This is an excerpt from our Glossy+ Research report The 2026 guide to holiday marketing strategies, including A-Frame Brands, Mastercard and Ritual, which examined which commerce channels are dominating marketers’ holiday strategies. The report is based on a survey of 90 brand and retailer professionals, as well as individual interviews with marketing executives.
Glossy’s survey found that brands and retailers are less focused on using their owned physical retail stores and owned e-commerce sites during the 2026 holiday season than they were in 2025. That’s despite the fact that both sales channels grow more important to marketers during the holidays.
Less than half of survey respondents (46%) said they plan to use owned e-commerce sites this holiday season, down from 69% of respondents who said the same in 2025. Similarly, 60% survey respondents said they plan to use owned brick-and-mortar stores during the 2026 holidays, down from the 84% of respondents who said the same a year ago.
Marketers said both channels grow in importance as sales channels during the holiday season, however. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said owned physical stores grow more important during holidays and 49% of respondents said the same of owned e-commerce sites.
Ari Bloom, founder and CEO of brand incubator A-Frame Brands, said one reason for marketers’ decreased usage of owned stores and e-commerce sites despite their importance during the holidays may be that brands feel less of a need to spend on owned spaces.
“Brands take their own channels and especially physical stores for granted,” Bloom said. “We see that repeatedly as the pendulum shifts back to controlled environments, but the reality is that wholesale channels are dying. Physical and multi-brand retail, except for mass, is going away. Very few department stores are healthy enough to survive this year, and a lot have gone out of business.”
Susan Grossman, evp of consumer acquisition and engagement services at Mastercard, said in an email she doesn’t think that marketers are becoming less invested in owned channels. Rather, the challenge is that consumers no longer follow a predictable path to purchase. “Today’s holiday shopper might discover a product through a creator, compare options on a retailer’s site, read reviews, receive an offer in a banking app, and ultimately purchase somewhere else entirely,” Grossman said. “The journey is increasingly fragmented and non-linear. As a result, marketers are investing less in any single channel and more in creating connected experiences across channels.”
Nevertheless, owned physical retail stores and owned e-commerce sites continue to rank as the No. 1 and No. 2 most used sales channels during the holiday season — the same spots they’ve held since 2024. Third-party brand stores and Amazon tied for the No. 3 most used sales channel during the holidays.
Overall, Amazon remains the dominant digital marketplace. Thirty-three percent of brands and retailers said their company plans to sell through Amazon during the 2026 holiday season, and 38% of marketers said Amazon grows more important to their sales during the holidays. Meanwhile, 29% of brands and retailers said their company plans to sell through other digital marketplaces, and 26% of marketers said other digital channels grow more important to their sales during the holidays.
Amazon’s dominance doesn’t necessarily mean every brand should prioritize it or other digital marketplaces during the holidays, however. Laura Brodie, chief growth officer at supplement company Ritual, said the right sales channel depends largely on how often customers purchase a brand’s products. “It depends almost entirely on purchase frequency. If you’re thinking about low-frequency one-time purchase, the shift toward marketplaces and retail makes a ton of sense because the digital foot traffic is there,” Brodie said. “You don’t need to pay to drive [consumers] to the destination.”
“If purchase frequency is high, the story shifts a little bit because the value of retaining that customer in an owned channel and driving the lifetime value can outweigh the cost of customer acquisition,” she added. “For one-time purchases, or categories that have search demand within marketplaces and retail channels, that shift makes a lot of sense. For brands where purchasing is at a higher frequency, capturing that within owned e-commerce or retail experiences can make a lot of sense. The cost of acquisition spikes during holidays, so it’s really about understanding that trade-off.”
This year, Glossy’s survey tracked TikTok Shop as a standalone sales channel for the first time. Results showed TikTok Shop was the most widely planned social commerce channel: 21% of respondents said their company plans to use TikTok Shop as a sales channel during the 2026 holiday season, compared with just 6% who plan to use another social commerce platform.
Despite marketers’ interest in TikTok Shop, A-Frame Brands’ Bloom cautioned that the platform can be difficult to navigate because it relies heavily on creator-led content rather than traditional brand storefronts. “TikTok Shop is going to be very content creator-heavy and it’s harder for brands to do it unless they’re really good at working with those content creators,” Bloom said. “It’s hard for brand stores to do it on their own on TikTok. It’s not set up for it, and it’s not a platform that natively works well with established brands. Creator brands, on the other hand, are going to be fantastic there.”
