How to become an e-commerce manager

You are good at building e-commerce sites and you are wondering how to make this your talent fruitful, proposing yourself as a manager of other people’s online stores. If you’re still not entirely clear on how to start, this guide will help you figure it out.

What I would like to talk to you about in the next chapters is just how to become an e-commerce manager, this is the name of the professional figure who takes care of managing an e-commerce site, in all its aspects. I will try to describe the duties of an e-commerce manager of an online shop and those of a social commerce manager, that is, who manages the sale of products and/or services through social media, now more and more predisposed to be used as real virtual shops. Finally, I will give you some useful tips to cultivate your experience and become a valid professional in the sector.

At this point you can’t wait to know what exactly an e-commerce manager does, right? Then take a few minutes of free time and read what I have to tell you on the subject: you will see that, in the end, you will have a clear picture of the subject and you will be able to understand what to do to manage an online business. I wish you a good read and wish you good luck for your business!

Index

  • How to become an ecommerce manager of an online store
  • How to become a social commerce manager
  • Tips on how to become an ecommerce manager

How to become an ecommerce manager of an online store

A customer told you he was struggling with the idea of ​​having to bring his business to the web and manage it himself, so he asked you for a hand: now what you want to know is how to become an ecommerce manager of an online store. Here are the main steps of the activity.

You must know that the e-commerce manager generally has two possibilities to start his work: take care of the administration of an e-commerce site even before it was born, therefore from the conception phases, or take over an existing platform. If you work within a company, an agency or for a medium / large client you will also find yourself coordinating other professional figures, such as the social media manager and SEO.

In any case, if you understand that e-commerce manager is the job you want to do, you will need to be very good at analyzing the market, especially in the specific segment concerning the online store to be managed, to develop a strategy capable of bringing profits and/or increase them. You will need to think and draw up a suitable business plan, with all the steps that lead to a return on investment.

The first step is to understand if a given activity is required by any customers, so if there is room to build a business and how to do it: for the survey you can use a survey. Ask people you know directly what they think and if they would buy the products of the new e-commerce you will be dealing with. Better still, though, to include a larger sample of respondents: for this purpose, I recommend you start using tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey, designed to formulate targeted questions. Read my guides on how to create an online questionnaire and free questionnaire programs to learn more.

The next step requires you to know the data analysis tools, which will allow you to monitor user behavior on the e-commerce site you manage and many other parameters, essential in order to understand if the administration approach set is correct, or if there is a need to “correct the shot”. The most popular tool for all this is Google Analytics: it is made available by the well-known search engine (with which all sites end up having to interact) and works through a tracking ID., that is, an alphanumeric code that must be entered within the web pages of the site you intend to keep an eye on. To know in detail how to use and apply it, read my guide on how Google Analytics works. Also, if you want to know what other tools are dedicated to the purpose, also read my guide on how to analyze a website.

Now, of course, the mission of e-commerce is to sell as many products as possible. Given that the context in which it is located is the Net, potential customers will have to be able to find your shop (or the one you manage) online. To do this they will use the browser and, above all, the search engines, primarily Google.

In this regard, you will have heard about the importance of being first on Google, just to be immediately identified by the user who typed a search key similar to the e-commerce activity in question. However, I’m sorry to tell you that there are no magic formulas, or universal solutions, to succeed.

What you can do, if you want to become an ecommerce manager of an online store, is to manage with prudence also those who, within the project, will take care of the aspects related to SEO. To learn more, read my guide on how SEO works, a discipline that deals with the optimization for search engines of content ranging from the web page to the whole site.

Wanting to summarize the aspects that must be rationalized in the best possible way, to try to index and position themselves on Google, first of all you will have to make sure that for the creation of e-commerce you use (or have been used) a platform already optimized for SEO and able to respect the standard parameters of Web speed, for the loading of the pages, or that, in any case, allow the employees to intervene on these factors.

My advice is to use proven platforms, more or less articulated, according to the type of sale they will have to support. In practice, they range from Shopify, perfect even for a merchant with no online sales experience yet, WooCommerce, the e-commerce system designed by WordPress, the most famous platform in the world for creating blogs and websites, up to Magento, one of the best methods to set up an online store with many pieces and also quite complex. I remind you that, in the case of WordPress and Magento, we are talking about CMS (content management system), ie platforms that are already partially “pre-packaged” to be populated with content and optimization systems.

