FILLED: Director of Ecommerce (Southern California)

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One of the coolest ecommerce jobs around!

ALLAN’S COMMENTS: We are working with a world-famous, ultra-premium sports nutrition brand in its search for a Director of Ecommerce based in scenic Huntington Beach, California — right next to Santa Ana and Laguna Beach. If you are a “beach person,” then this is the gig for you!

NOTE: We would love to find a candidate in this area who is open to being onsite a few days per week. HOWEVER, if we find the right candidate, then remote is an option BUT travel to the office a few times per quarter (for a few days each time) would be expected.

Having said that, there are worse places to visit than Huntington Beach!

About the Company

Our client develops, manufactures, and markets the highest quality products in the sports nutrition space. They’ve built their business on the back of products that work; products with the best natural ingredients in the right amounts that produce the best results.

Let’s talk about organic and natural ingredients, shall we?

The fact is, the quality and cleanliness of ingredients is EVERYTHING in the supplement business. And when a brand offers clean, great tasting products at an affordable price, you’ve got a winner. For real: I’m a gym rat who spends 8-10 hours a week immersed in RIGOROUS weekly personal training. (Ask me about it during our interviews!)

I’ve tried a million products over the years, and this client’s products are 100% legit. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be working their search. And don’t for a second think their products are just for bodybuilders. The people have focused on developing a product mix that works for anyone from, performance to basic health and wellness.

At this point they’ve started to rapidly accelerate growth and have started to transition from a bootstrap approach to a more sophisticated and built out team.

If you know anything about the supplement space, you’re probably aware that there are a gazillion supplement brands, MANY of which are of questionable quality — so it’s super hard for a legitimate brand to cut through that clutter. Poser brands make money by over-promising in their marketing and under-delivering by dumbing down their product formulations.

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Given the level of consumer cynicism in the supplement space, what’s my client’s secret to building a top brand?

Easy! All of the firm’s products are properly dosed, and its ingredients come in the highest quality vegetable forms. Plus, its amino acids are fermented and microencapsulated (as opposed to being processed from duck feathers … Yuck!). Every one of its products is naturally colored and flavored, so its products simply taste better.

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About the Role

Our client seeks an experienced Director of Ecommerce to help them optimize the onsite experience from end to end. We’re looking for a candidate with a strong understanding and strategy for optimizing the user experience on the site. Once the customer lands on the site it’s your job to optimize for conversion.

You need to drive any and all onsite KPIs. Naturally, the ideal candidate will have deep knowledge of UX/UI, Navigation, Taxonomy, Site Merchandising, CRO, A/B Testing, Abandon Cart/Browse, etc. You’ll need to identify and optimize any and all touchpoints from a landing page to checkout.

This person will NOT own any of the digital channels (paid, social, retention, etc) but will definitely work very closely with those internal partners. This is a role for an onsite optimization guru.

With all of that said, this role will fall more on the side of strategy and vision vs tactical execution (70/30). You’ll have one direct report and an agency to help with the day to day. However, ou can’t be afraid to dive into the day to day when needed though.

This is a great position for someone who wants to lead but also likes to roll up their sleeves. Harry and I like to call it a “Player Coach.” My client definitely expects to add to the team as the organization continues to grow.

Currently, the company is doing 8 digits in revenue on their own site (not including Amazon, which is a whole ‘nother success story). Given the size of the category, that number should/could be $50 million plus.

To close that gap, your priorities will include improving the company’s conversion rate, looking for better onsite experiences, building and optimizing deals, flash sales and bundles. You’ll need to improve all things related to site merchandising which will require a granular understanding of data/customer behavior.

To this point, the client has focused more on the day to day best practices. We need someone who can look at the bigger picture and the longer term. We want “pie-enlarging” growth, not “pie-rearranging” growth. We’re looking for a strong ecom leader who’s a team player at heart.

You won’t believe how much we know about this search!

I spent a ton of time on the phone with the client teasing out exactly what you’ll need to KNOW and DO to hit the ground running in this role. Some of the things I can share with highly qualified candidates include …

  1. The “real” background requirements for this position, along with the top five things all resumes MUST have to be considered for the role.
  2. The top five problems that exist due to this position being open. These are the little brush fires you will be expected to put out during your first month on the job. Every ecommerce job has these — and this one’s no different.
  3. What your average day/week will look like in this role. There’s what you read in the standard ecommerce job posting … then there’s reality. We’ve got the reality.
  4. The leading and lagging KPI’s that will determine your success in this role. In a nutshell: How you keep score.
  5. The major projects you’ll need to complete by Day 100 to be considered a home-run in this position.

I have a massive amount of proprietary intel to share with qualified candidates. My industry research for this assignment exceeds 50 pages! Be sure to TEXT me, Allan Seibert, at (706) 318-1196 for this info. Or simply use the email link when you apply for the role below.

View Allan Seibert's Linkedin profileView Allan Seibert’s profile

Main Responsibilities:

  • Collaborate across performance, retention and brand teams to come up with growth strategies with goals and timelines.
  • Drive P&L growth in collaboration with the finance team reviewing all lines of the P&L for improvements across sales, GP, distribution costs and fulfillment efficiencies to improve EBITDA position
  • You are the owner of our dot com D2C site as a product. You should constantly be thinking about how we can collaborate across the business to drive improvements in AOV, conversion rate, bounce rate, page load speeds and customer experience.
  • Ensure all key trading moments (promos, bundles, deals, flash sales etc.) are well planned and executed with a market activation plan, clearly phased targets that have been collaboratively produced with buying, marketing and merchandising functions and a clear awareness of any activity from last year has been considered
  • Work with the operations team to ensure availability of products on the website. You sit between performance and ops.
  • Work with Marketing leads to identify new and innovative ways to drive traffic to the websites as well as developing and improving traffic from existing channels
  • Work closely with the Brand Marketing lead to ensure all site creative fits with each brand’s guidelines whilst maintaining best customer journey to maximize conversion
  • Deliver and execute customer experience strategy by understanding and prioritizing pain points derived from customer journey maps and optimizing CX
  • Identify your competitors and evaluate their strategies to determine their strengths and weaknesses relative to those of your own
  • You should be a data nerd!

Essential Skills:

  • Ability to collaborate across functions with all levels of team
  • Ability to prioritize and structure work in an organized fashion
  • Strong financial and analytical ability – ability to budget, reviewing risks and opportunities
  • Excellent communicator – is able to give clarity and set direction
  • Strong commercial awareness about the industry
  • Critical thinker and problem-solving skills
  • Site Merchandising, UX/UI, Conversion Optimization, A/B Testing, Site Search, Navigation, Checkout, Site Analytics, Customer Insights, Onsite Features/Functionality, SEO from an onsite standpoint, etc.. Anything that drives site experience!
  • Shopify Plus experience is a nice to have but not a must have

Essential Behaviors:

  • Teamwork: The ability to collaborate across functions
  • Initiative: The ability to think outside of the box
  • Organized
  • Assertiveness
  • Pro-active, with a positive ‘can do’ attitude
  • Developing Self and Others
  • Driven and goal orientated
  • Influential: Ability to bring others along on a shared mission and journey
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