How To Build An In House eCommerce Team

I am a big believer that you need a strong in-house eCommerce team, regardless of whether you work with third parties or not. Third parties will only be as good as your internal team that can manage them. eCommerce requires so many core company competencies, it’s impossible to completely outsource it.

So where do you start?

eCommerce Manager / Leader

The number one thing I think every company should start with is an eCommerce leader. Depending on your stage of a company that might have to be the owner or a key person like a director or vice president of eCommerce. I personally believe this person needs to be exclusively focused on eCommerce if possible. They should be in charge of bridging the gap between all needs for eCommerce such as sales, marketing, design, branding, technology, and operations.

Customer Service

The 2nd thing I would do is build customer service.

Customer service is key to eCommerce. Although it may feel like you can just run it on autopilot. Nothing could be further from the truth. You need a strong customer service team that starts with a leader just like you would have one for any other way you sell products and require customer service in person etc. In this case, they will most likely be responding to emails or inquiries about their orders, returns, and perhaps even issues with packages not being delivered.

Operations & Fulfillment

Once you have an eCommerce manager and customer service down it’s time to get better at operations. This might be how you are managing inventory, fulfillment, shipment notifications, shipping labels etc. You may use a 3PL to handle most of this, but even still there are operations in dealing with them and ensuring your inventory is optimized for sales.

An operations manager that helps you build an operations team to work closely with customer service, marketing, and your eCommerce manager is key to scaling your team.

Marketing

Marketing is certainly something you can outsource, but you will almost certainly not get a strong result without some in-house content and expertise in marketing. At the very least you need someone focused on marketing, even if that’s the eCommerce manager until you can hire a dedicated marketing person to focus exclusively on marketing. Marketing itself is very broad, so my advice is to build up in-house expertise around content and building content first before trying to do everything yourself in-house.

Content is the key driver of marketing and you can then leverage third parties to manage paid ads or other specialized types of marketing if you don’t want to handle that all in-house.

Design

Design is a critical piece of any eCommerce business. Some require more intensive design work than others, but nonetheless, poor design will kill your sales opportunities and growth.

Building in-house design resources is probably the second to last thing I would do. It’s something that can be outsourced but ultimately it will become cheaper to bring some or all of it in-house.

Development

Development is the last thing I would bring in house because it’s the most difficult thing to hire for and also the riskiest to rely on just one or two people. Until you have an in-house team you can simply outsource development to an agency like Trellis.

The challenge with building in-house development is you likely need three to five people to do it well. You would need an engineering leader, a frontend developer, a backend developer, and possibly even a DevOps specialist depending on how complex your stack is. Realistically if you want to start somewhere you could start with a hybrid approach and have a developer work with an agency so you can have the best of both worlds.