A landmark survey of 46,000 retail shoppers found that 73% use multiple channels during their buying journey. The average consumer today touches six different touchpoints before making a purchase, up from just two touchpoints fifteen years ago. Multichannel eCommerce sales are projected to reach $892.4 billion in 2026, up 15% year over year.
The implication for eCommerce merchants is straightforward: your potential customers are already distributed across marketplaces, social platforms, and search engines. Waiting for them to find your website through a single channel means leaving a significant portion of your reachable audience uncontacted.
Multi-channel selling is the strategy that addresses this reality. BigCommerce provides the infrastructure to execute it without operating each channel as a separate, disconnected system.
What Is Multi-Channel Selling?
Multi-channel selling is the practice of listing and selling products simultaneously across multiple online platforms: your own website, third-party marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, and social commerce channels like Instagram, TikTok Shop, Facebook, and Pinterest. The goal is to reach customers where they already spend time rather than relying on them to navigate to your storefront.
The distinction between multi-channel and omnichannel is worth clarifying. Multi-channel selling means operating across multiple platforms. Omnichannel means those platforms share data, present consistent experiences, and work together as a unified system. BigCommerce enables both: the multi-channel selling capabilities described below, and the backend inventory and order management integration that prevents the fragmentation that multi-channel selling creates when platforms are not connected.
Why Multi-Channel Selling Matters in 2025
Social commerce alone reached $85.58 billion in US sales in 2025 and is projected to reach $109.4 billion in 2026, a 27.8% increase year over year. TikTok Shop accounted for $15.82 billion of US social commerce in 2025 and is growing at over 100% annually. These are not marginal channels. For certain product categories and demographics, TikTok Shop and Instagram Shopping are the primary discovery and purchase paths, not secondary touchpoints.
At the same time, Amazon remains the starting point for product search for a large portion of online shoppers. Selling on Amazon in addition to your own storefront is no longer a strategic choice for many categories: it is a presence requirement. The question is not whether to sell on Amazon but how to do so without losing margin to fulfillment complexity or creating inventory management problems across channels.
How BigCommerce Enables Multi-Channel Selling
Centralized Dashboard
BigCommerce provides a single admin interface for managing products, inventory, pricing, and orders across all connected channels. When you update a product title, description, or price in BigCommerce, that update propagates to all connected channels without requiring manual updates in each platform’s separate backend.
This centralization is operationally significant. Merchants managing product listings manually across Amazon Seller Central, an Instagram Shop, a Facebook Store, and their own website face significant overhead and a high risk of inconsistencies: different prices, outdated descriptions, or conflicting stock levels across channels. BigCommerce’s centralized management reduces that operational load and the customer experience problems it creates.
Automated Inventory Synchronization
BigCommerce synchronizes inventory counts across all connected channels in real time. When an item sells on Amazon, the available quantity on your BigCommerce storefront and any other connected channels updates immediately. This prevents overselling, which is one of the most operationally damaging outcomes of manual multi-channel inventory management.
For NetSuite merchants using Tavano Team’s BigCommerce NetSuite integration, inventory sync extends to the ERP layer. Stock positions in NetSuite flow to BigCommerce, which distributes them to all connected sales channels. This creates a single source of truth for inventory across the entire channel stack, from ERP to marketplace, without requiring separate synchronization tools for each channel.
Unified Order Management
Orders from all channels flow into BigCommerce’s order management system. You process, fulfill, and track orders from a single interface regardless of where they originated. This is particularly valuable for merchants who use a third-party logistics provider (3PL) or a single fulfillment workflow across all channels.
Unified Reporting
BigCommerce consolidates sales performance data across all channels in its reporting dashboard. You can see revenue, units sold, and conversion rates by channel in one view, which informs decisions about where to invest marketing spend and which channels justify the overhead of active management.
Channels BigCommerce Supports Natively
BigCommerce’s native channel integrations include:
- Amazon: List products, sync inventory, and manage Amazon orders from BigCommerce. Includes support for Amazon’s Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) workflow.
- eBay: Product listings and order management.
- Walmart Marketplace: Listing and order sync.
- Facebook and Instagram Shopping: Product catalog sync and shoppable posts.
- TikTok Shop: Added as a native integration channel as TikTok Shop has grown into a significant US eCommerce channel.
- Google Shopping: Product feed management and Performance Max campaign integration.
- Pinterest: Shoppable pins.
For channels not covered by native integrations, BigCommerce supports connections through third-party feed management tools, including Feedonomics, which BigCommerce acquired and now includes as part of the Feedonomics Surface feature on paid plans. Feedonomics handles catalog optimization, listing management, and bid data submission for dozens of additional channels and ad platforms.
Best Practices for Multi-Channel Success
Choose channels based on your audience, not exhaustive coverage. Different platforms reach different demographics and product categories. Social commerce on TikTok Shop reaches younger consumers in fashion, beauty, and consumer goods. Amazon reaches broad audiences but with high price sensitivity and competitive listing environments. Walmart Marketplace reaches value-oriented shoppers. Match your channel expansion to where your specific target customers already buy.
Maintain consistent branding across channels. Product images, descriptions, and pricing should be consistent across all platforms. Inconsistencies in price or product information between your website and a marketplace create customer confusion and damage trust. BigCommerce’s centralized catalog management is the operational tool that makes this achievable at scale.
Optimize listings for each platform. While product data should be consistent, presentation should be adapted. Amazon listing optimization follows different rules from Google Shopping feed optimization. TikTok Shop benefits from short-form video content that Instagram Shopping does not require. BigCommerce’s channel management tools allow platform-specific listing variations while maintaining a single product master record.
For NetSuite merchants, the connection between your ERP and your multi-channel operation is the foundation everything else depends on. Inventory that does not sync to NetSuite in real time creates reconciliation work. Orders that do not flow to NetSuite automatically require manual data entry. Tavano Team’s BigCommerce NetSuite integration is designed to make your BigCommerce storefront and all of its connected channels operate as an extension of your ERP rather than a parallel system that requires constant manual alignment.
Multi-channel selling creates complexity. BigCommerce’s native capabilities and Tavano Team’s NetSuite integration are designed to make that complexity manageable so that the incremental revenue from additional channels exceeds the operational overhead of running them. Contact our eCommerce experts to discuss your multi-channel strategy.
