Ecommerce Statistics (2026): 40 Sourced Figures

This page collects figures on the size of online retail, its growth, the companies that run the largest marketplaces and the costs that sellers face. Every number links to the document that first published it. The US market figures come from the US Census Bureau. Company figures come from annual reports and earnings releases filed with the SEC. Figures for Europe, the United Kingdom, Canada and China come from their national or EU statistics bodies. Survey and benchmark figures come from the organizations that ran them, and vendor data is labeled as vendor-reported. Merchants who are choosing the software to run an online store can compare plans, fees and features on the StatWharf page for ecommerce platforms.

Method

The data window runs from January 2024 to September 2026. StatWharf used primary sources only. That means government statistics offices, SEC filings, industry bodies and the original publisher of each survey or benchmark. Statistics aggregators and blogs that re-quote other sources were excluded. Each figure was checked against its source in October 2026. StatWharf dropped each figure that did not appear on its primary source. No value on this page is modeled, estimated or calculated by StatWharf.

Definitions differ between sources. In Census Bureau data, a sale counts as e-commerce once the order is placed or the price is agreed online. Payment can happen later. Its estimates cover only businesses with paid employees. Company figures such as gross merchandise volume (GMV) measure the value of goods sold through a platform, not the platform’s own revenue. Shares of retail from different countries use different retail definitions, so they show broad levels rather than exact rankings.

Some common questions have no reliable primary answer. No government body publishes a count of US e-commerce businesses or an e-commerce failure rate. No public source reports Amazon’s share of US e-commerce. Amazon reports its online stores revenue worldwide, while the Census Bureau measures US sales only, so the two cannot be divided. This page leaves those figures out rather than repeat estimates from secondary sites.

US e-commerce sales and share of retail

The Census Bureau publishes the official US e-commerce estimate each quarter. The adjusted figures remove seasonal patterns. The not adjusted figures show the actual holiday peak.

Online sales grew faster than retail as a whole. In Q2 2026, e-commerce rose 12.2% on the year. Total retail sales rose 6.7% in the same period, according to the same release. Full-year e-commerce sales rose 5.4% in 2025. Growth in 2026 has been faster.

The fourth quarter is the largest quarter for online sales before seasonal adjustment. Not adjusted e-commerce sales reached US$365,160 million in Q4 2025, or 18.3% of retail. A merchant who plans stock and staff by quarter can expect this holiday pattern to repeat.

Holiday shopping and mobile

The Census Bureau does not publish daily or channel data. Adobe measures online spending at US retail sites through its analytics product. Its figures are vendor-reported. Adobe says its analysis covers more than 1 trillion visits to US retail sites, 100 million products and 18 product categories.

Adobe reports that holiday spending of US$257.8 billion rose 6.8% on the year. Smartphones carried a majority of transactions for the season, at 56.4%, up from 54.5% in 2024. Most holiday transactions were made on a smartphone.

The growth in traffic from generative AI tools is large in percentage terms. Adobe notes that the base of users is still modest. The figure measures shoppers who clicked a link from an AI chat service or browser to a retail site. It does not measure sales.

Marketplaces and large retailers

Large marketplaces and platforms report their scale in their SEC filings. Amazon reports net sales by line of business. Shopify, eBay and Etsy report the value of goods sold through their platforms. Walmart reports the growth rate of its online sales.

Amazon’s online stores line counts goods that Amazon sells itself. Sales by independent sellers appear differently. Amazon books only its commissions and fulfillment fees from them, under third-party seller services. Independent sellers accounted for 61% of the units sold in Q2 2026. Amazon’s figures are worldwide. They include sales outside the United States.

Shopify is not a marketplace. It sells the software that merchants use to run their own stores. Its GMV of US$378,441 million in 2025 is the total value of orders placed on stores that use its platform. In its Q2 2026 release, Shopify reported more than 30% growth in GMV for the quarter. Etsy’s figure includes its Depop and Reverb marketplaces. Etsy reports that its gross merchandise sales fell 5.3% in 2025.

Shipping, returns and checkout costs

Shipping and returns are two of the largest costs in online retail. Amazon is the only large retailer in this set that reports its shipping costs each quarter. The returns figures come from a survey report by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Happy Returns, a returns software company. The checkout figures come from Baymard Institute, a research firm that studies e-commerce usability.

The NRF figures are expectations, not final counts. They come from two surveys run in summer 2025. One reached 2,006 consumers who had returned an online purchase in the past year. The other reached 358 e-commerce professionals at US merchants with more than US$500 million in revenue. Online purchases come back more often than purchases overall. The expected online return rate of 19.3% is above the overall rate of 15.8%.

Baymard’s 70.22% is an average of 50 published studies, some of them more than ten years old. Baymard notes that many abandonments are normal browsing, such as saving items or comparing prices. Its own survey found that 42% of US online shoppers had left a cart because they were only browsing. Among the remaining reasons, extra costs such as shipping, tax and fees came first, at 40%. Slow delivery came second, at 20%.

Pitney Bowes sells shipping services and software, so its index is labeled vendor-reported. It reports that US parcel volume of 23.1 billion shipments in 2025 rose 3.3% on the year.

Ecommerce by country

National statistics bodies measure online retail in different ways. The UK figure covers Great Britain and includes all internet sales by retailers. The Canadian figure excludes travel and ticket sales. The Chinese figure covers online sales of physical goods only. The EU figures come from surveys of households and of enterprises.

Statistics Canada reports that retail e-commerce sales were C$5.5 billion in July 2026. China’s online sales of physical goods reached 13.09 trillion yuan in 2025, up 5.2%. In the EU, the enterprise survey asks about the previous calendar year. The 2025 survey therefore reports 2024 activity.

What the figures show

Three points stand out. First, online retail in the United States is large and still gaining share. Sales reached US$1,233.7 billion in 2025. The share of retail rose from 16.1% in 2024 to 17.1% in Q2 2026.

Second, independent merchants make up a large part of the market. Third-party sellers accounted for 61% of units sold on Amazon in Q2 2026. Stores built on Shopify processed US$378,441 million of orders in 2025. Many of these merchants run more than one channel at the same time.

Third, the costs after the sale are high. About one online sale in five was expected to come back in 2025, at 19.3%. Extra costs such as shipping were the main checkout complaint in Baymard’s research. A merchant who compares store software can therefore look past the monthly plan price. Checkout design, shipping rates, returns handling and mobile performance each affect margin.

Where to go next

Merchants deciding where to build or move an online store can review the ecommerce platforms comparison. It sets out hosting model, transaction fees, published pricing and built-in features for each platform. It does not name a single best platform. Other dated figure sets are listed in the StatWharf research directory.

The next update follows two releases: the Census Bureau’s third quarter 2026 e-commerce estimate, scheduled for November 19, 2026, and the quarterly results of the companies listed above. Corrections to any figure can be sent to the editorial address below.

Factual corrections are free: editorial@statwharf.com.