Strategic Intelligence: Ecommerce Sector Scorecard Q3 2025 Update

Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the adage “every company is a tech company” a step further, with ecommerce companies racing to build their own large language models (LLMs) or partner with existing providers. Tech giants Microsoft and Alphabet face competition from smaller players such as Meituan, which launched its LongCat-Flash LLM in August 2025. Other companies like Spotify and Booking.com have allowed integration with OpenAI. Users of ChatGPT can now employ the functionality of Spotify and Booking.com’s websites (e.g., making a playlist or searching for accommodation, respectively) directly in the app. As the internet quickly becomes AI-native, ecommerce companies must stay abreast of changes or risk being left behind.

Key Highlights

• Alongside AI, ecommerce companies continuously seek to optimize last-mile delivery through autonomous methods. Amazon and Walmart are continuing their trials of drones, with the latter partnering with Zipline and Alphabet’s Wing to facilitate drone delivery to its customers. In October 2025, delivery company DoorDash, in partnership with Serve Robotics, unveiled a new delivery robot not too dissimilar to that employed by Alibaba. Autonomous delivery does not seem to be going away anytime soon, and the companies that can navigate the regulatory hurdles (such as those regarding beyond visual line of sight or BVLOS drone flight) and consumer backlash (including complaints about the noisiness of drones) the fastest will come out on top.

Scope

• This sector scorecard provides a top-down, comprehensive outlook for the key players in the ecommerce sector over the next two years, based on the key themes set to transform their industry landscape.

Reasons to Buy

• Companies that invest in the right themes become success stories. Those that miss the important themes in their industry end up as failures.
• The analyst's thematic research ecosystem is a single, integrated global research platform that provides an easy-to-use framework for tracking all themes across all companies in all sectors. It has a proven track record of identifying the important themes early, enabling companies to make the right investments ahead of the competition and secure that all-important competitive advantage.
• The analyst has developed a unique thematic methodology for ranking all major companies in all major sectors based on their relative strength in the big themes that are impacting their industries.
• First, we identify the top 10 themes transforming a sector across four categories (tech, macro, industry, and ESG). We also rank themes in order of priority by examining activity levels across 200 million alternative data signals, including patents, jobs, deals, filings, social media, and news.
• Second, we research each theme in detail, examining the value chain, key players, and trends. Additionally, we examine the impact of each theme across the 20 industries we cover. Our 200 million signals help identify the leading adopters of a theme in each sector.
• Finally, using our sector scorecards, we rank the companies most likely to succeed in a sector over the next five years.