The Ecommerce Capability Gap: Why Most UK Manufacturers Are Running Their Digital Function on Legacy People and Legacy Thinking

The same conversation happens in boardrooms across UK manufacturing every year. It usually ends with a decision to hire someone or change agency. What rarely happens is the harder conversation - whether the capability model itself is right.

<p>The same conversation happens in boardrooms across UK manufacturing and retail every year. The MD knows the ecommerce function is not performing. The website is dated, the data is unreliable, the agency relationship feels expensive and opaque, and the person nominally responsible for digital is stretched across too many things to do any of them well. The conversation usually ends with a decision to hire someone, or to change agency, or to wait until next year when there is more budget.</p>

<p>What rarely happens is the harder conversation: whether the capability model itself is right.</p>

<p>Most UK manufacturers and retailers have a people and capability problem in their ecommerce function that mirrors their technology problem exactly. They are running on legacy resources the same way they are running on a legacy platform. Not because the people are not capable, but because nobody has asked the right questions about whether the current setup can do what the business actually needs in 2026.</p>

<p>This article is about those questions.</p>

<h2>The Legacy People Problem</h2>

<p>The digital marketing manager who has been managing the website since 2008 is not a bad employee. In many businesses, they are a loyal, hardworking person who has kept something running against limited support and even more limited budget. The problem is not them. The problem is that the role they are doing today bears almost no resemblance to what the business needs from a digital function in 2026.</p>

<p>Modern ecommerce capability requires fluency across an increasingly complex ecosystem: AI-assisted content creation and optimisation, first-party data strategy and collection frameworks, attribution modelling and analytics that go beyond Google Analytics sessions, loyalty and retention programme management, platform performance and technical SEO, and the commercial judgement to make sense of all of it in the context of a P&L.</p>

<p>These are not variations on the same skill set. They are distinct disciplines that have each matured significantly in the last five years. The person who was competent managing a WordPress site and running email campaigns in 2018 has not automatically grown into all of them — particularly if the business has never invested in their development, never hired around them, and never built the data or technology infrastructure that would make those skills usable.</p>

<p>The same logic that applies to technology applies to people. Businesses that would not dream of making major commercial decisions on a PIM system from 2012 routinely make do with a digital capability structure that has not been meaningfully evaluated or evolved in a decade. The question is not whether the person is good. It is whether the capability model fits the requirement.</p>

<h2>The Swiss Army Knife Trap</h2>

<p>The most common response to a digital capability gap in a mid-market manufacturing or retail business is not to address it structurally. It is to add more to the brief of whoever is already there.</p>

<p>The digital marketing manager becomes responsible for the website, the CRM, the agency relationship, the social media, the paid search oversight, the analytics reporting and, increasingly, the AI tools the business is trying to adopt. One person. Multiple disciplines. No additional resource. No reduction in other responsibilities.</p>

<p>This is the Swiss army knife trap. It feels like pragmatic resource management. It is actually a systematic way of ensuring that nothing gets done properly.</p>

<p>A Swiss army knife is useful precisely because it is portable and versatile — but nobody uses a Swiss army knife when they need a proper blade. Overloading one person with an impossible remit does not fill a capability gap. It disguises it while compounding it, because the person in question spends all of their time context-switching between tasks they cannot do well and none of their time doing what the business most needs.</p>

<p>The businesses pulling ahead in ecommerce are not the ones with the biggest teams or the most generous headcount budgets. They are the ones that have made deliberate decisions about where specific capability is genuinely needed and sourced it accordingly — whether that means a hire, a specialist agency, a fractional resource, or a clearly scoped piece of consultancy. Specificity of requirement beats volume of resource every time.</p>

<h2>Should I Hire a Head of Ecommerce or Is There a Better Model?</h2>

<p>This is the question most MDs reach when they accept that their current digital capability is not adequate. The instinct is usually to hire either a head of ecommerce, a digital director, a senior ecommerce manager. And sometimes that is exactly the right answer.</p>

<p>But the hiring instinct often arrives before the diagnostic work that would tell you whether a full-time hire is actually what the business needs. A head of ecommerce at £80,000 to £120,000 per year is a significant commitment. It takes time to hire, time to onboard and time to produce results. If the underlying problem is a specific capability gap in data strategy, agency governance, <a href="/insights/should-you-replatform-your-ecommerce-site">platform migration planning</a> or AI adoption — a full-time hire may be the most expensive and slowest way to solve it.</p>

