If your ecommerce brand is struggling to grow, choosing between an Ecommerce Manager and a Marketing Manager depends on where your bottleneck lives: conversion or demand.
At some point, most ecommerce brands hit the same hiring crossroads. Revenue isn’t growing the way it should. Things feel messy. Everyone is busy, but results are uneven. And the question comes up in a meeting or Slack thread:
“Do we need an Ecommerce Manager or a Marketing Manager?”
The reason this question is so common is also why it’s dangerous. These two roles get confused constantly, and hiring the wrong one at the wrong time can slow growth instead of accelerating it.
The difference isn’t about seniority or titles. It’s about what part of the business actually needs ownership right now.
An ecommerce manager owns the store as a revenue engine. What an ecommerce manager actually owns day to day is where marketing often stops.
They are responsible for everything that happens after traffic lands on the site, including:
The metrics they live and die by look like:
A strong ecommerce manager makes sure the site converts demand into revenue efficiently. If traffic doubles tomorrow, they’re the person who ensures the business can actually capture that upside instead of leaking it through poor UX, broken flows, or inventory issues.
What they don’t typically own is demand generation itself. They don’t decide how much traffic you get. They decide what happens when it arrives.
A marketing manager owns demand. Their focus is on bringing the right people to the site in the first place, not on how the store converts them once they’re there.
Typical responsibilities include:
The metrics they’re accountable to usually include:
A good marketing manager knows how to scale channels, test creative, and allocate spend. They generate interest and intent. But they are rarely responsible for checkout flow, inventory constraints, or on-site conversion mechanics.
In short, they get people to the door. They don’t own what happens inside the store.
This framing reinforces decision clarity without pushing a hire prematurely.
Most common ecommerce hiring mistakes happen when brands confuse growth with marketing.
If revenue is flat, the instinct is often to hire a marketing manager and “drive more traffic.” But if conversion is broken, inventory is misaligned, or the site experience is weak, more traffic just means more wasted spend.
On the flip side, some brands hire an ecommerce manager hoping they’ll magically grow top-line revenue, only to discover that the real bottleneck is demand. The site is solid, but there simply aren’t enough qualified users coming in.
Common mistakes we see include:
The result is predictable: strong effort, weak outcomes, and a lot of finger-pointing.
You likely need an Ecommerce Manager if:
In these cases, the bottleneck isn’t demand. It’s execution inside the store.
An Ecommerce Manager brings structure to the chaos. They create systems, prioritize improvements, and ensure the site is actually doing its job: converting interest into money.
A Marketing Manager makes sense when:
Here, the store can handle more demand. The problem is that demand isn’t coming in consistently or cheaply enough.
Hiring an Ecommerce Manager in this scenario won’t fix growth. You don’t need a better store. You need more (or better) traffic.
At scale, this isn’t an either-or decision, it’s how high-performing ecommerce teams are structured.
The best-performing ecommerce brands separate ownership cleanly:
There’s a clear handoff: acquisition drives users to the site, and ecommerce turns those users into customers.
When these roles are well-defined, decision-making improves. Marketing knows how much demand the site can handle, and ecommerce knows what kind of traffic is coming. Instead of fighting over metrics, both teams optimize their part of the funnel.
That clarity is what allows brands to scale without chaos.
Ecommerce Manager vs Marketing Manager isn’t a debate about which role is “better.” It’s about which part of your business needs leadership right now.
If your store is leaking revenue, no amount of traffic will save you. If demand is the issue, site tweaks won’t move the needle.
Constant Hire is an ecommerce marketing recruitment agency that helps brands identify the real bottleneck before they hire. Then we place operators who can actually own it, not just hold the title.
If you’re unsure which role to hire first, that uncertainty is usually the signal. And it’s almost always cheaper to get that decision right upfront than to fix it later.
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