The rapid growth of the ecommerce marketplace has enabled online businesses to broaden their product offerings and expand their reach to new markets. With fewer consumers shopping in physical retail stores, the opportunity for ecommerce continues to grow.

SellersCommerce forecasts that 21% of all retail purchases will occur online in 2025, with ecommerce sales expected to exceed $6.8 trillion across 28 million ecommerce stores. This means that ecommerce businesses are tasked with providing a seamless online shopping experience, backed by strong logistics and fulfillment services, to meet rising demand.

So, what trends do ecommerce merchants need to understand to prepare their businesses for surges in consumer shopping this Peak Season?

• The proliferation of AI and AI-powered automation has turned the ecommerce industry on its head.
• Delivering a personalized, omnichannel shopping experience drives sales growth and customer retention.
• Faster and more affordable shipping is essential to meeting surging consumer demand online.
• The social media on the ecommerce marketplace continues to expand, rapidly.
• A streamlined returns management process is a key differentiator for ecommerce brands.
• Ecommerce stores get ahead with on-demand inventory and demand management across major channels.

AI and AI-Driven Automation Solve Customer Pain Points

Over the past few years, AI has revolutionized the ecommerce industry, fundamentally changing how brands operate and engage with customers. Its influence allows businesses to automate and optimize virtually every facet of their operations, leading to unprecedented levels of efficiency, personalization, and strategic insight.

Customer service, once a labor-intensive endeavor, has been dramatically streamlined through the widespread adoption of AI-powered chatbots, providing 24/7 customer support and ticket resolution. This not only improves response times, but also frees up human agents to focus on more complex or sensitive interactions. AI can be especially valuable during Peak Season, when your resources are stretched thin and scalability is top of mind.

Beyond customer service, AI excels at enhancing the customer experience through scalable personalization. By analyzing customer data—including browsing history, purchase patterns, and demographic information—AI algorithms can generate highly accurate and relevant product recommendations, dynamic pricing, and tailored messaging that create unique and engaging journeys for each individual shopper. Of course, AI is only as good as the data feeding it, so your teams should carefully consider the most appropriate ways to employ automation for client-facing materials.

From warehouse automation to last-mile delivery, AI contributes to a more agile, resilient, and cost-effective supply chain. AI significantly optimizes the supply chain by predicting demand for better inventory management, reducing waste and costs. It also optimizes shipping operations, predicting delays for proactive adjustments, leading to a more agile, resilient, and cost-effective supply chain. With this in mind, it’s critical that your supply chain partners understand how to leverage automation tools to improve your bottom line.

Flexport, for example, employs AI to streamline global logistics by streamlining shipping routes, automating document processing, and improving supply chain visibility. Machine learning helps cut transit times and costs by predicting delays and optimizing cargo loads. Generative AI automates tasks like data extraction from shipping documents and customer reporting, while voice bots can handle routine carrier communication. This makes your supply chain more efficient and predictable, improving transit times and reducing shipping costs.

Attract and Retain More Customers by Delivering a Personalized Omnichannel Experience

Delivering a personalized shopping experience to your customers has become table stakes for brands looking to attract and retain customers. People expect brands—especially ecommerce brands with access to consumer data—to recognize them. In fact, 80% of customers are believed more likely to make a purchase when brands provide personalized experiences. Personalized email campaigns, for example, are shown to deliver six-times-higher transaction rates.

Ecommerce platforms use AI and machine-learning-driven algorithms to track on-site behavior and customer data points in real time to deliver a unique experience to each site visitor. Retailers can personalize everything from searches performed on their websites, to product recommendations, ad retargeting, push notifications and even dynamic pricing.

Personalization can help drive growth for your ecommerce brand by:

• Increasing Conversions: Personalization increases the likelihood of a sale, because you’re helping customers cut through the clutter and find exactly what they’re looking for, and using their browsing history to create custom product recommendations.
• Improving Customer Retention: Reward your most loyal repeat customers with discounts and rewards that align with their purchase history. Consider building out a referral program for these customers so they can be rewarded for advocating for your brand and expanding your customer base.
• Creating a Built-In Feedback Loop with Your Customers: The first-party data you’ve collected on your customers and their purchases can provide a wealth of insight into their behaviors and buying patterns. You can use this information to inform selling and personalization strategies, and identify your ecommerce store’s best-selling products throughout the year.

Brands must collect, store, and analyze customer data to provide personalized experiences, which makes them responsible for informing customers how they collect this data, how long they store it, and what they do with it. While BigCommerce reports that up to 83% of users are comfortable sharing their data with brands to receive a personalized experience, data security must remain top of mind. Proactively gathering opt-ins from site visitors is critical to maintaining brand trust, and ensuring user data is handled with care.

Stay Ahead: Consumers Demand Faster, More Flexible Shipping Options

As more consumers turn to the ecommerce space for regular retail purchases, trends are pointing to major behavioral shifts that online businesses need to understand to boost sales and achieve scale.

For many consumers, online shopping is becoming a habit: up to 34% shoppers are making an online purchase every week. To capitalize on this opportunity, merchants should consider bolstering their marketing efforts, including social media marketing, email marketing, and customer referral campaigns to reward your most loyal customers. And remember: personalization is key. The more customized your promotional offerings are, the more likely buyers will choose your brand and complete a purchase.

As online shopping numbers surge, trends also indicate that consumers are becoming more discerning and evaluating more options than ever before making a purchase. This is largely because consumers are presented with more options and more advertising across the ecommerce landscape. This shift manifests itself in a cart abandonment rate of roughly 70% as customers search for the best deal, along with the fastest, most convenient shipping options.

