The first 90 days of a new ecommerce hire
The most common way a good ecommerce hire fails in India is not incompetence. It is nine weeks of watching, because nobody created their panel logins and nobody gave them one thing that was theirs.
- Sequence access by blast radius, starting with reporting and the shared inbox on day one and moving to pricing and settlement views by week three or four.
- Sharing the founder's login instead of creating named secondary users destroys your audit trail and leaves every OTP landing on the wrong phone.
- Give the new hire one small surface they own outright by the end of week two, small enough that a mistake is recoverable and visible enough that its number is theirs in the weekly review.
- If the activity logs on your seller panels show no changes made by their user after six weeks, they do not yet have a job, whatever the offer letter says.
The most common way a good ecommerce hire fails in India is not incompetence. It is spending nine weeks watching, because nobody created their logins and nobody gave them one thing that was theirs. By week ten they are interviewing elsewhere and the founder concludes the hire was wrong.
Day one access, in the right order
Access is the whole of the first week. Order it by blast radius, lowest first.
- Read access to reporting. Sales dashboards, the OMS or channel manager, business reports on every seller panel. Day one, no exceptions.
- The shared inbox and ticket queues. Seller support cases, courier escalations, the customer care inbox. This is where they learn what actually breaks in your business.
- Seller panel users, view first, then transacting. Create a user in their own name with their own work email. Start on reports and views, move to price, inventory and content edits by the end of week two.
- Ad account access. Reporting first, then campaign edit rights on one campaign set rather than the whole account.
- Financial and settlement views last. Payout reports, claim filing, the reconciliation sheet. Usually week three or four.
Do not solve this by handing over the founder’s login. It is the fastest option and it is wrong on four counts. You lose the audit trail on every price and stock change, so you can never tell who did what. You cannot revoke it later without changing a password that six other things depend on. The OTP still lands on the founder’s phone, so the new person is blocked every time they log in from a different device. And most platform terms expect named users anyway. Creating a secondary user takes about twenty minutes per platform. Do it before they join.
What to hand over, and what to hold back
Hand over the unambiguous high volume work immediately: the daily inventory check, the pending returns queue, listing content corrections, the weekly report. It builds context faster than any deck and mistakes are cheap.
Hold back three things for at least a month. Pricing authority, because a marketplace price change has downstream effects on buy box, ad efficiency and quick commerce margin that nobody understands in week two. The platform relationship, meaning the category manager conversations, until they have sat in on three of them. And any communication going out under the brand name to a large customer or as a formal escalation. Tell them explicitly that these three are held and when they get them. Withholding without a stated end date reads as distrust and is the thing people quote back to you in exit conversations.
Give them a small surface before a large one
Pick one thing they own outright by the end of week two. Small enough that a mistake is recoverable, real enough that its numbers are visible to everybody. Good candidates: one channel that is under five percent of revenue, one sub category of the catalogue, the RTO and returns reduction number, or the ad account for a single defensive campaign set.
Owning it means they decide, they present it in the weekly review, and you do not overrule them without a conversation first. The surface itself does not matter much. What matters is that everyone in the company, including them, now knows one number that belongs to them.
Checkpoints at 30, 60 and 90
Put all three in the calendar on day one, thirty minutes each, and do not let them slide.
Day 30. Can they run the daily and weekly operating rhythm without you in the room? Have they logged into every system in their own name? Ask them to walk through last week’s numbers unprompted. Then ask what has surprised them, because that answer is the most honest audit of your own operation you will get all year.
Day 60. They should have shipped one improvement you can point at, and they should have found at least one broken thing you did not know about. If they have found nothing broken, they are either not looking or not yet comfortable telling you.
Day 90. Move the ownership boundary. Either the small surface becomes a large one, or there is a specific written reason why not. This is also where you decide honestly whether it is working, and ninety days of evidence at this size is enough to decide on.
The read only failure mode
It looks like caution and it is the most expensive mistake in this whole sequence. The symptoms are easy to spot once you know them. After six weeks the new hire is still sending you changes for you to make. They are copied on the platform emails rather than on them. Their calendar is meetings rather than work. Everyone stays polite about it and nobody says out loud that the person does not have a job yet.
The fix is mechanical rather than motivational. Open the activity log on your seller panels and ad accounts and filter to their user for the last fourteen days. If there are no changes, there is no role. Give them the surface this week and let them break something small.