<p>The fractional and interim model has been well established in finance for decades. Most £20-50M UK businesses would not hesitate to bring in a fractional FD or an interim CFO for a specific programme of work because they understand that what they need is senior commercial judgement applied to a defined problem, not a permanent addition to headcount.</p>

<p>The same logic applies to ecommerce leadership. A fractional ecommerce director brings board-level digital seniority, commercial accountability and delivery experience to a business for a defined period and a defined purpose — without the £150,000 annual commitment, without the six-month recruitment process and without the risk of a permanent hire who turns out to be the wrong fit.</p>

<p>The right model depends on what the business actually needs. A business that has no senior ecommerce leadership and is making consequential platform, agency and people decisions on a regular basis probably does need a permanent head of function. A business that has a capable ecommerce team but lacks senior strategic direction, governance structure or a specific programme of transformation work is often better served by targeted senior input over a defined period. The distinction matters — and most businesses make the hiring decision before they have diagnosed which situation they are actually in.</p>

<h2>What Skills Does a Modern Ecommerce Team Actually Need?</h2>

<p>The core disciplines that matter for a UK manufacturer or retailer operating at scale are:</p>

<p><strong>Commercial ecommerce leadership.</strong> Someone who understands the relationship between platform performance, channel strategy, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value and P&L. This is not a technical role — it is a commercial one. The gap in most businesses is not technical competence. It is commercial judgement applied to digital decisions.</p>

<p><strong>Data strategy and analytics.</strong> Not reporting but strategy. Understanding what data the business needs, where it comes from, how it is collected, how it is trusted and how it informs decisions. As third-party data becomes less reliable and first-party data becomes more valuable, this capability is increasingly foundational. Businesses that do not have it are making commercial decisions on incomplete or untrustworthy information.</p>

<p><strong>AI fluency.</strong> Not expertise but fluency. The ability to use AI tools productively, to identify where AI can improve commercial outcomes, and to govern AI use appropriately within the business. This is no longer an emerging skill. It is becoming a baseline requirement for anyone working at a senior level in a digital function.</p>

<p><strong>Agency and partner management.</strong> The ability to brief, govern, evaluate and challenge external partners — agencies, technology providers and consultants — without requiring technical expertise in what they deliver. A poorly governed agency relationship does not fail because the agency is bad. It fails because nobody on the client side has the seniority or clarity to hold it to commercial account.</p>

<p><strong>Platform and technology literacy.</strong> Not deep technical knowledge but commercial literacy. Understanding what the technology can and cannot do, what good looks like, what realistic costs and timelines are, and how technology decisions connect to commercial outcomes. This is what allows an MD or head of ecommerce to make informed decisions without being dependent on their agency to frame every choice.</p>

<h2>The In-House Versus Agency Question — And Why Most Businesses Answer It Wrong</h2>

<p>Most businesses default to one of two positions. Either they try to build everything in-house and end up with a team spread too thin across too many disciplines to do any of them well. Or they outsource everything to agencies and end up with a fragmented supplier landscape, no internal capability development and a dependency on external parties who have no accountability for commercial outcomes.</p>

<p>The right answer lies in a deliberate assessment of three things: what the business genuinely needs to own internally to protect its commercial interests and institutional knowledge; what can be bought in more efficiently from specialist partners; and how those two things are governed together.</p>

<p>What most businesses need to own internally is commercial judgement and oversight — the ability to make informed decisions about digital strategy, to evaluate the work of external partners, and to hold the ecommerce function accountable for commercial outcomes. What they can often buy in more efficiently is delivery capability — platform development, paid media management, SEO, content production, data engineering.</p>

<p>The failure mode is buying in delivery without owning governance. An agency that operates without strong client-side oversight — without clear briefs, meaningful performance frameworks and regular commercial accountability — will optimise for the metrics it can control and report, not necessarily for the outcomes the business needs. That is not the agency's fault. It is a governance failure.</p>

<h2>What Is a Digital Steering Committee and Why Every Serious Business Needs One</h2>

<p>The digital steering committee is the governance structure that most ecommerce functions lack and most ecommerce failures trace back to.</p>

<p>A digital steering committee is a regular, structured forum that brings together the business's senior commercial leadership and the senior accountable people from any external digital partners — agencies, consultants, technology providers — under a shared framework of reporting, accountability and commercial oversight.</p>

