The Complete Guide to Ecommerce Channels: Building Your Multichannel Strategy for 2025

Ecommerce continues to experience a gold rush, with immense growth potential ahead. With researchers predicting ecommerce sales to soar to a staggering $1.8 trillion by 2029, the future is bright for online businesses. However, to fully capitalize on this growth, ecommerce brands must adapt to the changing landscape and embrace multichannel ecommerce strategies.

With over five billion internet users worldwide and 56.1% of shoppers making weekly online purchases, the opportunity to expand your customer base is massive. This opportunity comes with a catch, however. Convenience-driven consumers aren't shopping in just one place anymore. They're browsing on social media channels, comparing prices on marketplaces, and expecting seamless experiences across every touchpoint where they encounter your ecommerce brand.

The challenge? Managing multiple sales channels without losing your sanity — or your profit margins. As global markets expand their digital infrastructure and new technologies like AI supercharge online retail possibilities, your ecommerce business needs sophisticated strategies to harness this multichannel reality effectively.

In this article, you'll discover the essential types of ecommerce channels driving growth in 2025, proven strategies for managing them effectively, and how the right ecommerce platforms help streamline multichannel selling so you can focus on what matters most: growing your online business.

What are ecommerce channels?

Ecommerce channels — the various platforms and avenues where your ecommerce business sells products online — have evolved from nice-to-have additions into critical growth engines. Whether it's your ecommerce website, Amazon, social commerce platforms, or emerging AI-powered storefronts, each channel represents a pathway to reach potential customers where they already spend their time and money.

Understanding what these channels are is just the first step. The real question is why spreading across different sales channels has become essential rather than optional for your ecommerce store.

Why a multichannel strategy matters for your ecommerce business

Relying on a single ecommerce channel is like standing on one leg — it's inherently unstable. Diversification creates resilience by spreading your online business across multiple foundations, helping you reach new customers while protecting your existing customer base.

The customer journey is not a straight line but a complex web of interactions across multiple platforms. Digital savvy consumers are researchers, validators, and bargain hunters who leverage numerous platforms before making a purchase, whether they're comparing your ecommerce store to brick-and-mortar options or researching across different demographics and social media channels.

Reduce risk and protect your customer base.

Every third-party channel comes with its own set of rules, algorithms, and fees. Putting your entire ecommerce business on one platform exposes you to significant risk. By diversifying across different sales channels, if one platform suffers a setback, your other channels can keep your online sales flowing. Your ecommerce website acts as a stable home base, while marketplaces and social media channels serve as outposts to drive traffic and attract potential customers.

Different sales channels attract different customer demographics. During an economic downturn, value-conscious shoppers might flock to marketplaces like Amazon or Walmart for deals, while your brand-loyal customers may continue shopping directly from your ecommerce store. Having a presence across multiple platforms allows you to capture online sales from different consumer mindsets and demographics.

Increase reach and attract new customers.

Risk mitigation is just one piece of the puzzle. The real opportunity lies in the growth potential of multichannel ecommerce strategies. It's about meeting potential customers where they are, in the context in which they prefer to shop, and building brand awareness across diverse touchpoints.

Marketplace shoppers are often mission-driven. They search for specific products, prioritize price and fast shipping, and have high purchase intent. They trust the marketplace platform. 

Your ecommerce website shoppers often look for a premium experience, unique products, and a direct connection with your brand. When offered this, they typically become more loyal customers. 

Social commerce shoppers are in a “discovery” mindset, and aren't necessarily looking to buy. Still, they are open to impulse purchases when they see a product that inspires them through influencer marketing or organic content.

By selling across all three channel types, you engage with potential customers at every stage of the buying journey, from initial discovery through social media channels to brand loyalty on your ecommerce website.

But here's where many ecommerce brands stumble: they focus on being everywhere without connecting those touchpoints meaningfully. The ultimate goal isn't just a multichannel presence (being on many platforms) but creating an actual omnichannel experience that integrates those channels seamlessly for your ecommerce business.

