Recruiting for E-commerce and Marketplace Teams in Belarus
Belarusian brands are selling more online than ever, and a growing share of those sales happens on marketplaces. For many companies, the limit on growth isn’t the product or the warehouse. It’s people: someone who understands unit economics, can run ads inside a marketplace, keeps stock levels right across several platforms and knows what to do when a rating suddenly drops.
At the same time, retailers and product companies keep building their own e-commerce platforms, and they need engineers who can handle large catalogues, fast search and payments at peak load.
This guide covers both sides. You’ll find the roles you need, where to find candidates in Belarus, how to test their skills and what affects pay in 2026.
The Belarus e-commerce market in 2026
Online sales are still a smaller part of retail in Belarus than in many neighbouring markets. At the end of 2023, e-commerce made up about 8% of the country’s retail turnover. Across the Eurasian Economic Union as a whole, it already accounts for more than 17% of all retail trade. That gap is one reason the market keeps growing quickly.
Marketplaces are driving most of that growth. Wildberries and Ozon together hold more than 40% of Belarusian e-commerce. Belarus has become one of Wildberries’ biggest markets. In 2025, the number of Belarusian sellers on the platform grew by about 20%, and their sales grew by roughly one and a half times. Ozon reported 2.5 times higher turnover and 3.5 times more orders in Belarus. Local players such as 21vek.by remain strong, and many Belarusian manufacturers now sell through several channels at once, including export to other countries in the region.
One more trend matters for hiring. Sellers expect marketplace commissions to keep rising over the next few years. When margins get thinner, the difference between an average marketplace manager and a strong one shows up directly in profit.
Two kinds of e-commerce teams
When companies in Belarus say they’re hiring for e-commerce, they usually mean one of two very different teams.
Commercial and marketplace teams sell products. They manage listings, prices, promotions, ads, stock and reviews on marketplaces and in the company’s own online store. Most of these roles sit in brands, manufacturers, distributors and retailers.
Tech teams build the platforms. They work on catalogues, search, checkout, payments, mobile apps and integrations with marketplaces and logistics systems. These roles sit in online retailers, marketplaces and product companies, many of them residents of the Hi-Tech Park.
The two talent pools barely overlap. They have different career paths, different salary logic and need different assessments. Treat them as separate hiring projects.
Commercial and marketplace roles
These are the roles most growing brands need, roughly in the order they usually hire them.
| Role | What they do | Must-have skills |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplace manager | Runs listings, pricing, promotions and stock on Wildberries, Ozon and other platforms | Unit economics, platform rules, analytics |
| Marketplace ad specialist | Manages internal ad campaigns, bids and budgets | Ad metrics, testing, budget control |
| Content manager and infographics designer | Creates product cards, photos and rich content | Conversion-focused design, copywriting |
| E-commerce analyst | Tracks sales, margins and stock, builds dashboards | Excel or SQL, BI tools, unit economics |
| Supply and fulfilment specialist | Plans shipments to marketplace warehouses and stock levels | Demand planning, FBO and FBS logistics |
| Customer care and reviews manager | Handles reviews, questions, ratings and returns | Communication, problem solving |
| Category manager | Decides what to sell, at what margin and when to rotate products | Assortment strategy, supplier negotiation |
| Head of e-commerce | Owns strategy across marketplaces, own store and export | P&L ownership, team leadership |
A small brand often starts with one strong marketplace manager who does most of this alone, plus a freelance designer. As sales grow, ads, content and analytics usually become separate roles first.
Junior and senior aren’t the same job
The title “marketplace manager” covers a huge range of experience. Some candidates have run one small shop with a few dozen products. Others have managed thousands of SKUs across several marketplaces with large ad budgets. Both will describe themselves the same way on a CV. Ask about catalogue size, platforms, monthly turnover and ad spend early in the process, and you’ll save hours of interviews.
If you’re building a commercial team from scratch, our marketing and e-commerce recruitment team can help define the roles and the order to hire them in.
Tech roles for e-commerce platforms
On the tech side, e-commerce looks like any high-load product, with a few specific challenges.
- Backend developers build catalogues, orders, payments and inventory systems that have to cope with sales peaks.
- Frontend and mobile developers work on the storefront and apps, where every second of load time affects conversion.
- Search and data specialists handle search relevance, recommendations and pricing models.
- Integration engineers connect the platform with marketplace APIs, ERP systems, payment providers and delivery services.
- QA engineers cover checkout, payments and integrations, where bugs cost real money.
- Product managers and UX designers focus on conversion, checkout flow and customer experience.
Belarus has a deep pool of engineers with experience in retail, fintech and other high-load products. The Hi-Tech Park alone has around 60,000 employees, and many of its residents build products for international markets. Backend roles are usually the first and hardest to fill, so it’s worth working with a team that specializes in recruiting backend developers.
Where to find e-commerce talent in Belarus
Commercial roles
Marketplace specialists rarely come from classic retail career paths. Good places to look include:
- Seller communities and Telegram channels, where experienced managers share cases and tools
- Graduates of marketplace training programs, including the platforms’ own courses
- Agencies that manage marketplace accounts for brands
- In-house e-commerce teams at large Belarusian brands and distributors
The marketplaces themselves invest heavily in training. Wildberries’ free PRO WB program, for example, has trained more than 100,000 sellers across seven countries. That means many juniors arrive with solid theory. What they often lack is experience with real budgets and real mistakes.
