Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for E-commerce and Integration Manager

🎯 Role Definition

The E-commerce and Integration Manager is a hands-on technical product leader responsible for owning the commerce platform's integration architecture, executing and prioritizing integrations with ERP/OMS/PIM/payment/3PL/marketplace partners, and partnering with product, engineering, marketing, operations and external vendors to deliver a resilient, performant and scalable omnichannel commerce experience. This role requires a blend of technical integration expertise (APIs, webhooks, ETL/middleware), commercial e-commerce knowledge (catalog, pricing, checkout, fulfillment), and strong stakeholder and vendor management skills to translate business requirements into reliable integration solutions and measurable business outcomes.

Key SEO/LLM keywords: E-commerce Integration Manager, API Integrations, Middleware, ERP Integration, OMS, PIM, Payment Gateways, Marketplaces, Shopify, Magento, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, GA4, REST, GraphQL, Webhooks.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

Integration Specialist / Integration Developer with commerce experience
E-commerce Operations Manager or Channel Manager
Technical Product Owner or Technical Project Manager focused on commerce

Advancement To:

Senior E-commerce and Integration Manager
Head of Digital Commerce / Director of E-commerce
Director of Platforms & Integrations or VP of Digital/Commerce Technology

Lateral Moves:

Solutions Architect (Commerce/Platform)
Product Manager (E-commerce Platform Owner)
DevOps or Platform Engineering Lead (Commerce Infrastructure)

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Own the end-to-end integration strategy for the e-commerce ecosystem, defining standards and best practices for APIs, webhooks, authentication (OAuth), data formats (JSON/XML), and error handling to ensure reliable data flows between commerce, ERP, OMS, PIM and third-party marketplaces.
Lead the design, prioritization, scoping and delivery of integration projects (ERP, OMS, payment gateways, tax engines, PIM, CDP, 3PL, marketplaces) from requirements through production, balancing speed-to-market with technical debt and platform stability.
Collaborate with product managers and commercial stakeholders to map business processes (catalog, pricing, promotions, cart/checkout, order lifecycle, fulfillment, returns) into integration requirements and acceptance criteria.
Own integration vendor selection and management (iPaaS/Middleware like MuleSoft, Celigo, Boomi, Workato), negotiating contracts, SLAs, feature roadmaps and ensuring vendor deliverables align with platform strategy and security/compliance requirements.
Serve as the technical and functional liaison between internal engineering teams, external integration vendors, and business stakeholders — translating business requirements into technical user stories and acceptance criteria, and ensuring design review and code review discipline.
Design and validate robust event-driven and batch data flows to synchronize product catalogs, inventory, pricing and order data across channels while minimizing latency and cost.
Implement production-grade monitoring, alerting and observability for all critical integration points including failure detection, retry logic, SLA dashboards and incident runbooks to minimize downtime and lost revenue.
Drive the integration and release calendar, coordinating feature releases, migration windows, cutovers, data migrations, regression testing and rollback plans across internal teams, vendors and third-party platforms.
Define and manage the data contract and schema governance for catalog, product attributes, SKUs, pricing, tax, promotions and order payloads to avoid downstream reconciliation issues and ensure data quality.
Lead API lifecycle management — versioning strategy, deprecation policy, developer documentation (OpenAPI/Swagger), sandbox environments and partner onboarding processes to improve time-to-integrate.
Create and enforce robust security, compliance and privacy controls for integration points, including authentication, authorization, encryption in transit and at rest, PCI and GDPR considerations, and vendor security reviews.
Partner with analytics, SEO and marketing teams to guarantee tracking integrity (GA4, server-side tagging, GTM) across integrated channels and ensure event instrumentation supports conversion and funnel analytics.
Manage cross-functional integration testing (component, integration, end-to-end, performance) and coordinate test data, environments and QA resources to validate business flows before production deployment.
Lead performance tuning and optimization of integration flows to reduce latency during peak events (seasonal peaks, promotions) and to protect checkout and inventory accuracy under load.
Establish KPIs and reporting for integrations (integration uptime, order sync latency, reconciliation variance, rollback frequency, error rate) and present regular status and ROI updates to senior leadership.
Drive continuous improvement by running post-implementation reviews (post-mortems), capturing root causes for integration failures and implementing action plans to reduce recurrence and technical debt.
Manage budget, resource allocation and vendor spend for integration projects, creating cost/benefit analyses and prioritizing initiatives that increase revenue, reduce operational cost or mitigate risk.
Provide subject-matter expertise for new channel expansions (marketplaces, social commerce, international sites), owning the integration plan, partner onboarding and localization requirements.
Mentor and coach engineers, integration specialists and cross-functional product owners on integration best practices, reliability engineering and platform thinking to raise overall organization capability.
Lead data reconciliation and exception handling processes for orders, inventory and financial transactions, defining automated reconciliations and manual workflows to resolve discrepancies quickly.
Ensure that release and change management practices (feature flags, canary releases, blue-green deployments) are applied to integration changes to minimize consumer impact and enable rapid rollback when necessary.
Drive adoption of modern integration patterns, including REST/GraphQL APIs, event streaming (Kafka), serverless functions, and microservices where appropriate to improve scalability and maintainability.
Serve as an escalation point during major incidents affecting commerce integrations, coordinating cross-team response, customer communication and executive updates until resolution.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Maintain and update integration documentation, runbooks and onboarding guides for partner teams and third-party integrators.
Assist commercial teams with partner integrations, sandbox access and test plans during new merchant or marketplace rollouts.
Conduct periodic vendor performance reviews and recommend contractual changes or replacements when SLAs are not met.
Help define product taxonomy and guide catalog hygiene improvements to reduce integration mismatches and listing errors.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Proven experience designing and delivering commerce integrations: ERP (e.g., NetSuite, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics), OMS, PIM (Akeneo, Salsify), payment gateways, tax engines (Avalara), and 3PL/fulfillment providers.
Strong API design and integration experience with RESTful APIs, GraphQL, webhooks, OpenAPI/Swagger and schema management.
Hands-on familiarity with middleware/iPaaS platforms (MuleSoft, Celigo, Dell Boomi, Workato) and integration patterns (ETL, ELT, event-driven, streaming).
Proficiency with data formats and transformation tools: JSON, XML, CSV, XSLT, mapping and transformation logic.
Experience with cloud platforms and services (AWS, Azure, GCP) and serverless functions for lightweight integration logic.
Solid SQL skills for reconciliation, reporting and data investigation; familiarity with data pipelines and basic ETL concepts.
Working knowledge of e-commerce platforms (Shopify Plus, Magento/Adobe Commerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce) and their integration extension points.
Familiarity with order lifecycle, inventory management, pricing & promotions, returns, and tax calculations as they relate to integrations.
Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, New Relic, Sentry) and building dashboards for SLA/KPI tracking.
Experience with authentication and security protocols (OAuth2, JWT), PCI compliance considerations, and vendor security assessments.
Comfortable with CI/CD pipelines, feature flags, environment promotion and deployment gating for integrations.
Knowledge of analytics instrumentation and event tracking (GA4, GTM, server-side tagging) to ensure accurate measurement across channels.
Familiarity with marketplace integration patterns (Amazon, Walmart, eBay) including feeds, order ingestion and settlement.
Basic scripting or programming skills (Python, Node.js) to prototype integration glue or automation scripts.

