In-house team vs agency for ecommerce growth

Should an ecommerce brand build an in-house marketing team or use an agency?

In-house vs agency marketing is rarely an either-or choice. In our experience, for brands selling between £100k and several hundred thousand pounds a month, a hybrid works best: a small in-house team that owns the brand, the calendar, the budget and the decisions, working with an agency that brings the specialists. Building every role in house makes sense later, once each specialist would be kept fully busy by one brand.

The decision is less about cost than about coverage. Ecommerce growth needs more distinct skills than most brands can hire at once, and every gap slows the rest down. The question to ask is which skills you need every day, which you need some of the time, and who will hold them all together.

What roles does ecommerce growth actually need?

These are the roles we see brands at six figures a month relying on, whether they sit in house, at an agency or across both. Few brands can keep all of them busy full time.

What does an in-house team really cost?

Salary is only the visible part. Before comparing a hire with an agency fee, add up everything the role costs the business over a year:

• Employer costs on top of salary: employer National Insurance is 15% of earnings above £5,000 a year, and workplace pension contributions are at least 3% of qualifying earnings.
• Recruitment, whether that is an agency fee or weeks of your own time interviewing.
• Time to productivity, often a few months before a new hire is working at full pace.
• Tools and software, from ad platform add-ons to design and analytics licences.
• Management time, because someone senior has to brief, review and develop them.
• Cover, for holidays, sickness and the gap when someone leaves.

None of this makes hiring the wrong choice. It means the fair comparison is the full annual cost of the role against the full cost of the agency, including what the agency brings that a single hire cannot.

What does an agency give you that a hire cannot?

Breadth, first. An agency gives you access to several specialists for the cost of part of their time, which suits a brand that needs a little of many skills. It also brings pattern recognition: a team working across several brands often sees platform changes earlier than a single in-house marketer would, and may already have met your problem at another brand.

An agency also starts fast and does not leave a hole when one person moves on. The trade-offs are real. An agency knows your brand less deeply at the start, it has other clients, its best people can be moved to newer accounts, and a weak one can hide behind reports. That is why the model of the agency matters as much as the decision to use one.

When does building in house make more sense?

Bring a role in house when one or more of these is true:

• The work would keep a specialist fully busy for your brand alone, week after week.
• The role needs deep, daily knowledge of the product, such as merchandising or customer service insight.
• Speed of decision matters more than breadth, for example in a fast-moving fashion calendar.
• You already have a strong lead in house who can hire, manage and develop specialists.

Many brands end up bringing roles in house one at a time as they grow, usually starting with the growth lead and the creative producer, and keeping an agency for the channels and skills that are hardest to hire.

How does a hybrid team work in practice?

In a good hybrid, the brand owns the direction and the agency owns the execution in its specialist areas. The in-house lead sets the targets, the calendar and the budget, and knows the product and the customer better than anyone. The agency runs the channels and builds the assets, and brings what it sees across other brands back into the plan.

Where hybrids fail is the space between the two teams. Work gets duplicated, decisions wait for a meeting, and each side assumes the other has the data. As the project manager on our side of those relationships, I have found the same few habits make the difference:

1. One owner on each side, with the authority to make decisions without waiting for a meeting.
2. One shared plan, covering launches, promotions and stock, that both teams work from.
3. Shared access to the data, so nobody is arguing over whose numbers are right.
4. A shared chat per service, so questions are answered in hours, not at the next review.
5. A weekly rhythm: what happened, what we learned, what is blocked and what changes next week.

How does RedPxl work with in-house teams?

Many of the brands we work with have their own marketing or ecommerce lead, and some have designers, developers or retention marketers in house. We fit around what you already have. That might mean running paid media and creative while your team owns email, or building the site while your developer maintains it afterwards.

Every service gets its own group chat with the specialists doing the work, and every budget change is explained in writing, so your team always knows what is happening and why. If you are still comparing agencies, our guide on how to choose an ecommerce agency covers what to ask, and the questions for a PPC agency go deeper on paid media. If you are weighing up hiring against outsourcing, tell us what your team looks like today and we will give you an honest view of where an agency helps and where a hire would serve you better.