eCommerce Director - Motorsports (Remote, USA)

Are you an eCommerce pro trapped in an uninspiring role? Do you wish you could use your talents to grow a successful, passion-driven brand that is disrupting an industry? And maybe, just maybe, you’re also a car enthusiast? If this sounds like you, then Apex Wheels has an exciting opportunity for you.

Apex Wheels is a leading provider of high-performance automotive wheels and accessories, catering to the motorsport and performance car enthusiast community. Our mission is to provide wheels that deliver real and measurable performance, and to protect consumers from a misleading industry full of fashion-focused wheels.

We’ve been working tirelessly for the past year to refresh our brand style and messaging. Our new website is about to launch in August, and has been the CEO’s special project for a long time. If you see blue accents and buttons then you’re still looking at our old website. We’re looking for an eCommerce Director to take the reins and drive our ecommerce objectives through a new, dedicated department and team so he can confidently step away, knowing it’s in good hands. You’ll take the lead and grow the team, ensuring that the CEO’s vision is maintained and our CMO’s goals are met. Your role would take over ownership of the site, from strategy to implementation, going forward. You’ll identify the needs for feature enhancements, site optimizations and more.

We’ve tee’d up a really strong base of a website with a highly custom front and back end. Despite the years of work we’ve put into developing our system, we still consider this just the starting line. We built a race car that runs. You need to tune it to make it fast, and you need to maintain it to keep us in the race.

You’ll work under the leadership of our CMO, and side-by-side with our Performance Marketing Director. Our eCommerce Systems Administrator and various contract developers and consultants will report to you. You’ll add team members and additional contractors to meet your department’s objectives.

To be successful in this position, not only will you need to be an eCommerce champion, you’ll also need strong leadership and collaboration skills. While strong project management skills are a plus, you’ll have a Marketing Project Manager to support you. We need a people motivator and director - not just a technical wiz who lacks the soft skills needed to support and manage their team, or hold expensive agencies accountable. There are plenty of people to handle the nitty gritty technical details. You do need to understand technical systems well enough that you can ask the right questions, give proper guidance, and keep us from wasting development resources, or choosing the wrong systems/tools. We need an experienced General who previously fought in the trenches.

If you haven’t built and managed a meaningfully complex eCommerce website before – one that required thousands of hours of custom development, or a budget in the millions – then you likely don’t have the experience this position requires. A straightforward Shopify, Magento, or other system with a tweaked theme and a few plug-ins is not enough experience to handle the complexity of our system, and the workload of our developers. If your highest level of experience is managing a website, including the catalog database, all by yourself, then you haven’t worked at the scale we’re looking for. If you haven’t done extensive A/B campaign testing or continuously worked to rank higher for specific key terms, then you’re probably not the right fit.

We’re looking for candidates who really know how to squeeze performance out of a website like an experienced engine tuner. Candidates who are highly data-driven in their approach to improvement. Who have excellent customer experience instincts, and who know when just copying what other businesses are already doing will not be competitive enough.

While we welcome motorsports enthusiasts to apply, proven experience in any DTC product category - particularly products with higher price points, and not impulse purchases - is what really counts. Leveling up our eCommerce business will go much further than expertise in wheel fitments or experience at the race track.

This is a remote position that can work from anywhere in the contiguous USA and may include occasional domestic travel. 

How to apply: In your cover letter, tell us about the most complicated custom feature you came up with and implemented into an eCommerce site in your past experience. Be extremely specific - mention the challenges, the solutions you developed/implemented, the team members involved, and how your work resulted in supporting business goals. Please also tell us a little about your background in motorsports. If you’re not into motorsports, then tell us why you can still thrive at Apex.

Responsibilities:

