A day in the life of a National eCommerce Director leading a major CPG brand.
The Importance of eCommerce to National eCommerce Directors (Amazon)
Significant changes to consumer behavior hit Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) in 2020. These changes drove huge sales for CPG brands as the average shopper turned more to online purchases, particularly for household items, groceries, health goods, and more.
In response, the retail landscape snowballed with more access to consumer channels than ever before. The average consumer demanded shopping convenience, and the market listened.
Today, eCommerce Directors are among the most impactful drivers of brand success. If a CPG brand expects to see growth on Amazon in 2023, it will be hugely influenced by eCommerce and the focus areas you select today.
For Directors of eCommerce at major CPG brands, the principal focus will always be driving sales through the roof. But, to do this, they need a 30,000-foot view across many cross-functional business units.
This is no easy task.
Any leader overseeing sales, operations, marketing, and advertising on Amazon knows firsthand how time-consuming it is to extract, analyze, and leverage data from Amazon to inform subsequent actions.
This article will detail the metrics eCommerce leaders need to succeed and how they can act to achieve a diverse set of brand goals.
The Day-to-Day Life of a National eCommerce Director
A National eCommerce Director for Amazon at enterprise CPG companies is busy leading the management of large portfolios of industry-leading brands.
Their core focus is hitting key revenue targets (but not just sales, as revenue must meet profitability thresholds set by upper management), and driving market share growth, profitability, incrementality, and potential marketplace expansions.
Compounding this already busy schedule is their ongoing management of critical relationships up and down the organizational hierarchy.
Their biggest challenge overall is organizing all this ongoing work into a 360-degree view of eCommerce sales and operations. This can inform future strategy and make the case across key stakeholders.
Here’s a quick rundown on the metrics that matter for eCommerce Directors and how they can act.
The Top Metrics to Care Most About
There are endless Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) or metrics in the eCommerce space to measure results. It is easy to become overwhelmed with all the possibilities of things to measure. As a leader in eCommerce Sales, it’s crucial to keep your teams focused on the things that matter most while giving them tools to achieve those results as efficiently as possible.
Leaders of the total eCommerce business care most about the following metrics:
- Revenue: The total dollar amount of eCommerce sales for the company.
- Profitability: An enterprise brand’s Amazon profitability depends on how they manage product sales mix, trade agreements, marketing and search costs, and your capabilities to analyze and execute.
- Share Growth: Staying ahead of the competition by bidding for first place and measuring total sales against your category.
- Incrementality: Incremental sales are those that truly add to overall revenue, rather than simply reallocating revenue from one product to another.
At the highest level, these metrics are critical to creating shareholder value while driving the long-term success of their business.
That said, National eCommerce Directors lead cross-functional teams, commonly including:
- eCommerce sales
- Marketing
- Supply chain
- Analytics
These functional teams will have their own subsets of metrics that eCommerce Directors must monitor, and they may look slightly different from team-to-team.
For example, eCommerce Supply Chain teams contribute to the ‘Big Four” metrics mentioned earlier through inventory planning. It’s imperative that eCommerce Directors oversee seamless operations across receiving, processing, and shipping of retailer orders.
By optimizing things like demand forecasting and inventory allocation, eCommerce Directors can help their cross-functional teams increase efficiency and drive business impact.
The Top Metrics Upper Management Cares About
Ecommerce leaders manage down—supporting metric success with cross-functional teams—and manage up, delivering key wins for upper management.
Key metrics, like revenue and profitability, are essential for eCommerce Directors and their C-Suite leaders, but each role views these metrics differently.
For example:
While an eCommerce Director’s main focus lands on their team revenue, a C-Suite leader must deliver top-line wins for both eCommerce and Brick-and-mortar sales — and they understand the growing preference among consumers for hybridized shopping experiences.
Make sure you’re well aligned up and down your business units to navigate these slight differences.
How eCommerce Leaders Should Take Action Can Take to Drive Better Metrics
To stay sane, eCommerce Directors should align with both their cross-functional teams and upper management on the metrics that matter most—and identify the overlapping impacts. They should develop internal messaging on how, for instance, supply chain efficiencies deliver eCommerce wins, which then bubbles up to brand success within physical retailers.
Narratives like this are easy to define but harder to visualize. But luckily, smart tools (like Pacvue) are helping eCommerce Directors connect the dots across company-wide metrics, delivering automated optimizations and reporting.
Interested in shaving hours of manual work and delivering key insights faster? Let’s talk.
