Owned channels slip, what ecommerce audits reveal

As of November 7, 2026, the most useful holiday survey number is not a sales forecast. It is the gap between what brand marketers say about their own channels and what they plan to fund. Modern Retail's holiday research, based on 90 brand and retail professionals plus executive interviews, found that 46 percent plan to use their own e-commerce site this season, down from 69 percent a year earlier, and 60 percent plan to use their own stores, down from 84 percent. For a category team, that divergence between stated importance and planned use is where product listing work gets decided.

The gap between what marketers say and what they fund

Forty six percent against sixty nine percent

The 23 point drop in planned owned e-commerce use is large enough that it is unlikely to be noise, but it is also not the same thing as a 23 point drop in spending. What the research documents is a change in channel plans, and the interviews offer two competing explanations. One is complacency: brands assume their own store and site will perform because they always have. The other is fragmentation: shoppers now discover in one place, compare in another and buy somewhere else, so no single channel deserves the budget it used to get.

Importance up, budget down

The survey contains its own contradiction, and the contradiction is the story. Two thirds of respondents say owned physical stores grow more important during the holidays, and roughly half say the same about owned e-commerce, yet planned use of both falls sharply. A brand that believes a channel is more important and plans to use it less is either reallocating to channels it cannot control, or under investing in the one asset it does control. The second reading is the expensive one, because an owned store or site is where customer data and margin both accumulate.

Marketplace share is not marketplace control

Amazon remains the dominant digital marketplace in the survey: 33 percent of brands and retailers plan to sell through it this season, and 38 percent of marketers say it grows more important to their sales during the holidays. Other digital marketplaces trail at 29 percent planned use. TikTok Shop was tracked as a standalone channel for the first time and came out as the most widely planned social commerce channel, at 21 percent against 6 percent for other social platforms. Those numbers describe distribution reach, not control over the listing, the price or the customer record.

Purchase frequency decides the channel

The clearest operating rule from the interviews is that purchase frequency, not category, determines where a brand should concentrate. For a low frequency, one-time purchase, marketplace traffic is worth paying for because the shopper is already there and does not need to be driven anywhere. For a high frequency product, retaining the buyer in an owned channel can outweigh the acquisition cost, particularly in a season when acquisition costs spike. Applied to a category plan, that rule sorts SKUs into two groups with two different listing priorities, and it is the cleanest available read on category growth: a high frequency category can afford to slow down marketplace expansion, while a low frequency one cannot.

A listing audit before the peak weeks

If owned channels are being under funded while marketplaces take more volume, the compensating move is to make every listing carry more weight. That means auditing the product listing itself rather than the campaign around it: title structure, attribute completeness, image set, review volume and price consistency across channels. The audit below takes one afternoon per category and produces a fix list that survives the season, which matters more than a dashboard that only reports the problem.

1. Export every SKU in the category from each channel, and match them on a single internal identifier rather than on title text.
2. Score each listing on five fields: title, key attributes, image count, review count and price, then rank the category by the weakest field.
3. Fix the weakest field first across the whole category, because listing quality is judged in comparison and a partial fix changes nothing.
4. Re check the same five fields two weeks later, and record which fixes moved conversion, so the next category starts from evidence rather than habit.

Run that audit and the channel debate becomes concrete. A brand that finds 17 of 48 listings missing attributes does not need a bigger owned channel budget, it needs attribute work that benefits every channel at once. That is also the pattern the holiday predictions point to when they argue that brands should optimise back end data so assistants and marketplaces can parse inventory, decentralise the commerce stack so a sale can close wherever the shopper is, and protect margin for budget conscious buyers with threshold based shipping rather than blanket discounting.

FAQ

• How much did planned owned channel use fall?

  Owned e-commerce fell to 46 percent from 69 percent and owned physical stores to 60 percent from 84 percent, in a survey of 90 brand and retail professionals.

• Does that mean brands are spending less on their own channels?

  The research documents channel plans rather than budgets, and two thirds of respondents still say owned stores grow more important during the holidays.

• Which marketplace leads?

  Amazon, with 33 percent planning to sell through it and 38 percent saying it grows more important, while TikTok Shop led social commerce at 21 percent.

Sources

• Marketing Herald, owned channel focus slips ahead of the holiday season
• Layer3 Labs, AEO for ecommerce and product page structure
• Lifestyle and Tech, 2026 holiday predictions