Role Overview
Clients hire a Collectibles Store Manager at the Strategist level to lead, not just list. This role exists to drive long-term sales through intelligent inventory decisions, competitive pricing, and a sustained understanding of collector behavior. Clients expect you to treat the store like a living business—analyzing performance, timing key moves, and protecting margins in a market where value fluctuates daily. You’re not just managing product; you’re managing demand cycles, buyer psychology, and platform leverage.
This is not a listing VA role dressed up with fancier reports. The value here isn’t in how many SKUs you upload—it’s your ability to shape the store’s trajectory. Miss the market trends or overvalue low-potential inventory, and the client bleeds time and capital. Execute well, and the store can compound value season after season. The risk is real. The upside is equally real. You own the results.
Standards You Must Meet
• They expect sharp inventory judgment—every sourcing or listing decision must show you understand what sells, when, and why.
• You’re paid to move the store forward, so weekly results should reflect pricing tests, title improvements, and tactical relistings—not just maintenance.
• A flat or stale store signals missed signals; clients will notice if nothing improves and nothing changes.
• You must actively protect the store from overstocking low-velocity items or mispricing seasonal inventory—bad bets cost real money.
• Visibility matters: clients expect you to push lead SKUs with smart promotions or offer tweaks, not let winners sit idle.
• Good Store Managers don’t wait to be told—market shifts, calendar phases, and sales slumps must trigger action without prompting.
• Reporting isn’t for decoration; it must surface insights that shape next moves, not just echo past activity.
• Ultimately, they judge you by sales momentum—does the store feel more valuable month to month, or not?
What You’ll Be Doing
• Review the store weekly to flag underperforming SKUs and implement relist, reprice, or retire actions.
• Track pricing shifts using Terapeak and sales data to guide listing updates and protect margin on key categories.
• Identify high-demand items and push them through targeted offers, coupons, or short-term promotions.
• Lead title audits and optimize for discovery based on evolving search behavior and platform indexing.
• Make inventory decisions based on measurable sales velocity—not sunk cost, supplier pressure, or catalog bias.
• Monitor calendar cycles (holidays, events, sports seasons) to time sourcing, markdowns, and liquidations.
• Build and maintain reporting that triggers action—not just records activity—on store health and SKU movement.
• Spot operational inefficiencies and implement basic automations to reduce manual work across the workflow.
What You’ll Hand Over
• A weekly Inventory Action Sheet showing cut, relist, and promotion decisions tied to performance signals.
• A Pricing + Title Optimization Log documenting SKUs updated, test outcomes, and recommendations for scaling wins.
• A Lead SKU Push Plan with visibility tactics applied to top-performers (offers, markdowns, or promo slots).
• A Month-End Pattern Report connecting sell-through, timing, and sourcing gaps to next-move recommendations.
• A Clean SKU Kill List with low-velocity inventory flagged for removal, break-up, or bulk offload, linked to data — not opinion.
Tools You’ll Need to Use
• eBay Seller Hub – Central dashboard for managing listings, orders, promotions, and store performance.
• Terapeak (within eBay) – Research tool used to analyze pricing trends, sales history, and demand across collectible categories.
• Google Sheets – Essential for real-time tracking of SKUs, inventory counts, order fulfillment, and vendor coordination.
• eBay Listing Tool – Key for creating and editing optimized, high-conversion collectible listings.
• eBay Messaging System – Primary channel for timely, professional communication with buyers to maintain top-rated seller status.
• eBay Promotions Manager – Tool for setting up and managing store-wide offers, markdowns, and coupons to drive conversions.
• ShipStation or equivalent shipping software – Used to batch-process labels, track orders, and streamline the fulfillment pipeline.
Why Work Smarter
If you cannot automate basic repetitive tasks — like syncing spreadsheets, sending reminders, or tagging sales by SKU — your client is burning money unnecessarily. Even if they haven’t asked for it yet, sellers expect their Strategist to drive efficiency, not repeat manual work that could be systematized.
This skill isn’t officially required today, but it’s quickly becoming a quiet baseline across high-performing teams. At OES, we treat it that way — because the market already does.
Why Your Work Matters
Right now, every collectibles seller on eBay is facing one truth: if the store isn’t evolving, it’s leaking. Buyer demand shifts fast, pricing windows close daily, and stale inventory stacks up quietly but expensively. Clients are not paying for someone to keep listings online—they’re paying for someone to ensure those listings convert, compound value, and move the store forward with purpose.
This role isn’t optional; it’s business-critical. A miss on pricing, timing, or visibility directly hits cash flow. A mistimed sourcing decision can tank margins for the quarter. But when you read the signals and act decisively, stores grow in value—and clients notice. That’s why this is not support work. It’s ownership work, and the results are visible every week in revenue, sell-through, and buyer interest.
What We Expect From You
As a Strategist-level Collectibles Store Manager at OES, you hold the store’s revenue line—and reputation—in your hands. You’re expected to make judgment calls daily that balance pace with risk, profitability with platform compliance. That means you don’t just follow a plan—you build one. You see patterns in buyer behavior, sourcing workflows, and inventory velocity, then act decisively to shape results. We’re looking for someone who treats inputs like levers and understands that every decision made in a collectibles store either compounds or costs.
You’re accountable for store performance at a macro level. That includes managing a team that not only executes but aligns to your strategic direction. You deal in edge cases and exceptions, not just repeatables, and you escalate only when you’ve exhausted the levers under your control. You set the discipline standard—for pacing, offer logic, title strategy, listing compliance, and team communication. This role is a revenue-bearing command post, and we need you to fill it with precision.
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$615 – $1,580
OES salary standards reflect real market benchmarks, tier and experience level, ensuring fair pay for VAs and realistic expectations for clients.
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