Ecommerce Analyst (Remote / NC preferred)

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ALLAN'S COMMENTS: We are working with a manufacturer of hookah and shisha supplies and accessories in their search for a world-class Ecommerce Analyst, ideally based in North Carolina USA.

NOTE: There is an excellent chance this role will end up being remote or partial remote, so if after reading this posting, you'd like to apply, hit me up.

As a global market leader in the inhalation space (yes, there is such a thing), the client aims to revolutionize inhalation rituals through the design, manufacture, and marketing of a suite of world class products to improve the physical, emotional and mental benefits of inhalation.

The company's global footprint includes offices in North Carolina, London, Dubai, Delhi, Jeddah, Warsaw, and Hamburg, and it operates its own factories in the UAE and Poland. The company is committed to innovation, and it is dedicated to reimagining recreation, sensorial discoveries and social connections.

The firm seeks to be a forerunner in the research-backed science of inhalation (in which the tobacco component is heated rather than burnt), and its research team is led by experts in their respective fields.

For example, while browsing the client's corporate site, we were surprised to learn that in contrast to cigarettes (where the tobacco, along with paper, inks, and adhesives are physically set alight), a shisha cloud is generated at much lower temperatures through indirect heating. This makes smoking a hookah ~70% less harmful than cigarettes.

The company operates four websites: Two for B2B, and two for DTC on which it sells its own brands and others'. Worldwide, the firm does huge business — with the US market showing a ton of promise.

The firm’s primary DTC site is among the top in its category and averages a 48% share of the market (versus its closest competitor at 20%). The company’s B2B sites have grown slightly in the past few years, and management is optimistic that with some improvements to its tech stack, all four sites' best days are ahead of them.

As the firm's new Ecommerce Analyst, you will take ownership of all things data and ecommerce.

You’ll be the champion of the firm's data-driven decision making and build out the analysis to support its ecommerce businesses. This will include establishing KPIs, building a scalable data-capture framework, and observation-driven go-forward reporting structures that leverage quantitative and qualitative information to determine actionable insights.

In this role, you will work closely with the firm's Marketing, Sales, Operations and Finance teams, and you'll be the digital team’s data backbone -- maintaining a pulse on all industry, competitor, and internal-business insights.

Numbers tell a story, and in this role, you'll be communicating those stories to optimize ROI and customer experience across the organization.

Now, there will be a few key complicating factors as you analyze what the Marketing team's initiatives because the tobacco-specific business is regulated, which forces the Marketing team to prioritize influencers, email, remarketing, and organic / direct sources of traffic. Specifically, you can expect to design and pull reports on loyalty, retention, digital marketing, plus special inquiries on things like auto ship flows.

Additionally, the firm will be involved in an ERP integration which should be complete in April, 2024. Until that integration is complete, on a typical day you will be aggregating data from multiple systems (Magento, Instacart, SKUvault, etc). The key challenge will be to understand how the firm sells the same products across multiple sites, because the current SKU structure isn’t the same.

At first, you’ll be aggregating / calculating KPIs from various tools and platforms — so experience querying tables in SQL is mandatory. Doing this will require you to select the right data to model. Naturally, we’d expect you to be able to create and analyze dashboards in an ecom environment.

Things will get easier once the ERP integration is complete, but until then you can expect some (healthy) craziness. Management knows this is complicated, and we are calling that out right here and now. Full disclosure.

To win in this role, you MUST have experience aggregating data from different systems, designing and benchmarking KPIs, working with various BI tools, querying systems, selecting the right data to model, plus reporting, data cleansing, and dashboard analysis in an ecom environment (specifically Microsoft BI or Google Data Studio).

Additionally, the best candidates for this role will have a knack for seeing the entire business through the eyes of the customer. Of course, all of this would be with the objective of making money — which means we’d look to YOU to slice and dice your data by channel, customer cohort, product category and more (conversion rate, AOV, etc).

The company has a very exciting product launch (a proprietary hard good with a continuity backend!) scheduled for 2024, and you’ll be involved in the target market research and testing of that — understanding what motivates particular consumers; what triggers them to buy; at what price points; understanding seasonal tendencies, and so forth.

Management has already done its macro market research (demographics; psychographics; geographies, etc). Now it needs YOU to help drive the bottom-of-the-funnel inquiries:

• What are we doing RIGHT?
• What are we doing WRONG? And
• What do we need to do to GET BETTER?

Are you the type of person that revels in finding out why things are the way they are? Do you have an uncontrollable urge to work on complex problems until you find the perfect solution? Does the hair stand up on the back of your neck when you run across data that doesn’t seem right? Then this is the gig for you!

I spent a ton of time on the phone with the client teasing out exactly what you’ll need to KNOW and DO to hit the ground running in this role. Some of the things I can share with highly qualified candidates include ...

1. The "real" background requirements for this position, along with the top five things all resumes MUST have to be considered for the role.
2. The top five problems that exist due to this position being open. These are the little brush fires you will be expected to put out during your first month on the job. Every ecommerce job has these — and this one's no different.
3. What your average day/week will look like in this role. There's what you read in the standard ecommerce job posting ... then there's reality. We've got the reality.
4. The leading and lagging KPIs that will determine your success in this role. In a nutshell: How you'll keep score.
5. The major projects you’ll need to complete by Day 100 to be considered a home-run in this position. We’ve got the lowdown on how you can plug-and-play and drive REAL value in this ecommerce job.

I have a massive amount of proprietary intel to share with qualified candidates. My industry research for this assignment exceeds 50 pages! Be sure to TEXT me, Allan Seibert, at (404) 281-2025 for this info. Or simply use the email link when you apply for the role below.

• Own reporting, modeling, and the dashboard creation roadmap
• Provide actionable insights to business teams through data analytics
• Synthesize results into succinct takeaways that aid the team in decision making
• Create targeting and segmentation schemes and develop predictive modeling to optimize marketing spend.
• Develop models to forecast key performance metrics such as sales, conversion rates, LTV, CAC, ROAS, repeat rates, customer inquiry volume, optimal purchasing intervals, etc.
• Dive deep into complex attribution challenges and provide insights into acquisition and marketing mix through hypothesis testing
• Understand customer & product ecosystems, including long-term trends in demand patterns and customer behaviors
• Support analysis statistical modeling, experiment design, and data mining
• Identify inefficiencies within tools/systems, and make ongoing recommendations to leadership for enhancements that increase efficiencies and revenue
• Track budgets and KPI trends via dashboards
• Develop automated and ad hoc reports, and models to support decision making
• Ensure analytics implementation provides crystal-clear visibility into the impact and the value of new features and functionality
• Recommend and help run and analyze A/B tests on new features/content
• Leverage industry and market trends/insights
• Collaborate with the team on product and promotional performance
• Support ecommerce financial forecasting