2025 Ecommerce Data Exposed: DTC Spend, Revenue & Platform Trends

It’s 2025 and we’re dropping real operator numbers from over a thousand brands—spend, Amazon, Shopify, TikTok Shop—sliced by size and category, the kind of dataset nobody else shows. It’s dense, visual, and built for action, and we’ve got Austin and Andrew from Northbeam here to unpack it and set the stage for 2026.

Last time I said smaller brands would feel the squeeze, and we’ll show where that hit and how to correct course for 2026. Andrew’s going to run point on the data so we can keep this fast and useful.

Quick framing: we’ll reference both average and median. Average reflects the whole market roll‑up, while median shows what a typical customer experienced and dampens outliers.

Headline: spending and revenue both rose, but efficiency slipped and customer acquisition got pricier by about eight percent versus last year.

That tracks our world—biggest year, fastest growth, and the least efficient marketing we’ve ever run, especially in the first half.

Impression costs climbed faster than targeting quality and platforms need earnings growth, while competition, tariffs, and a jittery consumer added drag. The first half felt sticky; the back half loosened up.

Despite the chop, many with strong balance sheets and a steady playbook caught the Q4 tailwind. The theme is survive the surge, then sprint.

This is why cash and conviction matter—you keep executing through volatility while others flinch.

By size: sub‑five million brands saw spend barely up and revenue down, making them the most strained cohort. Ten to twenty million grew nicely, twenty to fifty stagnated, and growth re‑accelerated for companies above fifty million.

Under five is a dinghy in heavy surf, and twenty to fifty is the messy middle where the org must professionalize; if you punch through to fifty‑plus, growth gets easier even as MER takes a hit because you can afford to buy it.

Going from ten to fifty is a grind; once you’ve built the machine, scaling toward two hundred becomes more about operating leverage than heroics.

Tariffs were inflationary, which pushed prices and, by extension, acquisition costs up across the board.

By category: babies and kids was steady, beauty and personal care barely grew, food and beverage and home posted healthy lifts, sporting goods and fitness ripped, and tech averages were inflated by a few rockets while the median barely moved.

Sporting goods and fitness were standouts, beauty crawled, and health and wellness showed modest median growth with some monsters pulling the average way up.

Beauty was a grind for new entrants, while tech looked like a venture portfolio—one or two brands skewing the whole picture.

Health and wellness saw conversion rates jump while MER fell, which screams price pressure and more competitors trading margin for speed.

Exactly—outliers are crushing there, but median operators are fighting margin compression.

Whatever your niche, you need to live in the top quartile or the ad math gets unforgiving.

By AOV: sub‑fifty dollar carts surged, fifty to one hundred dipped, and growth generally climbed as order value rose, with five‑hundred‑plus up double digits on the median.

High‑ticket buyers remain flush and less tariff‑sensitive, so those carts held up and then some.

Low AOV momentum feels like TikTok Shop’s impulse engine, while fixed click costs make big carts more forgiving and mid‑price the squeeze zone.

Channel fit keeps sorting by price band: very low AOV often wins on TikTok Shop, mid‑price tilts to Amazon, and higher AOV works best DTC.

Month by month: March popped ahead of tariff changes, summer ran strong on growth and efficiency, April was rough, and category peaks varied widely.

Loved seeing how seasonality flips by niche—home stayed green all year while health and wellness cooled in December despite a hot Q4 elsewhere.

Winners never killed top‑of‑funnel; they kept testing creative, watched leading indicators like new customer traffic and email signups, and trusted the compounding.

On spend mix, AppLovin exploded from a small base, Meta and Google crept up, and budgets flowed out of Snapchat, YouTube, and Pinterest—which looks like opportunity for contrarians.

As brands scale, Google’s share of spend shrinks while Meta stays core, and the biggest players lean harder into TikTok, Snap, and YouTube to reach new pockets of demand.

Those channels require bespoke creative and real focus; you can’t just recycle assets and expect results.

AI search is tiny but surging: visits and revenue from LLMs grew many multiples through the year, and early 2026 already outpaced last January.

It won’t change your P&L tomorrow, but compounding adoption makes it a must‑watch; if you start anywhere, start where the traffic is biggest.

All right, crystal ball time—what’s 2026 look like?

2026 is the year of creative at scale—blend real creators with AI to generate more, better, and faster, then push it everywhere. Agile, omnichannel operators will win, and slow, legacy models that ignore DTC, social shopping, or new surfaces are going to get steamrolled.

I’m with you—creative is the edge and channel agnosticism is the mindset; sell wherever the customer wants to buy.

Social shopping is here even if unit economics feel thin at first; TikTok Shops, Whatnot, and the rest are becoming part of the path to purchase, so build an omnichannel plan.

Keep testing new formats like AppLovin, TikTok GMV, and Google’s demand gen, and use AI to lighten the creative lift so you can hunt for pockets of return beyond Meta and Google.

Killer work and a goldmine of charts—download the report, share it with your team, and dig in. World‑class stuff; appreciate you both, and we’ll see you in the deep end.