When it comes to eCommerce, Amazon is the reigning champ.
Despite increasing competition from established retailers, Amazon still dominates US ecommerce — accounting for nearly 38% of all eCommerce sales.
But the marketplace landscape is getting more competitive. Big name brands like Walmart and Macy’s are piling investment into new platforms, while Amazon has been working hard to optimize its fulfillment capability and shuffle its fee structures to maintain pole position as the number one sales channel for fast-growing brands.
Things are going to start moving even faster in 2025 — and as a marketplace seller, it can be pretty difficult to keep up-to-date on Amazon’s evolving strategies and what they mean for your bottom line.
That’s why we’re sharing our three key predictions for 2025 to help you plan for success in the year ahead.
Trend #1: The Amazon Flywheel Will Gain More Momentum
There are plenty of steady sales channels out there to explore, but let’s not beat around the bush: Amazon is the single biggest name in eCommerce.
Amazon has unlocked the key to scale by creating a marketplace that few brands can afford to ignore but even fewer can navigate profitably. As Henri Isaach at The Conversation smartly observed, “Amazon is no longer a retail site for customers but a service platform for its sellers.”
As we move into 2025, Amazon is only further consolidating its position by driving steady demand for faster deliveries that other marketplaces can’t provide and restructuring its business model to guarantee more control over sellers.
Amazon is driving demand for faster delivery
With the launch of Amazon Prime, the ecommerce giant created strong demand for 2-day shipping, and then turned around and sold that capability to its 3rd-party sellers in the form of Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA).
They have continued to move the goalposts in terms of delivery standards — this year reporting a 25% increase in same-day delivery orders.
They lowered their own fulfillment costs while improving delivery speeds with their optimized distributed warehousing strategy, which they will continue to invest in. Amazon accounts for 25% of the $9 billion currently invested in new warehouse development nationwide.
This includes the construction of a new $500 million Amazon Robotics Fulfillment Center in Niagara, New York. This latest addition to Amazon’s collection of artificial intelligence (AI) powered facilities will see thousands of mobile robots and a suite of robotic arms pick items and bring them to employees at ergonomic workstations.
Paired with automated packing systems and AI-powered robotic arms that swiftly sort packaged units for shipping, Amazon’s new Robotics Fulfillment Centers claim to cut fulfillment times by up to 25%.
Few brands have the spending power to invest in a facility of this magnitude, which only further cements Amazon’s reputation as the biggest and fastest marketplace in the game.
Sellers are still adapting to new FBA fees
AI-powered warehouses aren’t all that’s new over at Amazon.
FBA added new fees in 2024, including an Inbound Placement Fee, which charges sellers for the service of distributing inventory in order to better meet Prime delivery requirements.
The Inbound Placement Fee was further adjusted in February 2025, and it ranges from $0.16 to $0.68 for standard items. Large bulky items range from $0.55 all the way up to $5.95.
The fee itself varies depending on four different variables:
- Item size
- Item weight
- Number of shipment splits
- Inbound location
For example, let’s say you’ve got 200 units of a large standard parcel that weighs 3lb. If you’re shipping those products to just one region, you’re looking at an Inbound Placement Fee of $0.37 per item. That equates to a total fee of $74, which is due 45 days after each shipment is received.
Let’s be honest: this new fee isn’t going to send brands into the red. But it is a new overhead you’ll need to budget for, and yet another example of Amazon raising the bar and passing the cost of clearing on to its third-party sellers.
Trend #2: Amazon will realize even higher margins
For many years, Amazon’s retail platform was famously unprofitable, and the company relied on AWS as a high-margin revenue stream.
In 2024, however, the tides turned, creating what Marketplace Pulse dubbed “The Amazon Everyone Should Have Feared” — an Amazon that’s turning record profits while also pumping record levels of capital expenditures back into its infrastructure.
Those record profits are piling up thanks to a few strategic moves. But two of the biggest capital booms stem from the fact that the eCommerce giant has consolidated its third-party model while establishing new policies that place more cost burdens on independent sellers.
Amazon has consolidated its third-party model
In 2024, they boosted profitability by terminating its less profitable first-party (1P) sellers.
Under Amazon’s 1P model, Amazon bought products directly from sellers at wholesale prices. The eCommerce giant then owned the inventory and had full control over pricing, promotions and inventory levels.
Those sellers were then faced with the option to leave Amazon entirely or transition to a third-party (3P) model — becoming customers of the Amazon seller service platform.
Under the 3P model, independent sellers are responsible for their own product listings on Amazon’s marketplace. Third-party sellers must then oversee their own pricing, inventory and fulfillment — unless they opt to pay for FBA.
It’s not hard to see why Amazon prefers this model. Now, they’re able to earn fees from third-party sellers without having to assume the risk of buying and owning extra inventory. Less inventory also means lower operational overheads, and so the 3P model is a proverbial win-win — thus further fueling the Amazon flywheel.
Fulfillment costs will be difficult to quantify
In 2025, fulfillment costs will become even more difficult to quantify with FBA’s new reimbursement policy.
