Fractional Chief Digital Officer for ecommerce
A senior ecommerce executive on your leadership team for a few days a month. You get someone who owns the digital channel, sets the roadmap, and holds your platform, agency, and vendors to it, without hiring a full-time executive before the channel can carry one.
When a part-time executive is the right hire•
Most merchants and distributors in the middle of the market have a platform, an agency or a small team, and nobody senior whose job is the channel itself.
What the role covers•
The same responsibilities a full-time Chief Digital Officer would carry, sized to the hours the business needs.
Strategy and roadmap
One plan for the digital channel, tied to revenue and margin, that the rest of the leadership team can read and challenge.
- A twelve-month roadmap with costs, owners, and the order things happen in
- Platform and architecture decisions made on evidence, including when to leave things alone
- A short monthly report on what moved and what is next
Vendors and delivery
Someone on your side of the table who has built these systems and can tell a fair estimate from a padded one.
- Review of agency and vendor proposals, scopes, and invoices
- Technical review of what is being built before it ships
- Selection and negotiation when a platform, search, or data vendor has to change
Team and numbers
The working habits that keep the channel improving after the first plan is written.
- A regular meeting with your team and vendors, run against the roadmap
- Search, catalog, and conversion measures that the business actually reviews
- Hiring help when it is time for a full-time lead, and a handover to that person
How an engagement works
- It starts with an audit. Two weeks on your catalog, search, data flow, and platform, ending in findings and a prioritized roadmap. You keep the roadmap whether or not we continue.
- Then a monthly retainer. A fixed number of days each month, a standing leadership meeting, and direct access between meetings. The scope is set against the roadmap and reviewed each quarter.
- No long lock-in. The retainer runs month to month after the first quarter. The aim is a channel your own people can run.
Advisor first, builder only if you ask
Xumulus also builds: search, catalog indexing, and storefronts for large catalogs, described on the large-catalog page and the Neuron page. In this role that work is never assumed. Recommendations are written so that your current agency or any other firm can carry them out, and if Xumulus is one of the options for a piece of work, that is stated plainly and the decision is yours.
Start with the two-week audit•
The audit is the first step of every fractional engagement and also stands on its own. It shows what the role would work on in the first two quarters.
Who you would be working with
Daniel Kozlowski has built and run large commerce and enterprise content systems for twenty years, across Oracle WebCenter, Adobe Commerce (Magento), BigCommerce, Shopify, and Akeneo. That work includes a storefront integrated with Oracle ERP for a jewelry retailer with more than 80 stores, delivered in five months after two failed launches by others; a brand-asset portal for a wine family with more than 60 brands; and the agent knowledge portals at US Cellular. The fractional role is the same judgment without the build attached: what to fix first, what to stop paying for, and what to leave alone.
Find out if this fits your business
Send a note with your platform, rough SKU count, and the decision you are facing. You will get a direct answer from Daniel on whether a fractional role makes sense, including when it does not.