The Top 22 Ecommerce Trends of 2025

Live selling makes its way to the US

America’s fastest-growing marketplace looks more like a social app than a shopping site. In fact, many of the participants aren’t even there to buy, they’re there to be entertained.

It’s called Whatnot: a live-selling site founded just 3 years ago and recently valued at nearly $4B. The site holds auctions alongside a live group chat, strategically combining two of the most powerful levers in conversion: social proof and urgency.

With similar dynamics to live, in-person auctions, Whatnot buyers are heavily influenced by other buyers’ excitement as the auction escalates. What’s more, the perception that there’s a large crowd, all going after the same product, reinforces trust and appeal. And the numbers are impressive: engagement metrics resemble that of a social app while conversion metrics match that of a high-performing ecommerce marketplace.

While live selling is a growing phenomenon in the US, it’s been exploding in China for years. For the first time, in 2020, Chinese live-streamed shopping GMV ($137B) surpassed total US digital ad spend ($135B). Many view Whatnot and its competitors as transformative tech reshaping the retail landscape, potentially redefining how Americans shop.

Rise of e-commerce spurs increase in package theft and, in turn, protective solutions

The surge in online shopping, driven by widespread consumer shifts toward ecommerce, has also led to increased porch piracy and demand for protective solutions. While some consumers resort to buying doorbell cameras like Ring, or even cameras with “porch pirate insurance”, others have instead opted to schedule deliveries for when they’re home after work. In this way, getting a delivery only when you’re home is a partial substitute for porch pirate insurance or a doorbell camera.

Proxy shopping sites – which let consumers easily buy from other countries – are on the rise

Every country has some products that are only sold domestically, but Japan has a particularly high density of them: it's the world's 11th largest country by population, and the third largest by GDP, so the domestic market is enough to keep most companies busy. And since more than 90% of Japanese speakers live in Japan, most exporters would either have to pay for new packaging and marketing, or would have to sell to an audience that was willing to shop in a foreign language.

This creates demand for proxy shopping sites—platforms that let consumers place orders in foreign locations through local agents, who then ship the product to the consumer. The alternative to proxy shopping is to browse and order through Google Translate, a process that’s both clunky and error-prone.

The model also applies within countries: ShipToHawaii.com, for example, is a similar proxy shopping site within the US. And there are other sites that add a purchase opportunity where one wasn’t supposed to exist: Doordash had an early growth hack where it would post the menu of a restaurant online, accept orders, and deliver them—all without telling the restaurant, or charging it.

For enthusiasts of anime, J-pop merch, and Japanese snacks, proxy shopping’s appeal taps into broader hobbyist and niche interests, where exclusivity outweighs convenience. Buyers often show off to peers that the product they bought is only available in Japan (without necessarily mentioning that they bought it online). It’s also something close to a digital form of travel, experiencing things that are unique to another country without leaving home.

In a world where online shoppers want everything faster than they did the year before, sites like Zen Market tap into a market where inconvenience is a feature, not a bug.

E-commerce sellers seek out software to help remove backgrounds from photos

Ecommerce marketplaces historically have rewarded rank to those who have clean images on a clear white background. Google shopping and Amazon explicitly encourage this. There are costs to this, but larger brands have cost-effective ways to scalably produce good images. With the rise of a greater number of smaller brands, side hustles, and second-hand marketplace sellers, outsourcing Photoshopping to Fiverr, or spending the time themselves loses out to a product that's 90% as good at a 1% of the cost: software products like PhotoRoom allow sellers to remove the background from a product photo with a click.

These products are near-substitutes for good lighting and professional photography, and are another example of software eating the physical world.

And as dark mode becomes more popular, transparent PNGs are increasingly favored over solid backgrounds, meaning software like this is more important than ever. E-commerce sellers no longer know all the contexts in which their images will be shared, putting a premium on adaptability.

RemoveBG, which saw viral success when it launched in 2019, had a similar product but wasn’t focused on any particular niche. PhotoRoom took nearly the same product and marketed it to ecommerce sellers.

Temu – the TikTok for shopping – continues its massive growth

In late 2022, a then-obscure shopping app quietly became the most downloaded free app in the U.S. in both the Google Play store and the Apple App store, surpassing TikTok, Amazon, and YouTube. Temu, often described as ‘TikTok for shopping,’ capitalizes on growing social commerce trends, emphasizing product discovery over traditional intent-based purchasing.

While US companies are increasingly looking down on unprofitable paid growth, Chinese companies tend to see it more as an opportunity to accelerate a data advantage. By rapidly growing its user base early, Temu harnesses large-scale data collection strategies seen in other AI-driven personalization, resulting in a better-tailored shopping experience.

