Shop Direct - Data Science: Driving e-Commerce Strategy

About Shop Direct

We’re the people behind Very.co.uk, VeryExclusive.co.uk and Littlewoods.com. We’re the UK’s 2nd biggest pureplay etailer and we’re the only business to have been named Retail Weeks ‘pureplay etailer of the year’ three times in a row. We have a world-class digital ambition fuelled by collaboration, innovation and disruption. We’ve already delivered many truly world class projects, like being the first UK retailer to build our own in-house UX lab, and the first UK retailer to launch a WhatsApp-style conversational user interface (CUI) for customer service. Right now, we’re creating a state of the art hub to house a new tech, innovation and discovery team in the heart of London Victoria.

We have one of the largest e-commerce data sets in the UK - it’s what drives our business forward and underpins our strategy to make customers’ shopping experiences ever-more personalised and seamless.

In this talk we will be exploring how this data is integral to e-commerce strategy.  Setting the prices of products is one of the most important tasks of a business and the talk will many concepts in this context, such as elasticities, demand prediction and multi-objective optimisation. It also touches upon many practical challenges encountered involving data and scalability challenges.   

PIZZA: Pizza will be provided after the talk in the Undergraduate Common Room.

Profiles:

Gael is a seasoned global leader in Analytics and Data Science with 15+ years of experience. He has a solid track record of combining a strong business sense with analytical expertise and result focus to deliver significant value. He has demonstrated his high adaptability thorough his career, having lead several multicultural and multifunctional teams across the world, directly and remotely in various industries (financial services, banking, e-commerce), in high growth and mature environments alike.
Gael’s deep expertise covers a wide range of analytics applications ranging from credit risk to marketing, customer and web analytics, X-selling and pricing.
He has a solid track record of enabling quantifiable improvements by developing teams, bringing technical innovation, improving processes or instilling rigour. 

Gael is currently the Head of Data Science at Shop Direct. Shop Direct, which operates digital department stores such as Very, Littlewoods, Littlewoods Ireland and Very Exclusive, is the UK’s second largest Pure Play Etailer and has been recognised as Etailer of the year three years in a row. You can find out more about Shop Direct at: https://www.shopdirect.com/

Christian holds a MSc and PhD from the University of Liverpool. He worked as researcher and full stack commercial developer for various organisation over the last 12 years. His research focused on the use of multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for machine learning tasks such as: classification, regression, survival analysis, clustering and presence only modelling. As a commercial developer, he modelled and implemented various complex databases, whilst integrating data from many heterogeneous sources. These database were exposed via APIs, websites and BI solutions.

Christian works now as Data Scientist at Shop Direct. Shop Direct, which operates digital department stores such as Very, Littlewoods, Littlewoods Ireland and Very Exclusive, is the UK’s second largest Pure Play Etailer and has been recognised as Etailer of the year three years in a row. You can find out more about Shop Direct at: https://www.shopdirect.com/