DTC to Omnichannel: How Site Management Roles Are Evolving
The eCommerce Manager job description from five years ago barely resembles what the role actually covers today.
The eCommerce Manager job description from five years ago barely resembles what the role actually covers today.
A few years ago, a DTC-focused eCommerce Manager role was fairly contained: manage the Shopify or Salesforce Commerce Cloud site, run a bit of CRM and email, and report on conversion rate. That scope has expanded considerably as brands have moved from single-channel DTC operations into full omnichannel strategies.
Today's DTC Site Management roles increasingly touch retail media attribution, since paid traffic decisions on Amazon and Walmart affect DTC site performance and vice versa. They touch loyalty and subscription program management, since retention has become as important as acquisition in a higher-CAC environment. And they touch a growing stack of martech tools, from CDPs to personalization engines, that didn't exist in most mid-market tech stacks a few years ago.
The VP of eCommerce role has expanded even further, often now owning the strategic relationship between DTC and wholesale or marketplace channels rather than just the DTC website in isolation.
Job descriptions that still read like a 2020-era eCommerce Manager posting, focused narrowly on site merchandising and email, tend to attract candidates whose skill sets are similarly narrow. Companies that have updated their expectations to reflect the omnichannel scope of the role, and are willing to pay for that broader skill set, see a meaningfully stronger candidate pool.
We're also seeing more companies hire a Growth Marketing Manager or CRM Manager underneath a VP of eCommerce specifically to absorb the retention and lifecycle marketing work that used to sit inside a single generalist eCommerce Manager role. Splitting the function this way tends to produce better hires for both halves of the job.
CRM Manager, Growth Marketing Manager, eCommerce Manager, Director of eCommerce, and VP of eCommerce.
Once retention and lifecycle marketing work grows large enough to be a full-time job on its own, splitting into a dedicated CRM or Growth Marketing Manager alongside the core eCommerce Manager role tends to produce stronger results than asking one person to own both.
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