To find out more, read my guide on the best CMSs. Also, if you want to know other solutions, read my guide to the best ecommerce platforms. Since I mentioned it just now, you might also find it useful to read the guide on how to create an ecommerce with Shopify. For other aspects related to the optimization of pages and the contents within them, read my guide on how to structure a website instead.

Very well: let’s say that the shop is now online and you have verified what has been said so far, in your role as an e-commerce manager. Now is the time to plan an advertising strategy as well, to get sales off the ground. Here then you will have to take care of coordinating the work of the marketing department linked to the network sales project you are in charge of.

The two main cornerstones that you can verify, at the website level, are the launch of targeted advertising campaigns, for example within Google and the arrangement of links on the pages of the site. Very important is also the examination concerning the external sites that lead back to the e-commerce you administer. I invite you to read my guides on how Google Ads works, the main tool provided by the most used search engine, to advertise an e-commerce site within its pages and channels and, therefore, on how to create a campaign on Google Ads.

Subsequently, when the e-commerce you manage has acquired some authority, you can agree with the owner a strategy to sell links within the site to third parties: in this regard, read my guide on how to make links building.

Finally, use Google Search Console, the tool through which the sitemap of the site should have been sent to the search engine, to check for any errors present and unsuitable sites that link the e-commerce you manage, then correct them and remove them. For a general understanding of online advertising, read my guide on how to do online marketing.

Today it is very important to seek and maintain direct contact with potential customers and those already acquired: to do this it can be useful to have social pages (for example on Facebook and Instagram, two of the most popular social networks on the Net) related to an e-commerce business. I’ll explain in more detail in the next chapter how to get them.

You may also be asked to manage a newsletter: this tool, as well as being useful for communicating information to registered customers, can also become a way to promote the company. In this regard, I recommend using Sendinblue, which offers all the tools to create effective marketing campaigns, even via SMS and chat, with a basic plan that includes 300 free emails per day. To find out more, read my guides on Sendinblue and how to do email marketing.

It is not over yet, indeed, now comes the “hard work” of the e-commerce manager: the one that concerns all practical and immediate aspects. I refer to the cataloging of products and their online upload within the shop, the preparation of descriptive cards, the addition of photos and images that best describe the goods, the management of ordersshipments, any returns and cancellations. , customer servicegift codesdiscounts, offers and warehouse-level logistics, if any.

Obviously, to carry out all these tasks, if the volumes at stake are high enough, you can make use of a trusted team, to whom you will assign the various tasks, reserving their supervision. To evaluate the aspects under your responsibility, read my guides on how to open e-commerce and how to manage e-commerce.

At this point, you should have understood how to become an ecommerce manager of an online store and, above all, that it is a pretty challenging job. However, by planning things and having clear shop goals, you should be able to successfully manage any type of business on the Net.

How to become a social commerce manager

You have been asked to run an online store that sells its products through social media: at this point, what you need to know is how to become a social commerce manager.
First of all, social commerce can be defined as a more “confidential” form of commerce, which takes place mainly on social networksblogs and forums of large commercial exchange platforms, such as eBay, Amazon and so on. In this context, buyers, in addition to finding the products already available for purchase, can interact instantly with the page managers or with other users, able to provide feedback and useful opinions. This type of selling is increasingly finding favor with digital merchants, as it helps the search for many potential new customers, as practically everyone uses social media today.

As anticipated in the previous chapter, social commerce can represent an integrating part of a digital business, which arises from e-commerce structured on a website or be completely independent of it.

If you want to become a social commerce manager for someone, start by analyzing what they intend to sell and who they are targeting: you will need to understand which are the best channels to focus on and where to develop the commerce network.

In most cases, it should be Facebook and Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg’s social networks on which today it is very easy to upload products to sell, taking advantage of their popularity. Among other things, the commercial tools of the two channels are structured to communicate with each other.

