Taming E-Commerce Marketplace Volatility to Boost Gross Merchandise Value

Increased volatility — in demand, sales, and shipping requirements — is driving complexity for e-commerce fulfillment in 2025. As social media turns traditional shopping on its head, retailers are experiencing massive spikes in demand in the wake of viral trends and surprise brand drops across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Merchants are also implementing more “sales events,” product launches, random discounts, and limited releases to surprise and delight their audiences into purchasing more regularly. This “chaotic” selling style is sending retailers scrambling as it’s increasingly difficult to forecast demand across an unpredictable sales ecosystem.

Adding further complexity to fulfillment, more and more sales channels are now accessible to retailers. While Amazon.com remains the biggest marketplace, capturing nearly 38 percent of the e-commerce market in 2023, the number of alternative marketplaces (e.g., Rakuten, AliExpress, Walmart) is growing. Under pressure to effectively manage these challenges and boost gross merchandise value (GMV), what steps can retailers take to keep up with volatile order volumes, protect margins, and drive repeat purchases? Here are three:

1. Predictive Purchasing

The days of Excel spreadsheets and manual sales analysis to determine ballpark reorder quantities are long gone. Today’s retailers understand that to survive in volatility, they need to get smarter about predicting what customers want. Accordingly, they’re turning to purpose-built technology to analyze historical sales performance and plan for future requirements, while minimizing the dollar value buried in warehouse inventory.

In addition to mechanisms such as safety stock and “minimum order quantity” alerts, merchants are leveraging predictive purchasing capabilities, placing a historical inventory lens on past performance — from regular seasonal spikes (e.g., holiday shopping) to more unpredictable product drops or viral trends — to better plan for the next cycle.

With predictive purchasing, merchants can analyze inventory levels on a daily basis across different date ranges, taking into consideration sales velocity, layer quantities, profit details, shipped order volumes from all channels, and more, to accurately predict future sales. For specific channels such as Walmart (WFS) and Amazon (FBA), retailers can analyze past WFS and FBA sales and stock levels to predict when they need to send more inventory to the respective warehouses.

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2. Holistic Approach to Multichannel Sales

The increase of sales channels, from social media shops to global marketplaces, requires sophisticated warehouse operations that can seamlessly integrate complicated order streams. From an inventory perspective, retailers need a holistic approach that dissolves the lines between marketplaces to avoid overselling and disappointing consumers.

Because most retailers list on multiple marketplaces — in addition to selling via their own Shopify or BigCommerce platform — keeping track of stock levels, for example, across the breadth of channels becomes a complex task. Advanced order and warehouse management tools help simplify and streamline the process. For example, if a customer purchases a product on Amazon, these tools will ensure the item quantity is deducted automatically on Walmart, eBay and all other channels to eliminate oversales.

3. Operational Resilience Through Strategic Investments

Warehouse managers love predictability. When they know how many orders they’re going to need to pick and pack, they can resource accordingly and create a plan of attack for the day or week. However, when Marketing suddenly drops a promotional code through an email campaign, it can create a customer experience nightmare, with the warehouse team staring down the barrel of a 10x requirement to deliver with little to no prep time.

To prepare for the erratic demand spikes that accompany ad-hoc promotions and viral social media trends, strategic investment in warehouse management technology that's easy to use, fast to train, and can scale up quickly is crucial for transforming potential chaos into opportunity.

In conjunction with rapid scalability to handle unexpected spikes, merchants need full transparency into key performance metrics, such as number of fulfillable orders, how to best group orders for processing, number of picks and packs per person, average order throughput time, and storage range. This granular data can be used, for example, to create guided picking paths to boost fulfillment efficiency and to determine whether additional pickers or packing benches are needed to manage surging volumes.

As consumer behaviors continue to evolve, businesses that can effectively forecast demand and quell the operational impact of expanding sales channels and chaotic selling will be able to turn the potential chaos into a competitive advantage.

Johannes Panzer is head of industry solutions, e-commerce at Descartes, a provider of on-demand, software-as-a-service solutions focused on improving the productivity, performance and security of logistics-intensive businesses.