Why this idea means business : We explore what’s needed for leaders in e-Commerce to excel. Learn 9 key skills great e-Commerce leaders master. Read this for ideas on how to succeed as an e-Commerce leader.
As recent articles covered creativity and marketing leadership, this week we complete the set by exploring e-Commerce leadership.
Online selling is a tough area to lead. If it’s your job to lead e-Commerce growth, you find you run into many barriers and frequent issues.
Faced with such challenges, you have to work out what sort of leadership skills you need to be able to excel in e-Commerce.
Start with control and complexity
A good starting point is the e-Commerce channel choices from your e-Commerce plan. These affect how much control and complexity is involved. The more control required, the more complex the leadership challenges you face.
With channels like marketplaces and bricks and clicks, you outsource activities like payments and deliveries. Selling is simpler.
However, running your own store means you control the whole customer experience. You handle everything from driving traffic to customer service and all points in-between.
So, there are different levels of leadership skills needed :-
- Core skills – for all leaders in e-Commerce.
- Advanced skills – for those selling via online retailers.
- Master-level skills – for those selling Direct-to-Consumer (D2C).
Core skills needed for leaders in e-Commerce
All online sales require certain basic events to occur.
For example, customers need to be made aware of the brand. They need a website from which to buy. They need to pay and have their order delivered.
These events are driven by 3 core skills that leaders in e-Commerce must master :-
- Plan and manage the e-Commerce selling experience.
- Drive a differentiated offer.
- Digital marketing skills.
Plan and manage the e-Commerce selling experience
First, you must learn how to plan the overall e-Commerce selling experience so you can define how you’ll move customers through each step. You identify :-
- what needs to happen at each step.
- who will make it happen.
- the resources required to make it happen.
For this, you have to think deeply about your organisation and operations. You make sure all the activities line up so that the customer’s experience feels seamless to them.
For example, you don’t run advertising campaigns when you’ve got payment gateway issues. You don’t run price discounts, without briefing your customer service team so they can answer any questions they get.
You make sure everyone responsible for each step is clear on their role. Plus, how changes in one area impact other parts of the process. Skilled leaders in e-Commerce show how the overall process works and make sure everyone involved knows what’s expected of them.
Drive a differentiated offer
However, ensuring that an online sale “can” happen doesn’t mean that it “will” happen. There are over 26.5m e-Commerce sites online. They all have some sort of way for customers to place orders.
So, the second skill leaders in e-Commerce need is the ability to define how they’ll make their brand stand out online.
This is about defining a positioning that sets out what makes your offer better or different from competitors.
There are many ways to do this, usually involving using different levers of the marketing mix.
For example, you offer higher quality or exclusive products. Or make your product cheaper or offer extra value via subscriptions. You make your brand more desirable and distinctive via your advertising and customer experience. Your order to delivery process offers extra benefits like staggered payments for high-ticket items or faster deliveries.
Skilled leaders in e-Commerce know how to bring their competitive “hook” to life online.
Digital marketing skills
Finally, most of what you outsource using simpler channels like marketplaces is around the “back-end” experience. Payments and deliveries, for example.
But you still have to do the “front-end” selling. That demands strong digital marketing skills. For example, creating adverts to drive traffic, buying digital media and having a social media presence.
You also need to know how to run more technical activities like SEO, data capture and optimising product pages.
These are all key e-Commerce tasks. As the leader, you need to establish who’s doing them, who’s paying for it, and how you measure and evaluate each of them. That might be through your own team, agencies or other third-party support.
Advanced skills needed for leaders in e-Commerce
Marketplaces are relatively stable and automated in terms of how they work. It’s not quite “set and forget” but pretty close.
However, moving up the control / complexity ladder to sell via online retailers, either bricks and clicks or pure players like Amazon brings a new set of e-Commerce leadership challenges.
This is where the e-Commerce leader’s focus shifts to managing relationships e.g.
- Retailer account management.
- Third-party partner management.
- Internal stakeholder management.
Retailer account management
First, you need to manage the relationship with the buyer at each online retailer. They’re responsible for placing orders. But they’ll only do so if you’ve convinced them this will drive their category growth.
So you build a commercial plan with them. This will cover areas like :-
- advertising and media support.
- pricing and order quantities.
- supply chain agreements.
- who handles customer service issues.
You usually hire a dedicated sales manager, who’s responsible for managing the relationship. They need strong commercial and negotiation skills, plus social and interpersonal skills to engage the buyer long-term.
Skilled leaders in e-Commerce are good at finding and supporting those with the right type of e-Commerce capabilities to carry out this pivotal e-Commerce role.
Third-party partner management
However, it’s not just the buyer you need to build a relationship with. There will be others involved too.
For example, you need to work with the retailers’ supply chain team to make sure your products are properly packaged and labelled when they go into their warehouse.
You also need to work with their finance and IT teams to make sure payments, customer data and product information are stored and shared appropriately.
And if the retailer sells media space on their site, you usually have to manage that with a separate team.
Outside the retailer, you also need to work with other third parties who influence the experience. For example, your agencies and your logistics provider who transports your products to the retailer’s warehouse.
