In Part 1, we made the case that e-commerce platforms need owners, not just builders—that successful platforms require dedicated internal capability, not just a systems integrator who rolls off after launch.

Now let’s get practical. What does an internal e-commerce ownership team actually look like? What capabilities do you need in-house, and how do these roles work together to create customer experiences that drive adoption?

Building an effective internal team doesn’t mean you need dozens of people. But you do need specific capabilities represented, even if individuals wear multiple hats in smaller organizations. These six roles form the foundation of a product-driven e-commerce operation.

Product Manager

The product manager owns the vision, strategy, and roadmap—and more importantly, owns outcomes, not just feature delivery.

A strong e-commerce product manager balances competing priorities from customers, sales, marketing, and operations. They make evidence-based decisions about what to build next, grounded in customer research, business metrics, and technical feasibility.

This role requires both strategic thinking and tactical execution. Your product manager should understand conversion funnels and user journeys, speak the language of both business and technical teams, and translate between them effectively.

From a customer experience perspective, the product manager orchestrates all touchpoints to work together coherently. They identify where customers get stuck and prioritize fixes based on impact. When checkout abandonment spikes, they investigate why. They’re the one who asks “is this actually easier/better for our customers?” when stakeholders push features that serve internal processes over user needs.

UI/UX Designer

User experience isn’t about making things pretty—it’s about making things work intuitively for your specific customers. A dedicated UI/UX designer ensures your platform serves user needs, not just business requirements or technical constraints.

Great e-commerce design is born in an understanding of your customers’ workflows, pain points, and mental models. Your B2B buyers aren’t shopping like consumers on Amazon. They’re placing complex reorders, managing approval workflows, or searching for parts by specification. Your designer creates experiences that feel ‘easy’ despite underlying complexity.

Poor UX creates friction at every step: customers can’t find previous orders, the reorder process requires too many clicks, mobile navigation is confusing, error messages are cryptic. Each friction point either sends customers back to calling your sales team or worse, to competitors who make buying easier. Your designer identifies and eliminates these friction points systematically.

Merchant/Merchandiser

This role bridges product information and customer experience, responsible for how your catalog is presented, organized, and enriched to drive discoverability and conversion.

In B2B e-commerce, product content quality often determines whether customers can find what they need. Your merchant manages taxonomy, ensures product attributes are complete and accurate, creates compelling descriptions, and coordinates imagery and documentation. They understand which attributes matter for search and filtering.

When product information is incomplete or inaccurate, customers lose confidence and abandon their carts. When they can’t find products because taxonomy is confusing, they give up and call. When product pages lack specifications or images, customers can’t make informed decisions independently. Your merchant ensures every product page answers customer questions before they’re asked, turning your catalog from a digital price list into a resource that helps customers solve problems.

Search Manager

Search is the primary discovery mechanism for most B2B e-commerce platforms, yet it’s often neglected after launch. Your search manager owns the quality and effectiveness of on-site search, turning it from a basic utility into a conversion tool.

This role involves analyzing search queries to understand what customers are looking for and how well the platform serves those needs. Your search manager identifies queries with zero results, refines synonym handling, adjusts relevance algorithms, and ensures filtering works intuitively.

Without dedicated search ownership, the experience degrades as your catalog grows and customer behavior evolves. Customers get frustrated, and you never know why because nobody is monitoring the data.

Technical Leader

Your technical leader ensures the platform can evolve sustainably. This person isn’t necessarily writing code daily, but they’re responsible for technical architecture, integration health, and engineering roadmap.

In many organizations, this role bridges internal IT and external development partners. Your technical leader translates product requirements into technical specifications, evaluates technical trade-offs, and ensures engineering efforts align with strategy.

From a customer perspective, the technical leader’s work is often invisible until something goes wrong. They ensure pages load quickly even as catalog size grows, architect integrations so inventory accuracy is reliable, and implement monitoring so problems get caught before customers encounter them. They ensure the platform is not just functional but reliable, performant, and resilient—the foundation that every other experience improvement depends on.

