CPG DTC: How Consumer Brands Sell Direct (2026)

CPG DTC is when consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands sell direct to consumers (DTC) through their own channels instead of selling through distributors or marketplaces.

The opportunity sits inside a huge pool of consumer spending. In the US, personal consumption expenditures, also known as consumer spending on goods and services, makes up more than two-thirds of the GDP.

That’s the pull toward DTC for CPG companies: getting closer to the consumer spending that already finances so much of the US economy. Ahead, we’ll look at CPG DTC examples and what you can learn from the Shopify businesses succeeding in the industry.

What are consumer packaged goods?

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) are products people buy, use, and replenish more frequently than most other products. Some of the main categories of CPG products are: 

• Food and beverages
• Personal care products
• Household supplies
• Health and wellness products 

These generally have short lifespans and high sales volumes compared with durable goods.

Another common term for CPG is fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). NielsenIQ describes FMCG as the products at the fastest end of the spectrum in terms of movement, such as beverages, toiletries, and packaged foods, where high demand or perishability keeps inventory turning over quickly. 

At the other end of the spectrum are slow-moving consumer goods (SMCG). According to Statista, the term refers to less frequently purchased, longer-lasting items, such as appliances and furniture.

What is a DTC business?

A direct-to-consumer (DTC) business sells products to customers through its own channels, like an ecommerce site, instead of through retailers or marketplaces. The model works because by eliminating intermediaries who need to capture their own profit, the DTC retailer can capture more margin while still offering a competitive price to customers. The global DTC ecommerce market is projected to grow from about $163 billion in 2024 to $595 billion by 2033, according to DataHorizzon Research.

Where CPG describes the product category, DTC describes the sales model. The two are compatible because many CPG products need to be replenished. Retailers can capitalize on the need for replenishment by offering repeat-purchase opportunities through subscriptions, bundles, replenishment reminders, and personalized offers for food, beverages, personal care, and household products.. 

A direct purchase also gives you first-party information about behaviors such as purchase frequency and product preferences, valuable cues you can use in efforts at customer retention which are more difficult to find when the transaction occurs entirely through another retailer.

And selling DTC doesn’t have to mean selling DTC only. Liquid I.V., for example, continues to sell through retailers including Costco, Target, Walmart, Walgreens, and Whole Foods while operating their DTC ecommerce channel. 

Their DTC site offers subscriptions with customizable products and delivery frequency, giving customers incentives to buy repeatedly from the brand itself.

What are the benefits of CPG DTC?

For CPG companies, DTC adds a source of customer intelligence, as well as a place to test and sell alongside existing retail channels. Here’s more on the benefits:

You can build a first-party customer relationship

An owned checkout gives you consented data on what customers buy, how often they return, and which products they buy together. That can support more relevant replenishment, loyalty, and personalization. Qualtrics’ “2026 Consumer Experience Trends Report” found that 86% of customers would share more personal data if organizations were more transparent about how it’s used.

You can spot changes in demand sooner

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) reports that 81% of shoppers were highly concerned about the cost of essentials in 2025, while roughly 30% to 40% were buying more from discounters and lower-priced brands. DTC data gives you another signal for seeing how customers respond to prices, packs, bundles, and promotions.

You can test products before committing to a retail rollout

Snack brand Purely Elizabeth, for example, used their DTC site to launch their first limited-edition granola without its usual retail partners. Glossy reported that Purely Glow sold 2,200 bags in their first days selling DTC, outpacing the company’s initial sellout forecast.

You can move faster as product discovery moves online

TikTok’s Amanda Parker told Food Dive in July 2026 that food category sales on TikTok Shop had more than doubled year over year. Food Dive also reported that in 2025, US users made more than 103 billion searches with purchase intent on TikTok, while enterprise-brand sales on the platform rose 97%. DTC gives CPG companies a direct online commerce operation they can use alongside these emerging discovery channels.

Tip: The daunting part of DTC is often everything sitting behind the storefront. Shopify and Accenture’s Commerce-as-a-Service (CaaS) offering combines Shopify’s commerce infrastructure with Accenture’s managed services. The model can help CPG companies launch up to 93% faster while reducing the cost and operational burden of running the channel. 

CPG DTC examples and use cases

CPG DTC takes several forms. Some brands use it to add a direct sales channel after previously only selling wholesale; others use it for subscriptions, experimentation with new products, international growth, or as one part of a broader retail and wholesale strategy.

