According to Tradebyte’s fourth annual e-commerce report, sportswear emerged as a sustained growth segment in 2025, recording 9.9 percent GMV growth year-over-year through their brand network. This positions sports ahead of fashion (8.6 percent), accessories (4.6 percent), and premium/luxury (0.3 percent), though below underwear’s exceptional 44.5 percent surge.
What’s driving sports growth
The report identifies three structural factors supporting sportswear’s performance:
Hybrid lifestyles and fitness trends sustain demand for performance and athleisure products as athletic activity continues integrating into daily routines. Athleisure’s enduring influence maintains category relevance beyond traditional sports participation by blurring boundaries between activewear and everyday clothing. Consistently high conversion rates demonstrate stronger purchase completion compared to fashion categories, likely reflecting functional necessity and lower return propensity.
Operational advantages
Sportswear benefits from distinct e-commerce characteristics that enhance profitability: lower return rates compared to fashion, driven by more standardized sizing and functional product attributes; clearer value propositions where performance features justify price points and reduce vulnerability to dupes; and strong cross-border appeal as technical specifications translate more consistently across markets than fashion aesthetics.
Strategic context: two pressures reshaping all categories
The report identifies return rates and dupe culture as the dominant cross-category challenges in 2026.
Return rates vary dramatically by market – from 14 percent in the UK to over 50 percent in Switzerland, Germany, and Austria. As free returns phase out across Europe, brands are investing in AI sizing tools, enhanced product imagery, and predictive analytics to reduce return volumes.
Dupe culture – once limited to social media “lookalike hauls” – has become mainstream shopping behavior, particularly among price-conscious younger consumers. Shoppers now routinely order multiple alternatives to compare at home, increasing return volumes while reshaping value perceptions. Efficient supply chains, creator-led visibility, and algorithmic promotion have normalized dupes as smart purchases rather than second-best options.
For sportswear, this creates both challenge and opportunity. Technical performance claims and fit precision become competitive differentiators when consumers compare branded products with cheaper alternatives in real time. Brands that articulate functional advantages through enriched product data—materials technology, construction details, performance testing – can justify premium positioning against lookalikes competing purely on aesthetics.
Beyond sporting goods
The Tradebyte report also examines broader e-commerce trends including geographic market shifts across Central and Eastern Europe and the Nordics, AI-driven commerce and automation strategies, social commerce and retail media as discovery engines, regulatory challenges including EU customs and sustainability requirements (particularly the Eco-design for Sustainable Products Regulation), cross-border fulfillment networks, and marketplace diversification strategies for building brand resilience.
About the report
Tradebyte’s findings are based on aggregated transaction data from over 1,000 fashion and lifestyle brands across 90+ marketplaces, representing billions in annual GMV. The report combines proprietary network data with industry research from eMarketer, Salesforce, and sector-specific studies. Regional and category breakdowns reflect year-over-year comparisons between 2024 and 2025 year-to-date performance through the Tradebyte platform. The report is available for free from Tradebyte’s website.
About Tradebyte
Tradebyte is a leading e-commerce platform and an independent subsidiary of the Zalando Group. Since its acquisition by Zalando in 2016, Tradebyte has become a cornerstone of the ZEOS ecosystem, connecting over 1,000 fashion and lifestyle brands with 90+ marketplaces across Europe and beyond. The company provides the essential infrastructure for multi-channel commerce, enabling brands to manage inventory, product data, pricing, and fulfillment across diverse retail platforms. Their network processes billions in gross merchandise value (GMV) annually, making their aggregated data a critical indicator of sector-wide e-commerce trends.
