The State of DTC Commerce, 2020–2026
Based on 688,243 Shopify storefronts tracked continuously from June 2020, of which 177,038 were still trading in July 2026.
Executive summary
Between mid-2020 and mid-2026, surviving direct-to-consumer merchants raised prices 20.1% and expanded assortments 34.7%. Both figures are measured on the same fixed set of stores, so neither is an artefact of which merchants entered or left the market.
Three findings stand out:
- Assortment grew faster than price, in every single category. Not one of the 31 categories with a reliable sample contracted its product range. The median surviving store went from 101 to 136 listed SKUs — and this is genuine turnover, not accumulation: the same store still lists only 19% of the catalog it carried in 2020 (verified against our own product-level crawl, 2026-08-02).
- Price increases were near-universal but modest. 30 of 31 categories raised prices; the median increase was around 20%. Only one category — Smoking & Vaping — saw prices fall.
- Only 25.7% of 2020's storefronts survived to 2026, and survival was associated with price. The median 2020 storefront priced at $34.14; the median 2020 storefront that was still trading in 2026 priced at $44.53 — 30% higher. This is an association, not a lever (see "Survival was not random").
Against inflation, that is a price cut. US CPI-U (all items, NSA) rose from 257.797 in June 2020 to 333.952 in June 2026 — +29.5% cumulative. Against the matched cohort's +20.1%, surviving DTC merchants' prices fell ≈7.3% in real terms (1.201/1.295 − 1) while assortments grew 34.7%. Six years of inflation, and the survivors effectively cut prices.
Source: BLS CPI-U series CPIAUCNS (bls.gov news releases, June 2020 and June 2026). The cohort runs to July 2026 and the CPI figure to June 2026. We compare June to June deliberately — CPI-U NSA is not seasonally adjusted, so a same-month pairing is what removes seasonality, and the cohort's base week is June 2020. The residual one-month lag is disclosed rather than closed.
Why most published DTC price figures are wrong
The obvious way to measure this is to take the median price across all tracked stores in 2020 and compare it to 2026. That gives +30.9%.
That number is misleading. The tracked population grew from 688,243 to 1,619,433 eligible storefronts over the period. Some of the apparent increase is simply a change in which stores are being measured — premium brands joining, cheap stores dying — rather than any merchant changing a price tag.
Restricting to the 177,038 stores present in both periods removes the composition effect entirely. The answer is +20.1%.
Roughly 35% of the apparent price increase was composition, not pricing.
| Measure | 2020 → 2026 | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| All-store median price | +30.9% | What the market looks like now vs then |
| Matched cohort | +20.1% | Did merchants raise prices |
The same correction runs the other way for assortment: all-store SKU counts appear to grow just +9.5%, because new entrants are small and drag the median down. Matched, the figure is +34.7%. Composition bias does not have a consistent direction — it has to be checked per metric.
Year by year
| All-store median | Matched cohort | Cohort size | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 2020 | $34.14 | — | 688,243 |
| Jun 2021 | $34.88 | +3.4% | 395,842 |
| Jun 2022 | $37.18 | +7.0% | 317,377 |
| Jun 2023 | $39.63 | +12.2% | 267,774 |
| Jun 2024 | $40.58 | +15.3% | 219,319 |
| Jun 2025 | $41.67 | +17.7% | 201,345 |
| Jul 2026 | $44.70 | +20.1% | 177,038 |
Price increases were steady rather than concentrated in the 2022 inflation spike — the cohort added roughly 3–5 points a year throughout.
Category detail
Matched cohort, June 2020 → July 2026. Categories with fewer than 100 matched stores are excluded from published medians.
