Ecommerce Leadership & Enterprise Digital Retail

Leading Ecommerce at Enterprise Scale

Ecommerce leadership at enterprise scale requires a fundamentally different mindset than managing a single function or a smaller operation. Fortune 500 ecommerce environments operate with multimillion-dollar P&Ls, complex supply chains, and competing stakeholder priorities that demand integrated strategic thinking.

At Coles, as Head of Online Merchandising & Strategic Partnerships (2017–2019), I managed a $1.1 billion P&L across 800+ digital storefronts. At Catch.com.au, as Head of Merchandising (2017), I oversaw a $200 million P&L on the Mirakl platform, driving a 40%+ gross margin and maintaining inventory efficiency with Days on Hand under 45 days.

What distinguishes enterprise ecommerce leadership from smaller-scale operations is the requirement for alignment across merchandising, IT, finance, store operations, logistics, and marketing. These functions operate with different metrics, incentives, and timelines. The leadership challenge is not simply optimizing each function independently but orchestrating them toward shared business outcomes.

Enterprise ecommerce is not a digital-only function. At Coles, online represented a critical channel for a supermarket business with thousands of physical stores. Success required constant navigation between the economics and operational realities of online and in-store retail. This omnichannel complexity adds layers of organizational and operational challenge that are absent in pure-play ecommerce.

The scale also introduces operational complexity that smaller companies rarely encounter. Managing 800+ digital storefronts, for example, requires systematic approaches to ranging, promotion, pricing, and content that cannot be executed manually. Technology, data, and process automation become not optional enhancements but essential to viability.

P&L Management & Commercial Strategy

Direct P&L responsibility is a defining characteristic of enterprise ecommerce leadership. At Coles, the $1.1 billion P&L encompassed all revenue and cost streams associated with online grocery and general merchandise. At Catch, the $200 million P&L spanned cross-category marketplace operations including fashion, home, and grocery.

Gross Margin Optimization

Sustaining high gross margins in competitive ecommerce environments requires disciplined execution across multiple levers. At Catch, we achieved and maintained 40%+ gross margins through:

• Promotional Strategy: Balancing weekly deals and promotions to drive traffic and conversion without eroding margin discipline. This required coordination with production and studio teams to create compelling promotional assets, email marketing teams to drive traffic at optimal times, and social media teams to amplify reach and engagement.
• Category Mix: Prioritizing inventory investment and promotional budget toward higher-margin categories while maintaining breadth of assortment to support customer acquisition and retention.
• Supplier Negotiation: Developing long-term supplier relationships focused on cost reduction, rebates, and cooperative advertising arrangements that improved net margin.
• Fulfillment Cost Management: Optimizing warehouse operations, picking efficiency, and shipping cost per order to reduce the largest variable cost in marketplace operations.
• Dynamic Pricing: Using data-driven approaches to optimize pricing in real time, responding to competitor activity, demand signals, and inventory levels.

Inventory Management & Days on Hand

Maintaining Days on Hand (DOH) under 45 days across a $200 million operation demonstrates operational excellence and protects margin. Excess inventory ties up working capital, increases obsolescence risk, and forces markdown decisions that erode gross margin. At Catch, achieving low DOH required:

• Demand forecasting accuracy by category and seasonal pattern.
• Supplier replenishment discipline, including vendor-managed inventory (VMI) for key categories.
• Inventory visibility and real-time management systems integrated with warehouse operations.
• Regular category reviews to identify slow-moving SKUs and take decisive action before obsolescence.

Promotional Cadence & Commercial Planning

At Catch, weekly deals and promotions were the primary driver of customer acquisition and conversion. Executing this cadence at scale required tightly coordinated planning:

• Production & Studio Teams: Creative asset development for promotional campaigns, including product photography, banner design, and video content.
• Email Marketing: Segmented campaigns to drive traffic to promoted categories, with A/B testing to optimize open rates and conversion.
• Social Media Marketing: Amplification of key promotions across paid and organic channels, particularly on Facebook and Instagram where Catch's customer demographic was most active.
• Warehouse & Fulfillment Teams: Ensuring inventory readiness for promotional periods, with coordinated stock positioning and staffing to handle order volume spikes.
• Pricing & Merchant Teams: Strategic discounting decisions that balanced margin impact with volume uplift and customer acquisition value.

