When an ecommerce hire leaves: access and risk

An ecommerce person resigning is an operational risk event, not an HR event. HR will handle notice, dues and the full and final settlement. What you have to handle is that one individual currently holds live access to the systems that move your money, your stock and your prices, and that a meaningful part of how the business runs exists only in their head.

The revocation list is longer than you think

Write it once and keep it as a file. For a mid level ecommerce owner at an Indian consumer brand it usually runs past twenty entries, and the ones people forget are the expensive ones.

• Secondary user accounts on every seller panel, including the marketplaces you barely sell on and the ones where the account has gone dormant.
• Advertising console permissions, which on several platforms sit outside the seller panel and survive its removal.
• Courier and aggregator dashboards, where a live login can still book, cancel and redirect shipments.
• The payment gateway, any settlement portal, and read access to bank statements.
• The WhatsApp Business account and any broadcast or chatbot tool, which is very often tied to a personal handset.
• Shared drives and the catalogue master, where the real risk is not deletion but the copy that walks out.
• The channel manager or OMS, the ERP, the returns tool, the review tool, the analytics property, the ticketing queue, the shared inbox and any password manager vault.
• Group memberships, including seller community groups, the platform brand group and the internal ops groups where escalations get raised.

The mobile number problem

This is the India specific wrinkle and it causes the real damage. A large share of platform accounts, gateway logins and courier panels are bound to an individual’s mobile number and personal email for OTP and password recovery. If the person who opened your quick commerce or marketplace account used their own number, then on the day they leave, the ability to recover that account leaves with them. Deleting their user does not fix it, because recovery runs through the phone, not the user list.

Fix this while nobody is leaving. Move every account to a company owned number on a handset that stays in the office, and to a role based email such as marketplace at your domain. Where a platform will not let you change the registered number without fresh verification, do it anyway, once, painfully. During a notice period, go account by account and check which ones still resolve to the departing person, and change them before the last working day rather than after.

Capture the knowledge before the notice period runs out

Notice periods at this level in India typically run thirty to ninety days, and almost all of it gets spent on transactional handover while the valuable knowledge stays in one head. The valuable knowledge is very specific. Which category manager at which platform actually replies. What the workaround is for the SKU that will not take a bulk price update. Which pincodes you quietly stopped serving and why. What was promised verbally in the last joint business plan. Which recurring deduction you dispute every month and exactly how the claim is worded.

Get it out with a working session, not a form. Sit with them and walk through one full week of their calendar and their sent mail, asking why at every recurring item. Record it with their agreement. One hour of that produces more usable material than any template ever handed to a person on notice.

A handover document that is worth reading

The useless kind lists responsibilities. Manages the marketplace accounts, handles ads, coordinates with the 3PL. That is just the job description again, written by someone who has stopped caring.

The useful kind is organised by what happens next, and it contains every recurring task with its real day, deadline and the consequence of missing it; every open item with a named counterpart and a current status; every login and where its recovery lands; every unwritten rule and workaround with the reason it exists; the list of people at platforms, couriers and vendors with what each one is actually useful for; and the things they were about to do, with why. Ask for it in week one of notice and read it while they are still there to be questioned.

The person who was the only one who knew

Before you accept the resignation calmly, ask one question about every system and every relationship. If this person disappeared tomorrow with no notice, what would stop working. Any answer other than nothing is a single point of failure that existed long before anyone resigned.

Two of them hurt most. The platform relationship, where the category manager knows a person rather than a brand, and the manual workaround that only one person performs. For the first, introduce the successor or yourself by name, on a call, before the final week. For the second, make them run the workaround in front of somebody else twice, and write it down on the second run.

A sequence that works

Week one of notice: build the revocation list, identify every account tied to their number or personal email, and book the knowledge session. Middle of the notice period: move accounts to company numbers, run the introductions, collect the handover document and question it line by line. Final week: reverse the shadowing, so the successor does the work and the leaver watches. Last working day: revoke everything on the list in one sitting rather than over a fortnight, then check the activity logs a week later to confirm nothing is still logging in.

Run this the same way every time, including for people you like and would happily rehire. It is not suspicion. It is the same discipline as counting stock.