The omnichannel imperative for ecommerce brands

When a customer discovers your product on social media, researches it on a marketplace, and finally purchases from your ecommerce website, each interaction should feel like part of the same conversation. Your brand voice, visual identity, product information, and customer service should remain consistent whether someone encounters your ecommerce brand on TikTok or your checkout page.

This consistency doesn't just improve the customer experience — it builds stronger brand awareness, creates a more resilient online business, and ultimately commands premium positioning across every channel where you drive traffic.

Types of ecommerce channels for your online business

Ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce support multiple ecommerce sales channels both natively and through strategic integrations like Feedonomics, enabling your business to seamlessly manage omnichannel sales. These tools give you a centralized commerce hub to manage product data, streamline operations, and maintain consistent branding across all digital storefronts.

Natively, BigCommerce allows businesses to sell across marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Meta (Facebook & Instagram) through built-in connectors. These integrations let merchants sync product catalogs, inventory, and orders directly within the BigCommerce dashboard.

Your ecommerce website (direct-to-consumer).

Your branded digital storefront is foundational because, unlike a marketplace, it gives your online business complete control over your brand, customer journey, and valuable data. This direct-to-consumer (DTC) channel allows you to create a unique customer experience that reflects your brand's identity from start to finish.

On your own ecommerce store, marketing tools are easier to manage. You can publish rich content like blogs, directly integrate customer reviews, and leverage owned customer data to build powerful email marketing campaigns for abandoned carts or welcome series. You have complete control over your digital marketing strategy and can implement Google Ads campaigns that drive traffic directly to your branded experience.

Through its integration with Feedonomics, BigCommerce expands this capability by providing advanced product feed optimization and syndication across hundreds of global sales channels, including Google Shopping, TikTok Shop, Klarna, and more.

BigCommerce provides extensive customization through flexible templates, ensuring site speed and offering robust, SEO-friendly infrastructure to attract organic traffic and new customers. By controlling the experience and owning the relationship, your ecommerce website is the most critical channel for building lasting customer loyalty and maximizing your marketing strategy's effectiveness.

Online marketplaces.

Online marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Etsy, and eBay function as digital malls, connecting third-party sellers directly with buyers. These platforms represent massive opportunities for ecommerce brands to tap into existing customer bases and drive significant online sales.

Their main advantage is providing your ecommerce business with immediate access to built-in audiences. These platforms have already earned customer trust, which can significantly boost your credibility and ecommerce sales potential; for many ecommerce brands, marketplaces serve as powerful channels to reach new customers who might never discover their standalone ecommerce website.

However, there are trade-offs to consider. Marketplaces charge commission fees on every sale, and your ecommerce store faces intense competition from countless other vendors, often leading to price wars. Furthermore, strict rules and standardized page layouts create branding limitations, making it challenging to build unique brand awareness.

BigCommerce simplifies selling on these channels through its Channel Manager, which automates product listings. For more complex catalogs, its integration with Feedonomics pulls product data from your ecommerce store and optimizes it to meet each marketplace's unique requirements, streamlining your multichannel ecommerce operations.

Social commerce and social media channels.

Social commerce is the practice of selling products directly through social media platforms, allowing customers to complete their entire online shopping journey without leaving the app. This “stickiness” represents a fundamental shift in how ecommerce brands can drive traffic and convert potential customers.

Top platforms include Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook Shops, which leverage features like shoppable posts and interactive livestream shopping events to engage your customer base. Key benefits include streamlined, integrated checkout processes that reduce friction and boost ecommerce sales. This model works especially well for product discovery and impulse purchases, as users encounter products organically in their feeds.

Influencer marketing becomes particularly powerful in social commerce, building trust and driving online sales through authentic recommendations. These social media channels excel at building brand awareness among specific demographics and creating viral marketing campaigns that can dramatically expand your customer base.

Leading ecommerce platforms offer native integrations with these social channels, with automation tools that sync product catalogs, manage inventory, and centralize orders from a single dashboard, connecting your ecommerce website directly to your social media storefronts.

Search engines and product advertising.