Pricing strategy in marketplace environments also requires management of commission structures, which directly impact net margin. At Catch, the Mirakl platform enabled flexible commission models that were adjusted by category based on margin objectives and competitive dynamics.

Cross-Functional Team Leadership

This is perhaps the most critical capability for enterprise ecommerce leadership and the most difficult to develop. Functional expertise in merchandising, marketing, or operations is necessary but insufficient. Ecommerce leaders must be able to lead people outside their functional domain, navigate conflicting incentives, and drive alignment around shared objectives.

The Coles Organization Structure

At Coles, I led a large, diverse team that spanned:

• Product Managers: Responsible for digital platform features, checkout experience, personalization, and performance optimization.
• Business Analysts: Defining requirements, managing vendor relationships, and analyzing performance data to identify improvement opportunities.
• Merchandising Associates: Maintaining product content, managing category assortment, and executing promotional campaigns.
• Ranging Managers: Determining product selection and assortment for online channels, with particular focus on dark store operations.
• Business Development Professionals: Managing strategic partnerships, channel expansion, and new category launches.
• Offshore Team (via Accenture): A significant team based internationally, handling data entry, content management, and routine merchandising tasks under clear governance frameworks.

This team was highly diverse in terms of professional backgrounds, experience levels, and geographic locations. Effective leadership required clear communication of strategy and priorities, transparent decision-making processes, and regular alignment meetings to ensure the offshore team and onshore team were moving in lockstep.

Cross-Functional Coordination at the Leadership Level

Beyond the direct team, success required constant coordination with:

• IT & Platform Teams: For infrastructure, platform automation, API development, and technical architecture decisions. A critical partnership was automating manual merchandising workflows that had previously been resource-intensive and error-prone.
• Finance: For commercial planning, margin forecasting, promotional investment decisions, and working capital management. The P&L ownership model required monthly board-level reporting on KPIs including revenue, gross margin, inventory, and fulfillment costs.
• Supermarket Store Operations: For omnichannel alignment including store-pick-fulfilled orders, dark store operations, store staff training on online processes, and ensuring that online strategy did not create operational burden on in-store teams.
• Logistics & Fulfillment: For network optimization, last-mile delivery partnerships, dark store operations, and cost management.
• Marketing & Customer Acquisition: For promotional planning, customer communications, and understanding how paid marketing investments were driving traffic to the online channel.

The complexity of these relationships cannot be overstated. A pricing decision had implications for IT (system changes), Finance (margin impact), Merchants (negotiation), Logistics (volume impact), and Marketing (customer perception). Without strong cross-functional relationships and a systematic approach to decision-making that considered these implications, the organization would be constantly firefighting and suboptimizing decisions.

Catch: Cross-Functional Collaboration in a Marketplace Environment

At Catch, the cross-functional model was similarly complex but operated in a different organizational context. As Head of Merchandising, I collaborated closely with:

• Production & Studio Teams: Daily coordination on promotional asset creation, ensuring brand consistency and quality standards across all marketplace communications.
• Email Marketing: Weekly planning of promotional campaigns, including segmentation strategy, offer testing, and performance analysis.
• Social Media Marketing: Real-time coordination on content amplification, influencer partnerships, and crisis response.
• Warehouse & Fulfillment: Inventory visibility, order routing, and fulfillment readiness for promotional periods.
• Category Teams: Fashion, home, grocery, and general merchandise teams operating with specific category KPIs but aligned to overall marketplace objectives.

This structure enabled merchandising to be truly customer-centric and operationally aware rather than siloed from the actual experience of customers interacting with the platform.

Why Cross-Functional Leadership Is Critical

Ecommerce is inherently a cross-functional business. Revenue depends on product assortment (merchandising), marketing (customer acquisition), technology (platform performance), and operations (fulfillment reliability). Leaders who can influence across these functions without direct authority are disproportionately effective. This skill is developed through:

• Understanding the perspectives, metrics, and constraints of different functions.
• Building relationships based on trust and shared interest in business outcomes rather than functional politics.
• Making decisions transparent and explaining the "why" behind trade-offs between functions.
• Regularly reporting on shared metrics that demonstrate the interdependence of functions.
• Celebrating cross-functional wins and holding people accountable when silos damage business results.

Digital Merchandising & Category Management

Digital merchandising differs fundamentally from physical retail merchandising in both strategy and execution. The core principles of understanding customer behavior, managing assortment, and optimizing presentation remain the same, but the medium and scale are entirely different.

