What An Ecommerce Hire Really Costs
Category
Operations
Published by
Tom Emmanuel
Read Time
5 Minutes
Salary is the number brands quote. It is rarely more than two thirds of what the hire actually costs. Here is the full arithmetic, and an honest view of when hiring still beats an agency.
Tom Emmanuel
Founder, Furnace Commerce
The arithmetic nobody does
Employer National Insurance
Employer NI is charged on earnings above the secondary threshold and is a straight addition to salary. On a mid-level ecommerce salary it adds several thousand pounds a year before anything else.
Pension, recruitment and equipment
Auto-enrolment pension is a minimum employer contribution. Recruitment fees typically run a fifth of salary. Add a laptop and a desk and you are already meaningfully above the headline before the first day.
Tools are not free either
Whoever you hire needs the same software stack an agency already pays for. Analytics, listing tools, a repricer, maybe a research subscription. That is a four-figure annual cost that arrives with the person.
Holiday, cover and ramp
A full-time hire is available for around 232 working days a year once holiday is taken out, and the first two months are ramp rather than output. Neither shows up in the salary line.
Put the whole lot together and a mid-level ecommerce salary typically costs around half as much again as the headline figure. That is the number to compare against a retainer, not the salary.
When hiring is still the right answer
When you have one channel and it is big
If Amazon is most of your revenue and it needs daily attention, a dedicated person who thinks about nothing else will beat shared attention. That is a genuine argument for hiring and we will say so.
When you need range, an agency wins
Most brands between one and thirty million need Amazon, Shopify, marketplaces, retention and operations covered. One hire cannot be strong at all five. That is the case where an agency is both cheaper and better.
The hybrid usually beats both
An in-house coordinator who owns the day to day, with an agency covering the specialist channels, is frequently the right shape. It is also the one brands consider last.
Ask what happens when they leave
A single hire is a single point of failure. When they go you lose the account knowledge and start the recruitment cost again. That risk belongs in the comparison.
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