With the advent of online shopping and e-commerce, things were already bad for brick-and-mortar retailers who were struggling to make sufficient in-store sales that could cover their high operational costs. Now, it seems that the latest round of ETFs are betting on the demise of such retailers.

ProShare Advisors LLC has proposed three new ETFs that wager against traditional retailers. While two of the funds are banking on leveraging to stimulate returns, the third attempts to short conventional retailers and go long on firms that are in the midst of e-commerce and online shopping surpluses or stand to gain from the same.

The ETFs may have been sparked by a further downgrade of the retail industry on Monday due to Amazon's (AMZN  ) announcement that it would have a service similar to BestBuy's (BB  ) 'Geek Squad', rattling its shares. This announcement is just one in a series of many that Amazon has made which have been beating down traditional retailers one by one, starting with the Whole Foods (WFM  ) deal.

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The first ETF called ProShares Long Online Short Bricks & Mortar Retail ETF endows one with long exposure to the e-commerce market whilst offering giving one short exposure to big box retailers that have been thrown in deep waters by the online retailing trend. Keeping a track of the performance of the Online vs Bricks and Mortar Retail Long/Short Index reflects this suggestion.

The second ETF which is the ProShares UltraShort Bricks and Mortar Retail ETF offers a "200% daily inverse return to the Bricks and Mortar Retail Index." The index constitutes some of the 100 largest U.S. retailers that need to worry the most about companies like Amazon, and are all equally weighted. The third, the ProShares UltraPro Short Bricks and Mortar Retail ETF, "will offer 300% daily inverse return to the Bricks and Mortar Retail Index."

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Up until now, the declining retail industry seemed to be nothing more than a part of a larger and perhaps temporary trend. Thus, equity investors could only lay their bets via single stocks, real estate investment trusts or outdated ETF's that were not able to distinguish between in-store and online retailers. Yet, this has proven to be a costly option, especially since attempting to predict such changes on an individual level was making the market even more volatile than it needed to be.

"Clearly people want to short it so they're giving them that, and then also mom and pop are talking about this -- you read every week in the newspaper about Amazon and the death of the mall," said Eric Balchunas, an ETF analyst for Bloomberg. "This is a story that's going to play out for the next decade at least, and everybody can understand it."

The ETF will at least solidify what most people knew was already happening and even the playing field a little. As Balchunas said, considering that this is going to be a long term problem as the online space evolves rapidly- Amazon has already proven how quickly one can adapt- the ETF's may have been long overdue.