Managing 800+ Digital Storefronts at Coles

At Coles, the 800+ digital storefronts represented a significant operational challenge. These storefronts covered different geographic regions, customer segments, and category assortments. Unlike a physical store network where changes are made at physical locations, digital storefronts are managed centrally through content management systems (CMS), product information management (PIM), and related digital infrastructure.

Managing this scale required:

• Automated Merchandising Workflows: Working closely with IT and data teams, we automated manual merchandising processes. Tasks that previously required spreadsheets and manual entry—such as applying promotional pricing, managing daily deals, and updating product visibility rules—became automated workflows triggered by business logic rules. This automation reduced errors, improved consistency, and freed merchandising teams to focus on strategy rather than data entry.
• Product Information Management (PIM): Ensuring that product data (descriptions, attributes, imagery, nutritional information for grocery) was accurate, current, and consistent across all storefronts. For grocery, compliance with nutrition labeling regulations was a constant data quality challenge.
• Category Visibility & Ranking: Determining which products appeared in search results, category pages, and homepage recommendations. This involved understanding customer behavior data from analytics and optimizing ranking logic to balance revenue, margin, and customer satisfaction.
• Content Strategy: Creating guides, blog posts, and educational content that addressed common customer questions and drove organic search traffic. This was particularly important for grocery categories where customers researched recipes and nutritional information before purchasing.

Dark Store Merchandising

A particularly important merchandising challenge was the dark store operation. Dark stores are fulfillment centers optimized for online order picking rather than customer browsing. The merchandising approach for dark stores differs significantly from standard retail:

• Range Optimization: Dark store assortment was determined by online demand patterns rather than store shelf space constraints. This allowed for deeper assortment in high-demand categories and faster rotation of slow-moving SKUs.
• Picking Efficiency: Product placement within the dark store was optimized for picking efficiency. High-velocity items were placed in easily accessible locations to minimize picker time and reduce fulfillment costs.
• Online Customer Preferences: Unlike supermarket customers who see products in person, online customers rely entirely on search, filters, and product descriptions. Dark store merchandising had to reflect these digital shopper behaviors, ensuring that product information was complete and that search and filtering functions worked effectively.
• Promotional Readiness: Dark stores had to be prepared for promotional periods with pre-positioned inventory and staffing plans to handle order volume spikes.

Driving Conversion Through UX & Merchandising at Catch

At Catch, digital merchandising was directly tied to conversion optimization. Through focused category management and UX improvements, we achieved an 18% conversion uplift. This was driven by:

• Category Pages: Optimizing filters, sorting options, and product display to help customers quickly find what they were looking for. Each category page was structured around customer intent and search behavior data.
• Product Pages: Ensuring product descriptions, specifications, and customer reviews were comprehensive and trustworthy. For a marketplace with many merchants, consistent product information standards were critical.
• Recommendation Engine: Implementing algorithms that recommended complementary and related products to increase average order value.
• Mobile Experience: Optimizing the mobile shopping experience, which represented an increasingly large share of traffic. Mobile customers had different behaviors and required different interface design.
• Promotional Placement: Strategic placement of weekly promotions to drive engagement and conversion, with A/B testing to optimize placement and creative.

Weekly Promotional Cadence

At Catch, merchandise was largely organized around a weekly promotional cycle. Each week featured new deals across multiple categories, each with a clear start and end date. Managing this cadence required:

• Monthly planning of promotional calendar, including themes and category focus areas.
• Weekly coordination across merchandising, pricing, production, email marketing, and warehouse teams to ensure all systems were aligned on deal structure and timing.
• Contingency planning for deals that underperformed or overperformed, enabling rapid adjustments to inventory positioning and marketing spend.
• Post-promotion analysis to understand what drove customer acquisition, margin impact, and repeat purchase rate.

Strategic Partnerships & Channel Expansion

Strategic partnerships represent a critical growth lever for enterprise ecommerce, enabling access to new customer segments and channels without proportional investment in technology or operations.

The Coles × eBay Grocery Marketplace Initiative

One of the most significant initiatives during my tenure at Coles was launching the world's first grocery marketplace on eBay. This was a multimillion-dollar initiative that required several years of planning, negotiation, and execution.

The strategic rationale was clear: eBay's customer base included millions of Australian shoppers who regularly purchased from the platform. Coles could tap this audience by offering grocery and household essentials directly on eBay rather than hoping customers would visit Coles.com.au. For eBay, grocery was a new category that added frequency and value to the marketplace.

