Ecommerce is a $6.88 trillion business in 2026, and the way people buy keeps shifting under everyone's feet. Mobile now drives more orders than desktop, AI is changing how shoppers find products, and support volume is climbing faster than most teams can staff for. Below are 52 ecommerce statistics that actually matter this year, grouped so you can find what you need fast, each one linked to its source.
Most of these numbers come back to one thing: more orders means more questions, and more questions means more calls your team has to answer. We build AI phone support for Shopify brands trying to keep that phone line alive without adding headcount every quarter. If your support queue already spikes after every promo, start a free trial and hear how it handles your store's calls.
Hear what AI support calls sound like for your store. Just paste your Shopify URL and get sample calls in under 20 seconds, no email required. Listen to demo calls for my store.
Key highlights
- Global ecommerce sales will hit $6.88 trillion in 2026, about 21.1% of all retail. (SellersCommerce)
- Mobile drives roughly 60% of global ecommerce sales, on track for 67% by 2030. (Numerator)
- The average cart abandonment rate is 69.8%, and it's worse on mobile at 85.65%. (Baymard)
- 84% of ecommerce businesses rank AI as their top strategic priority for 2026. (Envive)
- 76% of consumers still prefer phone calls for customer support. (Knowmax)
- WISMO ("where is my order") makes up 20% to 40% of all support tickets, climbing past 50% at peak. (ServeRetail)
Market size and growth statistics
Global ecommerce revenue will reach $6.88 trillion in 2026. That's a 7.2% jump from 2025 and roughly 21.1% of total retail sales worldwide. (SellersCommerce)
Global online sales hit about $6.42 trillion in 2025, up 6.8% year over year. Steady, but the double-digit boom years are behind us. (SellersCommerce)
US retail ecommerce sales are projected to total $1.53 trillion in 2026, up 6.94% from the prior year. (Capital One Shopping)
US ecommerce sales reached $1.234 trillion in 2025, up 5.4% over 2024. That was the second-lowest annual growth rate since the Great Recession. (Digital Commerce 360)
Online buying now accounts for 23.1% of total US retail sales (up from 22.8% in 2024). Nearly a quarter of everything sold in America now runs through a checkout page. (Digital Commerce 360)
The global B2B ecommerce market is valued at around $36 trillion by 2026, dwarfing the consumer side. (Grand View Research)
Growth is real but it's cooling. The market is getting bigger while the yearly percentage gains shrink, which means the easy tailwind is gone and margins now come from operations, not just demand. If you want the forward look, our ecommerce trends for 2026 breakdown pairs well with these numbers.
Online shopper and behavior statistics
There are 2.86 billion online shoppers globally in 2026, about 33% of the world's population. (Capital One Shopping)
Global user penetration sits at 54.3% in 2026 and is projected to reach 58.1% by 2030. (Statista)
Daily online shopping dropped from 21% to 9% of consumers between 2025 and 2026, a clear swing back toward hybrid buying. (Numerator)
Nearly 50% of shoppers still prefer buying in-store for high-value items. Online won convenience, but trust for big purchases still leans physical. (Numerator)
55% of consumers cite the physical store as a key discovery channel, and 54% think its importance is growing. (Numerator)
The 2025 Cyber 5 (Thanksgiving through Cyber Monday) generated $44.2 billion in ecommerce sales, with Cyber Monday alone pulling $14.25 billion in a single day. (Digital Commerce 360)
The takeaway here isn't "people are leaving online." It's that shoppers now bounce between channels within a single purchase, so your phone line, your site, and your store all need to tell the same story. That cross-channel expectation is why ecommerce customer service has quietly become a revenue lever, not a cost center.
Mobile commerce statistics
Mobile devices drive roughly 60% of all global ecommerce sales in 2026, projected to reach 67% by 2030. (Numerator)
Mobile commerce sales will total $2.74 trillion in 2026, up 9.16% year over year. (SellersCommerce)
The global mobile commerce market is set to grow from $2.42 trillion in 2026 to $5.01 trillion by 2034, a 9.5% CAGR. (Fortune Business Insights)
1.65 billion people are expected to shop via smartphone in 2026. (Mobiloud)
Mobile's share varies a lot by region: around 50% of online sales in the US, but 77% in South Korea. (Mobiloud)
The average mobile conversion rate reached 2.8% in 2026, finally matching desktop, while shopping apps convert higher at 3.5%. (Mobiloud)
Mobile is where the volume lives now, but it's also where the friction is highest. A shopper on a phone is more likely to hit a wall, get frustrated, and call you instead of finishing checkout. The full picture is in our mobile commerce statistics for 2026.
