Sales Associate Job Description
Congratulations on taking the first step towards a career as a sales associate! Before we begin the sales associate job description, here are a few facts and figures:
- Employment opportunities in this field are excellent due to the need to replace workers who leave each year.
- Sales associates often work weekends and evenings, especially during peak retail periods such as the holiday season.
- This is the perfect job for a large variety of people of all skill levels. While teenagers may find it to be the perfect first job, young adults with college experience have a good opportunity to advance into management positions.
- Sales associates earn about an average of $12 an hour.
The general and retail sales associate job description will be familiar to anyone who’s ever walked into a store. Chances are that you’ve encountered and interacted with a sales associate in a grocery store, a car dealership, a clothing store, a book store, or even a hardware store. They are the general store workers who do everything from managing inventory, organizing product on the store floor, encouraging customers to buy a product, helping them find what they’re looking for, and ultimately ringing them up at the cash register. A sales associate’s job also may include administrative duties such as preventing theft, preparing the store for opening or closing, and even basic responsibilities such as cleaning shelves and counter-tops.
What is a Sales Associate?
A sales associate is the generic term for a store worker who helps the customer from the moment they enter the store to when they exit. To summarize the sales associate job description, we’ve broken down a sales associate’s job into five categories:
Summary of the Job Description for Sales Associate
- Managing inventory
- Sales
- Customer Service
- Cash Register
- Administrative Duties
Most of these apply particularly to the retail sales associate job description, which is the most common type of sales associate, but in general most if not all of the duties and responsibilities listed apply to all sales associate jobs.