Ecommerce Trends: How online retailers compete against Amazon

After GameStop offered to acquire eBay on May 3 in a deal worth $56 billion, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen framed the move as a path to help eBay compete against Amazon. “It could be a legit competitor to Amazon,” Cohen said in a Wall Street Journal report dated March 4.

Part of Cohen’s strategy would include leveraging GameStop’s physical locations in ways that could potentially bolster eBay’s omnichannel, fulfillment and authentication capabilities, among other uses.

Whether or not the deal eventually goes through, his point highlighted a challenge that retailers and online marketplaces of all sizes face: how to compete against Amazon when the ecommerce giant has so many entrenched advantages. Amazon ranks No. 1 in Digital Commerce 360’s Top 2000 Database. There, GameStop is ranked No. 81.

The database is how Digital Commerce 360 tracks the largest North American online retailers by their annual ecommerce sales. Amazon is also No. 3, and eBay is No. 6 in Digital Commerce 360’s Global Online Marketplaces Database. That database ranks the 100 largest such marketplaces by third-party gross merchandise value (GMV).

How online retailers compete against Amazon Cohen is not alone in viewing omnichannel services as one way that retailers can compete against Amazon.

While Amazon had made steady advances over the course of its history in opening physical stores and acquiring Whole Foods, along with its physical locations, it still lacks the presence of many of its competitors.

In fact, the company announced in January that it would close its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores, with some spaces converting to become Whole Foods Market sites. Amazon has found partners in many cases to compensate for its lack of physical spaces.

For instance, it has experimented with returns dropoffs at Kohl’s and UPS and begun working with Winn-Dixie on grocery delivery in areas where the chain is present. Omnichannel services are extremely popular among retail chains tracked by Digital Commerce 360. In 2025, 76.

6% of the retail chains in the Top 1000 Database offered buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) as an option. 64. 9% of the same group offered in-store stock status for their products to online shoppers.

Last-mile delivery partners and online grocery Amazon’s Winn-Dixie partnership underscores the gaps that still exist for Amazon in one of its most important categories. Online grocery sales in the U. S. grew by 25% year over year in 2025, according to data published by the firm Brick Meets Click. As that happened, the largest grocers in the U. S.

, including Walmart, Costco and Kroger, continued to build out their own delivery options. In some cases, this has included the use of third-party last-mile delivery services, as was the case with Kroger’s use of DoorDash and an expanded partnership with Instacart, which is Kroger’s “primary delivery fulfillment partner.”

When discussing Costco ecommerce sales in March, Gary Millerchip, its chief financial officer, noted that same-day delivery through Instacart, Uber Eats and DoorDash grew at a faster pace than overall Costco digital sales during the retailer’s fiscal first quarter.

In addition, Costco and Instacart expanded their partnership to Spain and France at the beginning of 2026.

Competing deal days timed around Amazon Prime Day As Amazon Prime Day continues to grow and evolve as an online sales event year after year, the promotion has attracted competitors, which now time their own branded events around Prime Day, establishing it as an important pillar for non-Amazon retailers as well. In 2025, for instance, as Amazon.

com web traffic increased by 32% on Prime Day from the previous 21 days, Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Temu each saw double-digit percentage increases for their own web traffic, according to Similarweb.

All the while, retailers have launched their own deal events, including Walmart Deals, Target’s Circle Week and Temu Week, scheduling them to appeal to shoppers who are already online looking for Prime Day finds. It’s just one way in which online merchants are adapting to Amazon’s dominance, even if they aren’t selling directly through its site.

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