Hire Director of Ecommerce — the operator who runs your P&L daily

The VP owns the P&L and sets strategy at executive level; the director runs the P&L day to day — trading, team, and execution cadence. Bigger businesses need both; mid-sized ones often start with the director.

Typically once online revenue supports a dedicated team — when the founder or marketing lead can no longer run trading, merchandising, and retention alongside everything else.

They should own the commercial outcomes of the site, with a technical partner handling the platform itself. That split — commercial ownership plus technical backstop — is exactly the model I provide.

Revenue and contribution margin against plan, conversion rate trend, repeat purchase rate, and team output velocity. If those four move, the hire is working.

Yes — that is the core of the role. A good director inherits teams, earns trust fast, sets clear expectations, and upgrades where needed without breaking what already works.

I work on a fixed monthly fractional retainer rather than a day rate, so the cost is predictable and you are not watching the clock. The investment depends on scope — how many trading cycles I own, team size, and whether a replatform is involved — but it typically sits well below a full-time director's loaded salary, bonus and equity. I scope it against the revenue and margin the role is accountable for, and we agree a notice period so you are never locked in.

The first two weeks are diagnostic, so expect findings and a ranked plan before the end of month one. Operational wins — tightened lifecycle flows, fixed site search, a disciplined promotional calendar — usually show inside the first trading cycle of 30 to 60 days. Compounding gains in retention and margin take a full quarter to read cleanly, because cohort data needs time to mature. I would be wary of anyone promising a revenue step-change in week one.

If your constraint is senior judgement rather than daily headcount, fractional usually wins — you get fifteen years of pattern recognition for two or three focused days a week instead of paying full freight for seniority you only need part-time. Once the function genuinely needs an operator present for every decision and a team that reports in daily, a full-time director makes sense, and I will tell you plainly when you have reached that point and help you hire and onboard them.

Yes, and that is the common case. I sit on your side of the table as the accountable owner, not a replacement for execution. I hold the agency to clear SLAs and an honest attribution model, keep your in-house team's rhythm intact, and strip out duplication. Most teams do not need more hands — they need one person deciding what the hands do, in what order, and why. That is exactly what you get when you hire a director of ecommerce on this basis.

Yes. I have delivered across Shopify Plus, headless builds, WordPress and Webflow, so I can own a migration end to end: scoping, vendor selection, SEO preservation, data and integration mapping, and a launch plan that protects live trading. The mistake I see most is treating a replatform as an IT project when it is a commercial one. The person who runs your trade should own the go-live, so rankings, conversion and revenue do not quietly fall off a cliff.

Yes, and I do. The Gulf timezone overlaps a full UK and European working day and reaches US mornings, so handovers and trade reviews land comfortably. I run everything through a shared operating rhythm — documented decisions, a single weekly trade review, and dashboards everyone reads the same way — so location stops mattering. I have served clients across the UAE, US, UK, Canada, Pakistan and Malaysia on exactly this model.