Ecommerce Trends: 5 High-Impact Commerce Trends To Prepare for in the Back Half of 2025

The back half of 2025 has arrived, and ecommerce trends are still changing. From artificial intelligence (AI) to omnichannel expansions to trade tensions, it can be difficult for brands to keep pace, let alone dream of overtaking the competition.

At the Digital Shelf Summit (DSS) 2025, Marge Farney, senior director of product information management and syndication at Flywheel Digital, and Amelia Ryczek, senior content account manager at Flywheel Digital, offered insight into five trends companies need to consider in the next six months, and what businesses can do to stay ahead of the competition.

5 Ecommerce Trends for the Second Half of 2025

Flywheel predictions from the beginning of the year still hold true: Ecommerce is on track to account for 40% of retail sales in 2025.

However, according to Ryczek, “How consumers end up on PDPs, though, and how they purchase — that is just continuing to change.”
This change underpins five emerging ecommerce trends for the remainder of 2025.

1. Increased Omnichannel Opportunities

Omnichannel opportunities will become even more important in the second half of this year. As noted by Ryczek, Flywheel analysis of four major retailers — Target, Walmart, Tesco, and Carrefour — found that omnichannel shoppers spend between 1.5 and 3 times as much as customers who shop only in-store.

Ryczek highlights four areas where retailers can enhance in-store shopping with digital experiences:

• Discovery: Mondelez Dairylea leveraged Tesco's digital media screens to promote corporate partnerships with QR codes that led customers to quickly find more information.
• Selection: Asda is trialing “Digital Spirits” screens in its Express stores, which let shoppers easily choose from more than 50 liquor products.
• Payment: At selected retail stores, customers are now served personalized ads from Instacart.
• Fulfillment: Ferrero Kinder offered an exclusive deal for shoppers ordering four Kinder products online.

2. Expanded Social Shopping

Ambient shopping — or shopping experiences that occur seamlessly and spontaneously, often while a person is engaged in other activities like browsing social media, streaming videos, or using apps — continues to grow.

“These are not people who are going into a search bar typing your SEO optimized kind of terms,” Ryczek says. “These are people who are stumbling upon your products.”

To take advantage of the growing scale of social shopping, three components are critical:

• Creator-driven content: Many TikTok creators are now being tapped to work with major brands such as Uber to create personalized, relatable campaigns that connect with viewers.
• Livestreaming: Livestream shopping may be coming to a store near you. After the success of this effort in China, Zara has plans to launch live shopping in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S., per Reuters.
• AI-powered avatars: Digital, AI-powered avatars can take on the role of influencers, but can be customized to brand needs. The caveat? Connection is key — companies must ensure that avatars are more than simple marketing tools.

3. Evolved Retail Media Funnels

Next is the evolution of retail media funnels. According to Farney, “There is a bit of collapsing or a blurring of traditional in-store and retail touch points for media activation. Top-of-funnel activities, things like TV, newspapers, those no longer reach as many consumers as they did in the past.”

This expands the potential reach of social and online advertising, but it also creates challenges in measuring the impact of multi-attribution touchpoints. While the stages of the funnel remain the same — awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty — brands must find new ways to effectively navigate each.

One emerging funnel feature is the use of data clean rooms. These clean rooms contain first-party user data uploaded and shared by brands to help improve ad customization and targeting. Multiple brands can upload data to the clean room. Once there, data is secured and anonymized, and the aggregate output provides a privacy-friendly, regulatory-compliant framework for ad testing, targeting, and metric measurement.

4. Improved AI Tools

Ryczek puts it simply: “There is a lot going on with AI.”

No longer an early adopter outlier, artificial intelligence is now a key component of effective retail strategies.

First is the development of second-generation AI chatbots. These chatbots go beyond the question-and-answer frameworks of their first-gen counterparts with improved natural language processing (NLP) and the ability to parse both content and context.

AI can also power value-chain efficiencies. Consider grocery shopping and delivery service Instacart, which uses machine learning to suggest replacements for products that are advertised on digital shelves but are out-of-stock in stores.

5. Continued Trade Impacts

Changing trade and tariff conditions will also play a large role in the remainder of 2025. Farney uses the example of the Chinese marketplace Temu, known for its extremely low prices.

“If that is disrupted now because of the tariffs, this is a really big opportunity for North American brands to step in with these new value products or sub-brands and take back that share of price-sensitive shoppers in that market,” she says.

Here, agility is the watchword for brands. When market conditions change, they must be prepared to target value shoppers with personalized ads and offers to capture their interest and begin building brand loyalty. 

Staying Strong in the Second Half

As the old saying goes, it’s not how you start — it’s how you finish.

Emerging ecommerce trends showcase an opportunity for brands that can create and implement effective strategies.

This starts with the recognition that omnichannel is truly “omni,” from discovery and selection to payment and fulfillment, every step of the process offers the opportunity to connect with customers. Next, brands must work on strengthening social shopping experiences and expanding the retail media funnel, keeping in mind that both are affected by the growing impact of AI tools.

Finally, brands and retailers need to stay agile as trade agreements change. This includes updating product detail pages (PDPs) on demand to reflect current supply and manufacturing conditions, and finding ways to capture emerging shopper groups, such as those looking to maximize value without sacrificing quality.

While the second half of 2025 comes with challenges for brands, it also comes with opportunities — if they can navigate new ecommerce trends and convert potential stumbling blocks into stepping stones.