These CPG DTC brands show a few of the possibilities:

CPG DTC challenges to plan for

CPG companies benefit from selling direct, but CPG DTC also requires taking on jobs previously handled by retailers and distributors. Every channel, not just the storefront, needs to be economically and operationally viable. Here’s more on the challenges:

• There’s often channel conflict. DTC prices, promotions, bundles, or exclusives can compete with the retailers a CPG company still depends on. According to a Q4 2025 Shopify survey,* 68% of food and beverage companies operate both B2C and B2B channels. 
• The logistics get more granular. The traditional CPG infrastructure is designed to move pallets and truckloads; DTC means picking, packing, shipping, tracking, and servicing individual orders. Shopify reports that businesses spend an average of 8.7% of annual expenses on shipping, before accounting for storage, packing, returns, or specialized requirements such as refrigeration. Some CPG retailers work around these obstacles by working with a third-party logistics provider (3PL) for their DTC fulfillment.
• The first-party data comes with governance responsibilities. The right to own customer data means responsible governance of its collection, permissions, security, and use. In PwC’s “2025 Customer Experience” survey, 53% of consumers said sharing personal information can be worthwhile for a smoother experience; but 93% said mishandling that data would cost a brand their trust.
• The operational complexity compounds. Adding a DTC channel to an already established brand adds another assortment, demand signal, technology stack, fulfillment flow, and customer-service operation to the business. Strategy& reported in their “Consumer Packaged Goods Outlook 2026” that more than 90% of CPG leaders expect ecosystem collaboration to become pervasive across areas including commercial platforms and operational processes. 
• Your lower-priced products have less room to absorb DTC costs. BCG’s 2026 CPG analysis specifically identifies higher marketing, customer-acquisition, logistics, and fulfillment costs as pressures on demand-generation. 

The proportion of business that should be run through DTC sales and wholesale to retailers depends on the product and its economics. Liquid Death, for example, has moved from what Adweek describes as a “DTC obsession” toward a wholesale-first strategy built around retail partnerships and in-store conversion as the beverage brand has scaled. 

Feel Goods, on the other hand, remains DTC-only, but cofounder Brian Wong told ModernRetail that the model is difficult unless the product is highly repeatable. The supplement brand has shipped more than 4 million servings, with most orders coming from subscriptions.

How to create a successful CPG DTC strategy

A successful CPG DTC strategy starts with deciding what the direct channel is there to do. From there, the strategy has to line up assortment, pricing, acquisition, fulfillment, and technology around that role.

Define the role DTC should play

Start with the job the direct channel needs to do. 

DTC might be there to drive repeat purchases, test new products, collect first-party customer data, support international expansion, or give customers an experience that in-store retail can’t replicate. That choice should then shape the operating model around it.

Take Grüns. The nutrition brand's core business remains ecommerce subscriptions, even as they expand into 7,000 retail stores, including Costco, Walmart, Target, and Sprouts. For them, selling through retailers carries a narrower assortment and channel-specific pack sizes, while the website keeps the full product range, limited-time flavors, and subscriber perks.

“It's Shopify or bust if a company wants to scale fast without issues,” says Chad Janis, founder and CEO.

Balance DTC with retail, marketplaces, and wholesale

A customer might discover a product on TikTok, compare it on Amazon, buy it at Target, then reorder through the brand’s DTC site. 

NielsenIQ’s 2026 “Consumer Outlook” describes ecommerce, social commerce, quick commerce, retail media networks, and brick-and-mortar as converging into one commerce ecosystem; and nearly three-quarters of FMCG sales still happen offline.

Plan around that movement. 

Keep product information, pricing, promotions, inventory, and measurement coordinated across owned ecommerce, retail partners, marketplaces, and wholesale so one channel doesn’t undermine another. Shopify can help centralize some of that work. Marketplace Connect syncs listings, orders, and inventory across Amazon, Walmart, Target Plus, and eBay, while B2B on Shopify lets wholesale and DTC run from the same commerce platform with integrated data on inventory, customers, and more.

For social media, the same principle applies. Treat retail social media and paid social campaigns as part of the purchase journey. Shopify Audiences can export commerce-informed audiences to Meta, Google, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Criteo in supported markets.

Build first-party data loops

Treat first-party data as a loop. Collect it through owned interactions, track the key performance indicators (KPIs) that show what customers do next, then feed those signals back into segmentation, retention, and acquisition workflows.

For CPG brands, pair those business KPIs with repeat-purchase signals such as time between orders, subscription uptake, retention by cohort, and product combinations. Shopify’s Customer reports can break out new versus returning customers and cohort behavior, including average order value (AOV), repeat purchases, subscription versus one-time orders, and acquisition channels. 

Then put the data back to work. 

Shopify customer segments update dynamically as shoppers meet or stop meeting specified criteria, while Shopify Flow can trigger actions when customers enter a segment. A CPG brand could identify customers approaching their normal replenishment window, move high-value repeat buyers into a VIP segment, or start a win-back workflow when purchase frequency drops.

