What is changing for ecommerce leadership
The Digital Services Act mandates a senior appointment
Most regulation tells companies what to do. Article 41 of the Digital Services Act tells them who to hire. Every provider designated as a very large online platform must establish a compliance function that is independent of its operational functions, composed of one or more compliance officers. The head of that function must be an independent senior manager with distinct responsibility for it. That person reports directly to the management body, may escalate systemic risk and non-compliance concerns to it, and cannot be removed without the management body's prior approval. The management body itself is responsible for ensuring compliance officers have the professional qualifications, knowledge, experience and ability to do the job.
Read as a job specification, that is a genuinely senior appointment: board-facing, protected from operational pressure, and carrying personal responsibility for risk assessment, mitigation and the annual independent audit. It is one of the few instances in European law where a regulation effectively creates a C-suite adjacent position and defines its independence.
Ecommerce is squarely inside the regime
Twenty-five platforms are currently designated as very large online platforms, meaning they reach at least 45 million monthly active users in the EU. Online marketplaces make up a substantial share: Amazon Store, AliExpress, Zalando, Shein and Temu, alongside Booking.com and Google's platforms. Designation triggers the full set of obligations — systemic risk assessment, mitigation measures, annual independent audit, transparency reporting and the compliance function described above.
Enforcement has moved quickly from designation to action. The Commission has opened formal proceedings against Shein and taken action against Temu, and has issued its largest Digital Services Act penalty to date against AliExpress over controls on illegal and counterfeit products. For platforms approaching the designation threshold, the practical lesson is that the governance and compliance leadership needs to exist before the obligations land, not after.
Board quotas arrive with listing
Ecommerce companies acquire board obligations as they mature. A listing on an EU regulated market brings the national board gender quota with it: 40% of each sex in France, Italy, Spain and Austria, 30% on the supervisory boards of listed and parity co-determined companies in Germany, one-third in Belgium and on Dutch supervisory boards. Groups that list in the UK fall under the Financial Conduct Authority's comply-or-explain disclosure regime against a 40% board target. For a company preparing an IPO, board composition is therefore not a post-listing tidy-up: it is part of the readiness work, and the candidates worth appointing are in demand from every company doing the same thing.
Pay transparency applies whatever your structure
The EU Pay Transparency Directive reaches every employer above the relevant thresholds, listed or not. Transposition is uneven — only four Member States met the 7 June 2026 deadline, with several including Germany, Spain and the Netherlands still legislating — but the substance is settled. Salary ranges must be given to candidates before interview, pay secrecy clauses are banned, the first gender pay gap reports fall due in June 2027, and an unjustified gap above 5% triggers a mandatory joint pay assessment with worker representatives. Digital commerce businesses that have grown quickly, hired opportunistically and never audited their pay structures are the ones most likely to find something in that first report.
The advantage of building rather than unwinding
There is a structural point in ecommerce's favour, and it is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up as data. Legacy sectors are trying to change board and executive composition that was set decades ago, against slow natural turnover: a board seat becomes available when someone retires, and a chief executive is appointed once in five or ten years. Ecommerce companies are still adding seats, still creating functions, still making first appointments to roles that did not exist three years ago — including the compliance leadership the Digital Services Act now requires.
That makes composition a live decision rather than a slow correction. For context on where the wider sector stands, the LEAD Network Gender Diversity Scorecard, which covers European retail and consumer goods together, found women in around 38% of senior executive roles at the 25 companies it surveyed in 2025. Ecommerce businesses have the rarer opportunity to reach that level by design, at the point of first appointment, instead of retrofitting it a decade later. Companies that use that window will not be explaining a shortfall to a regulator, an exchange or an investor in 2029.
How Female Executive Search helps you build the team
Female Executive Search, part of the CEO Worldwide group founded in 2001, specialises in identifying outstanding female leaders for board, C-level and executive committee roles. For ecommerce searches we draw on a global pool of over 28,000 vetted executives across 183 countries, including women leaders with marketplace, omnichannel, digital commercial, supply chain and technology backgrounds, as well as non-executive directors with the governance and regulatory experience a platform business needs on its board.
Our process is built for the pace the sector moves at:
- Shortlist in 7–10 days — qualified, interested candidates, not a database dump.
- Transparent milestone-based fee — 25% of the gross annual salary, paid in three instalments: at engagement signing, at shortlist delivery, and when your candidate starts.
- 6-month replacement guarantee on every placement.
For how this sector compares with the rest of the economy, see our sector-by-sector analysis of the gender gap.
You may not be able to name your company yet. A first compliance appointment signals to the market that designation is coming. A board hire made during IPO preparation is confidential until it isn't. And in a sector where competitors read each other's job boards closely, an open search can tell them more than you intended. Our executive job posting service exists for exactly this: the role is published to our pool of vetted female executives without your company name attached, and your identity is disclosed to a candidate only at the point you decide to take her to interview. It is a lighter commitment than a retained mandate and a faster way to test the market — and our note on when to post a role anonymously and when to run a search sets out which of the two fits which situation.
