INTERVIEW 社員インタビュー

Why I'm at Commerce Media

My name is Matsuda from Commerce Media. I started my career as a mechanical engineer, and now I work in e-commerce consulting, focusing on data. It may seem like I do a lot of different things, but in fact, I'm doing the same thing. Today, I'd like to talk about my career.

Current role and specific duties at CM

At Commerce Media, we currently provide support for the growth of our clients' e-commerce businesses. We mainly provide consulting services for in-house e-commerce businesses, focusing on data analysis and SEO, and also handle advertising operations. For clients who have stores in malls, we also provide mall consulting services.

In addition, I am creating analysis formats and building a data marketing infrastructure for the company, and am implementing within the company the most efficient and effective methods that I have used in my analyses to date.

A specific example is the response to GA4. Until now, e-commerce sites with their own domains often used Universal Analytics (UA) for analysis, but since its provision ended in July 2023, GA4 has become the new main focus of analysis.

GA4 is a completely different analysis tool from previous UA, so it made it much more difficult for clients to understand what was happening on their sites. Therefore, we used Google's BI tool, Looker Studio, to organize the data so that anyone could understand it, and deployed that method within the company.

Career so far

Originally, I didn't come from an e-commerce or retail background, but started my career as a mechanical engineer, so at first, my main job was research and development at a machinery manufacturer, and adjusting the performance of machines according to customer requests.

After about five years at that workplace, there was talk of starting a new business, which was a B2C business aimed at general consumers and e-commerce.

Originally, we were a manufacturer that developed products for consumers, but if we went through wholesalers and retailers, the profit per unit would naturally be lower. Therefore, we adopted EC as a way to sell directly to customers, and I became involved in EC myself, and this was my first experience with EC.

After that, e-commerce became the main focus, and I gained experience selling through various channels, including my own e-commerce site, Amazon, Rakuten, Yahoo! Shopping, etc. Nowadays, these products are commonplace and have a lot of competition, but at the time, I was able to develop a groundbreaking product that was in high demand, so I think I was quite successful in the e-commerce industry at the time.

After that, I left that company and started working as an EC manager for a sake manufacturer, where I gained experience launching and operating Shopify. Rather than just accidentally becoming involved with Shopify, I had always thought Shopify was a very good system, so it may not be an exaggeration to say that I joined the company because I could operate it on Shopify. (laughs)

At the time, we were just starting out and didn't have many people, so although it didn't contribute to sales, we needed to carry out the necessary administrative work and reporting with as few resources as possible. So we came up with ideas such as automatically reporting GA information using Looker Studio (formerly known as Data Portal) and setting up a system where weekly reports were automatically sent to the relevant departments.

The appeal of commerce media

When I was working for a sake manufacturer, I was in charge of our own e-commerce site, which we built using Shopify, so I was constantly gathering information about Shopify. When I gathered information about Shopify, I would come across blogs and interview articles, so I had known about Commerce Media for quite some time.

I first spoke with Commerce Media through a media outlet, and I had always had a vague desire to analyze data from various e-commerce sites and try to make improvements, so Commerce Media, which supports companies in a variety of industries, was the perfect company.

Furthermore, the appeal of Commerce Media, as I felt from talking to them, was that they handle the entire e-commerce business from upstream to downstream. There are some companies that simply focus on site construction or consulting, but it is very rare to find a company that covers such a wide range of services.

In addition to our own EC site, we also provide operational services, consulting, and advertising management for major shopping malls such as Rakuten, Amazon, and Yahoo! Shopping, and in the back office, we use OMS/WMS to manage logistics and handle customer satisfaction. We are truly in charge of the entire business.

What appealed to me about the broad range of coverage is that the company can handle a greater range and volume of data than other e-commerce support companies, and the timing was also perfect, so I decided to join the company.

Job satisfaction

I like improvements, or rather, I am the type of person who enjoys analyzing data, formulating hypotheses for improvements, implementing them, and repeatedly proving my hypotheses.

It's nice to analyze the data, execute the hypothesis you made, and then collect the data again and see a clear increase. It's easy to imagine with advertising, but the interesting thing about data analysis is that it gives you feedback in the form of numbers, such as a decrease in the cost per acquisition and the creation of greater sales within the same budget.

To give a recent example, I did SEO for an e-commerce site with a certain amount of brand power. I had a basis for believing that the work I did would definitely increase the numbers, and the results came out within about a week, with sales several times higher than last year.

Future career vision

This is more about what I want to do rather than a specific career, but as AI continues to make its way into the e-commerce field, it's becoming difficult to predict what changes will occur in a year's time.

A year ago, few people would have predicted that ChatGPT would become so popular, and I'm sure there will be even more big changes in the next year, two years, or three years, so I think it will be interesting to quickly adopt new technologies and reflect them in EC.

One of the things we are currently building experimentally is an internal AI help desk that will refer to our internal manuals and respond to specific technical questions. It is still in the testing stage, but if it works well, I think it could become a service in itself.

In addition, because consulting is a resource-limited service, if AI could answer simple or frequently asked questions, it would increase the number of companies we can support and could also be used to improve the quality of existing services.

Message to applicants

We often hear stories in commerce media about business owners who run their e-commerce business almost on their own, and who are not recognized for their results, or who have had difficult experiences because they were unable to consult with others. Therefore, I think that having someone to consult with and having your e-commerce work properly evaluated is a big attraction. I myself have been running an e-commerce business on my own for a long time, so I can understand how they feel.

Also, in terms of roles similar to mine, I think it's suitable for people who enjoy data analysis. In terms of recent image, is it similar to a youtuber? Distribute videos, analyze the results, distribute the improved content and analyze it. Just like EC, it's difficult because you need to repeat improvements and implementations and speed, but I think people who enjoy that are likely to succeed.

In addition, Commerce Media is a company that can handle a huge variety of data, including its own website, malls, advertising, orders, customer service, and logistics, so I think it is an environment that people who like data analysis will never get bored of.

Because there are so many things to analyze, it can be a little demanding, but if you enjoy analyzing data, taking action to improve, and sometimes finding that things turn out as expected, or sometimes failing, then we would love for you to apply.