Plan fulfillment and unit economics

For CPG DTC, calculate profitability at the order level. Your gross margin can look healthy until you factor in the costs of customer acquisition, pick-and-pack fees, packaging, parcel shipping, 3PL services, discounts, inventory lost to spoilage, and returns. 

Then test how the picture changes with higher AOVs, multipacks, bundles, and subscriptions. For inexpensive or bulky products, those levers can determine whether the direct channel works at all. 

There should be a line in the financial model dedicated to packaging. A large box can increase shipping costs even when the product itself is light since carriers often price by size as well as weight. Shopify lets you set package dimensions and weights for more accurate checkout rates, while shipping profiles can apply different rules to products with different shipping requirements.

Shopify’s smart order routing automatically prioritizes the best fulfillment location using rules such as proximity to the customer, minimizing split shipments, staying within the destination market, or favoring particular locations.

Finally, plan replenishment as an operational workload. A subscription order creates predictable demand, but also recurring inventory, payment, and fulfillment commitments.

Metagenics, for example, now has 36% of consumers and patients opted into subscriptions through their Shopify-powered DTC business, making subscriptions part of the supply-chain plan as well as the growth plan.

“With Shopify, we’re in control of our growth and have a platform that can scale with us,” says Suzie Young, head of digital.

Improve the customer journey

For CPG brands, the owned DTC storefront should make replenishment easier from the first product view through the next order. Use the site to help customers compare variants, build bundles, understand subscription savings, and find the right purchase cadence.

Then remove friction at checkout. Shop Pay gives returning shoppers one-tap access to saved shipping and payment details; Shopify reports that it can lift lower-funnel conversion by 5% and convert up to 50% better than guest checkout.

The relationship continues after payment. With Shopify Subscriptions, customers can manage recurring orders from their account, including skipping, pausing, or canceling deliveries, changing addresses, and updating payment methods. 

As well as reorders and shipping tracking, store credit, and return and cancellation self-services, the customer account page gives delivery updates without requiring customer support.

Dr. Squatch, for example, uses Shop Pay as part of what their ecommerce team calls a focus on “frictionless commerce,” spanning both checkout and post-purchase order tracking.

Adapt based on consumer expectations

DTC gives CPG brands something retail reporting can’t fully provide: a steady stream of feedback from the people buying and using the product. Capture it across reviews, post-purchase surveys, subscription changes, returns, customer-service conversations, and onsite behavior. 

A spike in questions about ingredients, for example, might call for clearer product-page content; or customers frequently buying the same products together might justify a bundle. 

Shopify Forms can collect customer-provided information, tag profiles, create segments, and trigger automations, while Shopify Inbox automatically groups conversations into topics such as product details, pricing, shipping, and returns.

The cosmetics brand Paul & Joe collects reviews and handles more than 100 customer interactions per day through online chat, while their ecommerce team continually adjusts the storefront for changing customer demand and seasonal priorities, including creating five to six landing pages per month for launches and featured products.

Choose commerce technology that can connect channels

CPG shoppers don’t stay inside one channel, so the systems behind those channels shouldn’t operate as separate islands either. FMI and NielsenIQ report that nearly 94% of US grocery shoppers bought both online and in-store in 2025, while ecommerce contributed close to 75% of total grocery dollar growth.

Choose a commerce platform based on what it can connect; map the systems that need to exchange product, inventory, order, pricing, and customer data across DTC, retail, wholesale, marketplaces, and fulfillment. For an enterprise CPG company, that commonly includes enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), product information management (PIM), warehouse management systems (WMS), 3PL, and accounting systems.

Shopify for enterprise can run DTC, retail, and B2B on the same commerce infrastructure while connecting existing systems through APIs, prebuilt integrations, apps, and partners. Shopify’s B2B integrations, for example, can sync customer data, orders, inventory, catalogs, and pricing with ERP, CRM, and other enterprise systems.

For brands that also operate their own stores or pop-ups, Shopify POS shares inventory, customer profiles, and order history with ecommerce. 

Death Wish Coffee integrated their ERP with Shopify to consolidate inventory and performance data across multiple locations and channels into a single automated view. The brand went on to support DTC subscriptions alongside a wholesale business selling to major grocers.

“The data we have is scattered in 20 different places, but with the integration, all of the data is automatically consolidated and right there at my fingertips,” says founder Mike Brown.

*Based on a November 2025 survey of 500 Shopify merchants conducted in English across Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States. Respondents were established merchants with two or more years on the platform. Results reflect the experiences of this specific sample and may not be representative of all merchants.