<p>It is not a project meeting. It is not an agency status call. It is a properly constituted commercial forum with defined membership, defined agenda, defined reporting and defined accountability.</p>

<p>The membership should include the MD or CEO, the commercial director or equivalent P&L owner, the senior ecommerce or digital lead (internal or fractional), and the most senior accountable person from each significant external partner. Not account managers. Decision-makers.</p>

<p>The agenda should be commercial, not operational. What are the revenue and performance outcomes we committed to? Are we on track? Where are the gaps? What decisions need to be made? What is blocking progress?</p>

<p>The digital steering committee is the single structural intervention that most consistently separates professionally run ecommerce functions from those that operate on goodwill and good intentions. It is not complicated. It does not require additional headcount. It requires the business's senior leadership to treat digital commercial governance with the same seriousness they bring to financial governance. Most do not. The ones that do perform differently.</p>

<h2>The Role That Exists But Wears Too Many Hats: The Case for a Chief Digital Officer</h2>

<p>Most mid-market UK manufacturers and retailers have a version of a chief digital officer. They just do not call it that, and they have not given it the authority, the seniority or the board-level visibility it needs to function effectively.</p>

<p>Instead, the role exists as a layer of middle management buried somewhere inside the marketing function, reporting to a head of sales or marketing director who may not have the digital acumen to evaluate the work, make the right resourcing decisions or represent the function credibly at board level.</p>

<p>The argument for a properly constituted head of digital function — whether that is a chief digital officer, a chief digital and commercial officer, or a director of digital with a genuine board mandate — rests on a simple commercial reality: digital is no longer a channel. It is the operating infrastructure of the business's commercial function. Platform decisions, data strategy, AI adoption, channel architecture, agency governance — these are board-level decisions with board-level commercial consequences. Treating them as a marketing sub-function is not an organisational efficiency. It is a structural risk.</p>

<p>The role needs two capabilities above all others. The first is commercial judgement — the ability to translate digital activity into commercial outcomes, to hold internal and external teams accountable to revenue and margin metrics, and to represent the digital function at board level with clarity and authority. The second is the ability to interpret, judge and shape the company's digital activities — understanding what the technology is doing well enough to know when it is not doing what the business needs, without requiring deep technical expertise.</p>

<h2>The Questions Worth Asking Before Your Next Digital Hire or Agency Brief</h2>

<p><strong>What is the specific capability gap we are trying to fill?</strong> Not "we need more resource" but the specific commercial capability that is missing — data strategy, agency governance, <a href="/insights/should-you-replatform-your-ecommerce-site">platform migration planning</a>, AI adoption. This is the answer that tells you what kind of resource to look for.</p>

<p><strong>What does success look like in twelve months?</strong> If you cannot define a measurable commercial outcome for the role or the agency relationship, the appointment is not ready to make. A brief without a success definition is an invitation to underperformance.</p>

<p><strong>Do we have the governance structure to get value from this hire or relationship?</strong> A head of ecommerce joining a business with no steering committee, no clear reporting framework and no board-level commercial oversight will spend the first six months building infrastructure rather than delivering results. The governance question should precede the hiring question.</p>

<p><strong>Are we buying in delivery when we actually need leadership?</strong> Many businesses appoint agencies when what they need is senior commercial direction. The agency delivers what it is briefed to deliver. If the brief is wrong, the delivery will be wrong. Senior leadership defines the brief. An agency executes it. The two are not substitutes.</p>

<p><strong>Is this a permanent requirement or a defined programme of work?</strong> The answer shapes the model. Permanent commercial leadership requires a head of function hire. A specific transformation programme is often better served by fractional or interim input with a defined scope and exit. Most businesses conflate these and end up with the wrong model for the requirement.</p>

<h2>Building the Right Capability Model for Your Business</h2>

<p>The businesses that get this right are not the ones that spend the most on headcount or agencies. They are the ones that have been honest about what they need, deliberate about how they source it, and rigorous about how they govern it.</p>

<p>That means doing the diagnostic work before making the hire. It means being specific about capability gaps rather than vague about needing more resource. It means building the governance structure — the digital steering committee, the reporting framework, the commercial accountability model — before adding more people or partners to a structure that is not yet working.</p>

