Building a Winning Team for Your Bigcommerce Business: Tips & Strategies

Our store runs on Shopify rather than BigCommerce, though the hiring problem looks identical on either.

The tip is to hire the loop you cannot outsource, and to hire it before the role everybody tells you to fill first. Our first proper hire was not a marketer. It was someone who owned the customer inbox and the day-to-day of fulfilment, which sounds administrative and is nothing of the kind, because that person ends up holding the only complete picture of what customers find confusing.

The collaboration that proved the point was between them and our designer. Support kept answering the same question about how to use the product, patiently, one message at a time. Rather than write a better canned reply, the two of them rebuilt that section of the product page together, using the exact words customers had used in the messages. Not the words we would have chosen, which is precisely why it worked.

That single question had been about 25% of the inbox. After the page change, it stopped arriving. The designer got a sharper brief than any I could have written, and the support person had visible proof that what they noticed changed the business, which is what keeps that job from feeling thankless.

Hire the person who sees the friction, then let them design it out.

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We are not on BigCommerce, so take this as advice from somebody running a specialist store on a different platform. The team lesson travels.

Hire for product knowledge over platform experience. Anyone capable can be taught where the buttons live in a store admin inside a fortnight. Nobody can be taught in a fortnight why a driver with a particular car and a long driveway needs a different cable to their neighbour. We hired a support person who had never touched an e-commerce backend but had owned an electric car for years, and within a month she was answering fitment questions better than I was.

The collaboration that changed the business was giving support a direct say in buying. Every fortnight, the person answering customer messages brings the list of things people asked for that we do not sell, and that list sits in the reorder meeting with the same weight as sales data. Eight of the lines we added last year came from it rather than from a supplier catalogue.

It works because the people closest to the customer usually know what is missing, and in most companies there is no route for that knowledge to reach a buying decision. Build the route and the range improves without you having to be clever.

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Tip: hire systems, not tasks.

Most founders scale from solo to lean teams by handing off to-do lists that only move the bottleneck—the founder is still approving every decision.

Hand off a repeatable system with its own intake, SOP (standard operating procedure), QA step, and weekly audit.

I was forced to do this early on when running both SEOBRO and RedditServices in parallel. I could no longer be the decision point for both. Therefore, each collaborator has end-to-end ownership of a system—one owns the content pipeline from brief to publish, another owns reporting cadence. I review the system on a fixed weekly basis, not daily. Good weeks hide problems faster than bad ones, so the audit is non-negotiable.

The moment I stopped assigning tasks and started assigning systems, the team ran without me checking in every day, even though output remained consistent during weeks that were heavily focused on client work.

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Build a team around complementary skills and clear ownership: pair people who understand e-commerce operations (customer service, logistics, website maintenance) with those who know the aesthetic and community (collection development, social media, product curation). Make roles explicit, set simple customer-focused goals, and empower cross-functional decision making so work flows instead of stalling in silos.

At Cyber Techwear, we coordinate customer service, order preparation, shipping, social media, and collection development around each new drop. That coordination—early input from logistics and customer service into design and launch timing—shortened feedback loops, reduced post-launch issues, and kept international orders flowing smoothly while preserving the brand’s creative vision.

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Keep your data architecture and platform strategy in-house while using augmentation talent to execute speedily and resolve specialized technical spikes. I have built global engineering teams for more than two decades, and I have found that the architecture that works best in e-commerce is the core-plus-one because the in-house staff must have a product owner and a chief architect who know the long-term plans in detail and also how BigCommerce communicates with your ERP systems, CRM, and marketing stack. Outsourcing the architect of your business may lead to a situation in which the realization of your plans is impossible due to the architecture being a black box that is difficult to scale or adjust during the peak season.

The working strategy is to integrate augmented developers into in-house teams’ processes, because it is not a good idea to treat them as something external. For instance, while transferring to a headless BigCommerce solution, the client relied on an in-house software developer responsible for the data schema and API security and hired augmented developers to create a front end with the help of Stencil CLI. The developers shared the CI/CD pipeline with the in-house employees, and that is how the client was able to meet all deadlines despite the involvement of augmentation.