Historically, Amazon would reimburse sellers for any inventory that was lost or damaged in their fulfillment warehouses. Amazon covered the cost of goods sold (COGS) plus their profit margin — only subtracting any relevant fees.
From a seller’s perspective, this essentially amounted to getting paid for a sale that never happened. This was even more profitable than a real sale in many cases, because sellers didn’t have to worry about the financial impact of customer returns.
Late in 2024, FBA announced that it would not increase its fees in the coming year. But the new reimbursement policy refunds sellers the manufacturing cost of items rather than the sale price. It also places the cost of packaging, labeling, and more back on the sellers in the case of lost or damaged inventory.
While this might seem reasonable from a corporate perspective, it could pose a large financial risk for sellers.
Let’s say you produce a popular product that only costs $5 per unit to manufacture but has a market value of $25 per unit. Amazon’s new policy means you’ll be losing 80% of your sale price on each reimbursement.
It doesn’t cover the full cost of doing business with Amazon. And although a loss like that might be ok every once in a while, your revenues could take a noticeable dip if it happens frequently.
2025, therefore, will likely show an even greater increase in profits for the retail behemoth.
Trend #3: Sellers will prioritize multichannel strategy
With its unparalleled market reach, most brands still can’t afford to ignore Amazon as a steady sales channel.
However, doing so profitably proves to be more and more difficult every year. In the near future, we may see sellers leveraging Amazon solely for brand awareness — a loss leader to drive traffic to their more profitable channels.
This move towards multichannel sales is being largely fueled by growing competition among ecommerce marketplaces.
Household retail names are creating new growth opportunities for sellers keen to lean away from Amazon’s increasingly rigid fee structures. Meanwhile, brands are starting to chart rapid growth and minimize risk by diversifying into those new marketplaces. Let’s take a closer look:
Old competitors are creating new opportunities
Other established retailers have picked up the scent of Amazon sellers’ discontent and are doubling down on efforts to build out their third-party marketplaces.
Walmart Marketplace has worked hard to attract new sellers, adding 50,000 new vendors in 12 months. What’s the key to Walmart’s massive growth? Simply put, they’re less stringent than other marketplaces when it comes to seller approval. They also allow international sellers.
This flexibility has seen Walmart’s online product count skyrocket to 420 million — and 95% of those additional products come from marketplace sellers.
Additionally, Macy’s made a splash with its third-party marketplace in 2022. It’s since grown from a marketplace of 400 brands and 20 product categories to more than 2,000 sellers. Macy’s also uses its marketplace to promote diversity by promoting 900 underrepresented suppliers, and has since moved to replicate its marketplace success over at subsidiary Bloomingdale’s.
Nordstrom followed suit in 2024, setting up its own marketplace partnering with select brands. Meanwhile, Best Buy plans to launch its own in the coming year. Best Buy already has a marketplace set up in Canada, but it focuses on refurbished sales.
This new marketplace is expected to mirror the model other major retailers are following, and means customers will be splitting their time in multiple places to shop for multiple items. That’s why it’s critical to establish brand visibility in each relevant market.
Multichannel means growth
With more and more options to reach new customers and new marketplaces hungry to attract popular brands, Amazon sellers will become less loyal to the platform as they prioritize a multichannel strategy.
A multichannel strategy means your brand can sell high-demand products through multiple channels like Amazon, Walmart and upstarts like Best Buy simultaneously. In doing so, you’ll be able to:
- Increase your brand awareness – Expanding to multiple platforms boosts your visibility by reaching new audiences who may not have otherwise seen your brand online.
- Lower your risk profile – Overreliance on one online sales channel can be risky. If that platform changes its policies or experiences supply chain issues, your business might take a hit. Diversification means risk is spread more evenly, insulating you from singular marketplace issues.
- Access to impulse buyers – Marketplaces and social media platforms like TikTok Shop often encourage quick, impulsive purchases. By establishing a presence on multiple platforms, you’ll be able to capture a higher volume of spontaneous buys and unlock new and steady sales opportunities.
But it’s important to remember that a multichannel strategy goes hand-in-hand with a couple of fundamental challenges — and it all traces back to complexity.
Maintaining a presence on multiple marketplaces means a lot of upkeep. You’ve got to stay on top of different marketplace requirements, manage contrasting platforms simultaneously, and level up your inventory management to ensure you’ve got visibility of what you’re selling to who and where it needs to go.
On top of that, there are often startup costs that accompany a new channel launch, as well as upkeep costs like Amazon’s wide range of selling fees.
But you shouldn’t let those complexities intimidate you. You just need an experienced fulfillment partner to help you streamline your operations and take over squeaky wheels so that you can reap the benefits of a multichannel strategy without the headache.
That’s where Ware2Go can step in to offer strategic support.
Our integrated plug-and-play software enables you to instantly launch and scale in multiple marketplaces, build your own warehousing network, and pull all your marketplace sales from a single pool of inventory to ensure your multichannel game is compliant with strict marketplace rules.
