E-Commerce Director

Overview

E-Commerce Director

Strategic Leadership & P&L Ownership

• Develop & Own the 3–5 Year Digital Strategy: Define the long-term vision, strategic pillars, investment priorities, and competitive positioning for the essential products category across all digital channels (owned e-commerce, marketplaces, quick commerce, social commerce).
• Full P&L Accountability: Own the digital channel P&L end-to-end, including revenue, gross margin, trade spend, last-mile contribution, marketing efficiency (ROAS/MER), fixed and variable opex, and final segment EBITDA.
• Annual & Quarterly Planning: Lead the integrated business planning (IBP) process for the digital channel, aligning sales, marketing, supply chain, finance, and category teams around aggressive but achievable targets.
• Investment Prioritization: Make build-vs-partner, technology investment, and resource allocation decisions based on strategic value and ROI modeling.
• Board & Executive Reporting: Present monthly and quarterly business reviews to the C-suite and board, articulating performance against KPIs, strategic initiatives, and risk mitigation.

Advanced Analytics, Insights & Commercial Strategy

• Customer & Behavioral Analytics: Lead the development of a unified customer data strategy, leveraging first-party data, purchase frequency analysis, lifetime value (LTV) modeling, cohort analysis, and churn prediction.
• Pricing Architecture & Elasticity Modeling: Establish a dynamic pricing framework optimizing between competitive positioning, price sensitivity, promotional lift, and margin health using A/B testing.
• Category & Assortment Analytics: Identify over-performing and under-penetrated sub-categories, supplier co-investment opportunities, and white-space assortment gaps using market basket analysis.
• Forecasting & Demand Sensing: Oversee SKU-level demand forecasts (7-day, 30-day, seasonal) integrating external signals (weather, promotions, competitor actions).
• Competitive Intelligence: Institutionalize a real-time competitive tracking framework covering pricing, promotions, delivery fees, and customer experience across key rivals.

Omni-Channel Marketing, Brand & Customer Growth

• Holistic Marketing Strategy: Set strategic direction for performance marketing (paid search, social, programmatic), owned channels (email, push, SMS), offline-to-online (O2O) integration, and loyalty.
• Customer Acquisition & Retention: Drive the customer growth engine, balancing new customer acquisition (CAC) against retention. Own repeat rate, LTV, basket size, and share of wallet.
• Personalization & CRM Roadmap: Partner with product and engineering teams to implement AI-driven personalization across homepage, search, recommendations, and promotional triggers.
• Promotional Effectiveness: Develop a disciplined promotional calendar with pre-analysis guardrails and post-promotion ROI validation to reduce discount dependency.
• Brand Equity Protection: Ensure brand positioning, tone of voice, and visual identity are consistently represented across all digital touchpoints.

Executive-Level Platform & Partnership Management

• Strategic Marketplace Relationships: Own C-level relationships with key third-party platforms and emerging quick-commerce players. Lead joint business planning, fee negotiations, co-marketing funds, and exclusive placements.
• Owned E-Commerce Platform Strategy: Lead the vision for the direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel, driving the technology roadmap for checkout conversion, site speed, search relevance, and mobile-first experience.
• New Channel Evaluation: Assess emerging channels (social commerce, livestream shopping, WhatsApp commerce, voice) using pilot-to-scale frameworks.
• Partner Governance: Establish SLAs with all platform partners covering uptime, API reliability, data accuracy, and customer support.

Operational Excellence & Fulfillment Strategy

• Fulfillment Model Design: In partnership with Supply Chain and Logistics, define the optimal fulfillment network for high-frequency, essential products—balancing dark stores, micro-fulfillment centers (MFCs), retrofitted facilities, and hub-and-spoke models.
• Speed & Quality Standards: Set operational standards for cut-off times, delivery windows, on-time delivery rates, substitution accuracy, and quality compliance.
• Inventory Visibility: Lead integration of real-time inventory visibility across all channels, minimizing oversell and out-of-stocks. Establish safety stock policies for fast-turnaround SKUs.
• Reverse Logistics: Design a low-friction, cost-efficient returns process, balancing customer satisfaction with loss prevention.
• Technology Roadmap: Partner with Product & Engineering to prioritize OMS, WMS, and last-mile routing tools that reduce cost-to-serve.

Digital Merchandising & Customer Experience (CX)

• Premium Digital Storefront Vision: Enforce best-in-class standards for product listings (imagery, copy, attributes), category navigation, site search/SEO, and cross-sell/upsell logic.
• Assortment Localization: Lead merchandising strategies tailored to geographic clusters based on local demand patterns and cultural preferences.
• Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Own a continuous testing roadmap (A/B tests on checkout flow, product tiles, pricing displays, delivery thresholds) to lift conversion rates and AOV.
• Quality Assurance: Establish governance to ensure 99.9% data accuracy across pricing, availability, promotions, and product content across all platforms.

Competitive Intelligence & Market Leadership

• 360° Monitoring Framework: Implement tools (price tracking, assortment scraping, sentiment analysis) to track competitor moves daily across pricing, promotions, delivery fees, and ratings.
• Rapid Response Playbooks: Develop pre-approved frameworks for competitor actions (price drops, free delivery, new service launches) enabling same-day countermeasures.
• Thought Leadership: Represent the company at industry events and in analyst briefings, shaping external conversations around the future of essential products e-commerce.

Entrepreneurial & Cultural Leadership

• Team Building: Recruit, mentor, and scale a high-performing digital team across platform management, merchandising, analytics, performance marketing, CRM, and marketplace operations.
• Cross-Functional Influence: Serve as a key member of the executive leadership team, influencing corporate strategy, technology investment, and supply chain transformation.
• Test-and-Learn Culture: Foster a culture of rapid experimentation, data-informed risk-taking, and post-mortem transparency.
• Resilience & Agility: Lead through periods of high volatility with calm, clear decision-making and a bias for action.

Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Business, Economics, Engineering, or related field required.
• MBA or Master's in Analytics/E-Commerce strongly preferred.
• 12+ years of e-commerce experience, with at least 6+ years in a senior leadership role (Director/VP).
• Proven experience leading the digital P&L for a high-frequency, essential products business.
• Demonstrated track record of scaling a digital business from $50M+ to $250M+ (or equivalent) with improving unit economics.
• Deep experience with marketplace ecosystems (Amazon, Instacart, DoorDash, Deliveroo, Talabat, etc.) and DTC owned commerce (Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify Plus, Magento, or similar).
• Experience designing or scaling fulfillment models for time-sensitive or quality-sensitive goods (dark stores, MFCs, cold chain, scheduled delivery).

Functional Expertise

• Analytical Mastery: Expert proficiency in Looker, Tableau, Power BI, or similar. Strong understanding of attribution modeling (MTA, MMM), predictive forecasting, and causal inference.
• Commercial Acumen: Deep understanding of trade spend optimization, promotional ROI, and category economics.
• Marketing Technology: Familiarity with Braze, Klaviyo, Segment, Google Marketing Platform, Meta Ads Manager, programmatic buying.
• Operational Systems: Exposure to OMS, WMS, TMS, and inventory management platforms (e.g., Manhattan, Blue Yonder, Tecsys, or bespoke).

Core Competencies & Personal Attributes

• Entrepreneurial ownership mindset.
• Resilience and adaptability.
• Exceptional communication & influence.
• Intellectual curiosity.
• High organizational rigor.