Soft Skills

Strong stakeholder management: can translate technical constraints into business decisions and influence cross-functional teams.
Excellent written and verbal communication, including API documentation and technical requirement writing.
Strategic thinker with ability to create and execute multi-quarter integration roadmaps that align with company goals.
Proven prioritization skills in a fast-paced environment, balancing tactical fixes and strategic platform investments.
Strong problem-solving and root cause analysis capabilities under incident conditions.
Collaborative team leader and mentor who can build capability across product, engineering and operations.
Customer-focused mindset with a drive to reduce friction in merchant and customer flows.
Comfortable presenting to senior leadership, crafting executive-level summaries and ROI-driven recommendations.
Adaptability and resilience when dealing with evolving requirements and third-party vendor variability.
Detail oriented with strong quality assurance and governance mindset.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, Supply Chain or related field.

Preferred Education:

Master’s degree (MS, MBA) or relevant technical certifications (MuleSoft, AWS, Google Cloud, PMP, Scrum Product Owner).

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science / Software Engineering
Information Systems / Data Engineering
Business Administration / E-commerce
Supply Chain Management / Operations

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

5–8 years of combined e-commerce product, integration, or technical program experience with at least 2–3 years in a managerial or lead capacity.

Preferred:

7–10+ years with demonstrable experience managing complex commerce integrations at scale, leading cross-functional teams, and driving platform-level improvements across ERP/OMS/PIM and marketplace ecosystems. Prior experience with cloud infrastructure, iPaaS, and modern API-first commerce architectures is highly desirable.