Marketplace manager is a profession at the intersection of entrepreneurship, sales, procurement and marketing. Let’s figure out what these specialists do and how to become one of them.
Who is a marketplace manager?
What do specialists do?
What a marketplace manager should know and be able to do
Pros and cons of the profession
How much do marketplace managers earn?
Career growth prospects
How to Become a Marketplace Manager
Expert advice
Who is a marketplace manager?
Table of Contents
A marketplace manager is responsible for the company’s performance on the marketplace: analyzes the niche, communicates with suppliers, selects the product range, creates product cards, organizes shipment and delivery of goods to consumers. Such a manager works on marketplace platforms such as Ozon, Wildberries, AliExpress, Yandex Market or Lamoda.
Sometimes a marketplace manager has only one responsibility: to set up advertising, organize purchases, logistics, or select products. The tasks depend on the scale of the company and the number of items sold. Some businesses need advanced specialists who know how to scale a brand, strengthen its positioning, increase conversion, and organize advertising on third-party sites.
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What do specialists do?
A marketplace manager is almost an entrepreneur, because his responsibilities include managing the full sales cycle, starting from searching, positioning, placing goods on the site, advertising and ending with sales and analytics.
The Marketplace Manager monitors the sales cycle, analyzes results from previous periods and develops new solutions to improve efficiency and increase profits.
Let’s take a closer look at what a marketplace manager does:
1.● Selects a marketplace and registers a store on it;
2.● Designs the company page and products;
3.● Conducts competitive analysis to offer popular products and remove unpopular items, set prices, plan promotions and discounts;
4.● Forms hypotheses on how to introduce products to different marketplaces;
5.● Searches for suppliers , negotiates trade offers and purchases goods;
6.● Organizes delivery to the warehouse: communicates with suppliers, controls logistics, resolves force majeure situations;
7.● Creates cards with product descriptions;
8.● Sets up and launches advertising;
9.● Answers questions and feedback from customers;
10.● Monitors the availability and supply of goods;
11.● Calculates unit economics and analyzes sales;
12.● Maintains financial reporting for the company and marketplace;
13.● Monitors marketplace updates.
Marketplace managers delegate some tasks, such as creating text and visual design for product cards, advertising, and promotion. In large companies, they work together with an accountant, analyst, marketer, logistician, and other specialists. The larger the business and the number of products sold, the more assistants the marketplace manager has.
What a marketplace manager should know and be able to do
The list of necessary professional skills, or hard skills, can be divided into economic, analytical, editorial and marketing:
● Economic
The manager must have knowledge of unit economics, the marketplace market and sites, trade matrices, ABC and XYZ analyses, which help track demand for goods.
● Analytical
You can’t do without an advanced level of Excel – you’ll have to create a lot of pivot tables and infographics. It’s not necessary to have an advanced level, basic knowledge is enough.
You need to be able to work with accounting and financial services, warehouse management services – 1C, SAP, Axapta, “My Warehouse” and additional product analytics systems MPSTATS.
It is useful to develop the skill of strategic thinking. A marketplace manager always thinks ahead, knows how to make forecasts and test hypotheses.
● Marketing
To control sales and promotion on the Internet, you need skills in working with marketplace advertising accounts and launching advertising campaigns.
● Editorial
A marketplace manager must be able to write sales texts, know the basics of SEO analysis, and be able to work in Figma or Adobe Photoshop.
The main soft skills , or soft skills, that a marketplace manager should have are stress resistance and customer focus. His work involves a lot of communication: with suppliers, consumers, businessmen, outsourced contractors. And you need to find mutual understanding with everyone.
Strong time management will come in handy to be able to organize not only your own work, but also the work of your subordinates. A marketplace manager should have such qualities as adaptability, flexibility, and tolerance to rapidly changing market conditions.
Some soft skills of a marketplace manager become professional, for example, the ability to work with large amounts of information. Stores can have thousands of products and SKUs, or SKUs, and they need to be structured, uploaded to the marketplace, and sales analyzed.
Pros and cons of the profession
Before deciding whether to become a marketplace manager, it is worth weighing the pros and cons of the profession.
Pros
✅ A profession in demand
The market is actively growing and developing, as are consumer demands. Businesses need qualified specialists who will help increase sales.
✅ Career prospects
The profession combines several areas: sales, purchasing, marketing and entrepreneurship. Therefore, there are always opportunities for development.