Paid product listings on search engines like Google Shopping and Bing Shopping connect ecommerce brands with high-intent users actively searching for specific items. These visual ads feature product images, prices, and your store name directly in search results, making them essential components of any comprehensive digital marketing strategy.

Success in this channel depends on optimized product data feeds and strategic Google Ads campaigns. Product feed optimization ensures your listings are visible and accurate, improving your ranking and preventing ad disapproval. An optimized approach to these marketing campaigns can significantly drive traffic to your ecommerce website.

This same data feed powers Google's free product listings on its Shopping tab. It enables powerful dynamic remarketing campaigns, which show past visitors ads for the exact products they viewed on your ecommerce store. These tactics help ecommerce brands recapture potential customers and improve conversion metrics.

Sophisticated ecommerce platforms integrate with feed management solutions, allowing your ecommerce business to manage and optimize product data feeds centrally for hundreds of channels, including Google and Bing, creating a direct line to shoppers ready to purchase.

Mobile apps and emerging third-party retailers.

Mobile commerce is expanding beyond traditional ecommerce websites to include emerging channels like Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) marketplaces and strategic brand partnerships. Services such as Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm function as discovery platforms, introducing ecommerce brands to new, purchase-ready customer bases within their apps.

This strategy complements your brand's native mobile app, which drives powerful benefits for your ecommerce business. App-based online shopping excels at personalization (tailoring content and push notifications to user behavior), retention (creating a direct, loyal channel that encourages repeat purchases), and mobile-first user experience (offering faster, more intuitive experiences than mobile browser shopping).

Advanced ecommerce platforms like BigCommerce enable this multi-channel expansion through headless commerce architecture. This approach decouples the front-end user experience from the back-end commerce engine, allowing a single platform to power numerous customer touchpoints simultaneously. This flexibility ensures your ecommerce brand can innovate and expand reach without re-platforming, whether you're exploring drop shipping partnerships or developing custom templates for different sales channels.

Challenges of managing multiple ecommerce channels

While diversifying across different sales channels is powerful for your ecommerce business, it introduces significant operational challenges. Given these operational complexities, success requires a more strategic approach than simply expanding everywhere at once.

Channel complexity and content management.

Each platform is a unique ecosystem with its own rules, content formats, and customer expectations. A product listing for Amazon requires keyword-optimized titles and strict policy adherence. An Instagram Shop post thrives on high-quality visuals and community engagement, while your ecommerce website allows for deep brand storytelling and comprehensive digital marketing integration.

Managing these distinct requirements across multiple sales channels creates a significant administrative burden for your ecommerce business. Success demands tailored content and marketing campaigns for each platform rather than a simple copy-and-paste approach, requiring sophisticated content management and marketing strategy coordination.

Inventory and fulfillment synchronization.

Accurate syncing represents the most critical technical hurdle for multichannel ecommerce operations. A sale on one channel must instantly update stock levels across all others to prevent overselling. This connectivity becomes particularly complex when managing drop shipping relationships alongside direct inventory.

Failure to sync in real-time leads to canceled orders, poor customer reviews, and potential marketplace penalties that can damage your ecommerce brand's reputation. Success depends on sophisticated, centralized inventory management software that integrates seamlessly with all your different sales channels, ensuring your online sales operations run smoothly.

Brand consistency and messaging coordination.

Maintaining a consistent brand voice, pricing strategy, and customer experience becomes complex when each channel has different cultural expectations and demographics. A premium, service-oriented message on your ecommerce website can be undermined by aggressive, price-focused competition in marketplaces.

This inconsistency can confuse potential customers, erode trust, and weaken your overall brand awareness efforts. Your marketing strategy must ensure your ecommerce brand presents a unified front across all social media channels, marketplaces, and your ecommerce website, while still optimizing for each platform's unique characteristics and customer demographics.

Ecommerce channel strategy tips for your online business

A strategic approach is critical because presence without purpose leads to failure for your ecommerce business. Simply being on every available platform wastes resources and dilutes your brand awareness efforts. The goal isn't to be everywhere but to be where it matters most for your ecommerce brand and target demographics.