The execution challenges were substantial:

• Product Integration: Syncing Coles' product catalog with eBay's platform, ensuring pricing was competitive, and managing inventory allocation between Coles.com.au and eBay marketplaces.
• Fulfillment: Determining whether orders would be fulfilled from Coles' distribution centers, from the nearest store (store-pick model), or through dedicated dark stores. Each option had different cost and service implications.
• Customer Experience: Ensuring that grocery orders on eBay met the same reliability and freshness standards as Coles' own channel, despite operating through a different platform and, potentially, different fulfillment networks.
• Merchant Compliance: Managing Coles' standing as an eBay seller, including seller ratings, return policies, and customer service responsiveness.
• Financial Modeling: Understanding the eBay take rate (commission), ensuring the margin model was viable, and forecasting volume and customer acquisition costs.

This partnership expanded Coles' addressable market and brought millions of dollars in incremental revenue while demonstrating the potential of marketplace partnerships as a growth strategy.

Last-Mile Delivery Partnerships

Another critical set of partnerships was with third-party logistics providers for last-mile delivery. Coles partnered with UberEATS, Airtasker, and Deliveroo to offer rapid delivery options to customers, with a strategic goal of reducing average delivery time by 35%.

These partnerships were transformative because they:

• Expanded Geographic Coverage: Third-party providers operated in areas where Coles did not have distribution infrastructure, extending the addressable customer base for online grocery.
• Improved Customer Experience: Faster, more flexible delivery options (including same-day delivery) created competitive differentiation against other online grocers and increased customer lifetime value.
• Optimized Fulfillment Costs: Rather than building proprietary logistics infrastructure, Coles could use third-party networks that achieved scale across multiple merchants and platforms, reducing per-order delivery costs.
• Enabled Rapid Scaling: Coles could scale delivery capacity without proportional capital investment in vehicles, staff, and infrastructure.

Managing these partnerships required commercial negotiation around pricing, service levels, and reporting. It also required integration work to connect Coles' order management systems with partner platforms and ensuring that customers had a seamless experience across channels.

Last-Mile Logistics & Omnichannel Execution

For grocery retailers moving into ecommerce, last-mile delivery is arguably the single most important operational capability. Customers purchasing online expect rapid, reliable delivery of fresh products at a cost that does not significantly exceed the value of their time saved by shopping online.

Fulfillment Model Options

There are several fulfillment models that grocery ecommerce operations can employ, each with different economics and operational implications:

• Store-Pick Model: Supermarket employees pick online orders from shelves during non-peak hours and prepare them for delivery. This model leverages existing store infrastructure and inventory but puts additional demand on store operations staff. It works well for regions with high store density.
• Dedicated Dark Stores: Purpose-built fulfillment facilities optimized for online order picking, with product assortment and layout determined by online demand rather than store design. Dark stores achieve higher picking efficiency than store picking but require capital investment and separate inventory management. They work well for regions with high online penetration.
• Hybrid Model: Using both store picking and dark stores based on geography, demand patterns, and operational capacity. This was the model Coles employed, with dark stores in high-demand urban areas and store picking in regions with higher store density.
• Third-Party Fulfillment: Outsourcing fulfillment entirely to logistics providers or marketplaces. This model reduces operational complexity but reduces control over customer experience and costs.

The choice of model has significant implications for customer experience (delivery speed and reliability), gross margin (fulfillment cost per order), and operational complexity. At Coles, the hybrid approach reflected both the existing store footprint and the need to achieve rapid delivery in competitive urban markets.

Delivery Time Optimization

The 35% reduction in average delivery time at Coles came from several coordinated improvements:

• Dark Store Network Expansion: Adding dark stores in areas with concentrated demand reduced the distance between fulfillment location and end customer, improving delivery speed.
• Third-Party Logistics Integration: Partnerships with UberEATS, Airtasker, and Deliveroo provided additional delivery capacity and geographic reach, particularly for same-day and next-day delivery.
• Order Management Optimization: Improving the order-to-fulfillment process, including order consolidation, route optimization, and reducing time from order placement to fulfillment start.
• Delivery Window Management: Offering customers specific delivery windows (rather than all-day delivery) allowed for more efficient route optimization and reduced failed delivery attempts.