| Category | Stores | Survival | Price 2020 | Price 2026 | Δ price | SKUs 2020 | SKUs 2026 | Δ SKUs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apparel | 58,192 | 21.6% | $47.93 | $57.31 | +19.6% | 123 | 170 | +38.2% |
| Home & Garden | 20,144 | 23.5% | $67.63 | $84.83 | +25.4% | 121 | 161 | +33.1% |
| Beauty & Fitness | 15,287 | 20.2% | $31.05 | $37.04 | +19.3% | 53 | 65 | +22.6% |
| Food & Drink | 12,753 | 32.4% | $26.47 | $33.06 | +24.9% | 49 | 62 | +26.5% |
| Sports | 8,686 | 34.2% | $63.35 | $74.42 | +17.5% | 106 | 144 | +35.4% |
| Arts & Entertainment | 7,823 | 35.2% | $58.43 | $70.23 | +20.2% | 114 | 160 | +40.4% |
| Toys & Hobbies | 6,074 | 29.2% | $28.05 | $32.40 | +15.5% | 173 | 251 | +45.1% |
| Autos & Vehicles | 5,161 | 36.6% | $148.61 | $185.10 | +24.6% | 146 | 226 | +54.8% |
| Health | 4,608 | 26.1% | $40.95 | $48.19 | +17.7% | 50 | 60 | +20.0% |
| Gifts & Special Events | 4,095 | 29.1% | $31.67 | $37.83 | +19.5% | 168 | 231 | +37.5% |
| People & Society | 4,019 | 24.8% | $31.32 | $36.36 | +16.1% | 87 | 120 | +37.9% |
| Pets & Animals | 3,493 | 21.1% | $29.86 | $34.39 | +15.2% | 72 | 96 | +33.3% |
| Business & Industrial | 3,177 | 33.8% | $95.26 | $128.36 | +34.7% | 115 | 171 | +48.7% |
| Consumer Electronics | 2,594 | 14.9% | $65.31 | $76.39 | +17.0% | 81 | 107 | +32.1% |
| Computers | 2,122 | 24.5% | $109.88 | $133.63 | +21.6% | 81 | 114 | +40.1% |
| Games | 1,256 | 28.0% | $30.56 | $34.01 | +11.3% | 162 | 247 | +52.0% |
| Books & Literature | 1,077 | 32.4% | $22.25 | $25.92 | +16.5% | 132 | 188 | +42.4% |
| Jobs & Education | 957 | 33.0% | $37.88 | $50.06 | +32.2% | 70 | 84 | +20.0% |
| Travel | 876 | 22.3% | $62.88 | $76.20 | +21.2% | 78 | 90 | +15.4% |
| Smoking & Vaping | 860 | 15.7% | $28.16 | $27.79 | −1.3% | 276 | 352 | +27.1% |
| Antiques & Collectibles | 690 | 20.4% | $116.06 | $145.83 | +25.6% | 293 | 508 | +73.4% |
| Safety & Survival | 622 | 31.1% | $83.38 | $100.21 | +20.2% | 112 | 151 | +34.8% |
| Science | 523 | 36.0% | $66.25 | $88.48 | +33.6% | 67 | 94 | +40.3% |
| Adult | 468 | 19.8% | $47.52 | $55.58 | +17.0% | 230 | 374 | +62.7% |
| Firearms & Weapons | 271 | 33.3% | $66.69 | $73.85 | +10.7% | 116 | 159 | +37.1% |
| Wedding | 266 | 17.5% | $101.91 | $110.00 | +7.9% | 138 | 189 | +37.0% |
| Internet | 187 | 28.5% | $148.17 | $158.13 | +6.7% | 38 | 45 | +18.4% |
| Photo & Video Services | 176 | 28.0% | $96.65 | $119.15 | +23.3% | 100 | 126 | +27.1% |
| Libraries & Museums | 135 | 47.2% | $53.52 | $60.86 | +13.7% | 206 | 322 | +56.3% |
| Holidays & Seasonal | 117 | 19.2% | $35.94 | $47.99 | +33.5% | 83 | 125 | +50.6% |
| Finance | 108 | 21.5% | $44.55 | $58.27 | +30.8% | 60 | 94 | +56.7% |
Excluded for sample size (n<100): Attractions (41), Coupons & Discounts (22), Legal Services (21).
The category rows sum to 166,817, not the full 177,038-store cohort. A further 10,137 surviving merchants (5.7%) changed their primary category between 2020 and 2026; because every category figure is measured within a single category, those stores are counted in the cohort and in survival, but not in any category row.