<p>It also means being willing to challenge comfortable assumptions. The digital marketing manager who has been there since 2008 may be exactly the right person to lead the function with the right development and the right support. Or they may be the wrong person in the wrong role, held in place by loyalty and institutional knowledge rather than commercial fit. The honest assessment is the one that serves the business.</p>

<p>Right Partners works with <a href="/sectors/kbb-ecommerce-uk">UK manufacturers</a> and <a href="/sectors/consumer-goods-fmcg-ecommerce-uk">retailers</a> to build the right capability model for their commercial stage — assessing what they have, identifying the genuine gaps and helping them source the right combination of internal and external resource to fill them. If you are an MD or commercial director who knows the digital capability conversation needs to happen at board level, <a href="/free-strategy-consultation">book a free 60-minute conversation</a>. No pitch. No slides. A clear picture of what your business needs and the most commercially efficient way to build it.</p>

<h2>Frequently Asked Questions</h2>

<h3>What is the right ecommerce team structure for a UK manufacturer?</h3>

<p>There is no universal answer. The right structure depends on the business's commercial stage, the complexity of its digital operations and its existing capability. What matters more than structure is having clear commercial accountability for digital outcomes, the right senior leadership to make platform and strategy decisions, and the governance framework to hold internal and external teams to those outcomes. Most UK manufacturers in the £20-50M range need senior ecommerce leadership, a clear agency governance model and a digital steering committee before they need a large in-house team.</p>

<h3>Should I hire a head of ecommerce or use an agency?</h3>

<p>These are not alternatives — they serve different purposes. An agency delivers execution capability. A head of ecommerce provides commercial leadership, defines the strategy and governs the agency relationships. The more useful question is whether you need a permanent senior hire or whether a fractional or interim ecommerce director would better serve your current requirements. For businesses that need senior digital leadership for a specific period or programme of work, the fractional model often delivers better commercial outcomes faster than a permanent hire.</p>

<h3>What is a fractional ecommerce director?</h3>

<p>A fractional ecommerce director is a senior digital commercial leader who works with a business on a part-time or defined-scope basis rather than as a full-time employee. They bring director-level ecommerce expertise — strategy, agency governance, commercial oversight, team leadership — without the cost and commitment of a permanent hire. The model works particularly well for businesses that need senior ecommerce leadership but cannot yet justify a full-time appointment, or that have a specific programme of transformation work requiring experienced senior input.</p>

<h3>What is a digital steering committee?</h3>

<p>A digital steering committee is a structured commercial governance forum that brings together the business's senior leadership and the senior accountable people from external digital partners — agencies, consultants, technology providers — under a shared framework of reporting and commercial accountability. It meets regularly, focuses on commercial outcomes rather than operational activity, and ensures that the business's digital investment is governed at the same level of seriousness as its financial investment. Businesses with an effective digital steering committee consistently perform better on digital commercial outcomes than those without one.</p>

<h3>What skills does a head of ecommerce need in 2026?</h3>

<p>The most important skills are commercial judgement, the ability to translate digital activity into revenue and margin outcomes, data literacy, AI fluency, agency and partner management, and platform literacy sufficient to make informed technology decisions. Technical depth is less important than commercial breadth. The head of ecommerce needs to understand what the technology does well enough to hold partners accountable — not to build it themselves.</p>

<h3>Do UK manufacturers need a chief digital officer?</h3>

<p>Most mid-market UK manufacturers have the equivalent of a CDO function but it is usually buried in the marketing hierarchy without the board-level mandate or commercial authority the role needs. For businesses making consequential decisions about <a href="/insights/should-you-replatform-your-ecommerce-site">ecommerce platforms</a>, data strategy, AI adoption and channel architecture, the argument for senior digital leadership with genuine board visibility is a commercial one, not a structural one. The question is not whether the title is justified — it is whether the function has the authority and accountability it needs to make good decisions at speed.</p>

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<p><strong>Further reading:</strong> <a href="/insights/digital-evolution-not-transformation">Digital Evolution, Not Digital Transformation</a> · <a href="/insights/b2b-ecommerce-for-uk-manufacturers">B2B Ecommerce for UK Manufacturers: The Commercial Opportunity Most Are Still Ignoring</a> · <a href="/insights/what-good-management-consultancy-looks-like">What Good Management Consultancy Actually Looks Like</a></p>

More articles coming soon.