The path towards e-commerce profitability

Want profitable e-commerce? Start with the people who make it happen.

After almost 20 years in e-commerce, one thing’s become crystal clear: while fancy tech and trendy platforms are all the rage, true success begins with something far more fundamental – the human element. Or, better, the right mix of people and processes.

Running digital operations for electronics and high-end fashion brands for more than two decades, plus various startup and consulting projects, showed me that the journey to profitability starts with these three steps:

• Finding people who will like each other. Always involve the existing team when hiring the new members.
• Create a safe, fun-loving environment.
• Implement a degree of daily discipline – i.e. Agile methodology is great for that – and a few simple processes.

The role of the leader

If you are a digital leader, understand that your role is not about driving metrics. It’s about building leaders who can drive those metrics better than yourself. When each specialist becomes stronger than you in her domain, that’s when the magic starts.

Then, there’s team composition. Forget the standard talk about collaboration and synergies. What you need is alchemy. Not the usual clichés of team play, chemistry, and the vague invitations to collaboration. That doesn’t come by itself. It must be built. The role of the leader is to create very precise yet flexible areas of responsibility, and assign a person to each of them: User Experience. Conversion Rate Optimization. Performance Marketing. Content Maintenance. Product Catalog. CRM. Fulfillment. It’s a long list.

Every member on the team must have a mission, and it must be her own mission. She must be held accountable for it. All duplications and overlappings should be prevented. Once you have a team of accountable people, which means leaders, you need the alchemy: not the sum of the elements, but something completely new, bigger, better, more resilient. By then, you have to move to the background, step down from the stage. It’s not you who’s creating results, it’s your team of alchemists.

Alchemy

Alchemy takes time. The process of transformation is everything. Short term results and silver bullets are for the dreamers, for those who hope for shortcuts. Forget goals, create processes and stick to them, instead. Make sure they are maintained. They won’t stay up if you don’t prop them every single day with your work: is the goal clear to everyone? Is the roadmap stable through the year? Are the roles and the responsibilities understood by each team member? Do they feel accountable for the results expected from them?

No silver bullets

Building a high-performing e-commerce team is analogous to the sustained effort required to build a championship-caliber sports team, demanding consistent practice, disciplined adherence to strategy, and the resilience to withstand the pressure to deviate from the long-term vision. There are no quick fixes, no silver bullets. Focus on building robust, sustainable processes. When we prioritized perfecting our customer data processes over chasing short-term sales goals, we actually saw a significant uptick in revenue.

Playing defense

And let’s be honest, a significant part of the digital leader’s job is playing defense. In large organizations, everyone from the CEO to the janitor has an opinion on your website, your app, your content, your marketing campaigns. Everyone becomes instantly an expert when confronted with a photograph, a headline, a color palette. Your role? To shield your team of actual experts from this cacophony of voices, allowing them the space to experiment, to test, to learn. You can’t optimize conversion rates in between ten daily meetings, or with the Head of Accounting suggesting a different color for the CTA’s of your online shop. You have to manage the interferences and let the team focus on execution while you handle the politics.

The supplier ecosystem

Then there’s the supplier ecosystem. When to bring capabilities in-house? When to leverage external expertise? These aren’t just cost decisions – they’re about team evolution. The best digital leaders know when to build internal strengths and when to lean on partners. It’s a constant balancing act.

Our supplier relationships proved crucial. When we aligned our partners with our vision for strong, consistent processes – particularly in areas like logistics and customer experience – the impact on performance was significant.

Trust the process

“Trust the process” isn’t just a catchphrase – it’s survival. When we focused on protecting our processes rather than chasing quick wins, that’s when sustainable growth happened.

The lesson? In e-commerce, your competitive advantage doesn’t come from technology alone. It comes from the collective skills of your team, the clarity of your management, and the integration of your partners into a shared vision of success.

In e-commerce, profitability starts with well-oiled processes run by focused teams. Everything else is just wishful thinking.

Matteo Petruzzellis is a digital commerce leader with over 20 years of experience scaling e-commerce and digital marketing operations for premium brands such as Nokia, Wolford, Akris, where he built high-performing teams that delivered both growth and profitability. His consultancy work through In&Out People – including roles as Marketing Director at Classic Design Italia, CMO at Return on Art, VP Sales & Marketing at PlatformE, Global Head of Digital Sales at Art Basel – involved advising on digital marketing strategy, email marketing optimization, CRM development, and P&L restructuring

Currently Marketing Director at Radial Europe, he leverages his expertise in e-commerce to help the Sales team matching with B2C brands in need of high quality bespoke fulfillment solutions.