Data/Analytics Specialist

Your data and analytics specialist transforms raw platform activity into actionable insights that drive decision-making across the entire team. This role goes far beyond setting up Google Analytics—they’re responsible for the measurement framework that tells you whether your platform is actually working.

This person designs the instrumentation that tracks user behavior, conversion funnels, and business outcomes. They create dashboards that make complex data accessible and conduct deep-dive analyses to understand customer segments, product performance, and journey abandonment patterns.

More importantly, your analytics specialist connects platform activity to business results. They calculate customer lifetime value by segment, measure ROI of platform improvements, and quantify the impact of changes. They identify trends before they become obvious and surface opportunities hidden in the data.

Without dedicated analytics capability, decisions get made based on opinions rather than evidence. Your product manager might suspect checkout is a problem, but your analytics specialist quantifies exactly where users drop off and estimates the revenue impact of fixing it. They create the feedback loops that enable continuous learning through baseline metrics, A/B tests, and alerts that surface anomalies so the team can respond quickly.

The real power emerges when these roles work together. Consider a customer trying to reorder a critical part. The merchant ensured the product page includes complete specifications. The search manager configured synonyms so the customer can find it using their internal part number. The UI/UX designer created a streamlined reorder flow. The product manager prioritized quick reorder functionality based on usage data. The technical leader ensured real-time inventory accuracy. The analytics specialist measured that quick reorder drives 35% of revenue from returning customers.

No single role creates that experience. Missing one piece means customers encounter friction that sends them back to phone or email, undermining adoption.

These roles also create feedback loops for continuous improvement. Your UX designer identifies where users struggle. Your search manager sees which queries fail. Your merchant notices which categories have high bounce rates. Your technical leader detects performance issues. Your analytics specialist quantifies impact and tracks whether improvements move the metrics that matter. Your product manager synthesizes all of this into a prioritized roadmap.

None of this means you shouldn’t work with systems integrators. External partners bring deep platform expertise, implementation capacity, and cross-industry perspective that’s valuable, especially during major initiatives.

The key is defining the right partnership model. Your systems integrator handles implementation, but your internal team owns strategy, prioritization, and success metrics. Structure the relationship so knowledge transfer is continuous, not a one-time handoff. Your internal team should be embedded in the work, learning the platform deeply.

Most importantly, recognize that the integrator’s incentives may not perfectly align with yours. They’re optimized for delivering projects on time and on budget, not necessarily for long-term success. Your internal team ensures the platform serves business objectives beyond launch.

Building an internal e-commerce team requires investment in skilled professionals. For organizations accustomed to thinking of e-commerce as a project cost, this ongoing investment can feel uncomfortable.

But consider the alternative. Without this capability, you’re dependent on external partners for every change. Decision-making is slow because nobody internally has the context to make informed trade-offs. The platform slowly becomes outdated as competitors iterate faster.

Companies with strong internal teams ship features faster, make better decisions, and achieve higher adoption and revenue. They’re continuously evolving their platform based on what they’re learning, not waiting for the next project budget cycle.

If you’re lacking these capabilities internally, start by acknowledging the gap. Begin by appointing a product owner, even if it’s not their full-time role initially. This person becomes the single point of accountability for e-commerce outcomes.

Assess which capabilities you’re missing most acutely. Is user experience suffering? Start with UX. Is search frustrating customers? Prioritize search management. Build the team thoughtfully over time.

Create space for continuous improvement. Set aside dedicated time and budget for optimization separate from major projects. Establish metrics that matter and review them regularly. Most importantly, shift the conversation from “when will it be done?” to “how do we know it’s working?”

E-commerce platforms are never finished. Customer expectations evolve, competitive pressures mount, and technology capabilities expand. Organizations that treat e-commerce as having a finish line will always be playing catch-up.

Dedicated internal ownership transforms e-commerce from a cost center into a competitive advantage. It enables continuous improvement, faster decision-making, and better alignment between technology and business objectives.

Whether you’re launching a new platform or optimizing an existing one, invest in the team that will own its success. That investment will pay back many times over in adoption, revenue, and competitive positioning.

Your systems integrator can help you build a platform. Only your internal team can make it successful.