You've been running your eCommerce operation through an agency. They've managed your Amazon listings, your ad spend, your catalog — and it's worked, up to a point. But you're at a stage where you need more control, more institutional knowledge, and more speed. You're ready to build an internal team.
This is one of the most consequential decisions a brand can make. Done right, an internal eCommerce team becomes a true competitive advantage — people who understand your products, your customers, and your channel strategy at a depth no agency ever fully can. Done wrong, it's expensive, disorganized, and demoralizing.
So: who do you hire first?
The answer isn't one-size-fits-all, but there are clear patterns for how successful brands sequence their eCommerce team builds. Below is a framework for thinking through your first hire — and the hires that should follow as you scale.
Before You Hire: Know What You Actually Need
Before posting a job, get honest about where your business is. The right first hire depends on your specific situation:
- Are you primarily a 3P Amazon seller trying to bring operations in-house from an agency?
- Do you have a DTC site (Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.) that needs attention alongside marketplaces?
- Is your biggest gap in operations and logistics, or in marketing and growth?
- How much revenue are you doing? A $5M brand has different needs than a $50M brand.
Your answers will shape the profile of your first hire. That said, for most brands transitioning from an agency to an internal model, the logic below holds.
Hire #1 — The eCommerce Manager or Director
This is almost always the right first hire — a generalist leader who can own the full channel, manage the agency transition, and build out the team below them over time.
This person should have broad experience across marketplaces (especially Amazon, if that's your primary channel), DTC operations, and some understanding of paid media. They don't need to be a deep expert in every area — but they need to be fluent enough to manage specialists as you add them, and experienced enough to operate independently while the team is still small.
What they bring to the table:
- A single accountable owner for eCommerce P&L performance
- Institutional knowledge that stays with your company, not an agency
- The ability to manage vendors and agencies for functions you're not yet internalizing
- A strategic roadmap for team building as you scale
- Speed of decision-making — no more waiting on agency account managers
At the Manager level, this person will be hands-on, executing directly. At the Director level, they'll spend more time on strategy, vendor management, and hiring. Your budget and org structure will determine which makes more sense.
Hire #2 — The Amazon Specialist (If Amazon Is Your Core Channel)
If Amazon is driving the majority of your revenue, the second hire should be someone who lives and breathes the platform. This is a specialist role — someone who knows Seller Central or Vendor Central inside and out, understands the Buy Box algorithm, manages catalog health, and can run sponsored ads without constant guidance.
This hire takes a significant operational burden off your eCommerce Manager and allows them to focus on broader strategy and channel growth.
Why this hire matters:
- Day-to-day Amazon operations require constant attention — listings, inventory, suppression issues, case logs
- Amazon advertising is a full-time discipline in itself, especially at scale
- A specialist can catch and resolve problems faster than a generalist who's splitting focus
- Dedicated ownership of your most important revenue channel reduces risk
Look for someone with 2–4+ years of hands-on Amazon experience, not just agency-side reporting experience. There's a real difference between someone who ran campaigns and someone who filed cases, managed A+ content, and navigated FBA compliance.
Hire #3 — The Paid Media / Performance Marketing Manager
Once your operations are stable and someone owns the day-to-day platform work, the next growth lever is paid media. Whether you're running Amazon Advertising, Meta, Google, TikTok, or some combination, having an in-house media buyer is a meaningful upgrade from agency management.
Internal paid media managers are faster, more accountable, and better aligned to your brand's margins and goals. They iterate more quickly because they're not managing 20 other clients simultaneously.
Benefits of internalizing paid media:
- Real-time budget adjustments without waiting on an account manager
- Full visibility into ad spend, ROAS, and attribution — no black box reporting
- Tighter alignment between media strategy and product, inventory, and margin realities
- Faster creative testing cycles and campaign iteration
- Long-term institutional knowledge of what works for your brand and audience
At this stage, you might still work with a creative agency for video and photography — that's fine. But the media buying and strategy should be internal.
Hire #4 — The Content & Creative Strategist
Content is the connective tissue of your eCommerce presence — product listings, A+ content, Brand Store, website copy, email flows, social content, and more. As your team grows, this function often gets fragmented across multiple people who are all doing parts of it poorly.
A dedicated content hire brings structure, consistency, and quality to everything customer-facing. They own the content calendar, coordinate with creative resources, and ensure your brand voice is consistent across all touchpoints.
What this hire unlocks:
- Consistent, on-brand product content that converts better
- Faster go-to-market for new product launches
- A scalable system for managing content across channels
- Freed-up bandwidth for your eCommerce Manager and specialist to focus on performance
- Better SEO and discoverability across both Amazon and DTC
Hire #5 — The eCommerce Analyst / Data Analyst
By the time you're at five people, your biggest constraint is often clarity. You have data everywhere — Amazon Seller Central, Shopify, your 3PL, your ad platforms, your ERP — and pulling it together into actionable insight is becoming a real challenge.
An analyst brings rigor to decision-making across the team. They build dashboards, run attribution analysis, model out pricing and promotion scenarios, and surface the trends that matter before they become problems.
Why data pays off at this stage:
- Replaces gut-feel decision-making with consistent, reliable reporting
- Identifies underperforming SKUs, channels, and campaigns before they drag results
- Enables smarter inventory planning and demand forecasting
- Gives your eCommerce Director the data they need to make the business case for investment
- Scales with the business — the same analyst can serve a team of 5 or 15
A Note on Sequencing: There's No Rigid Formula
The order above reflects the most common pattern we see, but your situation may differ. A brand that's heavily DTC-focused might prioritize a CRM/Email specialist earlier. A brand with complex logistics challenges might bring in an eCommerce Operations Manager before a content hire. A brand investing heavily in influencer and social commerce might want a social/creator-focused hire sooner.
What matters most is that each hire solves a real, current bottleneck — not a hypothetical future one. The best eCommerce teams are built incrementally, with each new hire unlocking capacity and capability for the rest of the team.
The Most Common Mistake: Hiring Too Junior, Too Early
When brands are reluctant to pay market rate for a senior eCommerce hire, they often go junior to save money. This almost always backfires. A junior hire in seat #1 means the team is missing strategic leadership from day one. They can't manage the agency transition effectively, they can't build the team below them, and they often lack the experience to flag problems before they become expensive.
Your first hire sets the ceiling for the team. Invest in that hire, and let them help you shape every one that comes after.
Ready to build your eCommerce team? eCommerce Placement has spent 15+ years placing eCommerce professionals at brands of all sizes — from first hires to full leadership teams. We know what good looks like at every level, and we can help you find it.