Digital Trading Assistant

A Digital Trading Assistant helps run the commercial side of an online shop — usually a retailer's website or app. The job is about deciding what products get shown where, how promotions are set up, and how categories and search results are arranged so that customers find things and the site hits its sales targets. You work inside an ecommerce or online trading team, alongside buyers, merchandisers, marketing and the site's content and tech teams.

Starting salary: £24k–£30k
Live graduate jobs: 1 open now
Main way in: Direct application to an assistant or junior ecommerce role
They usually ask for: A degree is usually expected but the subject often does not…

Approximate graduate salary

Typically around £24,000–30,000 to start, though this varies widely — London and large online-only retailers tend to sit at the upper end or above it, while regional roles and smaller brands often sit lower. Bonus schemes linked to sales performance are common in retail but not universal.

What you'd actually do

Checking yesterday's trading figures first thing — sales by category, conversion rate (the share of visitors who buy), average order value, best and worst sellers — and flagging anything that looks off
Updating the site: swapping homepage banners, refreshing landing pages for a promotion, setting products live, retiring lines that have sold out
Merchandising category pages — reordering products so strong sellers, newly arrived stock or high-margin lines appear near the top, and making sure nothing out of stock is sitting on page one
Setting up and checking promotions and discount codes before they go live, then verifying they actually work on the site and have not broken pricing elsewhere

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Pulling reports in Excel or Google Sheets and the analytics tool the business uses, then writing a short summary for the weekly trade meeting where the team reviews performance
Checking search results for common terms and tidying up the rules behind them so searching, say, 'winter coat' returns sensible products
Liaising with buying and stock teams about what is arriving, what is overstocked and what needs pushing, and with marketing about what is being advertised that week

How graduates get in

Direct application to an assistant or junior ecommerce role — this is the most common way in. Many of these jobs are advertised as entry-level and do not require a specific degree.
Retail graduate schemes with a buying, merchandising or ecommerce stream. Common at larger high-street and online-only retailers, usually with autumn application deadlines and assessment centres involving a numerical exercise.
Internships or placement years in ecommerce, buying or merchandising — a placement year is a strong route in and some retailers hire placement students back after graduation.
Sideways moves from a related junior role: ecommerce content or online assistant, allocation or branch merchandising, digital marketing executive, or a customer service/store role at the same company. Internal moves into digital trading are very common in retail.

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Agency or marketplace routes — starting at a digital agency or on an online marketplace team and moving brand-side later. Less common as a first step but it happens.

What employers ask for

A degree is usually expected but the subject often does not matter. Business, marketing, economics, fashion management and maths-heavy subjects are common, though plenty of people come from unrelated subjects.
Comfort with numbers is the real gate. Employers often test this rather than asking for a particular qualification — expect a numerical reasoning test or a spreadsheet exercise at interview.
Solid Excel or Google Sheets. Filters, lookups and pivot tables are the practical baseline; you will be asked about this.
Grade requirements vary a lot. Structured graduate schemes often ask for a 2:1 and sometimes set A-level or GCSE maths thresholds; direct-entry assistant roles are frequently more flexible and weigh experience and interest more heavily.

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Some demonstrated interest in online retail — a placement, a retail job, running an online shop or side project, or simply being able to talk fluently about how a site you use merchandises its products.
No professional exams or chartered status apply to this role. Any formal training tends to be on-the-job or short courses in analytics tools.

Skills that matter

Reading sales data and spotting the story in it

The core of the job is noticing that a category dipped, working out whether it was stock, price, a broken page or the weather, and saying so before anyone else does.

Spreadsheet fluency

Daily and weekly trade reporting is built in spreadsheets, and slow or error-prone work here shows up immediately in meetings.

Attention to detail under time pressure

A mistyped discount or a promotion that goes live early is visible to every customer and costs real money, so checking work carefully matters more than speed.

Commercial judgement

You are constantly choosing between showing what sells best, what makes the most margin and what stock needs clearing, and those three answers are often different.

Working with content management and analytics systems

Most of the day is spent in a CMS (the tool that controls what appears on the site), a product information system and an analytics platform, so picking up unfamiliar software quickly is essential.

Clear, brief written updates

Trade meetings run on short summaries, and buyers and senior managers will act on your note rather than reading the underlying data themselves.

Putting these on a CV? We counted which skills 12,914 live graduate adverts ask for, and what to do with the answer — part of our application advice.

Where it leads

Digital Trading Assistant or Ecommerce Assistant — learning the systems, owning reporting and a small set of categories. Typically a year or two, though this varies.
Digital Trader, Online Merchandiser or Ecommerce Executive — owning categories outright, setting the trading plan for them and making the calls on promotions and ranging.
Senior Trader or Trading Manager — running a larger area of the site, managing an assistant or two, and sitting in planning conversations with buying and marketing.
Head of Ecommerce or Head of Online Trading, and from there director-level ecommerce roles. Timelines here vary widely and depend heavily on company size — a small brand may promote quickly into a broad role, a large retailer more slowly into a narrower one.
Common sideways moves: into buying or merchandising, into digital marketing or performance marketing, into ecommerce product management, or into marketplace and third-party channel management. Many people use the assistant role to work out which of these they prefer.

What people get wrong

“'Trading' means financial trading — stocks, shares, City dealing rooms.”

In retail, 'trading' means trading the business — managing day-to-day sales performance of a shop, in this case an online one. It has nothing to do with financial markets, and applicants regularly apply having misread this.

“It is a marketing job about making the site look good.”

Design and brand sit elsewhere. This role is judged on sales, margin and conversion, and most of the decisions are commercial — which product earns the top slot, whether a promotion is worth the margin it gives away.

“It is mostly creative and non-numerical, so it suits people who avoid maths.”

It is one of the more numbers-heavy entry roles in retail. Daily reporting, margin calculations and forecasting are a permanent part of the week, and interviews usually test this directly.

“You need a technical or coding background because it is 'digital'.”

You need to be confident using the systems, not building them. Coding is not normally required, although basic familiarity with how websites and data feeds work makes you considerably more useful.

Where this varies

The job title covers quite different realities. At a large retailer with a dedicated ecommerce department, the role is specialised: you may own reporting and on-site merchandising for one category and nothing else. At a smaller brand or a start-up, 'digital trading' can stretch to email marketing, paid search, stock decisions and customer service in the same week. Sector matters too — fashion and beauty trade fast with constant newness and frequent promotions, while grocery, homeware or B2B ecommerce move more slowly and lean harder on stock availability and search. Peak periods also differ sharply: in most consumer retail, the autumn through January run is intense and leave is often restricted around it. Finally, some employers use 'digital trading' to mean working with online marketplaces or third-party sites rather than the company's own website, so it is worth checking the advert carefully.

See all 1 live Digital Trading Assistant jobsFrom employers' own careers sites, updated daily Tailor your CV for this roleFree with an account, 3 a month

General guidance about the role across the UK market, not about any specific employer. Entry routes and requirements vary — always check the individual job advert.