Advancing Digital Commerce by Empowering Internal Teams

As brands close hundreds of stores, retailers are investing in the digital experience and digital commerce to win customers over more than ever. However, it doesn’t come easy; a winning digital strategy must have the right combination of technology, content and features, all of which require an investment of time and resources. Those resources must work collaboratively — often across functional silos including marketing, merchandising, creative, technology and more — to deliver an optimal experience.

To combat the constraints caused by limited resources, forward-thinking retailers, brands and digital merchants are assessing and aligning organizational design while also leveraging the most fitting technology in determining ways to enable a seamless, collaborative workflow.

Here’s one way: Embrace a cross-functional, multidiscipline organizational approach to create the necessary cohesion across the digital commerce team. With a flatter organization, communication happens more rapidly, collaboration is more effective and it takes less effort to get ideas off the ground.

Rather than assign one person to own responsibility for a single area — e.g., digital marketing, creative, content or merchandising — businesses could hire with multidiscipline and cross-functional in mind. This manifests itself in hybrid roles such as those focused on both search engine optimization and content, or on both merchandising and marketing.

Using cross-functional metrics to achieve a common goal and leveraging tools that support agile workflow and collaboration are also key to digital commerce success.

To learn more in depth about aligning organizational design, technologies, tools and work processes to empower internal teams, download FitForCommerce’s whitepaper here.

Kathy Kimple is senior vice president, senior consultant, at FitForCommerce, a boutique consultancy that helps e-commerce and omnichannel businesses make smarter investment decisions on strategy, technology, marketing, merchandising, operations, financials, organizational design and more.