The Great E-Commerce Divide: Growth Surges While Concentration Intensifies

The American e-commerce landscape experienced explosive growth in 2025, with order volumes surging an impressive 147% year over year. This remarkable expansion would seem to herald a golden age for online retail, suggesting opportunities abound for businesses of all sizes to capture their share of the digital economy. However, beneath these headline numbers lies a more nuanced and concerning reality: the benefits of this growth are concentrating dramatically among a small elite of dominant players, creating a widening gap between e-commerce winners and everyone else. The Numbers Behind the Growth A 147% increase in e-commerce orders represents extraordinary expansion by any measure. To put this in perspective, such growth suggests that for every 100 orders placed in 2024, approximately 247 orders were placed in 2025. This acceleration speaks to fundamental shifts in consumer behavior, ongoing digitalization of retail, and the continued migration of purchasing activity from physical stores to online channels. However, the distribution of this growth reveals stark inequalities within the e-commerce ecosystem. The top 5% of US e-commerce brands captured an outsized 54% of total order growth. This means that while thousands of online retailers experienced the rising tide of overall e-commerce expansion, more than half of all new orders flowed to a relatively small number of dominant players. This concentration ratio is particularly striking because it indicates that even in a period of explosive overall growth, the competitive dynamics favor established market leaders with significant advantages in brand recognition, logistics capabilities, marketing budgets, and technological infrastructure. The rich, in e-commerce terms, are indeed getting richer. Understanding the Shift in Consumer Behavior Greg Zakowicz, E-Commerce and Retail Advisor at Omnisend, has identified a critical trend underlying these statistics: intentional shopping. According to Zakowicz, this behavioral shift has been developing for approximately 18 to 24 months but intensified markedly in 2025. Intentional shopping represents a fundamental change in how consumers approach online purchasing, moving away from impulsive browsing and toward more deliberate, purposeful transactions. This shift manifests in several measurable ways. Overall engagement with marketing communications has declined, suggesting that consumers are becoming more selective about which brands and messages they pay attention to. The era of opening every promotional email or clicking on every advertisement appears to be waning, replaced by more discriminating behavior where consumers actively filter out noise and focus only on brands and products that genuinely interest them. However, when consumers do choose to engage, their behavior has changed dramatically. Purchase likelihood among engaged consumers increased by 51% compared to the previous year. This remarkable statistic indicates that when a marketing message successfully captures consumer attention, it's far more likely to result in an actual transaction than in the past. The quality of engagement has improved even as the quantity has declined. Additionally, average order values climbed 22% year over year. This increase suggests that when consumers decide to make a purchase, they're buying more per transaction. This could reflect several factors: consumers consolidating purchases to reduce shipping costs, increased confidence in online shopping leading to larger basket sizes, or inflation driving up the nominal value of typical orders. Quality Over Quantity: The New Marketing Paradigm These behavioral changes point toward a fundamental reorientation of digital marketing strategy. The traditional approach, which often emphasized maximizing reach and frequency of marketing messages, is giving way to a more sophisticated model that prioritizes relevance, personalization, and value delivery. The math is compelling. If consumers are engaging less frequently but converting at higher rates when they do engage, the winning strategy becomes clear: focus resources on delivering highly relevant messages to the right people at the right time, rather than casting the widest possible net. This represents a shift from interruption-based marketing to permission-based, value-driven communication. This transformation rewards brands that truly understand their customers, that can segment effectively, that can personalize meaningfully, and that can deliver genuine value in every interaction. It penalizes brands that rely on volume-based tactics, generic messaging, and one-size-fits-all approaches. In many ways, this shift explains why growth is concentrating among top performers—these tend to be the brands with the resources and sophistication to execute advanced personalization and customer intelligence strategies. The Power of Behavioral Automation Perhaps the most striking evidence for the quality-over-quantity thesis comes from data on automated email campaigns. Behavior-based automated emails—messages triggered by specific customer actions like cart abandonment, browsing behavior, or purchase history—drove an impressive 25% of total email revenue while accounting for just 1.7% of total email sends. These statistics are remarkable for what they reveal about efficiency and relevance. Automated emails, representing less than 2% of volume, generated one-quarter of revenue. This 14-to-1 ratio of revenue generation to volume demonstrates the extraordinary power of timely, relevant, contextual communication. Behavioral automation works precisely because it aligns with intentional shopping behavior. When a consumer abandons a cart, they've already demonstrated purchase intent. An automated reminder email at the right moment can convert that intent into a completed transaction. When a customer purchases a product that requires refills or replacement, an automated replenishment reminder arrives exactly when needed. These messages aren't interruptions—they're helpful nudges that align with existing consumer needs and desires. The success of behavioral automation also reflects a broader truth about modern e-commerce: data-driven personalization at scale represents a significant competitive advantage. Brands that can effectively collect customer data, analyze behavior patterns, and trigger appropriate automated responses gain efficiency advantages that compound over time. This capability gap helps explain why growth concentrates among sophisticated, well-resourced players. Implications for Different Market Participants For small and medium-sized e-commerce businesses, these trends present both challenges and opportunities. The challenge is clear: competing for attention and market share against dominant players with superior resources has become increasingly difficult. The concentration of growth among the top 5% suggests that scale advantages in marketing, logistics, and technology continue to matter enormously. However, opportunities exist for brands that can differentiate through authentic customer relationships, niche specialization, and superior personalization. The shift toward intentional shopping and the power of behavioral automation don't inherently favor large players—they favor smart players who understand their customers deeply and can deliver relevant value consistently. Small brands with loyal, engaged customer bases and sophisticated automation capabilities can punch above their weight class. For large e-commerce platforms and major brands, the data validates current strategies emphasizing personalization, automation, and data intelligence. The returns on investment in these areas appear substantial and growing. However, dominance is never permanent in digital markets, and the brands that become complacent risk disruption from more nimble competitors who better understand emerging consumer preferences. For technology vendors and service providers, these trends highlight enormous opportunities in automation platforms, customer data platforms, personalization engines, and analytics tools. As the importance of behavioral automation and intentional targeting grows, demand for sophisticated marketing technology will only increase. Looking Forward The dual realities of explosive overall growth and increasing concentration create an interesting dynamic for the e-commerce industry. On one hand, the total market expansion means there's room for many players to grow in absolute terms, even if their market share remains stable or declines slightly. On the other hand, the competitive advantages accruing to top performers suggest that the gap between leaders and followers will continue widening. Success in this environment requires understanding that modern e-commerce success is less about shouting louder than competitors and more about listening better to customers. It's about quality of engagement over quantity, about relevance over reach, about automation intelligence over manual effort. The brands that thrive will be those that embrace behavioral data, invest in automation capabilities, respect consumer preferences for intentional shopping experiences, and deliver consistent value that earns attention rather than demanding it. The era of spray-and-pray digital marketing is ending, replaced by an age where precision, personalization, and genuine customer understanding separate winners from losers. As this evolution continues, we can expect further concentration of growth among brands that execute these strategies well, while those clinging to outdated volume-based approaches will find themselves increasingly marginalized. The 147% growth in e-commerce orders represents a rising tide, but as the data clearly shows, this tide is not lifting all boats equally.