Tech roles
E-commerce engineers usually come from product companies, online retail, fintech and logistics tech. Most of them are employed and don’t actively browse job boards, so direct sourcing and referrals work far better than job ads.
A common mistake
Posting a vague “e-commerce manager” vacancy is the fastest way to get 200 CVs and no shortlist. Be specific: which marketplaces, how many SKUs, what monthly turnover and which tasks the person will own.
How to assess candidates
CVs in e-commerce are full of phrases like “grew sales” and “launched the brand on marketplaces”. The only way to tell real results from good storytelling is a practical test.
| Role | Test task | What good looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplace manager | Calculate unit economics for one product, including commission, logistics, returns and ad spend | Clear margin logic and a realistic pricing decision |
| Marketplace manager | Audit a real product card | Specific fixes for photos, title, attributes and reviews |
| Ad specialist | Walk through a real ad account | Talks in numbers: ad cost share, cost per order, return on ad spend |
| E-commerce analyst | SQL or Excel task plus a dashboard review | Accurate data, clear structure, useful conclusions |
| Backend developer | System design for a catalogue or checkout under peak load | Thinks about caching, stock reservation and failures |
| Integration engineer | Discuss a marketplace or ERP integration they built | Understands limits, errors and data consistency |
Keep take-home tasks short, ideally two to four hours for commercial roles. Strong candidates usually have several offers, and long unpaid tasks push them away.
Red flags
Be careful with candidates who can’t give a single number about their results, who only describe tasks without outcomes, or who present one small shop as large-scale experience. In interviews, ask about a time something went wrong: a stock-out before a sale, a blocked listing or an ad campaign that burned the budget. How they handled it tells you more than any success story.
Pay: what affects salaries in e-commerce
Salaries in e-commerce vary more than in many other fields, because the same title can mean very different levels of responsibility. As in IT, specialists in Belarus often discuss pay as a US dollar equivalent, while salaries are paid in Belarusian rubles.
These factors push pay up the most:
- Experience across several marketplaces, not just one
- Large catalogues and high monthly turnover
- Export experience on marketplaces in other countries
- Managing significant ad budgets with proven efficiency
- Strong analytics skills, including SQL and BI tools
- Team leadership or ownership of a P&L
Variable pay
For commercial roles, bonuses tied to results are common. The mistake is to link them only to revenue. A manager rewarded for turnover alone can grow sales while destroying margin through discounts and ads. A better formula combines revenue with margin or ad efficiency, so the bonus reflects real profit.
For tech roles, pay follows the wider IT market and depends mainly on stack, seniority and English level. For current figures by role and level, see our IT salary research for Belarus.
Build in-house or outsource?
You don’t have to hire every role. Most companies keep strategy, category management and unit economics in-house, because they’re core to the business. Content production, infographics and sometimes ad management can work well with agencies or freelancers, at least at the start.
For tech teams, the choice is usually between hiring in-house, building a dedicated team or using IT outstaffing, where developers are employed by a partner but work only on your product.
Keeping your e-commerce team
Marketplace roles have a high burnout risk. Platforms change rules, commissions and algorithms constantly, and every change lands on the same few people. To keep them:
- Set clear KPIs that people can actually influence.
- Fund ongoing training, because what worked last year may not work now.
- Make bonus formulas transparent, and review them when the platforms change their rules.
- Show a career path, for example from marketplace manager to category lead or head of e-commerce.
For tech teams, the usual retention drivers apply: interesting problems, competitive pay, modern tools and a clear path to senior and lead roles. The effort pays off. Gallup estimates that replacing an employee can cost from one-half to two times their annual salary.
FAQ
A marketplace manager runs a brand’s sales on platforms such as Ozon and Wildberries, for which Belarus is the second-largest market by sales. That includes listings, pricing, promotions, stock planning, reviews and often advertising. In smaller companies, one person covers most of these tasks.
Ask the candidate to calculate the unit economics of a product, including commission, logistics, returns and ad spend, and to audit a real product card. Strong candidates explain their decisions with numbers.
Start with one strong generalist if your catalogue and turnover are small. As sales grow, split out advertising, content and analytics into separate roles, usually in that order. If you’re unsure how to structure the team, our HR consulting team can help.
Usually six to ten weeks. The pool of people with real P&L ownership across several channels is small, so direct sourcing is often needed.
Yes, many brands start with an agency. Over time, most bring strategy, unit economics and category management in-house, because these decisions shape the whole business.
Many do. Belarus has a large pool of engineers who have built high-load retail, fintech and marketplace products, many of them at Hi-Tech Park companies working for international markets.
How recruitment.by helps
Recruitment.by has been hiring for Belarusian and international companies for more than ten years. We recruit marketplace managers, ad specialists, analysts and heads of e-commerce, as well as developers, QA engineers and product managers for e-commerce platforms. We know the local market, the salary levels and the people who rarely answer job ads.
Hiring for your e-commerce or marketplace team? Send us the role and we’ll come back with a hiring plan.