Hiring is often the first answer when a growing business feels stretched. Before you add headcount, it’s worth fixing the process the new person will inherit, and seeing how much of the admin AI can take on first. That way the hire you make is worth more.
Most growing online retailers hit the same point. New products need uploading, listings need tidying, prices and stock need checking every morning, and someone has to pull the trading report together for Monday. The obvious answer is another hire.
Before you write the job advert, it’s worth looking at how much of that role is repeatable admin. UK small business owners already spend around 11 hours a week on admin and finance, according to the Amex and Small Business Saturday UK SME Business Barometer (July 2026). In e-commerce, a big slice of it follows the same steps every day, and that is exactly the work Claude is good at.
This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about making sure the person you hire, or the team you already have, spends their time growing sales rather than copying data between spreadsheets.
We use Claude in the examples below because it’s the AI assistant we use most day to day. We’ll set you up with whichever AI tool suits your business.
What an e-commerce trading role usually involves
Look at almost any e-commerce or trading assistant advert and you’ll see a similar list:
1. Uploading new products and writing the listings
2. Optimising titles and descriptions so they sell
3. Daily checks on stock and prices, switching products on and off
4. Checking new product photos
5. Weekly trading reports for the commercial team
6. Lots of spreadsheet work and lookups
Every one of those has a repeatable core that Claude can take on, with a person checking the result.
1. New product uploads and listing copy
Give Claude the supplier’s spec sheet and your house style, and ask for listings in the exact columns your website or marketplace import needs:
“Here are the spec sheets for 20 new products and three of our best-selling listings as examples. For each product, write a title under 150 characters, five bullet points and a 120-word description in the same style. Put it all in an Excel file with the columns SKU, Title, Bullet 1 to 5 and Description.”
You check the file, fix anything that’s off, and import it. Claude can create Excel files on any Claude plan.
2. Daily stock and price checks
Each morning, upload yesterday’s stock and price export and ask for the exceptions only:
“List every product that is live but out of stock, every product that is back in stock but switched off, and any price below cost or more than 20% different from last week. Give me a spreadsheet I can work through, in that order.”
A 45-minute scroll through thousands of rows becomes a ten-minute list of the products that actually need action.
3. Checking product photos
Claude can look at the photos you upload (JPEG, PNG and similar files work on every plan) and check them against your rules:
“Check these 30 product photos. Flag any that don’t have a plain white background, look blurry, or show a colour that doesn’t match the product name in the file name.”
A person still makes the final call, but they only need to look at the ones Claude flags.
4. Weekly trading reports
Upload the weekly sales exports from each channel and ask for the report you build by hand today: sales by channel, best and worst sellers, margin, and a few plain-English lines on what changed. No more rebuilding the same lookups every Monday. If you’re on a paid Claude plan (Pro and above), Claude for Excel can also build and fix lookups inside your own workbook. We’ve written about this in detail in The Monday Morning Report.
What it saves: a typical example
Say a small online retailer adds 60 new products a month and each listing takes 20 minutes to write by hand. With Claude drafting and a person checking, that drops to about 5 minutes. That’s 15 hours a month back.
Add daily stock and price checks going from 45 minutes to 10 minutes (about 12 hours a month) and a weekly report going from 2 hours to 20 minutes (about 7 hours a month). That’s around 34 hours a month, worth about £680 a month at £20 an hour. This is a typical example, so swap in your own numbers.
Hire, automate, or both?
For most growing retailers, the answer is both. Automate the repeatable core first, then hire for judgement: supplier relationships, range planning, campaign ideas and growing the channels. You may find you can hire later, hire at a more senior level, or get far more from the person you do bring in.
Keep a person in charge of anything that touches customers or money: price changes, what goes live, and the final check on every listing.
Want it set up for you?
We set up jobs like these for a fixed price, done in weeks, built around your own channels and spreadsheets. See our fixed-price setups, including the fixed-price sales report setup. Take the 3-minute AI Readiness Check to see where you stand.
We’re not IT people. We’re business leaders who’ve put AI to work across sales, finance, operations and marketing. We can set this up for you, train your team and hand it over, or keep running it for you each month.
Growing pains like this are normal in a business that has grown quickly, and they’re fixable. Take the free Growing Pains Check to see where your business stands in three minutes, or book a free call about a Growing Pains Diagnostic: half a day with you and your business, then a written 90-day plan with the three changes that matter most.
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