpected issues such as factory shutting down temporarily due to an employee tested positive for Covid-19. Cross-unit coordination was strictly necessary with suppliers and internal divisions to ensure our company is able to meet target. Therefore, with the supply chain issue faced, our target changed from maximizing revenue due to limited product availability, to maximizing bottom line net profit with product availability from supplier. The reason being that running out of inventory within Amazon marketplace will hurt product listing and effect product ranking more. Therefore, we pivoted into optimizing advertising costs which is the variable costs, aside from overhead (fixed) costs. With that said, we conducted additional thorough analysis on different advertising product placement costs within Amazon, as well as observe what our competitors were doing, and extract sales and advertising reports to understand which particular "Search-term Keywords" have the best ROAS according to conversion rates and other key metrics such as 'X-clicks per sale', and 'Z-dollars per click'; multiplying those two together helps us understand costs per sale (customer acquisition costs). Our advertising team decided to shy away from bidding aggressively for exact keywords of product, but instead opt for a broad strategy which minimizes advertising spend while still able to increase product awareness and convert into a sale more efficiently; as the exact keywords can be very costly and the advertising costs is based on a pay- per-click system. Historically, the following process and analysis task has always been somewhat of a manual process. However, upper management understood that the following process can be taxing manually and an automated solution was needed to be implemented to truly add value towards the company's operation long-term. A similar operation process can be applied to other brands and products and adjusted according to company's goals and market competition. Therefore, management decided to invest in a third-party database software/system which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to project future sales based on data extracted and feed into system through various reports connecting to Amazon's backend application programming interface (API). All-in-all, the strategy was successful because we were able to meet company's target of minimizing costs and maximizing bottom-line profit while establishing a good foundational process in-place for future executions which requires collaboration from various internal business functions as well as external suppliers; since execution of strategy is ultimately a team effort, in which all employees including management are required to be actively involved in (Thompson, 2018). 3,692 English (United States) OCT Focus Page 2 of 2 649 words In my previous job, I worked in a company where we focused on helping brands to implement their direct-to-consumer E-commerce strategies. I was involved heavily within the advertising department, specifically on Amazon marketplace. The overall goal was to help this particular brand to gain market share, increase revenue while sustaining net profit margins, and be one of the top "Best Sellers" within its product category (within this product category, there was one other top competitor). Upper management implemented a top-down approach of setting financial goals such as revenue, which is based on Units Sold * Unit Price. Due to the seasonality of product nature, our operations and sales and marketing department had to collaborate closely to breakdown historical sales to two main different categories, consisting of organic sales and advertising sales. Then produce a few different forecast model estimates of future sales based on factors such as advertising dollars spend; for example, assuming unlimited budget for advertising, what would be the upper limit of revenue be prior to observing diminishing returns, and what would sales be given 'X' amount of dollars to spend, etc. Our organization had to dive deep and understand how advertising efforts affect total sales for this particular brand product offering; while also segmenting on which advertising efforts are the most cost-effective to produce the greatest return on advertising spend (ROAS) due to potential budget constraints. On top of that, our organization also have to factor in the inventory aspect due to shortage from supply chain and unexpected issues such as factory shutting down temporarily due to an employee tested positive for Covid-19. Cross-unit coordination was strictly necessary with suppliers and internal divisions to ensure our company is able to meet target. Therefore, with the supply chain issue faced, our target changed from maximizing revenue due to limited product availability, to maximizing bottom line net profit with product availability from supplier. The reason being that running out of inventory within Amazon marketplace will hurt product listing and effect product ranking more. Therefore, we pivoted into optimizing advertising costs which is the variable costs, aside from overhead (fixed) costs. With that said, we conducted additional thorough analysis on different advertising product placement costs within Amazon, as well as observe what our competitors were doing, and extract sales and advertising reports to understand which particular "Search-term Keywords" have the best ROAS according to conversion rates and other key metrics such as 'X-clicks per sale', and 'Z-dollars per click'; multiplying those two together helps us understand costs per sale (customer acquisition costs). Our advertising team decided to shy away from bidding aggressively for exact keywords of product, but instead opt for a broad strategy which minimizes advertising spend while still able to increase product awareness and convert into a sale more efficiently; as the exact keywords can be very costly and the advertising costs is based on a pay- per-click system. Historically, the following process and analysis task has always been somewhat of a manual process. However, upper management understood that the following process can be taxing manually and an automated solution was needed to be implemented to truly add value towards the company's operation long-term. A similar operation process can be applied to other brands and products and adjusted according to company's goals and market competition. Therefore, management decided to invest in a third-party database software/system which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to project future sales based on data extracted and feed into system through various reports connecting to Amazon's backend application programming interface (API). All-in-all, the strategy was successful because we were able to meet company's target of minimizing costs and maximizing bottom-line profit while establishing a good foundational process in-place for future executions which requires collaboration from various internal business functions as well as external suppliers; since execution of strategy is ultimately a team effort, in which all employees including management are required to be actively involved in (Thompson, 2018). 3,692 English (United States) OCT Focus