Chapter 159: The Ratings Are Changing
Perhaps feeling that working alone was too dreary, Lin Luyou decided to follow Zhao Mian's example and put on a pair of headphones.
Unexpectedly, this actually made it easier for her to concentrate.
Men's and women's apparel had always been the main drivers of sales on the platform. Consequently, Lin Luyou began her audit with the product data from these two categories.
Plugging the numbers into the formula, she used past sales to forecast product sales and inventory pressure for the next seven days, and the system quickly generated the results.
That number didn't seem quite right...
After glancing at the result, just as she was about to move on to the next brand for screening, her eyes locked onto a particular figure.
Feeling uneasy, she ran this brand's data through the first version of the product scoring system that the algorithm department had rushed to finish over the last couple of days. Compared to the morning, the score had dropped by 0.5 points.
This score was influenced by multiple dimensions—price, inventory, warehousing, positive review ratings—making it a delicate metric where a single change could affect the whole system. Besides, a drop of 0.5 points was not particularly high. According to the engineers' settings, any fluctuation within 1 point could be considered normal; only a change exceeding 1 point would trigger a system warning.
Furthermore, even with the score decline, this brand still held an overall score of 7.4, which remained above average across the entire product pool.
Setting this brand aside for the moment, Lin Luyou continued to examine the products of several other brands, painstakingly inputting the data into the system one by one to verify their scores.
As it turned out, when she reviewed the top twenty brands in the men's apparel category, she discovered that as many as six of them had experienced varying degrees of score declines.
This proportion directly exceeded 30 percent.
That hardly seemed normal...
Out of habit, Lin Luyou instinctively turned her head to ask Tang Xiao, only to remember the moment she turned that everyone was still out.
She pressed her lips together and decided to investigate further to see if she could pinpoint the root of the problem on her own. Therefore, she continued to pull up the previous days' data for these brands from the database and entered them into the system one after another.
An even more astonishing discovery awaited her.
As if they had coordinated, the scores of these brands over the past few days fluctuated like a stock market intraday chart—rising and falling alternately, though maintaining an overall downward trend.
By this point, Lin Luyou could no longer sit still. She directly screenshotted these interfaces and sent them to Chen Xujia via a private message.
[Lin Luyou: Xujia, I think there's something wrong with the data for these companies. Could you take a look when you have a moment? I just hope I'm being overly sensitive.]
It was no wonder Lin Luyou was nervous; brands ranking in the top twenty of a category were essentially the company's major clients and the primary targets for traffic support during major promotional events. If something went wrong with these products, the platform's losses would be counted in the tens of thousands.
At that moment, Chen Xujia was sitting with Yang Tianqi and the others in Qin Shishen's coffee shop, leisurely petting cats and chatting.
She glanced at the message and frowned.
Merely looking at these data points only revealed the outcome of consecutive days of score declines, but it did not show anything profound. Abandoning her cat-petting, she immediately prepared to pay the bill and head back to the company ahead of the others.
"Youyou has an urgent matter, so I'll head over first. You guys go on chatting."
With that, Chen Xujia set down her cola, picked up her bag, and left ahead of the others.
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"Youyou, what's going on?"
Just as she reached the seventh floor and before she even arrived at her workstation, Chen Xujia's voice rang out.