E-Commerce Beauty Buyer - Cosmetics

• We are looking for a commercially driven E-Commerce Beauty Buyer to accelerate the growth of our Cosmetics category.
• This is not a traditional buying role. The Buyer will own the end-to-end commercial performance of the category, combining buying, digital trading, assortment strategy, supplier negotiation, pricing, inventory management and customer insight to deliver sustainable GMV and profitability growth.
• The successful candidate will understand both Beauty and E-commerce: what customers are searching for, what converts, what trends are emerging and how to translate those insights into a high-performing online assortment.

Your responsibilities will include:

Category Ownership & Growth:

• Own category performance across GMV, sales growth, gross profit, margin and market share.
• Develop and execute the annual category growth strategy.
• Identify customer, brand, price-point and assortment white spaces.
• Drive customer acquisition, penetration, frequency and basket growth.
• Build clear beauty and emerging-brand strategies.

Digital Trading:

• Trade the category daily using real-time performance data.
• Monitor traffic, conversion, search demand, availability, pricing, promotional performance and SKU productivity.
• Identify underperforming areas and implement corrective actions quickly.
• Capitalise on trending products and emerging demand before competitors.
• Optimise promotional mechanics, bundles, gifting and digital exclusives.

Assortment & Range Productivity:

• Build a customer-led, digitally relevant assortment.
• Use data to determine which brands, products and price points should be expanded, maintained or exited.
• Drive productivity at SKU level.
• Reduce duplication, long-tail inefficiency and aged inventory.
• Maintain strong availability on high-demand and hero SKUs.

Brand Acquisition & Innovation:

• Identify and secure high-growth local, international, social-first and emerging beauty brands.
• Build a pipeline of new brands and product launches.
• Monitor global beauty trends, social media, search behaviour and competitor activity.
• Develop online exclusives and first-to-market opportunities.
• Ensure launches are executed with speed and commercial impact.

Pricing & Competitiveness:

• Maintain strong price competitiveness across key products and brands.
• Monitor competitor pricing and promotional activity.
• Balance customer value with margin requirements.
• Develop price architecture across opening, core, premium and prestige price points.

Supplier & Commercial Management:

• Lead negotiations across cost, margin, rebates, marketing investment, exclusivity, payment terms and promotional funding.
• Build strategic relationships with brand owners and distributors.
• Develop joint business plans with key suppliers.
• Hold suppliers accountable for availability, launch execution and commercial commitments.

Inventory & Availability:

• Partner closely with planning to ensure the right stock is available at the right time.
• Manage stock cover, sell-through, ageing and inventory productivity.
• Protect availability on top-selling SKUs.
• Balance growth ambition with working-capital efficiency.

On-Site Customer Experience:

• Work cross-functionally to improve category navigation, search and discoverability.
• Ensure product content, imagery, descriptions and attributes support conversion.
• Use customer reviews, search behaviour and shopping data to identify opportunities.
• Partner with marketing and site teams to create commercially powerful beauty campaigns and launches.

Qualification & Experience:

• 4–7+ years’ experience in e-commerce buying, category management, digital trading or commercial retail.
• Beauty/Cosmetics experience strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated ownership of meaningful GMV, sales and profitability targets.
• Strong understanding of e-commerce metrics including conversion, traffic, AOV, availability and promotional performance.
• Excellent commercial negotiation capability.
• Strong analytical and Excel/data skills.
• Proven ability to use data to make fast commercial decisions.
• Experience managing large SKU assortments is advantageous.
• Strong understanding of digital consumer behaviour and online retail trends.

Key Success Measures:

• GMV and sales growth.
• Gross profit and margin.
• Market-share growth.
• Conversion rate.
• Customer penetration.
• Average order value.
• In-stock availability.
• Stock turn.
• SKU productivity.
• Aged-stock reduction.
• New-brand contribution.
• Promotional ROI.
• Supplier funding.
• Speed to market.

The Environment: 

• takealot.com employees are entrepreneurial and dynamic, smart, customer- centric, fun and have the shared ambition of takealot.com being the leading e- commerce company in Africa. 
• We have fun, work hard, take ownership, work in teams to create solutions, and are always open to direct feedback/new ideas on where we can improve. 
• We are short on ego and high on output. 
• We are doers and not only thinkers, its all in the execution after all. 
• We love what we do and what we are creating.
• We seek to employ an Extra Ordinary Mind who is Smart, has Integrity, and is Hardworking