Heleno Pioner

As Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) matures, more emphasis is placed on how best to finance our operations via prices without sacrificing growth. In this project, my role is:

• Developing a methodology for setting the optimal revenue balance between fulfillment fees, advertisement and listing fees and how these revenue streams should evolve over time
• Create new price mechanisms (subscriptions, auctions, fee tiers) that balance complexity and revenue creation.

Poor inventory management practices by FBA sellers became a increased Amazon's cost-to-serve for faster delivery speed by $0.15/unit. To reduce this gap, I:

• Measured the contribution of different levers to reduce the cost-to-serve: inventory levels correspond to 1/3 of the gap
• Redesigned fulfillment fees to incentivize sellers to carry more inventory, by sharing part of Amazon's savings
• Tested the proposed idea with a discount experiment.

Marketing budget at Amazon is allocated using a weighted-average of past attributed profits and causal estimates of the incremental profit of the program. Due to high delivery costs, online grocery performance lagged behind other programs, compromising the future of this business.

• I created a metric that measured how incremental the online business is to the rest of Amazon using causal inference methods
• This metric corresponded to 70%+ of the income of the online grocery business, and avoided adhoc overides on the performance of the program

After increasing storage fees, FBA saw a sudden decrease in new product creation. As new selection represented more than 50% of sales during the holidays, FBA needed to revert this pattern while keeping storage fees to control inventory capacity

• I showed that reducing product creation was in line with seller's risk aversion and measured this effect: the new fee schedule reduced new products ROI by more than 50%
• I used the model to design a new schedule for storage fees, granting an experimentation period for new selection to minimize the risk aversion affect.
• The new fee design had a 17% increase in new selection after implementation

• Managed Revenue Management Analytics team: implemented price optimization tools for top 10 geographies

• Created the Advanced Analytics practice in the Brazilian subsidiary (AMBEV): developed tools for pricing, marketing, and human resources

• Taught Econometrics and Industrial Organization (undergraduate and graduate level)

• Taught Econometrics and Industrial Organization (undergraduate and graduate level)