Assistant Merchandiser - Level 1
Salary: Competitive Plus Benefits
Location: Coventry Store Support Centre - Ansty Park, Coventry, CV7 9RD
Contract type: Permanent
Business area: Food Commercial
Closing date: 04 September 2025
Requisition ID: 400015339
As an Assistant Merchandiser, you’ll be responsible for supporting the Senior Merchandiser/Merchandiser in the delivery of customer-focused product ranges to successfully achieve sales, profit, margin and stock targets through the merchandising of a range or product category. Using your exceptional planning and organisational skills, you will meet key milestones to ensure operational excellence at every touch point with the customer. You will have an eye for detail and superb analytical skills, as well as a desire to learn and grow in your role.
What You’ll Do
You’ll play a key role in executing a multi-channel merchandising strategy across your category and ranges, aligned with the wider commercial objectives. You’ll take ownership of category, range and SKU-level forecasting to optimise stock holding, margin and availability, using merchandising systems to manage intake and stock positions effectively.
Working closely with the A&R Replenishment Assistant, you’ll plan initial allocations, and launch builds to ensure stock and availability targets are met. You will identify opportunities to adjust system parameters to improve availability and stock efficiency, and support trade reviews through detailed attribute analysis.
You’ll contribute to weekly trading performance reviews, highlighting risks and opportunities, and support post-implementation analysis. You’ll help ensure merchandising milestones are met within the critical path by resolving or escalating issues as needed, and build strong supplier relationships to influence performance and ensure timely stock delivery into the warehouse.
You’ll manage orders in line with agreed parameters, maintain high standards of process compliance and data integrity, and provide excellent service to store colleagues by resolving trading queries quickly. You’ll also support the Merchandising Admin Assistant with day-to-day departmental tasks, contributing to the smooth running of the team and the success of your category.
Essential Criteria
- A solid foundation in core merchandising principles.
- Strong analytical and numerical skills to interpret data and drive decisions.
- Clear and confident communication skills, both written and verbal.
- Excellent administrative and organisational capabilities to manage multiple priorities.
- A proactive mindset, taking ownership to ensure both individual and team targets are met.
- A collaborative approach to building effective relationships with stakeholders.
- The confidence and curiosity to learn and adapt to new systems and tools.
We are committed to being a truly inclusive retailer so you’ll be welcomed whoever you are and wherever you work. Around here, there’s always the chance to try something new — whether that’s as part of an evolving team or somewhere else across the business - and we take development seriously and promise to support you. We also recognise and celebrate colleagues when they go the extra mile and, where possible, offer flexible working. When you join our team, we’ll also offer you an amazing range of benefits. Here are some of them: Starting off with colleague discount, you'll be able to save 10% on your shopping online and instore at Sainsbury's, Argos, TU and Habitat, and we regularly increase the discount to 15% at points during the year. We've also got you covered for your future with our pensions scheme and life cover. You'll also be able to share in our success as you may be eligible for a performance-related bonus of up to 5% of salary, depending on how we perform. Your wellbeing is important to us too. You'll receive an annual holiday allowance and you can buy up to an additional week's holiday. We also offer other benefits that will help your money go further such as season ticket loans, cycle to work scheme, health cash plans, salary advance (where you can access some of your pay before pay day) as well access to a great range of discounts from hundreds of other retailers. And if you ever need it there is also an employee assistance programme. Moments that matter are as important to us as they are to you which is why we give up to 26 weeks’ pay for maternity or adoption leave and up to 4 weeks’ pay for paternity leave. Please see www.sainsburys.jobs for a range of our benefits (note, length of service and eligibility criteria may apply).
