Brand Merchandising Manager
Sales & Business Development
Cape Town, South Africa
About impact.com
impact.com is the world’s leading commerce partnership marketing platform, transforming the way businesses grow by enabling them to discover, manage, and scale partnerships across the entire customer journey. From affiliates and influencers to content publishers, brand ambassadors, and customer advocates, impact.com empowers brands to drive trusted, performance-based growth through authentic relationships. Its award-winning products—Performance (affiliate), Creator (influencer), and Advocate (customer referral)—unify every type of partner into one integrated platform. As consumers increasingly rely on recommendations from people and communities they trust, impact.com helps brands show up where it matters most. Today, over 5,000 global brands, including Walmart, Uber, Shopify, Lenovo, L’Oréal, and Fanatics, rely on impact.com to power more than 225,000 partnerships that deliver measurable business results.
Your Role at impact.com
The Marketplace Growth Manager, Merchandising is a newly created role central to driving visibility, engagement, and growth across all sides of impact.com's Marketplace. This role owns the merchandising strategy for brands, products, publishers, and creators — curating, positioning, and promoting the right partners to the right audiences at the right time — ensuring the Marketplace is compelling, discoverable, and conversion-ready across the full ecosystem. The ideal candidate brings a creative eye, a data-driven mindset, and a relentless focus on reducing manual work through AI-powered tools, automation, and scalable systems. Success in this role means brands, products, publishers, and creators don't just exist in the Marketplace — they get found, get chosen, and get results — and the team behind it isn't buried in manual lift to make it happen. This position reports to the Sr. Director, Marketplace Growth.
What You'll Do
Are you obsessed with making great content perform — and making the work behind it smarter? Our ideal candidate combines editorial instinct with analytical rigor and a bias toward automation, scale, and process efficiency. You know how to position brands, products, publishers, and creators compellingly across a multi-sided marketplace — and you know how to use AI to do it faster, leaner, and at greater scale.
Your job will:
Focus on driving discoverability and partnership conversion through strategic merchandising — curating partner content across brands, products, publishers, and creators, managing editorial calendars, and executing personalized, multi-channel promotional programs that connect the right partners with the right opportunities. Equally important, you will lead the charge on reducing manual merchandising lift through automation, smarter tooling, and cross-functional process improvement.
More specifically, you'll get to:
- Own merchandising end-to-end across brands, products, publishers, and creators — develop and execute strategies to curate, position, and promote all partner types across the Marketplace, increasing discoverability, selection rates, and partnership activation across the full ecosystem.
- Build and manage editorial calendar(s) — plan and execute proactive, structured merchandising calendars that drives consistent visibility for brands, products, publishers, and creators across in-app placements, featured lists, mailers, and notification prompts.
- Lead automation and scaling of merchandising operations — identify and eliminate manual processes by building dynamic, auto-updating partner lists, automated workflows, and AI-powered merchandising programs that scale reach and relevance across all four partner segments without scaling headcount.
- Leverage AI tools to work smarter — actively adopt and advocate for AI-powered solutions across content creation, partner list curation, audience segmentation, and performance reporting to continuously reduce time spent on repetitive tasks and free up capacity for strategic work.
- Partner cross-functionally to improve processes and reduce manual lift — work closely with Product, Data Science, Engineering, and Operations teams to identify friction points in merchandising workflows across brands, products, publishers, and creators, advocate for tooling improvements, and co-develop resources that make the team more efficient and scalable.
- Curate high-fit partner lists — develop and maintain curated, audience-aligned lists across brands, products, publishers, and creators that support recruitment, activation, and program growth goals across the full Marketplace ecosystem.
- Identify and act on merchandising signals — analyze partner performance data, browsing behavior, and partnership trends across all partner types to surface the right partners at the right moments and continuously optimize placement strategy.
- Design and run A/B tests — continuously test messaging, creative formats, placement types, and audience targeting to improve click-through, selection, and conversion rates across brands, products, publishers, and creators.
- Become deeply familiar with impact.com's product offering and translate that knowledge into merchandising strategies that drive measurable behavior change across all partner types.
- Set goals and be held accountable to metrics — including partner discoverability rate, selection rate, merchandising-influenced GTV, activation lift, automation coverage, and manual effort reduction across all four partner segments.
- Communicate findings and recommendations to leadership and stakeholders with clarity and confidence.
What You Bring
A minimum of 3 years of experience in a growth, merchandising, editorial marketing, or partnerships role within a marketplace, e-commerce, or SaaS environment.
Hands-on experience with AI tools and automation platforms to build scalable workflows and personalized communications.
Proficiency in data analysis — ability to interpret merchandising metrics, identify trends, and translate insights into action.
Experience designing and executing merchandising initiatives (in-app, email, notifications).
Strong understanding of marketplace dynamics and two-sided or multi-sided platform ecosystems.
Comfort with A/B testing and iterative experimentation.
Strong written communication skills — able to craft clear, engaging, and brand-appropriate copy for lifecycle touchpoints.
Ability to work cross-functionally and present insights effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Familiarity with team management and collaboration tools (Google Workspace, Confluence, Jira, Slack).
Willingness to learn and adapt quickly in a fast-paced, evolving environment.
Bachelor's degree.
Core Competencies
- AI & Automation Fluency — proactively identifies opportunities to automate merchandising workflows, reduce manual lift, and scale personalized promotion across brands, products, publishers, and creators without sacrificing quality.
- Operational Efficiency — consistently looks for ways to streamline processes, improve tooling, and free up capacity for higher-impact strategic work.
- Editorial & Curation Judgment — knows how to position brands, products, publishers, and creators compellingly across marketplace surfaces and audiences.
- Data-Driven Decision Making — uses metrics to prioritize placements, test formats, and iterate on what works across all partner segments.
- Cross-Functional Collaboration — builds strong relationships across Product, Engineering, Data, and Operations to align on process improvements and execute merchandising programs at scale.
Benefits and Perks
At impact.com, we believe that when you’re happy and fulfilled, you do your best work. That’s why we’ve built a benefits package that supports your well-being, growth, and work-life balance.
- Flexible Working: Our Responsible PTO policy means you can take the time off you need to rest and recharge. We're committed to a positive work-life balance and provide a flexible environment that allows you to be happy and fulfilled in both your career and your personal life.
- Health and Wellness: Your well-being is a priority. Our mental health and wellness benefit includes up to 12 fully covered therapy/coaching sessions per year, with additional dependent coverage. We also offer a monthly gym reimbursement policy to support your physical health.
- A Stake in Our Growth: We offer Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) as part of our total compensation, giving you a stake in the company's growth with a 3-year vesting schedule, pending Board approval.
- Investing in Your Growth: We’re committed to your continuous learning. Take advantage of our free Coursera subscription and our PXA courses.
- Parental Support: We offer a generous parental leave policy, 26 weeks of fully paid leave for the primary caregiver and 13 weeks fully paid leave for the secondary caregiver.
- Technology Financial Support: We provide a technology stipend to help you set up your home office and a monthly allowance to cover your internet expenses.
Note: Benefits may vary by location and are subject to local regulations.
impact.com is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace. All employees and applicants for employment shall be given fair treatment and equal employment opportunity regardless of their race, ethnicity or ancestry, color or caste, religion or belief, age, sex (including gender identity, gender reassignment, sexual orientation, pregnancy/maternity), national origin, weight, neurodivergence, disability, marital and civil partnership status, caregiving status, veteran status, genetic information, political affiliation, or other prohibited non-merit factors
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