Once you have been entrusted with managing the Facebook and Instagram pages of commercial activity, you will have to add the account to the Facebook Business Suite, or the designated social media manager will have to do it, which you will supervise. If you don’t know what the Business Suite (previously called Facebook Business Manager ) is, read the guide on how to use Facebook, while, for the next steps, it might be useful to understand how to manage a Facebook page.

In the event that the business for which you have been appointed to act as a social commerce manager does not yet have a Facebook page, it will necessarily be created to start any type of sale: in this regard, read my guides on how to create business Facebook page and how to manage a business Facebook page. If you want to get some ideas, also take a look at my guide on the best Facebook pages. One last tip: to create greater authority around the commercial page created, request the badge that identifies it as an official page. To find out how read my guide on how to make a Facebook page official.

The next step, the most important one for you, will be to structure the actual sales system, integrated on the Facebook page. You’re in luck: the well-known social network provides all the necessary tools, really simple to use. To get to know them, and start exploiting their potential, read my guides on how to create a Showcase on Facebook and on how Facebook Shops works, the function that allows you to profile the actual shop and upload products to sell or synchronize them with the catalog of any e-commerce site.

But that’s not all: the same products can also be sold within a company’s Instagram profile, the social network for sharing photos and multimedia content. Read my guide on how to make money with Instagram, to discover the business opportunities offered by the social channel, then also read my guides on how to sell on Instagram and how to activate Insight Instagram, to better configure a business account and receive data necessary in order to monitor sales trends. Also remember the importance of using hashtags on Instagram, to make users find products: in this regard, read my guide on the best hashtags.

Among the other social media on which it could be useful to establish an online presence, I would like to point out LinkedIn, specially indicated for structured companies and professionals; TikTok, a very young editorial channel that could be interesting to use to propose products dedicated to this target, and finally Twitter, to be used above all for cultural activities, newspapers or as a complement to a blog.

Thousands of contents and posts scroll through social networks: therefore, to highlight those of the company page you manage, a budget for sponsorships must be agreed with the owner of the business. On the subject, read my guides on how Facebook Ads works and how to do Facebook Ads, the internal program of Facebook and Instagram for paid ads.

As a social commerce manager, one of your focuses should be to suggest to the social media manager the right type of posts and sponsored to publish, based on the sales data you have in hand. For example, there are times of the year in which it is convenient to invest in individual themed posts on offers and sales, while others in which it is preferable to focus on the acquisition of likes on the company page. All this within a sales strategy that aims to maximize earnings.

Once this is done, the best part comes the part relating to the calculation of the products available for sale, logistics and shipping. I refer you to the previous chapter for the list of tasks to coordinate.

Although what has just been described should represent the summary of the tasks required of a social commerce manager, someone could also entrust you with the management of a store on a third-party platform, an affiliate program or the management of advertisements on ad sites.

If this happens to you, read my guides on how to sell on Amazon, how to sell on eBay, how to affiliate with Amazon, how to sell on Facebook and how to sell online for free, to get into the order of ideas of the matter.

Tips on how to become an e-commerce manager

If you’ve come this far and figured out how things work, you probably know you might be cut out for the job of running an online store – listen to these tips on becoming an e-commerce manager.

First of all, to become a professional ecommerce manager, know that having completed studies in the field of Economics and CommerceStatistics and being an expert in the digital field is almost essential. So, if you want to seriously delve into these topics, look for courses or masters promoted by schools or qualified organizations.

Always follow the virtuous example of those who achieve tangible results: for example, a few years ago the Aranzulla Days took place, during which I personally held live training events aimed precisely at those who want to create an online business. The case studies and the strategies I have illustrated have led Aranzulla.it to be one of the 30 most visited sites in Italy. This is to tell you to always check the credentials of training agencies and teachers.

Another very important thing is to stay up to date on industry news: for example ShopifyWordPress (and at the same time Woo Commerce) and Facebook for Business offer blogs and dedicated sites, within which you can read what are the changes taking place on platforms. Follow the news, the economy and try to intercept what is liked and what is trending in a specific period, always aware of the fact that, for your customers you will have to structure a solid commercial strategy, not based only on passing fashions, to have long-term earnings. Do you want some inspiration on the subject? Read the guide on the best e-commerce in Italy, to find out what people’s favorite online shops are and how they work.

 

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