Three things worth writing about
1. Everyone widened their range
Assortment expansion is the most consistent signal in the dataset. Zero categories contracted. The extremes are striking: Antiques & Collectibles +73.4%, Adult +62.7%, Finance +56.7%, Libraries & Museums +56.3%, Autos & Vehicles +54.8%.
Is this real, or just catalog accumulation? The obvious objection is that merchants are
not widening their range at all — they are leaving discontinued products live. We tested it
against our own product-level crawl of 894 randomly sampled cohort stores (we have crawled
81.8% of the cohort). Shopify
publishes a published_at date per product, so today's catalog can be split into products
that already existed at the 2020 base week and products added since.
Accumulation is not what happened. The median surviving store still lists only 19% of the
catalog it carried in 2020 — the typical merchant has replaced roughly four-fifths of its
range, and only 12.9% of today's catalog predates the base week. Catalogs are being actively
turned over, not hoarded. Store-level medians also show little junk: 7.0% of listed products
have no available variant (mostly ordinary out-of-stock), and just 1.6% are long-abandoned
(over three years old and unavailable). Duplicate titles and missing prices are ~0%.
The eCommerce storefront datasets' product_count matches our own independent crawl almost
exactly (median per-store ratio 1.000), so the underlying SKU metric is sound.
Two honest qualifications. First, the magnitude is sensitive to how out-of-stock listings are treated: measured on listed products the median store goes 118 → 158 (+33.9%); excluding long-abandoned listings it is +24.6%; excluding everything currently unavailable it is +7.2%. We can only measure that share for 2026 — no product-level crawl exists for 2020 — so the headline figure assumes 2020 catalogs carried a comparable share. Second, dead weight rises steeply with catalog size: median long-abandoned share is 0% for stores under 50 products but 5.3% for stores over 2,000, and 17% of sampled stores do still list essentially their whole 2020 catalog. The direction of the finding is solid; quote it as growth in listed assortment.
2. Survival was not random
Overall survival was 25.7%, but the range is wide enough to be a story in itself:
- Hardest hit: Consumer Electronics (14.9%), Smoking & Vaping (15.7%), Wedding (17.5%)
- Most durable: Libraries & Museums (47.2%), Autos & Vehicles (36.6%), Science (36.0%), Arts & Entertainment (35.2%)
Consumer Electronics losing 85% of its 2020 storefronts is the sharpest single number here — consistent with marketplace consolidation squeezing independent electronics sellers, though this dataset can show the what, not the why.
Survival also tracks price within the population: recomputing the 2020 median price using only the stores that survived to each later year climbs steadily, $34.14 → $38.14 → $39.97 → $41.33 → $42.58 → $43.61 → $44.53. The longer a store lasted, the more it charged in 2020.
State this carefully. It is a store-level association and it does not reproduce between categories — across the 31 published categories, the correlation between 2020 median price and survival rate is only 0.11. Wedding is one of the priciest categories and one of the least durable; Books and Food & Drink are among the cheapest and outlast the market. Price almost certainly proxies for things we cannot see here — brand, capitalisation, whether the store was a serious business in 2020. Nothing in this dataset says that raising prices makes a store likelier to survive.
3. One category cut prices
Smoking & Vaping is the only category where prices fell (−1.3%) — while simultaneously expanding assortment 27.1% and losing 84% of its merchants. That combination reads as a sector under real pressure.
The regulatory record explains it. The 2020–2026 window spans the FDA's PMTA premarket-authorization regime and its escalating enforcement against unauthorized flavored and disposable products, the PACT Act's 2021 extension to vaping (ATF registration, adult-signature delivery, carrier shipping bans — a direct tax on the online-store model this dataset measures), full retail flavor bans in six states plus PMTA-registry laws in ~14 more, and, by 2025–26, a federal multi-agency task force with funded port interdiction against disposable imports. Compliant online sellers were squeezed from both sides: shrinking legal product lists and shipping costs above, and price competition from an enforcement-lagged illicit disposable market below. Falling prices, churning assortments, and an 84% merchant exit is what that squeeze looks like in storefront data.
Sources: FDA Center for Tobacco Products enforcement releases; the PACT Act ENDS amendments; state flavor-ban and PMTA-registry statutes.