CiQ Experience

Introduction:

Internships are an important part of the learning experience in one's early career. In this article, I will break down my 6-month internship experience as a Data Science intern at CommerceIQ and things I learned along the way.

About the company:

The aim at CommerceIQ is to enable brands to grow on e-commerce. It is the first and only omnichannel purpose-built automation platform to support the entire e-commerce flywheel of identifying digital shelves, optimize assortment, promotions, and retail-aware advertisements.

Largely, we work on the following areas:

• CIQ Sales: Maximise your digital shelf to increase conversions and total sales.

• CIQ Advertising: Optimise and allocate advertising spend in real-time to drive incremental sales growth.

• Managed Services: Anticipate consumer behavior, market trends, and competitive actions to improve your e-commerce profitability.

Vision:

CommerceIQ's vision is to build a modern operating system for brands to win in E-commerce. A majority of our work is based on customer obsession. Thus, our mindset and approaches are always closely aligned to meet the business objectives and add value to our clients. I personally extremely enjoyed this way of thinking since for all my work, I could see the direct value of it and how it's enabling brands to get a better understanding about the market and smaller segments within them, what is their share of voice in these segments, what is their opportunity for improvement in these segments and eventually how can they win the market. We believe that instead of just helping brands understand their business on e-commerce, can we tell them how they can win their market and build tools to enable them to achieve this objective.

My work and team:

The Data Science team consisted of around 10-15 members. I was a member of the CIQ Advertisement pod in the Data Science team and my work was around automatic creation and applications of Digital Shelves in winning the market, identifying important keywords for mining, and ad campaign generation. Brands have a goal to capture most of the customers to buy their products in comparison to the competitors, essentially enabling them with a higher market share of sales. To do this in the offline world, Brand and Category managers have a way to mentally map their business or the catalog of the products they are selling into brick-and-mortar markets, market sections, market ailes, and market shelves. And on a continuous basis, they measure-manage-&-optimise the availability, visibility, share of presence, assortment coverage, advertising, and promotions for awareness and competitive mitigation for gaining the market share. However, in the online world (in e-commerce) this is extremely difficult due to the massive scale of operations. There are millions of products and ways to search for them on retail platforms. Hence, it becomes extremely difficult to understand how to win your market without having a map of how their business is performing. This is where my work on digital shelves was important. Digital Shelves provide a customized and cognitively aligned mind map to customers in the way they look at their business, also provide changing insights. Changing search trends across client and competitor digital shelves can be captured. Emerging and diminishing digital shelves can be identified and tracked under the hierarchy. Under each node, the related asins, keywords, related, and comp asins are captured. The market share can be mapped over the market shelves and broken down into market shelf segments to show values at that level. This could also be used in market share-aware advertising. Thus, I was given the opportunity to work on a problem of significant importance with the freedom and flexibility to lead and drive the project, closely aligning with the business needs of the client and how can my work help create value for them.

Culture:

I have enjoyed the culture at CommerceIQ since the minute I joined and perhaps even before that, during my interviews. Everyone in my team and overall was extremely accommodating and made me feel at home while onboarding. 1-to-1 sessions were set up with every member of the team in my first week to get context on all the problems and projects being worked on. Moreover, the wide and constructive feedback from the entire team during our scrum meetings was extremely useful in making sure that my work is sound from multiple viewpoints. What I also enjoyed was the freedom given to me to explore the problem in detail with a small push given in a direction. After being given a starting point, I had the freedom to explore the problem from multiple viewpoints, discuss and brainstorming multiple approaches before finalizing on an approach. Being a curiosity-driven person, I had the independence and authority to lead and plan my project while making sure it aligns with the product and customer needs which helped me build a business and problem-solving perspective, something I feel will be extremely beneficial to me in the future.

Overall experience:

Overall, I believe that my experience at CommerceIQ over the past 6 months has been incredible. Thinking back as to how I used to approach a problem back then vs now, I feel that I have evolved significantly. I got the opportunity to do both cutting-edge work while making sure that my work has a significant and tangible impact which is extremely satisfying. There is nothing more satisfying at work than to see your work and approaches out in production and helping brands make millions of dollars and winning the market. In hindsight, I could not have asked for a better place to work over the last 6 months and my experience has been truly incredible and I would recommend everyone reading this to reach out to the team to work on cutting-edge technologies and help brands grow on e-commerce.