In-house, agency or hybrid: what should an ecommerce team actually own?
2026-07-08
The in-house versus agency debate isn't about the cost. In reality, it’s about control, and making the wrong choice can be costly in ways that don’t appear on your invoice.
- Ecommerce
- Digital Marketing
- StrategyLeadership
People often see the in-house versus agency choice as a budget issue. Should you pay an agency retainer or hire and manage the work yourself? If you focus only on cost, you miss the bigger picture. The real question is which skills give you an edge because they are part of your own team, and which tasks just need to be done well by anyone. If you make the right call, the money will follow. If you get it wrong, you either lose profit to an agency for something you should handle, or you spend on salaries for work the market can do better and for less.
The real variable is how specific the knowledge is to you
There is a well-known economic idea behind this. In 1937, Ronald Coase asked why companies exist instead of just buying everything they need from the market. Later, Oliver Williamson explained that using the market has its own costs, like finding suppliers, negotiating, writing contracts, checking the work, and risking being too dependent on one partner. A company brings work in-house when these extra costs are higher than doing it themselves. The key factor is what Williamson called asset specificity: how much the knowledge or asset is tailored to your business.
When you look at your ecommerce team, this idea becomes clearer. Things like your margin structure, customer data, why customers buy from you instead of a competitor, your promotional calendar, and your unique catalogue are all specific to your business. This knowledge grows in value the longer it stays with your team, and it loses value if it moves to an outside account manager. That is the kind of work you should keep in-house. On the other hand, tasks like a one-time replatforming, a burst of creative work before a busy season, or specialist paid-media work that benefits from experience across many accounts are not unique to you. The market usually handles these better and more flexibly.
What stays in-house, always
Strategy, trading decisions, customer data, the brand, and the P&L should always stay in-house. These are your core responsibilities. If you let any of them go, you are not just outsourcing tasks: you are giving away your judgement and control over your business. An agency can create a campaign, but decisions about how much to pay to acquire a customer and what a returning customer is worth must remain with your own team.
What an agency genuinely does better
Specialist expertise is valuable and often worth the cost. A strong paid-media or technical SEO agency can spot trends across many clients that an in-house team might miss. Agencies can also handle busy periods, like the rush before Black Friday or a big migration project, without needing you to hire more staff. They cover the costs of tools, training, and staying up to date, sharing these across all their clients. When used for the right tasks, this is not wasted money. It is a way to access skills you could not build on your own for the same price.
The dependency trap that quietly costs the most
This is where business owners can get into trouble, often without realising it until they want to make a change. If the agency controls your ad accounts, analytics, tracking, creative files, and company knowledge, it becomes hard and expensive to switch providers. Economists call this the hold-up problem: once someone is hard to replace, they can demand more from you. At that point, you are not just buying a service. You are renting your own abilities back from them, on their terms. The solution is not to bring everything in-house out of fear, but to set up the right structure. Make sure you own your accounts, data, and strategy, and keep enough knowledge in-house so you could brief a new partner quickly. Let agencies do the work, but keep control.
Where hybrid works, and where it just means paying twice
Most successful teams use a hybrid approach, but this can mean two very different things. The good version keeps important knowledge and decisions inside your team, while bringing in outside experts for specific tasks. Your team sets the strategy, owns the data, and manages relationships, while the agency handles specialist work as needed. The bad version is the opposite: the agency makes key decisions, and your in-house staff just pass along messages, so you end up paying for both. If you cannot clearly say who makes which decisions, you are likely in the costly version without realising it.
A test you can run on every function
For every task, ask yourself three questions: Is this core to what makes us different as a business? Does it need ongoing, close knowledge of our customers and margins? Does its value grow the longer we keep it in-house? If you answer yes to all three, keep the work inside, even if an agency could do it cheaper for now. If you answer no to most, outsource it and give the agency a clear brief and targets. For tasks that fall in the middle, like SEO, CRO, and lifecycle, it often works best to have a small in-house lead who manages outside specialists. That is a healthy hybrid setup.
The line moves, the principle does not
These decisions are not permanent. A skill that is less important now might become central as your business grows, and then it makes sense to bring it in-house. But the main principle stays the same: keep what is unique to your business and grows in value over time. Outsource specialist or one-off tasks. No matter what you outsource, always keep control. An ecommerce leader is not judged by how much they do themselves, but by whether they keep control of key decisions and assets.