Do Small Ecommerce Businesses Really Need Dedicated Developers?
Depends honestly. If you're running a small store with maybe fifty products and a standard checkout flow, you probably don't need anyone full-time. A decent theme, a couple of well-picked plugins, that covers a lot of ground.
Things get messier once you start layering stuff on though — custom integrations, syncing inventory with a POS, multi-currency checkout, whatever. I've seen stores where three or four plugins are all fighting over the same function and nobody notices until page speed tanks or checkout starts throwing random errors. That's usually the point where "I'll just figure it out myself" stops working.
Doesn't mean you need a permanent developer sitting on payroll though. For a lot of smaller operations, bringing someone on hourly or for a specific fix does the job fine. If the project's actually complex enough to warrant it, it's worth looking into options to hire ecommerce developers rather than duct-taping another plugin on top.
Small stores stay small until they don't. Worth checking in on this every so often, not just once.