Head of Ecommerce

Job Role:

The Head of eCommerce is a pivotal role leading the team running Play Music Today’s Online Store. The role is responsible for achieving the company’s targets via the online channel through optimising the performance of our eCommerce Platform, driving onsite trading activations and managing our digital performance channels.

Leading an in-house and agency team, responsible for delivering 8 figure revenue for the eCommerce store of the UK’s biggest multi-channel musical instrument retailer.

Reporting to the Ecommerce & Marketing Director and working closely with the Head of Marketing, you’ll lead our in-house team as well as being the key relationship holder with our third party digital marketing agency.

We need an all-rounder who’s comfortable with both strategy and delivery. The PMT eCommerce team is small, friendly and energetic and you’ll need to be comfortable turning your hand to a variety of tasks.

Key Responsibilities:

eCommerce Performance

• Accountable for delivering the company business plan to achieve revenue, margin and cost of sales targets.
• Leading the eCommerce and Merchandising team who deliver the day-to-day trading of the website. Driving eCommerce best-practice and high-quality execution.
• Key responsibility for forecasting website performance across all KPIs including traffic, conversion rate, average order values, marketing spend and COS.
• Key stakeholder in the business for the eCommerce team and website platform.

Product Merchandising

• Ensuring that the team are developing and executing merchandising strategies, including product placement, categorization, and promotional campaigns.
• Leading the team responsible for the publishing and maintenance of PMT’s extensive product range.

Digital Acquisition Strategy

• Develop multi-channel digital marketing strategy that drives long-term, cost-effective growth.
• Setting and allocating customer acquisition targets and budget between channels.
• Leading our eCommerce and Marketing reporting development to accurately report on performance, spend and onsite analytics.
• Overseeing paid search, affiliate, social media marketing to agreed CPAs and ROAS.
• Overseeing and optimising search engine optimisation.
• Reviewing/assessing additional potential customer acquisition channels.

Platform Development

• Leading the ongoing development of our eCommerce platform in collaboration with our development agency and other third parties.
• Creating and delivering our technology roadmap to ensure the best ROI from our development decisions.
• Overseeing on-site conversion rate optimisation through activation of best-practice initiatives, using industry benchmarks and A/B testing.
• Business casing and achieving sign-off for new website features and managing their deployment from inception to completion.

Website P&L

• Manage and optimize eCommerce P&L, including forecasting, budgeting, and financial performance.
• Effectively manage our Digital Marketing budget across multiple agency partners.
• Lead Annual, Quarterly and Monthly budget planning to ensure the most effective spend of our Paid Media Budgets.

Multi-Channel Offering

• Working with the marketing, store, customer service and operations teams to deliver a seamless multi-channel offering where customers are able to interact and purchase via their chosen channel smoothly.

Team Leadership

• Recruit, lead, and develop a team of 6 across merchandising, trading, eCommerce and CRM roles.
• Be fully accountable and proactive in all aspects of leadership (e.g. team structure and succession planning, performance management, development).
• Take a leadership role in building a high-performance culture in our Liverpool Head office, take responsibility for wider initiatives to promote the success of the office, culture, and team morale, alongside the eCommerce and Marketing Director.
• Collaborating with key stakeholders across Commercial, Operations, Customer Services, HR, Finance and Store teams.

Skills & Experience:

• Degree-level education.
• Minimum 7 years experience in direct to consumer eCommerce or Digital Marketing.
• Experience with content management systems (CMS) and basic HTML/CSS knowledge is a plus.
• Strong working knowledge of Excel.
• Ability to analyse large sets of data to drive actionable change.
• Strong analytical skills are required, preferably with Google Analytics.
• An understanding of key platforms such as Facebook Business Manager, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Google Search Console is preferable.
• Knowledge of Magento 2 is preferred but not essential.
• Knowledge within the Musical Equipment industry is preferred but not essential.
• Excellent communication and project management skills.
• Ability to work cross-functionally and influence stakeholders at all levels.

Preferred Experience:

• Experience in e-commerce, SaaS, or subscription-based business models.
• Familiarity with SQL, eCommerce platforms, Google Analytics and data visualisation tools or other data query languages.