A typical mistake is to hire full-stack developers instead of experts in a specific platform because e-commerce is not general web development. One should understand issues like PCI compliance, cart logic, or catalog processing. Thus, while assembling a team, one should look for individuals who have been engaged in high-load processes before and are aware of all requirements imposed by the BigCommerce API.

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One tip for building a strong ecommerce team is to create clear ownership around outcomes, not just tasks. Everyone should understand what they own, how success is measured, and how their work impacts the broader business.

In teams I’ve led, I’ve brought advertising, inventory, creative, and operations together around a shared weekly scorecard. For example, before a major promotional period, the advertising team might identify the products with the strongest growth potential, while inventory validates stock coverage and creative ensures the PDP and promotional assets are ready. Instead of each function working in a silo, everyone is working toward the same revenue and profitability targets.

That cross-functional visibility helps teams catch problems earlier, make faster decisions, and ultimately operate more like one ecommerce team rather than a collection of separate functions.

The mistake most BigCommerce sellers make with their team is hiring one “marketing person” to run ads, write product copy, manage the feed and answer emails all at once. That role burns out fast and nothing gets done at a level that actually moves revenue. What works better is splitting feed and catalog ownership away from paid acquisition ownership, even if it’s the same two people wearing different hats on different days.

We handle paid search for a home goods brand on BigCommerce with a catalog north of 500 SKUs. Before the split, the same person built Shopping campaigns and also fixed feed errors. Every time Google flagged disapproved products, campaigns sat stale for days because feed fixes always lost to ad work in the queue. Once we separated the two, feed issues got resolved the same day instead of sitting for a week, and ad spend stopped bleeding into products that were about to get suspended anyway.

The collaboration habit that mattered most: a standing fifteen-minute sync twice a week between whoever owns the feed and whoever owns the campaigns, nothing formal, just a shared note on what changed in the catalog and what needs a bid or budget adjustment because of it. Small habit. It’s the reason nothing falls through the crack between merchandising and spend.

The most effective tip for building a strong BigCommerce team is to organize around cross-functional accountability rather than departmental silos, ensuring e-commerce marketers, developers, and operations managers share joint ownership of key business metrics like conversion rate and customer lifetime value. In e-commerce, isolated teams often optimize for conflicting goals—marketers run heavy promotions that break inventory systems, while developers push custom features that slow down page speeds.

A concrete example of this in practice is the execution of a major platform release or system migration under a tight deadline. Instead of using a traditional “waterfall” hand-off—where strategy passes to design, then to engineering, and finally to operations—the organization forms a cross-functional strike team from day one. In one successful deployment, product managers, systems architects, and customer support leads conducted weekly joint “risk audits.” While engineers built the core features, customer support leads simultaneously drafted training documentation and flagged potential user-friction points, and operations leads prepared infrastructure monitoring. This real-time, parallel collaboration eliminated back-and-forth revisions late in the development cycle, reduced release-week support tickets by over 50%, and delivered the project three weeks ahead of schedule.

The biggest lever for a growing BigCommerce operation isn’t headcount — it’s making sure whoever owns inventory and customer service has a standing seat in platform decisions, not just a review pass at the end. We saw this clearly building a B2B ordering platform for a medical-supply company that had run everything through manual phone orders for years: the fixes that actually moved the needle came from putting warehouse staff in the same requirements sessions as engineers, because they knew exactly where the manual process broke down in ways the dev team never would have guessed. That collaboration cut the response-time queue significantly in the first year and got customers ordering in two clicks instead of calling in. The pattern holds at a smaller scale, too. A technical team can rebuild checkout flow endlessly, but if the person managing stock levels isn’t in that conversation, you end up with a fast store that’s still wrong half the time. Cross-functional input up front beats cross-functional cleanup later.