When starting an e-commerce business, you might be inclined to think that you need the same people that a regular retail store does. After all, e-commerce is the fastest-growing arm of the retail industry. While you do share the same objectives, you don’t always share the same skill set needed to run either venture.
What you need is a team with a little more digital proficiency. But more importantly, you need a responsive and efficient database to enable your online operations. Look for a database administrator that can provide tuning, monitoring, and performance management of your SQL servers. Now you just need to round up the rest of your team.
Web developer
As the backbone of your e-commerce business, web developers are in charge of the most critical tasks that optimize usability, performance, and experience. They’re responsible for rendering your product catalog, programming cost calculation, enabling geolocation and payment processing, and organizing your entire online storefront.
Working hand in hand with your developers are your user experience or UX designers. By integrating functional and usable interfaces, UX designers enhance every customer’s journey through your website.
Operations manager
Operations managers in e-commerce act as the branch managers of the traditional brick-and-mortar business. Online, they oversee the performance of the site. These include evaluating the correctness of product listings, management of stock-keeping units or SKUs, and functionality of query forms, payment channels, and promotional offers. They identify pain points in the customer’s interaction and often work with digital marketers for the solution.
Inventory manager
Inventory managers and their associates are the primary movers of your e-commerce business. They ensure that the data relayed by the operations manager matches their warehouse manifests. They’re responsible for receiving, recording, and ordering new stock, organizing products in storage, and facilitating the movement of goods on the way to logistics.
Logistics director
Logistics for e-commerce business means the transportation of goods to the warehouse, and then to the customers.
This involves both clerical and field duties. Administrative duties include handling customs clearance for international shipments as well as quality control reports and transport insurance. They’re also expected to manage delivery fleets and cooperate with courier services for the swift delivery of goods.
IT technicians
While you already have a web development team, a reliable troop of IT technicians is also necessary for making sure that everyone on board understands and properly utilizes your digital infrastructure. They are the joints that connect the essential data from operations to logistics, sales and marketing, and post-sales agents. They’ll also be responsible for data security.
Digital marketing specialist
Your site has to have visitors, so you need an expert digital marketer on your team to make this happen. Digital marketers extract and process the data provided by your operations manager to initiate campaigns and strategies that make use of practical, attractive, and targeted content. They leverage SEO and social media to make sure the right people see your business.
Customer service agents
Never forget to have a team of customer service agents at your disposal. They are in charge of responding to and resolving product inquiries, return requests, and negative reviews from customers. Given you’ll be handling a lot of these, customer service is usually outsourced by businesses, and you probably should, too.
Since you don’t have to worry about expansion, a well-glued team consisting of these essential employees is enough to run your e-commerce business toward success, so choose your team wisely.
