Merchant Acquisition Agent at Kilimall

Department/Function: Supply

Reports to:Business Director

Location: Mombasa Road

Warehouse @ Athi River Athi55 Management

High level Position Summary (Describe the basic purpose of the role; key areas of responsibility)

The Merchant Acquisition Agent is responsible for executing the rollout and maintenance of specialized support for Merchants that complement Kilimall’s Merchant Marketplace. This role involves sourcing new merchants, providing stellar product service levels to Kilimall merchants, and ensuring a robust catalog of appealing Kilimall Marketplace products through varied merchant acquisition.

Responsibilities and Duties:

• General project management of Merchant Acquisition Support tasks and Kilimall Marketplace Systems activities required to assemble, train and deploy the Marketplace with a targeted number of Merchants/Products.
• Category Strategy and Ownership:
• Work on category planning and business strategy; drive best-in-class customer experience, maximize units sold and avg. price per unit sold through timely analysis and action.
• Technical project management: Automate and scale the category level growth via new selection, product listing quality and in stock.
• Define opportunities to enhance our merchant experience and improve site merchandising, customer, and site experience.
• Merchant Management:
• Manage the Merchant Onboarding process, including creation of, enhancements to and tracking of process to identify and sign new seller partnerships.
• Ability to manage immediate response to “fire drills” necessitated by Merchants or internal teams.
• Respond to escalated merchant product phone calls and emails.
• Technical Project Management:
• Marketplace Merchant Support & Communications:
• Triage escalated product related emails to appropriate development resources as needed.
• Communicate with merchants on behalf of Kilimall regarding existing bugs and expected resolution times for fixes
• Develop and disseminate usable training materials regarding Kilimall Marketplace for use by all frontline staff (Merchant Support Process and Guidelines).
• Work with development and business development teams to enact best practice policies for use of Kilimall Marketplace.
• Provide on-call support for any issue outside of normal business hours as needed by frontline “Tier 1” contact points.
• Merchant Analysis:
• Consolidating a weekly report on reasons for ticket escalations, patterns with any type of system or process failure affecting Merchants, and number of inquiries during on/off/peak hours.

Special Requirements:

The ideal candidate will be a self-starter with a passion for independent, creative problem-solving, have proven data analysis skills, show strong ownership/commitment, have proven leadership experience in managing projects, and bring relevant insights in technology. They will be comfortable getting hands dirty to deliver a set of business and customer experience improvement results and bring innovative ideas to the table every day, in order to find better ways of accomplishing our Marketplace objectives.

The successful Kilimall Merchant Acquisition Agent must have:

• Experience supporting Merchants within a Storefront/Marketplace
• Prior experience sourcing Merchants into new online storefront/marketplaces.
• Extreme technical interest and capability
• Exceptional attention to detail, independent worker, extreme comfort in potentially stressful, ambiguous, fast changing environments
• Experience in consumer or small business-facing support
• Empathetic business tone with merchants using our
• Desire to see all issues to complete resolution and ownership of projects passed to you from management.
• Strong demonstrated problem solving and documentation skills; extremely clear and concise written and Verbal communication skills

Qualifications:

• A higher diploma or a bachelor’s degree from an accredited university in Sales and Marketing or any other relevant course:
• 1-2 years working experience in a similar position preferably in an e-Commerce company.

Behavioral Competencies:

• Very strong personality and organizational skills.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• A good team player.
• A good leader with people management and time management skills.
• High level of commitment to duty, and discipline.
• Demonstrable ability to put customer interests first.
• Strong focus on impact.
• Unquestionable level of integrity.