It’s no secret that ecommerce has been experiencing a seriously steep ascent the past five years. While growth has been pretty steady ever since the day buying and selling online became commonplace for consumers, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred a surge that no one saw coming.
While ecomm experts keep saying the industry will cool down any minute now, the numbers tell a different story. While the 2024 U.S. totals are still being tallied, the third quarter alone was up 7.4% year-over-year — and there’s still a record-breaking holiday sales season to add to the bottom line.
In 2023, roughly 19% of all retail worldwide was done online. By 2027, it’s predicted that ecommerce will account for close to a quarter of all sales. Don’t be shocked if the real numbers shake out even higher, though, as mobile shopping takes a stronger hold and digital-first Gen Z comes into even more discretionary income.
For folks who run an online store, these numbers are both exciting and petrifying.
The growth of ecommerce is a good sign for those in the industry. As long as ecommerce keeps taking a bigger piece of the retail pie, online companies know there’s no shortage of shoppers. On the other hand, this level of growth also means more competition, more audiences to try and reach, and more tech to learn and weave into your existing strategies.
Phew! At face value, that’s a lot to take on. While we can’t slow the trajectory of ecommerce, we can give you our top five recs for some of the simplest tech to adopt for standing out and scaling your store in 2025.
Tool 1: Klaviyo for On-point Emails Every Time
It’s true. We’re kicking off this list of must-haves with an email marketing tool that’s anything but new. Since 2012, Klaviyo has been setting the standard for how online brands communicate with their audience. What started as an email marketing tool has expanded to include SMS, mobile push, and more ways to message people at the right time.
And while you probably have an email marketing tool already, you may want to take a second look at ol’ Klaviyo (or at least give your current tool a good once-over to see how it stacks up). Early 2024, Klaviyo made some big head-turning changes, one of them being the launch of Klaviyo AI.
Klaviyo is one of those tools that’s intuitive enough to sign up and start running email marketing campaigns without a ton of studying, but has a tremendous amount of room to grow with your store. You can send basic, barebones emails and still have all the features at your disposal to adapt to changing consumer needs for years to come.
A couple of the sales-scaling features powered by Klaviyo AI include:
- The power to analyze all of your products, match them to individual shoppers, and ship them out in perfectly timed, perfectly curated emails. A lot of features promise to take guesswork off your plate, but this one sincerely does.
- Gazing into the AI crystal ball and predicting when someone is going to buy something. By poring over details like lifetime value, spending potential, and predicted demographic for each person and across all of your customers, you can swiftly give shoppers extremely tailored experiences.
- Providing tips to keep your marketing emails out of spam folders. Seems simple enough, but it’s a doozy of an issue that’s been a bug in the butt of marketers for decades. Klaviyo AI helps you keep contacts warm and important.
- Automatically running, choosing, and sending A/B test winners. Test signup forms, email campaigns, automated flows, and beyond without the hassle of managing the whole shebang.
AI, or artificial intelligence, is still finding its foothold in the world of ecommerce. Some ideas jeopardize consumer security, are an environmental drain, or simply aren’t very useful to the average shopper. The innovations rolled out by Klaviyo, though, are set to help online stores run hyper-relevant (in non-creepy ways) marketing campaigns at the best times for each one of your customers.
Tool 2: Ahrefs for Showing up Before Competitors in Search
Is SEO dead?
If you spend time on the internet in places where people are talking about search, you’ve probably seen that question circulating for years. But the short answer is: no, SEO is not dead. (If it was, it wouldn’t be on this list!)
Some of the top challenges online stores face can be eased by thoughtful search engine optimization. Differentiation and competition are just a couple of the hurdles SEO can help clear.
There are many SEO tools in the sea, but Ahrefs is our personal favorite. It’s simple to use, dashboards put relevant data front and center, and it’s easy to identify competitors (and where you can catch up). As an online brand, you’re vying for attention and it’s critical to find ways to optimize your products and product categories for search.
It’s true that most product discovery today starts on Amazon, where thoughtful branding and owned customer experiences, unfortunately, perish. Brand discovery on social media is also on the rise. However, at least 30% of product discovery still starts with the search bar.
If your brand or product can rank first in search engine results, you can snag nearly 40% of the clicks from curious consumers. Even second and third place rankings can pull in roughly 20% and 10%, but climbing to those coveted spots takes some SEO prowess.
With Ahrefs, you have everything you need to start ranking higher than your competitors with:
- Site audit that checks on your stores’ technical SEO and overall site health. If there are broken links, missing H1 tags, 4xx errors, or more funky stuff messing with your rankings, this tool will tell you in seconds.
- Keyword explorer lets you input any and all keywords you’re toying with and shows you things like search volume, keyword difficulty, traffic potential, and parent topics so you can put the most potent keywords on your site and product description pages.
- Competitive analysis lets you directly compare your website with competing ones. Drop in your own store’s URL and Ahrefs will automatically populate top competitors so you can generate keyword and link opportunities to beat them out.
Tool 3: EcoCart for Growing and Being Good to the Planet
The environment has been a huge topic for years. Being good stewards of the land is increasingly important to people, and it’s an issue heavily reflected in consumer trends. Eighty-five percent of consumers “are experiencing the disruptive impacts of climate change in their lives,” and one place they can make a difference is where they shop.