First, not all channels suit every ecommerce business. A brand selling high-end, custom products thrives on the rich storytelling capabilities of its ecommerce website and visual platforms like Pinterest, but would get lost in price-driven, commoditized marketplace environments. Aligning your channel choices with your target demographics' behavior and your brand's identity is paramount for connecting with the right potential customers and optimizing your marketing strategy.

Second, poor execution on even the right channels proves costly for your online business. Each platform demands unique content, policies, and management approaches. Spreading your team too thin results in neglected storefronts, inconsistent messaging, and operational errors like unsynced inventory across your different sales channels.

Unfocused execution burns through time and marketing budgets on channels with low returns on investment while damaging customer trust and brand awareness. Track key metrics consistently across all channels to identify which platforms drive the most valuable traffic to your ecommerce business.

A strategic approach focuses on mastering the few channels that most effectively reach your target customer demographics, ensuring every dollar and hour invested in your digital marketing drives meaningful growth for your ecommerce store.

The strategic approach outlined above requires a solid technological foundation to execute effectively, which is where composable commerce architecture becomes crucial for your ecommerce business.

How composable commerce unlocks multichannel success

Composable commerce isn't just another buzzword — it's the strategic advantage that transforms how ecommerce brands conquer multiple sales channels. At its core lies best-of-breed architecture, engineered for the flexibility that drives true multichannel ecommerce success.

The power of architectural freedom for ecommerce platforms.

BigCommerce's composable approach demolishes the limitations of traditional, monolithic ecommerce platforms. With extensive platform functionality accessible through robust APIs, your ecommerce business gains unprecedented control over your commerce ecosystem. This isn't just API access — it's architectural freedom that lets you craft solutions as unique as your brand and optimize your marketing strategy across all channels.

Build your perfect ecommerce technology stack.

API-first design becomes your integration superhighway for your online business. Connect your existing ERPs, custom PIMs, and CDPs seamlessly into one unified commerce powerhouse — no more wrestling with incompatible systems or settling for one-size-fits-all solutions. Your ecommerce business deserves platforms that adapt to your needs, not the other way around.

Custom frontends that convert across different sales channels.

Creating distinctive customer experiences across channels isn't just possible, it's effortless with the right ecommerce platform. Extensive API coverage empowers you to build custom frontends that speak directly to each channel's unique audience and demographics. Whether you're targeting mobile shoppers, B2B buyers, or social commerce enthusiasts, your storefronts become conversion machines tailored for success, with templates optimized for each platform's requirements.

Accelerate sales with headless commerce.

Meet Catalyst, BigCommerce's framework for headless commerce that eliminates the complexity traditionally associated with headless builds. This fully integrated storefront implementation leverages cutting-edge technologies like Next.js and React, connecting seamlessly to BigCommerce's rock-solid backend. You get the customization potential of headless architecture combined with the reliability and scalability of a proven SaaS platform — without the headaches.

Future-proof your ecommerce business growth.

This best-of-breed architecture isn't just solving today's challenges — it's positioning your online business for tomorrow's opportunities. As new channels emerge and customer expectations evolve, your composable commerce foundation scales effortlessly. You're not just building an ecommerce store; you're constructing future-proof infrastructure that grows with your ambitions, supports emerging partnerships, and adapts to new digital marketing opportunities.

Composable commerce represents more than technical excellence — it's your competitive edge in the multichannel marketplace, where flexibility isn't just an advantage for your ecommerce business; it's everything.

The final word

Success in multichannel ecommerce isn't about being everywhere — it's about being strategic, consistent, and technologically equipped to deliver seamless experiences across the channels that matter most to your customer base. Focus on building a strong foundation with your ecommerce website, then strategically expand to the platforms where your target demographics spend their time and money.

The ecommerce brands that thrive in 2025 will be those that master the balance between channel diversification and operational excellence, using the right ecommerce platforms and marketing strategies to turn multiple touchpoints into a unified, profitable customer journey.

FAQs about ecommerce channels