It’s what TikTok did in order to launch in the US: They spent $1B on US ads in 2018 alone. They knew they needed a sticky recommended page from the get-go and Temu is following the same playbook.

It’s also what SHEIN did. One key ingredient used by SHEIN, and very much needed for fully-optimized product recommendations is a massive product line. While the average Target store has 80,000 unique products for sale, SHEIN adds 6,000 new items every single day, making it likely that a perfect set of recommended products can be generated for any given user.

Another key ingredient Temu is bringing from China to the US is discovery-based online shopping. Amazon is a very high intent site where users go when they know what they want. Brick-and-mortar shopping malls are the opposite and while China has successfully brought the shopping mall experience online, the US has not. Now, just like how TikTok gives users an endless feed of entertaining videos to scroll through, Temu is giving consumers an endless feed of products to buy – and ones they didn’t even know they wanted.

Taobao is another app in China that’s successfully done discovery-based shopping. Many Chinese consumers open the Taobao app when they’re bored, with no product in mind. Over the course of several days or weeks, users will build a shopping cart and even use built-in social features like asking friends’ opinions on items in their cart. These features don’t make sense on a site like Amazon where users often purchase with time sensitivity and 2-day shipping, but they do with discovery-based social shopping.

Box design software becomes more popular as companies get creative with packaging

A bicycle company with high damaged-delivery rates tried something clever. They printed an image of a TV on their boxes instead of just "handle with care". It reduced shipping damage by up to 80%. Other companies have famously compelling strategies too. Snapple prints facts on the underside of their drinks’ caps and some ice cream brands put jokes on the inside bottoms of their containers to tempt customers to finish. Other ecommerce companies strategically use the cardboard of their delivery boxes as adspace. It may, in fact, make Amazon the world’s biggest direct mail advertiser. Now, a growing number of companies seek to make it easier for ecommerce companies to design effective boxes. Pacdora, for example, an online platform for customizable 3D packaging design and mockups, is on the rise.

Rise of e-commerce creates a bias toward shelf-stable food products

The rise of ecommerce has created a bias towards shelf-stable versions of existing products, from beef tallow as an alternative to butter and freeze dried strawberries as opposed to fresh ones.

Consumers are playing shopping roulette, buying bins of returned Amazon items for steep discounts

25% of returns happen right after the holiday season. This means companies often have to hold refurbished inventory until the next season, only to sell it off at a discounted price.

Instead, Amazon and other big retailers are choosing to sell returned goods by the pallet load.

This emerging micro-industry of buying returned product pallets and reselling items individually aligns with broader consumer demand for secondhand and refurbished goods. Bin stores are where many of these items reach consumers, at heavily discounted prices.

Walmart’s 2 week return period means that their pallets of returned goods are in many cases more valuable than those from Amazon which have a 4 week return period. The longer a product is in a consumer’s possession before being returned, the more wear and tear and potential for damage.

The name of these stores comes from the fact that items are stored in bins, rather than neatly placed on shelves. Buyers have to rummage through the packages to find something they want — with significant savings as the potential reward.

A combination of low-effort selling and huge consumer demand has proven popular with prospective store owners. Bin stores are cropping up throughout the nation, and there’s no shortage of stock; almost half a trillion dollars’ worth of consumer goods are returned by shoppers every year.

Given that 15–40% of online purchases are returned (while the return rate of in-store purchases is one third of that), much of the stock comes from digital retailers. As e-commerce grows beyond its current meager <20% of total retail spend, we can expect the number of returned items to increase rapidly in the coming years.

Consumers embrace used goods, fueling demand for product refurbishment technologies

You might assume that sticker removers would mainly be used by consumers who don’t want a sticky residue on their new purchases. But it’s actually the people flipping secondhand items online who are driving demand.

Secondhand marketplaces like Poshmark, Depop, Facebook Marketplace, and Vinted are booming right now. This cottage industry generated $523 billion in global revenue last year, as consumers have become increasingly comfortable with buying pre-owned items.

However, buyers still prefer secondhand products to look new. In fact, they are willing to pay close to the original retail price for an untarnished item.

For this reason, seasoned sellers usually try to remove signs of a previous life. Sticker removers are tools of the trade. These sets help sellers to remove the old-fashioned price labels often used by thrift stores.

Another commonly used tool is the fabric shaver, which essentially removes lint from garments. On subreddits devoted to the secondary clothing market, sellers brag that a few minutes with a fabric shaver can restore a shirt or sweater to the point that it fetches almost the same price it did when new.