Skilled leaders in e-Commerce map out all these relationships. They create an external stakeholder management plan which sets out what needs to happen in each case, and who’s responsible for it.
Internal stakeholder management
This stakeholder plan is then usually extended to internal stakeholders. Dealing with retailers usually means more work for different functions in your business.
For example, your finance team needs to connect with their finance team to manage order payments and refund costs. Your supply chain team needs to connect with their supply chain to ensure smooth deliveries happen on time and in full. Even your marketing team has to be involved, as you may need to upgrade the packaging to ensure it works for e-Commerce.
The complexity of working with online retailers mostly comes from the quantity of relationships to manage. Advanced e-Commerce leaders map these out, and plan how to manage them efficiently and effectively.
Master-level skills needed for leaders in e-Commerce
These relationship challenges also apply to the most complex e-Commerce channel, D2C. But they’re taken to another level as now you manage every part of the experience.
For example, you need your IT team and agency to help you set up and run your store website. Plus to set up all the back-end systems like payment gateways and inventory systems.
As our setting up your own store guides already cover many of these challenges, we’ll focus instead on how you tackle some of the bigger, more strategic challenges such as :-
- building your e-Commerce brand and competitive advantage.
- fixing customer issues.
- thinking creatively.
Building your e-Commerce brand and competitive advantage
Branding opportunities are narrow when you sell your product via someone else’s online store. You control what your product looks like online and what it says. But beyond that your branding opportunities are limited. You might be able to negotiate special placements within retailer sites (e.g. a store within a store), but it’s always your brand within the context of someone else’s.
D2C on the other hand lets you do stand-alone branding. The customer’s interaction is directly with the brand. That’s why it’s called direct-to-consumer.
This means you control the brand experience through advertising, the store website and the delivery and customer service experience.
It’s much easier to show your brand identity assets and bring your brand’s personality and tone of voice to life via D2C.
It’s what makes strong D2C brands stand out online.
It also means you have full flexibility over how you build your store’s competitive advantage. Whether that’s a cost leader position on price, or a differentiated or niche offer.
This is where you see the full benefit of having your own store. You can test new offers quickly and access the data immediately. Your relationship with the customer will be stronger as you deal with them directly. Plus, there are more opportunities to build CRM programs and drive loyalty.
Fixing customer issues
This is all great when everything runs smoothly. However, no matter how much you plan, there are always issues. So skilled leaders in e-Commerce set up their customer service teams with the right systems and skills to keep customers happy.
The leadership challenge here is about making sure the rest of the business functions align with this customer happiness priority.
This is often easier said than done.
For example, finance teams see money going out on refunds and want to make refund rules stricter. But that’s not great for customers.
Or supply chain teams complain about the inefficiency of sending out single orders and push to raise minimum order quantities. Again, not customer-driven.
The most successful D2C stores orient their systems and decisions around what’s best for customers. Skilled leaders in e-Commerce know how to get other business functions to fully support that.
Thinking creatively
While you spend a lot of time firefighting issues as an e-Commerce, leader, you still need to be able to sometimes step back from the flames. To think more creatively about what your D2C store offers, and how it’s going to win.
This can be a challenge when there’s so much organisational complexity going on. So many relationships to manage and problems to solve.
But this is where skilled leaders in e-Commerce stand out.
If you want your store to be the 1 in 26.5m which grabs your customers’ ongoing attention and interest, you need to be innovative. Imaginative. Ideas-driven.
You find out what your customers want. And then find ways to creatively deliver that to delight and engage them. You want them to describe your online store as being excellent rather than being excrement.
Conclusion - How leaders in e-Commerce excel
If there was only one way to excel in e-Commerce, everyone would be doing it. Skilled leaders in e-Commerce understand their specific e-Commerce challenges and develop the right skills to meet them.
You need more advanced skills depending on the level of control you want and the complexity you’re prepared to handle.
With simpler channels like marketplaces, it’s mainly about leading the front-end selling experience.
When you sell via someone else, it’s more about managing relationships. With retailers, your internal stakeholders and a variety of third-parties.
And if you go for full D2C control and complexity, your leadership focus is on building strong brands and competitive advantage, while fixing issues and still thinking creatively.
Check out our e-Commerce capabilities article for more on this. Or drop us a line if you’d like to learn more about leadership skills in e-Commerce.
Photo Credits
Win Red Neon Sign : Photo by Danny Howe on Unsplash
Red tulip / Yellow tulip : Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash
Digital Marketing : Photo by Diggity Marketing on Unsplash
Warehouse : Photo by Ruchindra Gunasekara on Unsplash
Amazon on phone : Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
Man on phone in office : Photo by Berkeley Communications on Unsplash
Man looking at ceiling (adapted) : Photo by Anton Danilov on Unsplash
Absolutely on point. The most successful e-Commerce brands don’t just sell products — they build seamless experiences. From personalization to logistics and branding, excellence comes from mastering every touchpoint.
Thanks for this — the human touch is very important in e-Commerce leadership.