• Own Our eCommerce Experience: Support Apex’s goals and mission in every way the website can assist it, from direct-to-consumer or dealer sales, to customer service and support. Act as an advisor to leadership with respect to eCommerce best practices, providing guidance and direction. Own every eCommerce-related project/activity. Supervise outside web developers, graphic/UX/UI designers and other contractors to ensure adherence to predetermined strategies, goals and deadlines. Oversee the look, feel, and arrangement of our website, working closely with our design and dev agencies to get the right interface and structure for the best, most secure, easy-to-navigate customer experience and robust sales conversion. Work in partnership with our eCommerce Systems Administrator and outside partners to build new pages and site features for our retail and wholesale websites. 
• Oversee Website Maintenance: Keep our website from going down and from product data being out of date or inaccurate. Oversee website sales and promotions (build up and tear down). Implement processes to ensure that website issues are identified before they impact our customers. Build and report on proactive testing plans, then support the resolution, tracking and monitoring of website bugs. Monitor the resolution of bugs from start to finish, and ensure that all relevant team members are well-informed of bugs and their status. Work with our eCommerce Systems Administrator to create, update and manage digital assets and content, including all promotions, educational content and SEO. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to manage product catalog, promotional build-outs, product feeds, posting of articles and content, etc. Ensure that the site is being properly backed up and updated, either internally or via outside partners. Keep all departments proactively informed of issues, solutions, timing, etc. 
• Own Website Optimization: You’re responsible for getting the most out of our site. Using eCommerce best practices, work with the Performance Marketing Director and outside SEO and CRO consultants to continuously optimize our website and build high-converting sales funnels by utilizing SEO, PPC campaigns, product feeds, email and targeted landing pages. Race to improve conversion rates before Black Friday. Implement and monitor the execution of all A/B testing to research, formulate and test ways to optimize UX/UI and increase conversions. Ensure that all organic and paid traffic-driving programs work in harmony with the website. Work with internal and external parties to ensure website tracking/site tagging technology (Meta Pixel, Google tag, etc) is running properly and capturing impactful data to support paid media. Proactively seek and provide data related to optimization through internal teams including tracking and monitoring the customer journey, GA4 conversion rate, and provide insights on customer shopping trends to support gaps. Work with your team to develop user journey maps, identifying critical paths to conversion and providing insights that inform web design, development and the testing roadmap. Collaborate, internally and externally, to establish site tagging, pixel and UTM strategies that support highly accurate, granular data collection. Use heat maps, scroll maps, and journey recording tools to prove that investing in development is worth it.
• Implement eCommerce Process Enhancements: Identify appropriate tools that will allow us to turn granular data into actionable, effective online marketing strategies. Organize and maintain up-to-date documentation on all eCommerce systems, practices, procedures, etc. Create weekly reporting on key performance metrics (e.g. site traffic, conversion analysis, user behaviors, ROAS, etc.) in support of the company’s goals for growth. Ensure that a simple extended vacation by our System Admin will not leave us clueless and scratching our heads.
• Lead Our eCommerce Team: Under the direction of our new CMO, build and oversee a diverse team of eCommerce professionals. This includes interaction with team members at each phase of the employee life cycle, from hiring to exiting. You’ll be responsible for delivering timely and frequent feedback, delivering performance evaluations and compensation reviews and for mentoring/coaching/growing our eCommerce team members. Create and prioritize department and individual goals. Select and oversee consultants, contractors, and agencies to supplement our internal team. Keep those outsiders in check and on budget. Know when to outsource vs. insource. 

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in marketing management, business, information systems, or other relevant education
• A minimum of 7 years of professional experience building enterprise eCommerce platforms
• A minimum of 5+ years of people management
• Demonstrable track record of using data - not supposition - to devise sales-enhancing online strategies and improve ROI
• Experience with headless eCommerce and proven ability to incorporate the following (or similar) technology into a robust eCommerce Strategy: Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Meta Pixels, PPC, CMS platforms, heat-mapping tools, Magento and Magento2, Sanity, Mandrill, Mailchimp, Google Optimize or similar A/B testing platform
• Extensive experience working with outside developers and agencies
• Highly analytical and skilled in researching, dashboarding and reporting 
• Creative and energetic team player with a passion for achievement
• Organized self-starter who can prioritize assignments and manage projects independently
• Experience with project management software, ideally Notion and ClickUp
• Experience in and/or a passion for motorsports is preferred, but not required

Benefits

• $120k - 180k annual salary, depending on experience
• 100% Apex paid employee medical, dental, and vision benefits with buy-up options and robust company contributions towards dependent medical benefits 
• 3 weeks of paid vacation leave - earn more with tenure and advancement
• Fully remote work with a flexible working environment where work/life integration is encouraged
• 401k with employer matching
• Paid Sick Leave
• Paid Holidays
• Support your track addiction with reimbursements for HPDE and autocross event registration fees
• Eligibility for the SEMA college grant and loan forgiveness program
• Casual in-office dress environment where T-shirts, jeans, and shorts are welcome
• Employee discounts and freebies on Apex products and swag
• Participate in company activities including karting, spectating at races, track days, and more