✅ Quick mastery of the profession
A few months of courses – and you can start working. Training requires practice, experience will come only after solving real problems.
✅ Possibility to work remotely
Most vacancies, especially for entry-level specialists, are focused on remote work. The salary of a full-time and part-time employee is almost the same.
Cons
❌ Large volume of tasks
The manager constantly works with the flow of information and learns to manage data from different professional fields.
❌ Irregular working hours
The working day usually does not fit into a strict 8 hours. And the higher the position of the marketplace manager, the more time the employee spends on work.
❌ Lots of routine
There is room for creativity in a manager’s work, but most of the time is spent preparing reports, creating product cards and monitoring sales.
❌ High competition in the market
Managers quickly adopt promotion practices from each other. It is necessary to constantly search for and test new hypotheses, the life cycle of which sometimes fits into just a few days.
A large volume of tasks, decision-making and working with large sums of money require a marketplace manager to be responsible and reliable. Whether this is an advantage or a disadvantage depends on the ambitions and goals of a particular person. Some people work constantly and enjoy it, while others want to maintain a balance between work and personal life.
How much do marketplace managers earn?
Like any IT specialty, the profession of a marketplace manager is divided into several levels: junior, middle and senior .
The salary depends on the specifics of the company, job responsibilities, work schedule. In some companies, it is formed from the salary and bonus, or a percentage of sales – this is a standard system for a sales manager.
Juniors perform basic tasks: fill out product cards, request trade offers from suppliers, and monitor deliveries to the warehouse.
Middles
organize the full procurement cycle, from finding a supplier to processing and delivering the goods to the consumer. They work with the marketplace platform itself: register the company, create product cards, set up advertising campaigns, moderate reviews, track orders, deliveries and sales. Advanced specialists must be proficient in analytics services. They usually have about 1.5 years of experience and successful cases in their portfolio.
Seniors
know marketplaces and other promotion platforms well, are able to attract additional tools to solve problems, understand marketing, team management and advanced analytics, competitive analysis, advertising campaign analytics. A senior-level manager is strong in developing strategies, testing hypotheses, forecasting sales and managing a department.
Career growth prospects
Career growth depends on abilities and desires. On average, it is possible to reach the position of a senior specialist in 3-5 years. You can grow to the head of a department or direction, combine this position with the position of marketing director, be a deputy director of trade marketing and other options. The growth points of a marketplace manager depend on the specifics and scale of the company.
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How to Become a Marketplace Manager
To begin with, you can study the knowledge bases that the marketplaces themselves offer. They will give a basic idea of the work and introduce you to the trading platform. But these materials do not provide practice, only theory. In the work of a manager, it is the solution of real trading problems that plays a key role.
Therefore , in order to become a professional marketplace manager, after studying the general information, you need to choose a course. What is important to pay attention to:
● The content of the program and the share of practice in the educational process
Practice during training in the profession of marketplace manager is a priority. This is the only way to master the features and algorithm of online sales.
● The amount of time allocated for training and how it coincides with personal free time
This is not an academic discipline that takes years to learn. After a few months of study, you can apply for positions as assistants and junior managers.
● Expertise of mentors
It’s good if the course teachers are practicing specialists who know about current marketplace updates and can share professional secrets.
● Certificate after completing the course and the company’s license to conduct educational activities
These documents confirm the specialist’s qualifications. Thanks to them, a response to a vacancy comes faster.
● Reviews of the course or reviews from similar disciplines, if the course is new and is being launched for the first time
Reviews provide an idea of the quality of the educational material, the expertise of the mentors and the professional prospects after completing the course.
There are no restrictions for mastering the profession of a marketplace manager. But you need to be prepared for the fact that this is not an easy job that will require time, effort and high concentration during training.
Transfer from related fields is also possible. Such students will have advantages in mastering the profession. For example, an editor or content manager will need less time to learn how to write product cards and design advertising materials; an accountant is already familiar with reporting and working in Excel and 1C; a marketer knows the basic mechanics of promoting products, creating creatives and launching advertising campaigns. They only need to learn more about the specifics of marketplaces, adapt knowledge for the site and gain new knowledge from other areas.
Courses on working with marketplaces can be useful for entrepreneurs and Internet marketers who have decided to scale up and enter new promotion platforms. Before hiring a manager for this, the business owner should understand the essence of the work of such a specialist.