Omnichannel Alignment

For a supermarket, ecommerce cannot be managed independently from in-store operations. Omnichannel alignment requires:

• Inventory Transparency: Customers shopping online need accurate visibility of in-store inventory. Store operations teams need to understand when inventory is allocated to online orders versus in-store display.
• Assortment Consistency: Customers should encounter broadly similar assortments and pricing across channels. Significant discrepancies create confusion and customer frustration.
• Pricing Harmony: While different channels can have different pricing, extreme variation needs to be justified. Some customers deliberately shift channels to exploit price differences, undermining gross margin.
• Operational Coordination: Promotional periods that drive online demand cannot occur without coordination with store operations to ensure adequate inventory. Store staffing needs to accommodate picking online orders if using the store-pick model.
• Customer Experience Consistency: Return policies, customer service quality, and product quality should be consistent across channels. Treating online and in-store customers differently damages brand perception.

Achieving this alignment is organizationally complex because it requires store operations to accept additional constraints and responsibilities in service of an online channel that may not be their primary focus. It requires clear communication that online and in-store are mutually supporting rather than competitive, and recognition of the operational burden that online places on store teams.

Data Standards & Platform Interoperability

Data standards may sound like a technical or back-office concern, but they are fundamental to scaling ecommerce operations. As networks become more complex, with multiple suppliers, platforms, and systems needing to exchange information, standards become the infrastructure that enables interoperability.

GS1 & Global Data Standards

Following my experience at Coles and Catch, I joined GS1 Australia as an Account Director (2019–2022), managing relationships with major retailers, marketplaces, and suppliers including Amazon, Google, Alibaba, and 300+ brands. The work centered on advancing data standards adoption across the ecosystem.

GS1 standards, including barcodes, product identifiers (GTINs), and data attributes, are essential for several reasons:

• Inventory Management: Suppliers and retailers need to use consistent product identifiers to accurately manage inventory across multiple channels and fulfillment centers.
• Catalog Accuracy: Retailers selling through multiple channels (direct, Amazon, Google Shopping, other marketplaces) need to ensure that product information is synchronized across all platforms. Standard product attributes make this synchronization possible.
• Compliance: Many jurisdictions require specific product information on labels and packaging (nutrition, allergens, country of origin, etc.). Data standards enable retailers to manage compliance at scale.
• Consumer Trust: Accurate, complete product information builds consumer confidence in online shopping. Incomplete or inaccurate data is a leading cause of negative customer reviews and returns.
• Third-Party Integrations: Marketplaces like Mirakl, Algopix, and others that serve the ecommerce ecosystem rely on standardized data formats to integrate with multiple suppliers and retailers.

Platform Interoperability & Mirakl

At Catch, the operation was built on the Mirakl platform, a SaaS marketplace solution that manages product information, pricing, order management, and merchant relationships. Mirakl's design reflects the importance of data standards—it uses structured data schemas for products, pricing, inventory, and orders that enable interoperability between merchants, the marketplace, and third-party integrations.

Effective use of Mirakl (or similar platforms) requires:

• Merchant Onboarding: Setting clear expectations with merchants about data quality requirements, including product attributes, descriptions, and imagery standards.
• Data Validation: Implementing automated validation rules to prevent merchants from uploading incomplete or inaccurate product data.
• Integration Ecosystem: Connecting the marketplace with fulfillment systems, financial platforms, analytics tools, and other third-party systems that rely on accurate data.
• API Management: Providing merchants with APIs that enable them to manage inventory, pricing, and orders programmatically rather than manually through the interface.

Scaling to Multiple Marketplaces

Retailers and suppliers increasingly need to operate across multiple marketplaces—Amazon, eBay, Google Shopping, Shopify, and vertical-specific marketplaces. Data standards enable this without requiring complete reimplementation for each platform. The product information maintained in a central system can be exported in the format required by each platform, ensuring consistency across channels.

For Coles' eBay partnership, for example, standard product data could be synced from Coles' product information system to the eBay integration, ensuring that product descriptions, pricing, and images were consistent with Coles' own channel and with any other channels where Coles sold.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Resources

For deeper exploration of specific ecommerce leadership topics, see the following articles:

• The Coles × eBay Grocery Marketplace: Scaling Enterprise Partnerships
• Last-Mile Delivery Optimization: From 35% Time Reduction to Profitable Scaling
• Marketplace Merchandising at Scale: Managing 800+ Storefronts
• Data Standards & Platform Interoperability: The Foundation for Marketplace Success