These points underscore the need for ecommerce businesses to present complete and transparent pricing information, and establish fast, affordable shipping as a core decision factor for consumers. If your online business is working with a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, be sure to ask about fast shipping options that can offer customers nationwide 2- and 3-day shipping. Merchants can boost sales up to 25% when they advertise fast delivery speeds.

We recommend that merchants partner with a dedicated 3PL partner to help them optimize demand planning and forecasting to strategically place best-selling inventory in regional fulfillment centers. For example, Flexport’s eCommerce Fulfillment leverages a network of fulfillment centers across the U.S. to allow merchants to ship faster to high-demand areas, accelerate online sales with fast shipping options, and reduce strain on demand planning.

Social Commerce Continues to Drive Growth and Influence Purchase Behavior

It’s no secret that the social commerce space is growing rapidly. It’s estimated that the social commerce market will be worth more than $2.9 trillion by 2026, a 30.81% increase year over year. Ecommerce businesses face a huge opportunity to accelerate sales by establishing social commerce storefronts across major platforms—especially Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.

The most popular product categories for social commerce include:

• Clothing, apparel, and accessories
• Electronics
• Health and wellness items
• Grocery and food supplies

In the months leading up to Peak Season, we recommend mapping out your social media and social commerce strategy, and leveraging historical data to understand which products to promote. To start, consider offering discounts for new referrals via email and social media. Nielsen reports that 92% of consumers trust referrals from friends and family more than traditional marketing, and up to 77% are more likely to try a new product.

Don’t discount the value of generating and sharing customer reviews across your social media platforms. Social proof helps increase sales on social media platforms—especially on sites like X, where positive reviews deliver an average conversation rate of 6.46%.

If your ecommerce brand is considering a major push across social commerce platforms, social monitoring tools can help you identify emerging trends, track demand shifts, and move or replenish inventory to meet potential sales spikes. This will enable merchants to strategically place inventory close to customers, and inform their demand planning strategy ahead of Peak Season. As you build out your social commerce strategy for Peak, remember to communicate with your supply chain partners to ensure your business is sufficiently stocked to meet customer expectations.

Does your ecommerce brand need help outlining its social commerce strategy for Peak? A trusted 3PL like Flexport can help your online store integrate with major social commerce platforms, so you can view your inventory position, set up auto-replenishment, and stay in stock—all from one platform.

Streamlining Returns Management Can Be a Major Differentiator

The returns management process continues to be a major factor for ecommerce brands’ success during Peak. The average rate of return on an ecommerce purchase is projected to be 24.5% in 2024, compared to just 8.71% of in-store purchases.

With this in mind, it’s clear that online stores need to emphasize smooth returns and exchange processes to improve their shopping experience and retain customers. Because these returns and exchanges can become tedious for businesses and consumers—15% of shoppers also abandon their carts due to an unsatisfactory return policy—many online retailers are leveraging 3PLs to reduce friction.

Flexport Returns, for example, works as your dedicated returns management partner, enabling greater control of your returned inventory, and can be managed all under one roof. By directly integrating with major returns partners like Loop, ReturnGo, Narvar, and more, Flexport Returns can restock inventory within three business days. This eliminates manual returns inspections and tedious back-and-forth with buyers, saving your business time and money during Peak Season.

By leaning into a 3PL’s advanced shipping and fulfillment infrastructure, merchants can quickly move returned items back into inventory. This leads to an improved customer experience, and reduces the strain on business’ internal resources during the busiest months of the year.

On-Demand Inventory Management Across Major Sales Channels

In a modern logistics infrastructure, you need the flexibility to adjust to rapid changes in market conditions and consumer buying habits. Ecommerce merchants should focus their demand planning efforts on meeting sales needs across multiple sales and social commerce channels, enabling them to sell when and where there are surges in consumer demand—especially during Peak Season.

Accurately mapping your inventory needs and ordering SKUs accordingly enables ecommerce merchants to avoid costly reserve storage fees when they’re overstocked, or strained supply chain operations if they’re understocked. Understanding these trends can make all the difference when your operational resources are especially strained during Peak—and also ensures you maximize your sales by remaining in stock.

If your ecommerce brand needs help with on-demand inventory management and planning, a trusted 3PL like Flexport can help. Services like Flexport Reserve Storage integrate your inventory needs across multiple channels, allowing you to send products across our nationwide network to high-demand areas. Whether you’re using Flexport Fulfillment, FBA, or your own warehousing, this ensures your best-selling products are always in stock, without having to worry about delays or stock-outs. You may also consider automating this process with products like Flexport Replenishment, which allows your business to manage stock levels within fulfillment centers and replenish inventory across multiple sales channels.

All of these products can also be combined with other Flexport services to provide a one-stop shop for all of your logistics needs. Because of our expertise and expansive fulfillment network, we can offer competitive rates to handle everything from storage to inventory management to fulfillment. If you’re already working with a Flexport team member, we can help advise you on your demand plan.

Ready to Get Started? Flexport Can Help.

At Flexport, we strive to provide merchants with the logistics support they need to tackle Peak Season. Our fulfillment experts can help you refine your shipping, tracking, and returns procedures, so you can focus on building a memorable brand experience that will drive sales and delight your customers.

Talk with a fulfillment expert today to learn more about Flexport’s competitive shipping and logistics services.