Retail and commerce
Selling products to final customers through stores and digital channels.
Retail connects assortment, availability, convenience, and trust to a consumer purchase. The operating model changes when a business owns inventory, acts as a marketplace, fulfills orders itself, or relies on third parties. A checkout transaction hides procurement, merchandising, returns, and payment flows.
What to look for
Compare contribution after fulfillment and returns, not just product markup. Store traffic, basket composition, inventory turns, and repeat purchasing explain different parts of performance. Online sales are a channel spanning several industries, so the ecommerce profile states which models it covers.
Explore this sector
- E-commerceProduct sales and transactions
E-commerce connects online demand to payment, delivery and returns. A merchant earns on products; a marketplace earns on transactions and services. Their revenue, inventory exposure and unit economics differ.
- Grocery retailHousehold baskets
Grocery retailers turn supplier inventories into convenient household baskets. Their economics depend on stock availability, purchasing terms, product mix, labor productivity, and losses from waste or shrink.
10 companies to know
Selected examples from the industries covered in this sector, spanning different operating roles. This is an editorial selection, not a ranking by revenue, market value, or size.
Listed alphabetically. Names link to official sources. Checked . How we select examples.
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Operates a portfolio of local supermarket and online grocery brands, combining group-level capabilities with distinct retail businesses serving customers in their individual markets.
Explore Grocery retail -
ALDI U.S.
Discount grocery retail
Sells groceries through a discount-store model with a substantial private-label assortment, working with suppliers on fresh produce, everyday grocery lines and rotating special products.
Explore Grocery retail -
Operates commerce platforms including Taobao, Tmall, AliExpress and Alibaba.com, connecting merchants with consumer and business buyers across domestic and international online markets.
Explore E-commerce -
Amazon
Online retail and seller services
Combines its own retail sales with a marketplace for independent sellers, adding fulfillment services that can handle inventory storage, distribution and delivery for merchants.
Explore E-commerce -
Runs several food-retail formats, from hypermarkets and supermarkets to convenience stores, connecting physical shopping with online ordering and other digital services for customers.
Explore Grocery retail -
Costco Wholesale
Membership warehouse retail
Sells groceries and other merchandise through membership warehouses, combining annual membership access with a curated assortment and purchasing model serving households and business customers.
Explore Grocery retail -
Coupang
Integrated commerce and delivery
Connects online shopping with its own fulfillment and delivery infrastructure, making logistics execution and customer delivery promises central parts of the commerce offering.
Explore E-commerce -
eBay
Third-party online marketplace
Connects independent sellers with buyers through an online marketplace, supporting listings, transactions and cross-border selling without being the retailer that owns every listed item.
Explore E-commerce -
Connects independent grocery retailers with regional wholesale organizations and central services, allowing locally operated stores to draw on shared purchasing and distribution capabilities.
Explore Grocery retail -
Etsy
Creative-goods marketplace
Runs a marketplace connecting creative entrepreneurs with buyers of original, personalized and other qualifying goods; shoppers generally purchase from the individual seller rather than Etsy.
Explore E-commerce
This is a developing reference. This sector currently contains 2 detailed profiles; the index does not claim exhaustive coverage of every subsector.
Read the classification policyFrom understanding to operating
Try this workflow with ERP.AI
For store-based retail operations, review replenishment requests against location-level inventory, reserve eligible stock, and record approved movements that supply the stores making each request.
2 Run it with Proto
Get the desktop agent, then return to the app page to continue setup.