Is your channel getting stale?

Running an ecommerce brand right now, as Young Urban Project puts it, feels a bit like trying to hit a moving target in poor lighting. The market is growing, yet most ecommerce marketers will tell you privately that things feel harder, not easier. CAC is up. Attention spans are down. The channels that used to be reliable are getting noisier every month.

This is the reality of a maturing market, and a maturing market demands a different kind of discipline: i.e., more honesty about what's earning its place in the mix.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• The first-party data gap is widening fast. With third-party cookies disappearing and privacy regulations tightening, rich permission-based customer profiles — built through email, loyalty programs, and app behavior — are becoming a compounding advantage. Every month you're not building that foundation is a month someone else is.
• Social commerce is where discovery happens. It's not where your most valuable customers come from. TikTok and Instagram Shopping have genuinely collapsed the path to purchase, and that matters for top-of-funnel strategy. But the customer who impulse-buys a $35 item from a TikTok ad has a fundamentally different relationship to your brand than the one who finds you through search or email. Treating them the same is a costly oversimplification.
• Mobile-first is a revenue issue hiding in plain sight. The majority of ecommerce purchases now happen on a phone. And yet checkout flows, image sizes, and navigation on most stores are still clearly built for laptops. Cart abandonment rates on mobile remain significantly higher than on desktop, and that gap is largely a fixable UX problem with a direct, measurable impact on revenue.
• The definition of a 'good' shopping experience has changed. Customers now expect the brand to know who they are across every touchpoint. When someone browses on their phone, buys on their laptop, and tries to return in-store, they expect the experience to be seamless across all three. When it isn't, they notice, and they remember.

What this means: The midpoint of the year is the right moment to get honest about what's actually driving revenue and what's just driving activity. Those are different things, and right now is when you have the breathing room to tell them apart.

AOV:  What gets lost when you only look at the blended view

Most ecommerce teams track blended average order value like it's a reliable north star. The problem is that it's an average of channels that behave completely differently, and optimizing for a blended number means simultaneously overpaying for low-quality traffic and starving the most profitable sources in the mix.

Branvas's 2026 channel benchmark report puts the gap in stark terms. Email drives $95–$120 AOV on average. Paid social on Meta and Instagram drives $50–$70. TikTok Shop sits at $35–$59. That's a fundamentally different customer with a fundamentally different relationship to your brand, showing up in the same blended number and flattening the distinction entirely.

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• High ROAS on paid social is not the same as channel health. When you layer return rate and CAC on top of ROAS, the picture changes significantly. A seemingly healthy paid social channel driving a $60 AOV and a $35 CAC starts looking very different once you layer in a 28% return rate, for example. Email, meanwhile, tends to carry a disproportionate share of actual revenue.
• Paid social and email attract fundamentally different customers. Paid social acquires at lower AOV. Email nurtures into higher-value, lower-return, more loyal buyers. The two channels aren't competing — they're sequential. Acquisition through paid social only compounds into real business value if those customers move immediately into retention infrastructure that builds on the first purchase.
• The low AOV of paid social is a strategy problem, not a platform problem. Most brands run single-SKU creative optimized for the cheapest conversion. Running bundle-first creative — leading with a starter kit or complete-the-look collection ad instead of a $30 hero product — changes the math. A 1.5% conversion rate on a $90 AOV outperforms a 2.0% conversion rate on a $55 AOV, especially once return rates are factored in.
• Organic search is the most undervalued channel in most brand's mix. It consistently delivers $75–$95 AOV, lower return rates, and purchase intent that paid channels can't replicate. Customers who find you through search are actively looking to buy — and they tend to have LTV 20–40% higher than average. Most brands underinvest in it anyway.

What this means: ROAS tells you what happened on the first click. AOV by channel tells you what your customers are actually worth — and which parts of your mix are building a business versus generating noise. Pull the channel-specific numbers before holiday planning starts. The blended view won't show you what needs to change.