Things like a company’s environmental transparency, eco-friendly packaging materials, products utilizing recycled plastics, and other sustainable practices play a huge part in purchase decisions. A massive 80% of shoppers are willing to pay more for sustainably produced or sourced goods — up to 10% more on average.
One company heeding the needs of modern shoppers is EcoCart. It can be challenging and cost-prohibitive to develop new products meeting the criteria of eco-conscious shoppers, but EcoCart is an easy way to contribute positively to the environment from your checkout experience.
With EcoCart on your site, shoppers can contribute pocket change to offset their order’s carbon footprint. It’s an incredibly transparent app that helps shoppers feel confident about their purchase and the environment in one fell swoop.
This add-on gives you a leg up on competitors that aren’t taking positive action with the environment, winning new shoppers and earning loyalty for the long run.
Tool 4: Grin for Getting Started With Influencer Marketing
Curiosity about influencer marketing is at an all-time high. As a quick summary, this type of marketing is when a company asks an influencer — an online personality who can sway the opinions and actions of a devoted social media following — to use, review, or promote a product or service to their followers on their own social media accounts, not the company’s.
It’s the strategy that’s helping online brands earn trust, show authenticity, and get in front of their ideal customers, no matter how niche. And it’s all the rage. The only issue? It can be tough to know where to start.
Grin is an influencer marketing platform designed to sap the overwhelm from the process. It can help you identify content creators who would be a perfect fit for your brand and products, kickstart your relationship with them, create influencer campaigns for goals like product launches or brand awareness, and give you real-time reporting and ROI along the way.
If 2025 is the year you’re looking to give influencer marketing a try, Grin is a go-to tool for helping you understand the landscape and ensure you’re growing with this fresh initiative.
Tool 5: Zest for Scaling Through Gifting Channel
The gifting market is growing at a ridiculous 10.4% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), with corporate gifting alone already surpassing $300 billion. Despite proving itself to be a red-hot market, few ecommerce brands are tapping the opportunity as a sales channel.
Gifting has massive potential for a few reasons:
- Gift orders are typically large volume orders, boosting average order values.
- Receiving a product as a gift by a trusted individual is an incredible endorsement (think of it as the ultimate word-of-mouth referral).
- It’s a foolproof way to get your products in the hands of more people. They can use it, eat it, try it out, and go to your site to buy on their own.
- Unboxing your goods as a gift is a very memorable moment that shines a positive sentiment on your brand.
- Having your products gifted to thousands of people willingly by a customer is a dream come true for brand awareness.
So, why haven’t brands latched onto gifting as the ultimate sales channel? It’s complicated. Historically, sending online gifts in bulk requires shoppers to jump through a bunch of hoops. They can either 1) go through the checkout process one time per recipient, or 2) head to the footer for a contact form and hope for a response.
Either option requires shoppers to scrounge for addresses, endure long back-and-forth conversations, and make a huge purchase with very little transparency until the gifts are actually in the hands of recipients.
Compare that with your well-oiled, über-optimized DTC shopping experience and, well, it’s definitely a dud. Instead of putting themselves through the trials of buying thoughtful products from brands they love, gifters simply resort to the ease and convenience of gift cards.
Zest is the only tool changing this experience for good. It’s the first-of-its-kind gifting platform built for brands to sell more gifts directly from their website. With Zest in their tech stack, online stores can offer their shoppers:
- An easy way to buy gifts for one or hundreds of people in a single checkout instead of many tiresome transactions.
- A branded gifting storefront that looks and feels like an extension of the DTC website.
- Instant e-gfiting through link, text, or email for digital-first shoppers that want to get in and send all the gifts they need in just a few clicks.
- Easily customizable gifts including personalized gift notes and add-ons like gift wrap or logo-branded cards.
- Private storefronts made specially for VIP clients and corporate gifters who require custom pricing, products, and more.
- Concierge gifting services if they prefer a hands-on, 1:1 gifting experience instead of the self-service path to purchase.
Zest is made to bring the process of buying gifts online into the 21st century and turn it into an experience as optimized and streamlined as the rest of the online shopping experience. With flexible gifting experiences that remove friction for gifters and reduce manual tasks for brands, gifting is finally an opportunity ecommerce brands can leverage for growth in 2025.
When brands add Zest to their tech stack, they reap benefits like increased brand awareness, gift sales, conversion rates, brand affinity and more. If you’ve been trying to squeeze more juice from your gift channel, Zest is too good to pass up in the new year.
Bonus Tool 6: Threekit for Immersive AR Shopping
This one’s a bonus tool because augmented reality (AR) is an impressive tool but may not be the best fit for many product types. But for brands selling products that could use some extra visual oomph to close a sale, Threekit can help.
Products like glasses, clothing, and furniture do especially well as a potential customer can visualize them on their body or in their living space. Threekit takes the mental strain in trying to picture these things on your own out of the picture.
More than 50% of consumers have used AR in making a purchase at some point, so this could be the cutting-edge tech to boost conversions and grow your store in the year ahead.
The Perfect Tech Stack for Growth in 2025
There are an infinite number of factors impacting how much your store grows or slows in 2025. Things outside of your control, like the economy, global events, and beyond can change the ecommerce landscape in a heartbeat.
However, there are a lot of variables you can control, including your products and how they show up to shoppers everywhere. By nailing to-dos like rising to the top in search rankings, getting in on trending influencer marketing, and expanding your sales opportunities with gifting, growth is yours to dominate.
