Ecommerce outsourcing: what to hand over, and what to keep
Paying someone outside the business to do a job inside it. Done well, you buy skill you couldn't hire. Done badly, you buy a contract and a login you don't own.
- 100Outsourcing
- Delegating certain business processes or tasks to external agencies or freelancers, often to save costs or access specialised expertise.
- Often outsourced
- Warehousing, customer service, design, photography and email marketing
- Keep in-house
- The decisions, the customer data and the accounts it lives in
- Our interest
- We're an agency, so we sit on one side of this
What to outsource, and what to keep in the building
Let's face it: we're an agency, so we're not neutral on this. Here's the split we'd give you anyway.
- Outsource specialist craft you can't fill a week with: email builds, design, SEO, photography
- Outsource physical work that scales badly at home: storage, packing, returns
- Outsource overflow, not judgement: customer service at peak, not your refund policy
- Keep the decisions: product, pricing, what the brand sounds like
- Keep the customer data, and the accounts it lives in
Own every account the outsourced work happens in
Your Klaviyo account, your Shopify store, your domain and its DNS, your ad accounts: all in your company's name, with the outside team added as users. If you part ways, you remove a login. Nothing stops sending.
Insist on it from anyone, us included. An agency that builds inside its own account owns your history, and leaving means starting again. It's the first of the red flags when hiring an email marketing agency.
Signs your outsourced team is actually working
- You can check every number they report in your own account
- You can name the person doing the work, not just the one who sold it
- They tell you what they'd stop doing, as well as what to add
- Someone has written down which side owns what
- The notice period is short enough that they keep earning it
That last one matters most. Long contracts protect the supplier. A short notice period protects you, and it keeps everybody honest.
When outsourcing your email marketing makes sense
Email is a good test case. It needs strategy, design, copy, data and deliverability, and that's rarely one person.
Hand it over when email is a real revenue line and nobody inside has the hours or the Klaviyo depth. Keep it when the list is small and a monthly newsletter is the whole programme. Agency vs in-house goes through the trade properly.
Related terms
FAQs
Is outsourcing cheaper than hiring in-house?
Sometimes. Compare the whole cost, not a fee against a salary: recruitment, tools, management time and holiday cover all sit on the in-house side. Outsourcing tends to win on specialist work you can't fill a week with, and lose on work that needs someone in the building every day.
What should an outsourcing agreement cover?
Who does what, written down. Who owns the accounts, the files and the data. How results are reported, and where you can check them. The notice period. And a data processing agreement if they'll handle your customers' personal data, because under UK GDPR they're processing it on your behalf. Nothing here is legal advice.
How do we leave an agency without breaking our email?
If the accounts are yours, it's mostly removing their access. Ask for a handover first: what each flow does, which segments matter, where the templates live, and anything set up outside the platform. Don't switch flows off on the way out, because they're probably still earning.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
Half an hour with Theo, our founder.
We're all about relationships built on trust, mutual respect and a shared vision for success. If that sounds like your vibe, let's make some waves together 🌊
