Home / Services / Ecommerce Management / Fractional Ops Manager

Fractional Ops Manager

Give back the ten hours a week you're spending on admin.

R26,000 – R60,000 Per month · 30h / 45h / 60h / 80h tiers · 3-month minimum R23,400/mobilled annually · save 10%

Show price as

Is this you?

It's 10pm and you're editing product listings again

The store works. Orders arrive every day, the courier collects most afternoons, and the revenue is real. Which is exactly why you're still at the laptop at 10pm, editing a product listing, chasing a supplier about a late purchase order, and clearing the day's support tickets before they turn into refunds.

You've probably searched for the fix already. "Shopify store manager". "Ecommerce virtual assistant". The results split into two piles: cheap task-doers who need you to write instructions for everything, which is just your 10pm job with extra steps, and agencies that want to talk about growth strategy when the thing drowning you is operations.

What you actually need is a fractional operations manager. A senior person who owns the running of the store for a defined number of hours a month, makes the routine decisions without you, and reports what happened in plain English, tied to revenue.

What you
actually get

Every line below is a deliverable, not an intention. If it's on this list it's in the proposal, and if it's not on this list it isn't included.

Capped hours, tracked and reported openly

You buy 30, 40 or 60 hours a month. Every hour is logged against what it produced, and the log is in your monthly report. You will never wonder what you paid for.

Catalogue and listing management

New products up, prices right, descriptions and images maintained. The 10pm job, done inside business hours by someone whose actual job it is.

Stock monitoring and reorder flags

Levels watched, sell-through tracked, and a flag raised before you sell out rather than after. A stockout is the most expensive admin failure there is.

Supplier and purchase-order coordination

Orders placed, deliveries chased, discrepancies queried. The unglamorous middle of ecommerce, handled without you copied on every email.

Customer support to an agreed ticket volume

Handled in your tone, against written procedures, with anything sensitive escalated to you rather than guessed at.

Subscription, affiliate and partner admin

The recurring-revenue plumbing kept clean: failed payments, pauses and upgrades, partner queries and commission admin.

A monthly finance and settlement pack

Settlements reconciled and summarised against revenue, so the month closes with numbers your accountant can use, not a gateway export nobody opens.

A monthly operations review call

Thirty minutes on what happened, what's flagged and what next month looks like. This is where the retainer stays honest.

How it runs

So you know what's happening and when, and so nobody has to ask for a status update.

Month 1

Takeover

Access set up on scoped collaborator accounts, the routine jobs documented as SOPs as I take them over, and a baseline of where the hours go. You feel the difference inside the first fortnight, mostly in your evenings.

Month 2

The rhythm

The routines run without hand-holding, the first full reporting pack lands, and we tune the hour allocation against what the store actually needs.

Every month

The standing pattern

Hours logged against outcomes. The finance pack at month end. The review call. Flags raised early, not confessed late.

Quarterly

Step back

A look at the quarter's numbers and whether the tier still fits. If you're consistently under your hours, I'll say so and move you down.

What I need from you

The projects that run late almost always run late for one of these reasons, so they're worth reading properly before we start.

Collaborator access with the permission scopes the work needs, plus supplier, shipping and gateway accounts where relevant
Answers on flagged decisions within two working days, most of what stalls a store is a waiting decision, not a missing skill
One point of contact, I report to a person, not a committee
Notice of launches, promotions and big stock buys, so the hours get planned rather than firefought
The truth about the current workarounds, the undocumented ones are what break takeovers

What's not included

On the public page rather than buried in the proposal, so there's no argument in week five.

Unlimited hours, overage billed at R950/hour
Physical warehousing and 3PL contracts, coordination is included
A second market or region, that is Multi-Market Operations
Paid media management
Site redesign work

Your other options

What happens if you don't do this

Do nothing. You can keep running operations yourself, founders do it for years. The cost never shows on an invoice. It shows in the evenings, the postponed marketing, and the growth work that never gets your best hours.

Go cheaper. An ecommerce virtual assistant costs a fraction of this, and if your bottleneck is pure task volume and you enjoy writing instructions, it can work. But a VA executes, they don't own. You still carry the checking, the deciding and the month-end reconciliation, which was most of the job.

Go bigger or smaller. Several storefronts and no consolidated numbers is a different job, that's Multi-Market Operations. And if you're doing under roughly 50 orders a month, this retainer is the wrong purchase, the hours won't be earned. Buy Store Setup or Rescue, take the SOPs, and run it yourself until the volume argues otherwise.

Straight
answers

The 30-hour tier works out over R1,000 an hour. That's steep.

Against agency hourly rates, yes, and I won't pretend otherwise. The honest comparison is the alternative hire: a competent ecommerce operations manager is a R65,000-plus monthly salary, before recruitment fees and before the months of risk if the hire is wrong, and you'd be buying 160 hours when you need 30. You're paying senior rates for exactly the hours the store needs and not one more.

Why not hire someone in-house?

You should, eventually. Once there is genuinely a full week of operations work every week, an employee is cheaper per hour, and I'll tell you when I think you've crossed that line. Below it, a salary buys idle capacity, and you carry the recruiting, the managing and the single point of failure yourself.

Why not just get an ecommerce virtual assistant?

For pure task volume, a good VA is honest value, and I'll say so if that's all you need. What a VA doesn't bring is ownership: procedures written and maintained, suppliers coordinated, a finance pack at month end, and someone accountable when a listing error costs a weekend of sales. Manager and assistant are different products. This is the first one.

I'm not giving an outsider admin access to my store.

Right instinct. Access runs through collaborator accounts with permissions scoped to the work, granted by you, revocable in one click. No owner login, no billing details. Every change sits in the store's activity log, and the monthly report says what was done and why, so the audit trail runs in both directions.

What if I need more than my hours? Do unused ones roll over?

Overage is R950 an hour, flagged before it's incurred, never after. Unused hours don't roll over, and I'd rather say that plainly than bury it in the terms: if you're consistently under, I'll move you down a tier. The minimum term is three months, and if you're staying, annual billing starts from R23,400 a month, a 10% saving.

You're a small studio. What if you get sick, or disappear?

The answer has to be structural, not reassuring. Every routine becomes a written SOP from month one, so the knowledge lives in a document, not in my head. Every account is yours, so nothing needs recovering. And because the hours are capped, the client roster is too, I'm not one bad week from collapse. If I vanished tomorrow you'd lose a supplier, not your store.

Selling into more than one market?

Multi-Market Operations, From R75,000

One operator across every market. One set of numbers.

See Multi-Market Operations →

Sound like
your problem?

One call, no deck. If this isn't the right package I'll tell you which is.

Email instead