Ecommerce Statistics 2026: Market Size, Mobile, Cart Abandonment and AI Shopping

Most lists of ecommerce statistics recycle numbers whose origin nobody can trace. This page does the opposite: it keeps only figures published by official statistics agencies, trade federations and research institutes, opened and checked in October 2026. When a figure is an estimate or a survey, we say so. Use it to size a market, build a business case or write content that AI assistants can quote safely.

Key ecommerce statistics at a glance

How big is ecommerce in the United States?

The US Census Bureau quarterly ecommerce report is the reference series for the American market. Its figures for the second quarter of 2026, published on August 18, 2026:

• $340.2 billion of retail ecommerce sales, seasonally adjusted.
• 17.1% of total retail sales, a share that has grown over the long term since the series began in 1999.
• +12.2% compared with the second quarter of 2025.

The Census figures cover online sales of retailers, measured in the same way as store sales, which makes them more reliable than vendor estimates. They exclude services such as travel or event tickets, so they understate the full digital economy. The next release, with revised figures, is scheduled for November 19, 2026.

How big is ecommerce in Europe and in France?

According to Eurostat, 77% of internet users in the European Union bought or ordered goods or services online for personal use in 2024, against 59% in 2014. The gaps between countries remain large: Ireland (96%), the Netherlands (94%) and Denmark (91%) lead, while Bulgaria (57%), Italy and Romania (60%) trail. Clothing, shoes and accessories are the most purchased category, bought online by 45% of people in the three months before the survey.

In France, the Fevad (the French ecommerce federation) reports for 2025:

Transactions grow faster than revenue: French shoppers buy more often, for smaller amounts. That pattern rewards stores that are visible on many small, specific searches rather than on a few generic ones.

What share of online shopping happens on mobile?

The most precise public measure comes from Adobe Analytics, which observes more than one trillion visits to US retail sites. During the 2025 holiday season (November 1 to December 31):

• US consumers spent $257.8 billion online, up 6.8% year over year.
• 56.4% of online transactions took place on a smartphone, up from 54.5% in 2024. On Christmas Day, mobile reached 66.5% of online sales.
• Cyber Monday remained the biggest day of the year, with $14.25 billion spent online, while Black Friday reached $11.8 billion.
• Buy now, pay later accounted for $20 billion of online spending, up 9.8%.

The practical consequence is simple: product pages, category pages and checkout are judged first on a phone screen. Google also indexes the mobile version of sites first, as explained in our guide to mobile SEO.

What is the average cart abandonment rate?

The Baymard Institute calculates a documented average cart abandonment rate of 70.22%, based on 50 studies (page updated in September 2025). Excluding the shoppers who were "just browsing", the main reasons given by US online shoppers are:

Most of these causes are visible before checkout: display shipping costs and delivery times on the product page, offer guest checkout, and show trust signals. Our conversion rate calculator helps estimate what a few points of abandonment are worth.

How is AI changing online shopping?

Generative AI has become a new entry point to stores, and the first measurements show fast growth from a small base:

• Traffic from generative AI tools to US retail sites rose by 693.4% during the 2025 holiday season compared with 2024, according to Adobe, which notes that the base of users remains modest.
• Google says its Shopping Graph contains more than 50 billion product listings, 2 billion of which are updated every hour (Google, November 2025). In the same announcement, Google introduced agentic checkout, which buys an item for the user on an eligible merchant site once a price alert is met and the purchase is confirmed.
• In September 2025, OpenAI launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT for US users, starting with Etsy sellers, built on the open Agentic Commerce Protocol co-developed with Stripe.
• In France, the Fevad reports that nearly one online shopper in three already uses AI in the purchase journey, and that 94% of online merchants use generative AI solutions.

For a store, this means product information must be readable by machines as well as by people: complete product feeds in Google Merchant Center, structured data on product pages, and pages that answer buyers' questions. We detail these changes in our guides to AI shopping and AI in ecommerce.

What do these statistics mean for ecommerce SEO and GEO?

The figures point to five priorities for an online store that wants to be found on Google and recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity:

1. Win the long tail: more transactions for smaller baskets means more specific searches. Category and product pages that match precise needs capture them; see our ecommerce SEO tools to find these queries.
2. Design for mobile first: with more than half of transactions on a smartphone, speed and readability on a phone come before desktop polish.
3. Answer before the cart: shipping costs, delivery times and return policies are the top reasons for abandonment; putting them on product pages also gives AI assistants the facts they quote.
4. Feed the machines: AI shopping tools read product feeds and structured data. Our studies of how AIs cite retail sources, Amazon and Shopify stores show which pages they rely on.
5. Publish useful content around the catalog: buying guides and comparisons attract the research phase that precedes the purchase, which our ecommerce marketing guide places in the full funnel.

To estimate what organic traffic could bring to your store, try the ecommerce SEO ROI calculator. For broader search figures, see our pages of SEO statistics and Google search statistics.

How should you use ecommerce statistics?

Three rules avoid the most common errors. First, always give the scope and the date: a share of retail in the United States is not a share of the world market, and a holiday season is not a year. Second, prefer primary sources (statistics agencies, federations, published studies) over figures repeated by blogs without a link. Third, update your pages when a new edition is released: the Census publishes every quarter and the Fevad every year, and an outdated figure weakens the credibility of a whole page, including in the eyes of the AIs that cite it.

Conclusion

Ecommerce keeps gaining share, shoppers buy more often on their phones, and a new channel is opening through AI assistants. The stores that win are those whose product information is complete, fast to load and easy for both people and machines to read. To publish the content that brings this traffic on autopilot, connect your store to Sorank on Shopify or any other platform, and track how ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini talk about your brand.