Ecommerce recruitment: are you hiring a trader or a marketer?

There seems to be a fair bit of confusion around ecommerce roles at the moment and it’s understandable. “Ecommerce” is a pretty broad term and can cover two genuinely different jobs, yet we regularly see briefs which merge them into one – and indeed, in some businesses a ecommerce manager will have a foot in both camps.

The problems can arise when these companies end up hiring somebody who is brilliant at half the role, yet has very little experience of the other half.

The trading side

An ecommerce trader effectively lives inside the store. Merchandising, on-site product presentation, pricing and promotions, range and availability, conversion rate, average order value and the day-to-day trading calendar can all sit with them.

They’re generally commercially focused and often sit closer to buying and operations. They’re looking at what’s selling, what isn’t and what they can change on the site to improve performance.

It’s a proper specialism in its own right. Research from NielsenIQ highlights just how important availability and the wider digital shelf experience are to ecommerce conversion, and that’s exactly the sort of territory a good ecommerce trader understands.

The marketing side

An ecommerce marketer is doing something rather different, with their focus much more on getting people to the store in the first place.

Paid media, SEO, email, CRM and the various acquisition channels that drive traffic are much more likely to sit with them. They’re thinking about traffic, cost per acquisition and channel return and will normally sit closer to the wider marketing team than buying or operations.

Google has written extensively about the shift towards first-party data and privacy-focused advertising and the impact this has on how businesses acquire, understand and measure their customers. That only makes specialist knowledge around acquisition, measurement and channel performance more important, rather than something you can simply bolt onto an ecommerce trader’s job.

So why do the two get merged?

For smaller businesses, sometimes they genuinely do need both in one person and that’s absolutely fine. Yet if you’re looking for someone who can manage merchandising, pricing and trading whilst also being brilliant at PPC, SEO, CRM and email you need to be realistic about what you’re actually asking for.

We’ve seen businesses advertise what is essentially an ecommerce trading role, then interview digital marketers who have never owned merchandising or margin. Equally, a very good ecommerce trader might have little hands-on experience managing paid acquisition, SEO or CRM.

On paper – or at a glance through job titles –  both candidates can look right. In reality, they’re very different marketers and that difference becomes pretty obvious once you start getting into what they’ve actually been responsible for.

What happens as the role becomes more senior?

This is where things can get slightly more complicated. An Ecommerce Executive or Ecommerce Manager will typically lean towards one side, whether that’s trading or acquisition and operate within a fairly defined remit within those disciplines.

A Senior Ecommerce Manager might own the full on-site P&L or the wider acquisition mix with genuine budget responsibility. By the time you reach Head of Ecommerce level, you’re much more likely to see responsibility for both sides alongside technology, people and the overall commercial performance of the channel.

At that point the trader-versus-marketer question becomes less important because the job is about bringing everything together,  although it’s still worth understanding where somebody has come from and where their real strengths sit.

Before you start recruiting

The most important thing to do before recruiting for an ecommerce role is to work out what you actually need this person to do. Is the role really about trading and on-site commercial performance, or is it about acquisition and getting more customers to the site? Do you need somebody who’s genuinely brilliant at one of those things or somebody who’s pretty good across both?

You also need to be realistic about the salary. We’ve seen plenty of roles where the wish list gets longer and longer, yet the salary remains far too low.

Seniority is important too. A Head of Ecommerce and an Ecommerce Manager can have surprisingly similar-looking job descriptions, yet in reality they’re very different hires when it comes to ownership, commercial responsibility and leadership.

We’ve been recruiting marketing people since 2005 and ecommerce is definitely one of those areas where getting the brief right at the start makes a massive difference. The job title alone doesn’t really tell you enough.

If you’re hiring an Ecommerce Manager, Senior Ecommerce Manager or Head of Ecommerce and aren’t completely sure whether you’ve got the brief, level or salary right, we’re always happy to have a chat.

Brand Recruitment is a specialist marketing recruitment agency working with businesses across the UK. Since 2005 we’ve recruited across digital, brand, content, CRM, data and ecommerce, helping businesses find the people they actually need rather than simply the people whose job title happens to match.