Meanwhile, leveraging our expertise will help you optimize your fulfillment strategy and diversify your presence beyond Amazon.
Master Amazon Trends in 2025 With These Three Pro Tips
No two businesses are 100% alike — and so your optimal multichannel strategy is going to be unique, too. But to build that strategy, you’ve got to carefully consider how you develop your multichannel approach and enter new marketplaces.
These three pro tips will help you kickstart that journey on the best possible footing:
1. Start diversifying your marketplace presence now
Amazon might be the biggest fish in the eCommerce pond, but remember: it’s not the be-all-end-all. Walmart is catching up, and new entrants like Macy’s and Best Buy are coming in hot. There are new opportunities to connect with customers, and you need to start capitalizing on them.
Start by researching the platforms and communities that’ll be the best fit for your product catalog. Look into the requirements for selling on each marketplace, and then cross-reference those requirements against your current sales and fulfillment operations.
With an established presence on multiple marketplaces, you’ll be able to drive exposure with multiple platform listings and get more eyes on your products. You’ve just got to make sure you’re investing in multichannel selling software capable of integrating each sales channel so that you don’t lose sight of what’s going on.
Again, this is where a third-party logistics (3PL) expert like Ware2Go can make life simpler.
Ware2Go’s FulfillmentVu software includes 300 plug-and-play connectors so you can seamlessly add new channels like Amazon, Walmart, Target, Macy’s, TikTok and more. But because all of those channels are connected using one platform, you’ve always got real-time visibility across every marketplace — allowing you to manage stock levels, set replenishment alerts, and avoid stockouts.
2. Map out and optimize your fulfillment strategy
To develop a cost-effective multichannel strategy, you’ll need to map out your existing fulfillment operations. From there, you’ll be able to identify bottlenecks, potential challenges, and opportunities for improvement and development.
As part of the mapping process, you’ve got to ensure you:
- Analyze your costs – Don’t rely on marketplace estimates or Amazon’s assumptions about your supply chain costs. Combine data sources to map out your actual expenses. This will give you a better picture of your margins and ensure you’re not leaving capital on the table.
- Optimize fulfillment at the SKU level – Some products are best suited for a solution like FBA, while others are more cost-effective in a 3PL network. A SKU-level strategy lets you choose the best fulfillment option for each product, maximizing margins while maintaining flexibility and control across your operations.
- Invest in a centralized fulfillment system – To manage multiple sales channels, you’ll need 360-degree visibility across your entire operation. That calls for a centralized order fulfillment system like Ware2Go’s FulfillmentVu system. It tracks inventory levels, order status and shipping timelines in real-time — giving you the data you need to make informed decisions and optimize your multichannel strategy.
As part of the mapping process, you might end up deciding that managing multichannel fulfillment is a bit more complex than you’d originally thought. That’s when it pays dividends to partner with an experienced 3PL.
3. Outsource to a fulfillment partner with marketplace experience
Adopting a multichannel approach is key to marketplace success. But, building out internal infrastructure before knowing whether a new market will take off can tie up capital and expose your business to unnecessary risk.
By partnering with the right 3PL you can avoid the risks and scale with confidence.
Outsourcing your multichannel fulfillment to Ware2Go enables you to leverage existing warehousing facilities, teams and technology without any upfront investment. You’ll be able to:
- Reduce capital expenditures and onboarding delays – Ware2Go’s solution has direct integrations so that you can connect to all the major marketplaces. But you can also expand into new channels with Ware2Go’s simple backend connections and exclusive partnerships — which means it’s fast and simple to kickstart your presence on a new marketplace.
- Meet marketplace requirements without lifting a finger – All of Ware2Go’s certified warehouse partners are trained in all standard operating procedures to ensure compliance with any marketplace requirements.
- Draw from a single pool of inventory – Ware2Go simplifies inventory management by streamlining fulfillment across multiple marketplaces using a single fulfillment network and technology. That means you don’t need to worry about manually matching up the numbers on your Amazon, Walmart, and Shopify sales against your inventory. It’s all done automatically.
By getting rid of those squeaky wheels and outsourcing the trickiest parts of your fulfillment operations, you can rest easy knowing you’re leveraging the benefits of being a multichannel seller without dealing with the added stress of managing those complexities.
Start Capitalizing on Amazon’s Trends for 2025
Marketplace competition is heating up, and sellers can’t afford to be complacent. Amazon is still the most important place to be, so you must stay up-to-date on seller requirements and remain compliant.
But you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket, either.
To stay competitive and maximize your sales potential, you’ve got to diversify your marketplace presence. That means teaming up with an experienced fulfillment partner to help you explore new and steady sales channels, plug into marketplaces, and streamline fulfillment operations to meet multiple channel requirements.
Ware2Go is the perfect solution. Ware2Go’s technology has direct integrations with all major marketplaces and an extensive fulfillment network to enable your brand to meet the delivery requirements of any sales channel.
