The most telling insight on current web/e-commerce staffing trends is not a surge or decline, but the absence of either. This function has remained largely unchanged in the past five years, culminating in a plateau over the last two. While individual firms may sit above or below the median depending on their digital intensity or industry focus, their YOY consistency indicates that most have settled into a repeatable, mature operating model.
As shown in Figure 1 from our full report, Web/E-Commerce Staffing Ratios, web/e-commerce staffing within IT settled at a median of 3.2% in 2025. This follows several years of ratios hovering just above 3.0%, with the five‑year peak reaching 3.4% in 2023. Rather than signaling stagnation, this lack of movement reflects equilibrium. Even as digital channels expand in reach and importance, the staffing required to support them has stabilized, reflecting a balance between capability, demand, and efficiency.
This trend indicates a convergence toward what organizations view as a sustainable staffing level and is rooted in a combination of maturity and technological leverage. Organizations have largely completed the heavy lifting of building core web and e-commerce platforms, shifting focus from capacity expansion to incremental enhancements, compliance, and user experience optimization.
At the same time, this stability should not be interpreted as simply universal optimization. In some firms, it may also reflect structural factors such as budget discipline or slower organizational redesign. Another important dimension is how responsibilities are allocated across the enterprise. Responsibilities once centralized in IT are increasingly shared with digital product teams, marketing units, and external partners, reducing the need for growth within IT itself. Together, these forces create a scenario where demand rises, but staffing remains steady.
“Advances in cloud computing, SaaS, automation, and low-code tools are allowing organizations to scale their web and e-commerce capabilities without increasing IT head count,” said Asif Cassim, principal analyst for Avasant Research, based in Los Angeles. “At the same time, responsibilities are increasingly distributed across business units and external partners, further reducing the need for dedicated web/e-commerce staff.”
Even so, the overall trend suggests that web and e-commerce staffing has become predictable, standardized, and less experimental than other IT staff. Looking ahead, the most likely outcome for next year is continued stability with a slight potential dip in the ratio. As automation advances and organizations further decouple digital capabilities from traditional IT structures, the proportion of web and e-commerce staff within IT may decline slightly, even as digital workloads expand. Rather than signaling decline, such a shift would reinforce the same underlying story: these capabilities are becoming more efficient, more distributed, and less dependent on dedicated IT head count. In short, the flat trend is expected to persist, not as a sign of inertia, but as evidence of sustained operational maturity.
In this study, web/e-commerce staff includes web developers, designers, administrators, and other individuals who work on the company’s public websites, as well as those who maintain intranet sites. It also includes personnel who are dedicated to e-commerce activities, such as electronic data interchange specialists. We have a separate staffing category for personnel supporting communications and messaging systems.
When considering the ratio of web/e-commerce personnel, it is helpful to keep in mind that the size of web/e-commerce support operations varies widely by industry sector, depending on an organization’s need for e-commerce and online customer service. For CIOs to calibrate their staffing requirements, the full report provides benchmarks for staffing functions related to web and e-commerce development and operations. We benchmark web/e-commerce staffing using two ratios: web/e-commerce staff as a percentage of the IT staff, and users per web/e-commerce staff member. Finally, we examine the influence of different sectors on web/e-commerce staffing.
This Research Byte is a brief overview of our report on this subject, Web/E-Commerce Staffing Ratios. The full report is available at no charge for subscribers.
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