Here’s a good question: When it comes to your organization, where does the ecommerce team belong?
Some companies treat it as a sales function. Others park it under marketing. And a few are carving out a center of excellence (COE). But as ecommerce evolves — touching retail media, data strategy, and shopper experience — it’s clear that your organizational structure can be a major factor in your brand’s performance.
At Salsify’s 2025 Digital Shelf Summit, four senior leaders sat down to hash this out during a panel session: Rachel Tipograph, CEO of MikMak; John White, CIO at Dorel Home; Joanne Doucette, WW director of digital content operations and partner tools at HP; and Jamie Schwab, VP global digital commerce at Colgate-Palmolive.
Each brought a distinct perspective based on real-world org charts, team dynamics, and battle-tested experience. Let’s take a closer look at some of their insights.
If you’re hoping there’s a clear answer to where the ecommerce team should sit — there isn’t. And that’s exactly what makes the question so pressing.
Tipograph opened the session with an audience poll, asking attendees where ecommerce currently lives in their respective orgs.
The results? All over the place.
“There is literally no consistency,” Tipograph says. “I work with 2,300 brands and can tell you with significant confidence, there is no consistency.”
What does it mean? It’s a signal that companies are still playing catch-up with what ecommerce has become. It’s not just a sales channel anymore — it’s a media buyer, a data hub, a customer experience engine. And as the function evolves, the org chart has to evolve with it.
The big takeaway from this session wasn’t a clear, definitive answer — it was the wide range of setups and approaches that have worked for the panelists, depending on the company’s culture, leadership, and pain tolerance.
Here’s how each panelist described their current ecommerce team structure:
Ecommerce at Colgate reports into customer development.
According to Schwab of Colgate-Palmolive, “My boss is technically part of the marketing organization, and yet I am technically part of the customer development organization,” she says. “[But] that’s just according to the payroll as of right now.”
HP’s ecommerce operation sits within sales but acts as a center of excellence, supporting all routes to market.
According to Doucette of HP, “We partner with all the different routes to market. What we've done today is pretty much the different core competencies that sit within how we go to market.”
Dorel’s team started under IT, but eventually evolved into a centralized project management office (PMO) model.
According to White of Dorel Home, “We started it honestly on the IT side … [but] what’s happened is we’ve really found that [ecommerce] has had to be involved in everything … At this point, it’s immersed in the whole business.”
While there was no prescribed playbook coming out of this panel, there were some striking throughlines. No matter where ecommerce lives on paper, these four themes kept coming up as critical to getting it right.
Org charts don’t mean much if they’re not built around how customers actually buy. Schwab noted that in many companies, ecommerce sits wherever the budget happens to land — but that doesn’t mean it’s aligned with how the shopper moves.
“Who makes the decisions tends to be where ecommerce sits ... but is that decision-making also following the shopper?” Schwab asks.
Doucette put it even more simply: “It starts with the customer,” she says. “Within HP, that’s really sales.”
If your org structure isn’t anchored in customer behavior, you’re solving for internal comfort — not external impact.
Retail media spend is exploding, and it’s exposing just how fuzzy ecommerce ownership can be. Tipograph warned that media investment is quickly becoming one of the largest costs in serving customers, which naturally pulls ecommerce closer to marketing — or whoever controls the purse strings.
Schwab went further, calling retail media the force that will eventually force the issue.
“[Retail media] is the Trojan horse that is gonna attack the other side of who doesn’t own it right now,” he says.
If your ecommerce success depends on multiple teams, you need someone making sure those teams, you know, actually work together.
White described Dorel’s shift toward a centralized PMO model as a possible solution.
“You can say ‘communication’ and get everybody in a room ... But everybody walks out with their own opinions,” he says. “Having that one person sitting in the middle ... has led us to break through.”
Finally, your ecommerce tech team can’t just be a service desk. They need to be partners in the business. At Dorel, IT and sales are aligned financially and strategically — something White sees as non-negotiable: “Our IT leaders have the same financial goals as our sales leaders,” he says. “Our tech team’s number one mandate is: get to ‘yes.’”
Yes, there’s no universal answer to where ecommerce belongs — but there are a few common traps that leaders can avoid.
The leaders at this session made it clear: Structure is only part of the equation. What matters more is how your teams align, who’s empowered to make decisions, and whether the org is set up to move quickly in a fast-changing market.
So, your first step? Get your teams out of their silos. Cross-functional collaboration isn’t just a buzzword — it’s how ecommerce actually happens. Without shared goals across sales, marketing, IT, and operations, all of your careful planning will fall apart upon execution.
It also means recognizing that ecommerce can no longer neatly live under a single banner anymore. The companies that are adapting fastest are the ones treating ecommerce as a connective tissue, not a standalone channel.
Retail media is another pressure point, and one that’s only getting louder. But Schwab warned against treating it like a traditional media spend — unless it actually behaves like one.
“You can’t just say, ‘treat retail media like media’ unless it’s able to do what other media does,” she says.
And with artificial intelligence (AI) creeping into every corner of the ecommerce stack, now’s the time to prep your foundation. That starts with your data — how it’s tagged, structured, and connected. As Doucette put it: “We need to make sure our content is tagged with metadata … so it gets into the AI engine.”
For leaders trying to future-proof their orgs, the message wasn’t “pick the right department.” It was “build the right muscles.”
The future of ecommerce org structure won’t be about drawing cleaner lines but dissolving existing ones. If anything, the message from this panel was that ownership is becoming everyone’s responsibility — whether they like it or not.
White made the point that true ecommerce integration is already happening across functions — even if the org chart hasn’t caught up yet: “Everybody from the guys in the warehouse, to IT, to sales, to marketing — everybody owns it.”
Doucette sees sales retaining formal ownership, but with enablement increasingly led by specialized teams: “Sales is still gonna be making the decision ... but COEs are gonna lead the enablement of that strategy.”
For Schwab, the long game is seamlessness. Sales should sell, marketing should market — but the internal walls need to come down: “Sales can do what sales does and marketing can do what marketing does ... It needs to be seamless.”
And Tipograph’s bet? Eventually, we’ll stop debating which department owns commerce — because someone new will: “My bet is the chief growth officer.”
A shift is happening, if it hasn’t started already — one that rewards clarity, collaboration, and teams built to flex, not just function.
There’s no one way to structure an ecommerce team — but there are plenty of wrong ones. This session made one thing abundantly clear: If your team is misaligned, siloed, or stuck in an outdated model, it’s time to shift gears.
Ecommerce doesn’t sit in one department anymore because it is the department — touching media, data, sales, and operations in ways legacy orgs weren’t built for. As our world, society, and marketplace become increasingly digital, the companies that will thrive are willing to rethink not just where ecommerce fits, but how their entire organization works around it.