What Actually Changed About Multichannel Selling This Year

September 2026

By Shannon Curley

For most of the last decade, multichannel was the thing you got to after the Amazon business was working. You listed on Walmart, you stood up a Shopify store, and whatever came through them was gravy. Nobody was going to lose their company over skipping it.

That framing is gone. Operators are increasingly treating diversification as basic risk management. That doesn’t mean list everywhere immediately, which is the wrong lesson and an expensive one.

Amazon Isn’t Shrinking, The Pie Just Keeps Getting Bigger

The case for diversifying isn’t that Amazon is in decline. Amazon is still adding selection, still adding customers, and still the largest single block of volume most 8-figure brands will do this quarter. A brand that pulls back from Amazon to chase a second channel usually just moves its own revenue around and pays freight twice for the privilege.

What changed is that the other channels stopped being rounding errors.

Channel signal	What the data shows
TikTok Shop, first-half 2026 GMV	$50.3 billion, up 92% year over year, with $11.8 billion of that in the US and US growth roughly doubling
Walmart items carrying a 2-day-or-less delivery promise through WFS	50% average GMV growth
Deloitte holiday e-commerce forecast	7.5% to 8.4% growth, against total retail growth of 4.0% to 4.8%

The point isn’t to replace Amazon. It’s to add meaningful revenue somewhere else without breaking the Amazon business that already works.

Diversification Runs in Both Directions Now

Here is the detail that reframes the whole conversation for anyone who came up on Amazon.

There is a large population of Shopify-born brands that has never sold on Amazon at all. For them, Amazon is the diversification play.

Amazon-native brands are expanding outward, and D2C-native brands are expanding into Amazon.

If you’ve been treating multichannel as a synonym for leaving Amazon, that population is the correction. What gets rewarded now is the ability to operate on several platforms at once, which is a different competency than being excellent at Amazon.

Inventory Is Where the Shift Actually Shows Up

The most concrete change is in how brands buy and position inventory, and it started roughly 6 months ago.

For years, a brand selling on a second channel took units off the Amazon pile when an order came in, because the volume didn’t justify anything more deliberate. That’s no longer true. Brands are buying a little more than they need, holding it in bulk outside Amazon, and allocating it deliberately. Some are running separate UPCs for D2C. A SKU doing meaningful volume on TikTok Shop is no longer an edge case, and once that happens it needs its own inventory plan.

2 practical notes from the operator side.

Hold buffer stock outside Amazon. It is what lets you cover a channel that takes off in November, and it is cheap in September and expensive in December.
Run an FBM offer alongside the FBA offer on the same ASIN. It keeps a listing alive when the FBA units stall in FC Transfer, which protects the rank you spent all year building.

AI Discovery Is What Turned Advice Into Urgency

Multichannel advice has been around for years without much urgency attached. What added the urgency is that the first step of the shopping trip started moving.

Traffic to US retail sites from AI sources grew 393% year over year in Q1 2026, and by March that traffic was converting 42% better than paid search and email. Those are still small numbers against total retail traffic, so read them as a direction rather than a finished shift.

An AI assistant may compare Amazon, Walmart, Target, TikTok Shop, and a brand’s own site in the same recommendation. If your product is missing from one of the channels that matters, you may never make that comparison set at all. Before, skipping a channel meant missing that channel’s traffic. Increasingly, it can also mean missing the recommendation altogether.

Worth watching this month

Amazon Accelerate runs September 22 to 24 in Seattle

The last few years each produced a logistics headline, with AWD one year and the supply chain network expansion the next. Our guess is that this one goes to AI inside Seller Central instead, since Amazon’s logistics stack is already built and the seller side has had no agentic moment yet.

Copying Your Amazon Listing to Four Other Channels Is the Common Mistake

The Amazon-born habit is to copy the same listing onto every new channel, wait a few weeks, and call whatever happens a test. That habit is what makes most channel tests look like failures.

Each channel is a different store with a different shopper. A Walmart shopper, a Target shopper, and a Macy’s shopper behave differently in the physical store, and they behave differently online for the same reasons. The baseline product data can be shared. The imagery, the bundling, and the way you talk about the product should be calibrated per channel, and doing that has gotten dramatically cheaper in the last 18 months.

The same logic now applies to machines. Adobe found retail product pages scoring around 66% on machine readability, which means roughly a third of product content is invisible to the models doing the recommending. Complete attributes, accurate inventory status, and real delivery estimates are what the assistant reads. Brand voice is for the human who clicks through.

The Tactical Takeaway

The goal isn’t to be everywhere. It’s to have enough channel coverage that one marketplace, one fulfillment problem, or one change in customer behavior can’t take your whole business with it.