Our Most Hilarious Ecommerce Predictions for 2025

Inspired by Saxo Bank’s outrageous financial predictions for 2025, we thought it appropriate to post our most hilarious predictions for the ecommerce market in 2025. Maybe they have a touch of reality or maybe not. Who knows? We don’t, that’s for sure!

1. AI Shopping Buddies Go Rogue
   Driven by the AI hype, the decades-old promise of smart shopping assistants becomes reality. However, instead of helping, your AI shopping assistant starts guilt-tripping you into buying eco-friendly products or subscribing to luxury watermelon-of-the-month clubs.
   
2. Metaverse Checkout Lines
   Mark Zuckerberg, after spending billions on his metaverse, finally gets it. Instant digital shopping in the metaverse should become more real: virtual stores add long checkout lines for a “realistic” shopping experience.
   
3. Smart Fridges Revolt
   Fridges, tired of being underappreciated, start haggling directly with grocery websites for discounts on your behalf—but only for products they “like” being stocked with. The so called revolt of the fridges inspires Hollywood to make a blockbuster with the same title.
   
4. Subscriptions for Everything
   Not just razors or coffee, but socks, napkins, and even disposable chopsticks are locked behind a monthly subscription plan with free returns, but not free shipping. People who want to buy old-fashioned, through singular, non-repeat transactions, are turned down, because ecommerce investors don’t want them anymore. Only ecommerce companies with subscription-based revenues receive fresh funding. It leads to a bit of revival of the high street.
   
5. TikTok Craze
   Not only elections are won by TikTok candidates, also viral ecommerce rages are created here. The Products sell out before you can even add them to your cart because an influencer live-streamed their cat sitting on it for five seconds. Because of a sudden spike in suicides and street protests, governments forbid TikTok, citing national security.
   
6. Delivery Drones Get Petty
   Veteran drones, returning from tours in Ukraine, reintegrate in the parcel delivery market. However, their PTSD symptoms are viral. Affected drones develop territorial behavior, “accidentally” dropping packages on rival delivery bots or refusing to deliver during bad weather.
   
7. VR Try-Ons Get Too Real
   Virtual reality dressing rooms create avatars so realistic that customers face existential crises when their virtual selves look better in the outfit than they ever could in real life. Plastic surgery is booming, especially for under-age girls and non-binaries.
   
8. Social Credit Points for Click-bait
   Retailers start awarding shoppers loyalty points not for purchases, but for the snarkiest or most viral product reviews. Virtually any relation between these click-baits and reality is absent. E-commerce giants with the biggest budgets for bot farms, aggressively producing fake product reviews, get huge fines from regulators.
   
9. AI-Generated Near-Fakes Sell like Hell
   GenAI generated variants of popular luxury items, so-called near-fakes, sell like hell. The near-fakes sell better than the inspirational originals of famous luxury brands. It leads to an instant crash on the French stock market and – predictably – high stake law suits between manufacturers. However, the outcomes go both ways, and near-fake creators keep adapting till the point that they are sufficiently original.
   
10. Grandma NFT billionaire
    During the crypto-presidency of Trump, not only bitcoin, but also the NFT market, is breaking new records. Your grandma turns into an ecommerce mogul, selling hand-knitted NFTs of her famous Christmas sweaters. She’s able to pull it off and becomes a crypto billionaire.

Although, we came up with these hilarious ecommerce predictions to make you smile, there might be a touch of reality in each of them.

Martijn Hoogeveen

Founder and CEO of Icecat NV. Investor. Ph.D.