4 Big Trends For DTC E-Commerce Growth In 2025
Diane Keng, CEO & cofounder of Breinify, a leading AI-power predictive personalization platform. Forbes 30 Under 30, Enterprise Technology.
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce brands are always looking for the next lever to pull that can help scale their businesses to new heights. But with the ever-changing nature of consumer trends and emerging tech—and the reality of limited budgets for marketing experimentation—it can be hard for brands to decipher between worthwhile long-term investments and passing fads.
In this article, I’ll examine four big trends in DTC e-commerce growth that appear to be very much here to stay.
1. Social Commerce
The growth of social commerce will continue throughout 2025, with more than $100 billion in revenue projected from social media product purchases, an increase of 22% from 2024.
As social media channels expand and streamline their shopping capabilities, and consumers become increasingly more comfortable with making purchases this way, social commerce has emerged as a huge opportunity for brands engaging in e-commerce.
Led by the launch of TikTok Shop and the continued development of Facebook and Instagram Shops by Meta, brands now have multiple new sales channels through which they can engage and convert customers. Attractive, shoppable posts and live video shopping sessions are helping today’s forward-thinking brands reach new audiences and provide an Amazon-like buying experience requiring a minimal number of taps or clicks.
One potential downside of social commerce, however, is the addition of new channels to consider when working toward omnichannel brand consistency. A brand’s social shop presence needs to feel aligned with how the brand engages customers across all other digital channels as well—web, email, SMS, mobile app and more.
To maximize relevance and revenue, every new social commerce shop should be customized to be part of a connected, consistent customer journey experience.
2. Deeper Product Detail
Another trend in e-commerce is the growing demand for more and more background detail and information on each product sold. No longer satisfied with just a nice-looking label and some positive star ratings, 70% of online shoppers now say that product content can make or break a sale. Today’s research-savvy and quality-conscious consumers want to know things like:
• Where the product is made
• Full ingredient/material list
• Origin of source materials
• How the product is packaged
• Product care or assembly considerations
• 3D product views
• Detailed experiences of existing customers (e.g., testimonial videos)
• Use case examples and ideas
This trend further supports the above case for social selling, where brands now rely heavily on user-generated content from existing customers, as well as live or long-form brand-generated product content that serves the role of a modern-day infomercial.
The desire for more product information also has an impact on how brands serve personalized content to customers across their owned digital channels. Shopper personalization is now evolving beyond just product recommendations into full content experiences—such as surfacing educational content on a particular electronic device or skincare product that a customer might be interested in or sharing recipes that offer inspiration on how to use and enjoy a particular food item.
3. Cookieless Personalization
The changing regulations on using website cookies to track user behavior—including widespread permission requirements, browser restrictions and potential cookie phase-outs—are forcing e-commerce brands to look for other approaches that can offer each shopper a personalized experience.
For example, Mozilla’s Firefox browser already blocks third-party cookies by default, as does Apple’s Safari. These changes have spurred considerable advancements in the field of cookieless personalization.
With cookieless personalization, both existing customers and new shoppers are presented with personalized product recommendations and content experiences without relying on third-party cookies. Instead, AI and machine learning algorithms can surface user-specific recommendations based on observed shopper page activity, their location, seasonality, recent and forecasted weather, current events and more.
By using this algorithmic knowledge to A/B test and dynamically adjust customer-facing web pages, emails, shopping apps and SMS offers in real time, brands can ensure they’re able to continue providing a personalized customer experience in a cookieless world, thereby maximizing conversions and revenue well into the future.
4. Better Product And Content Discovery
Although consumers in 2025 are demanding more product information than ever before, they don’t want to have to hunt for it. They’re spending less time scrolling through brand websites and expect the products and information they need to be readily available at their fingertips.
The days of consumers putting up with robotic chatbots and irrelevant search results are gone.
That’s why better product discovery has become an important trend for e-commerce brands. The same AI engines empowering modern product and content personalization are also being used to improve website chat and search functions.
For example, instead of scrolling through a clothing brand’s collection of sweaters looking for something warm that comes in red, a generic search for “sweaters” would return a curated, personalized list of product recommendations knowing that it’s currently very cold in the shopper’s location and that the shopper likes the color red.
Similarly, rather than returning static, boilerplate responses to a customer’s support inquiry, an AI-enabled chatbot can surface the most relevant product and help content and even guide the customer through the necessary steps to resolve their question or problem.
Recommendations
Based on these four e-commerce trends, savvy online brands should consider the following actions and investments to see strong DTC revenue growth in 2025:
1. Extend their brand experience to TikTok Shop and other social commerce platforms to capitalize on new sales opportunities with new and existing audiences.
2. Go deep with the amount of detail and supporting content provided for each product, including long-form video and regular live selling experiences.
3. Provide a more personalized experience for known and unknown shoppers with modern customer personalization technology that uses AI algorithms instead of cookies.
4. Upgrade on-site product and content discovery capabilities to reduce the customer’s search time and increase their likelihood of making a purchase.
By implementing these strategies, DTC e-commerce companies can better meet the needs of today’s consumers.
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