What does an e-commerce strategist do?
An e-commerce strategist owns the plan for selling through a screen. That covers the store itself (platform, structure, product pages, checkout), the traffic that reaches it (search, paid, social, email, marketplaces), the content that persuades (photography, product film, copy, reviews) and the numbers that say whether it is working (conversion rate, average order value, acquisition cost, retention). The strategist does not build all of it; they decide what gets built, in what order and why, and they hold the team to the result.
In a brand the role sits between marketing, merchandising and technology. In an agency it is the person who writes the e-commerce plan a client's digital team executes, and who keeps asking whether the beautiful campaign is actually making the cart move.
Why it matters
Why an e-commerce strategist matters
Online, the store is the brand. There is no sales associate to recover a bad first impression, no window to walk past, no shelf position to buy. Everything a beauty or fashion brand spends on awareness ends on a product page, and if that page does not show the product well, load fast and make the purchase easy, the spend is wasted. The strategist is the person who connects the brand's ambition to the mechanics of the cart.
The role also decides where a brand shows up. Direct-to-consumer, marketplaces, retailer sites, social commerce and wholesale partners all have different economics, and choosing the mix is one of the biggest commercial decisions a modern brand makes. A product sold on the brand's own site carries the full margin and the full cost of acquisition; the same product on a marketplace gives up margin for traffic; on a retailer's site it borrows trust and loses control of the presentation. The strategist weighs those trade-offs product by product.
In practice
How an e-commerce strategist works in practice
- 01
The strategist starts with an audit: traffic sources, conversion by page and device, product performance, the competition's stores. From that comes a roadmap: platform changes, content priorities, channel investments and the tests that will prove each one. They brief the designers and developers on the store, the creative team on product content, the performance team on acquisition, and they meet weekly against a dashboard.
- 02
Content is a larger part of the job than most people expect. Product film in particular has become the format that moves conversion on a product page and on social at the same time, so the strategist is often the person asking for a steady stream of it rather than one campaign a season.
- 03
The calendar is the other half. Online retail runs on moments (launches, seasonal peaks, sale periods, the long run-up to the holidays), and the strategist plans inventory, content and spend against them months ahead. Much of the year's revenue arrives in a few weeks, and the brands that do well in those weeks decided what they would show and say long before the traffic turned up.
- 04
The strategist also keeps the store honest about its content. Product pages, films and photography age; a quarterly review of what is live, what is converting and what no longer looks like the brand feeds the next brief, so the creative work stays in step with the catalog and the calendar.
At RIOT
E-commerce strategists at RIOT
Product content for commerce is a regular part of our work. For Gantri we produced two months of social product films, the kind of steady output an e-commerce plan runs on rather than a single hero piece. The Nutrafol x Sephora product films had to work on a retailer's stage as well as the brand's own, and the Bogg Bags CTV spot "Real Life, Worry Free" was built to send people toward a cart. An e-commerce strategist decides what the content has to do; we make it do that.
Watch out
What people get wrong about e-commerce strategists
Treating the platform choice as the strategy. Which cart you use matters far less than what you put in front of people and how you get them there. The second mistake is optimizing acquisition while ignoring the product page; cheaper traffic to a page that does not convert is just cheaper waste. The third is separating brand from commerce, so the campaign looks one way and the store looks another. The customer sees one brand, and the strategist should too.
