SVP E-commerce: All You Need to Know

What should you know about SVP e-commerce? 

SVP E-commerce: About the Role

SVP stands for Senior Vice President and, as a retail inflationary measure, it’s like saying Vice President of E-commerce. So, if you think about it, if you’re an SVP of E-commerce, you should know everything about e-commerce.  

I decided to take some time and write down all the things I think anyone aspiring to become an SVP would like to know.  

To be clear: this is not an exhaustive list and I am not claiming that if you know these things then you will become an SVP; I’m just trying to give you some ideas. I also want to be very clear that it is impossible to know all the things on this list. You need to pick your battles and prioritize your time wisely.  

For example, it’s probably not worth spending months optimizing your site for mobile unless at least 10% of your traffic comes from mobile devices or unless there is some business reason for doing so (like Walmart).

What I’ve tried to do is divide the knowledge into categories: technical and non-technical.  

The division is pretty artificial and there is a lot of grey area between the two, but it has worked well enough for me.

Technical

Understand how search engines work:

This includes knowing which one’s matter, how search works in general, how search engines rank pages/sites/whatever., etc. 

Understand how e-commerce works

This includes conversion rates, average order values. 

Understand how online shopping works – shopping cart abandonment rate, etc.

Know your competitors

For example:

• What are their strengths? 
• What are their weaknesses? 
• What are they doing better than you? 
• What are they doing worse than you? 

Non-technical

Understand how people shop online

This includes knowing what the shopping cart abandonment rate is, how much time people spend on your site, what they click on, etc. 

Understand your business and what you’re trying to accomplish

This might seem obvious, but if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, then you probably won’t know which of the technical or non-technical things matter. 

For example: 

If your goal is to get a lot of traffic from search engines, then you should spend a lot of time understanding SEO. 

If your goal is to get a lot of traffic from Facebook, then you should spend a lot of time understanding how to use Facebook ads. Maybe you need to focus on building great content for social media instead of just advertising. Maybe you need to focus on getting “shares” instead of “likes.” Maybe if you have really great content, people won’t want to share it with friends, but will just want to link to it directly. 

Conclusion: SVP E-commerce

If you are an aspiring SVP E-commerce, then I hope this post was helpful. In this post, we have learned what you need to know to become an SVP of E-commerce. Also, we have learned what skills you should learn in both technical and non-technical aspects.