Strategy – EC Solutions Business
Tracking E-Commerce Trends and Maximizing Value for Commerce Companies
Koichiro Tanabe
Director
In charge of EC Solutions Business
General Manager of LY Solutions Division
Retail Media as New Business
In December 2023, we launched our “Retail Linker” retail media network service. Through this service, brand producers serve as their own advertisers, distributing advertisements on retail media networks using retailer-owned media ad spots and mediums.
Retail media is marketing that distributes ads based on member information, purchase histories, behavioral data and other such user information. This approach already sees widespread applications overseas, and it is gradually gaining popularity in Japan as well.
It offers the advantage of providing advertisements in locations near purchase points using a wide range of advertisement media, while specifically selecting targets for direct advertising.
At ValueCommerce, we have built up experience in this field through our pay-per-click advertising service “StoreMatch” and CRM tool “STORE’S R∞” via Yahoo! Shopping, and we possess a wide range of knowledge in budgetary and ad content pattern trends on an industry-by-industry basis. By sharing this knowledge with brand-producer advertisers, we believe that ValueCommerce can offer unique advantages to users, and leverage this to break into retail media as a new business field for our company.
In order to strengthen this area of operations, we will establish the Retail Media Promotion Office in 2024 with the aim of accelerating planning efforts and business development as we strive to be pioneers in the field of retail media.
Gradual Growth in Existing Solutions
However, 2023 saw changes to online mall measures and policies which serve as the basis for EC Solutions Business at our company, the release of new ad product types, and various other external changes which created major challenges for us.
Despite these conditions, we still moved forward with product improvements and achieved particularly strong growth for “StoreMatch Pro”, which is part of our “StoreMatch” suite of solutions. “StoreMatch Pro” is primarily used by product makers, but moving forward, we will focus our efforts on bringing in new customers for this product.
With our in-house “STORE’S R∞” product as well, we hope to make good use of data gathered and accumulated thus far to make further progress.
In 2024, ValueCommerce will closely follow trends and changes among online malls and other e-commerce sites, while devoting our efforts toward the development of solutions that can be used by wider ranges of users.
Turning to Past Experience for New Advances
We will continue to strengthen EC solutions Business with a focus on the two main areas of retail media and LY Corporation (LYC) related business. Our business for LYC has a long history. ValueCommerce, on the other hand, has only recently broken into the field of retail media and the current locations of the two businesses may be different.
However, by sharing and feeding back the knowledge we have obtained through our various business operations, I am convinced that the resulting synergy will prove mutually advantageous.
Moving forward, we will call upon all of the knowledge at our disposal to serve commerce organizations across the Internet landscape while maximizing their performance.