Conversion rate and cart abandonment statistics
The global average ecommerce conversion rate sits in a 1.4% to 3.0% band in 2026. (Foundry CRO)
Shopify-only stores average about 1.4%, per Littledata's benchmark panel. (Foundry CRO)
Conversion swings hard by category: food and beverage peaks at 4.5% to 6.11%, while luxury and jewelry falls to 0.87% to 1.19%. (Foundry CRO)
The documented average cart abandonment rate is 70.22%. Seven in ten carts get built and then dropped. (Baymard)
Mobile cart abandonment hits 85.65%, versus 73% on desktop. The small screen is where checkouts go to die. (Foundry CRO)
Around 48% of cart abandonment is driven by unexpected costs at checkout like shipping, taxes, and fees. (Baymard)
Here's the thing about abandonment: a big slice of it is hesitation, not rejection. A shopper who can't find your return policy or isn't sure about sizing often just leaves. Answer that question in the moment, on chat or on the phone, and some of those carts come back. We go deeper in our cart abandonment statistics for 2026 and our guide to ecommerce conversion rate optimization.
If your abandoned carts spike right after a launch, that's when a call gets a shopper over the line. Start a free trial and hear how the AI handles a pre-purchase question on your store.
AI and automation in ecommerce statistics
84% of ecommerce businesses rank AI as their top strategic priority in 2026. (Envive)
89% of retailers have adopted AI in some form, but only 7% have actually scaled it. Almost everyone is experimenting; almost no one has it running everywhere yet. (Envive)
The global AI-in-ecommerce market is projected to grow from $9.70 billion in 2026 to $47.87 billion by 2033, a 25.7% CAGR. (Elogic)
Consumers using generative AI for shopping jumped from 38% in 2024 to 51% in 2025, a 34% year-over-year rise. (Triple Whale)
Adobe tracked a 4,700% year-over-year increase in generative AI traffic to US retail sites as of mid-2025. (Triple Whale)
AI-driven tools influenced 19% of global online orders. Roughly one in five purchases now has an AI touchpoint somewhere in the path. (Numerator)
79% of brands say AI-driven conversational commerce has increased their sales. (Triple Whale)
The gap between "adopted AI" (89%) and "scaled AI" (7%) is the real story. Most brands bought a tool and stalled. The ones pulling ahead picked one painful, repetitive job and automated it end to end. For phone support, that job is usually the same handful of questions asked all day, which is exactly what AI voice agents for ecommerce are built to take off your team's plate.
Customer support statistics
76% of consumers still prefer phone calls for customer support, even in a chat-first world. (Knowmax)
71% of Gen Z say they would reach out to support via a live phone call. The "young people never call" assumption is aging badly. (Knowmax)
Phone support costs $15 to $25 per interaction, versus $4 to $8 for live chat and $8 to $15 for email. It's the priciest channel to staff. (Knowmax)
74% of consumers expect customer service to be available 24/7. After-hours silence reads as "closed." (Knowmax)
The industry-average first response time for ecommerce support is 4 to 6 hours, while best-in-class teams answer in 30 to 60 minutes. (Knowmax)
WISMO ("where is my order") inquiries make up 20% to 40% of all support tickets, and over 50% during peak season. (ServeRetail)
96% of shoppers track their orders when tracking is available, and 43% check it daily until the package lands. (Freshworks)
Best-in-class operations keep their WISMO rate below 4%. Most brands are nowhere near that. (ShippyPro)
Put these together and the pattern is obvious. Phone is the channel people still want, it's the one they call after hours, and most of what they ask is the same repetitive order-status question. That's a job you can hand off. See how in our breakdowns of 24/7 ecommerce phone support, WISMO calls, and the full ecommerce customer support statistics for 2026.
Payments and returns statistics
Digital wallets now handle 53% of all global ecommerce transactions in 2026, more than credit cards (16%) and debit cards (10%) combined. (Searchlab)
There are 5.2 billion digital wallet users globally in 2026. (Searchlab)
Digital wallets are on track to overtake cards as the number one ecommerce payment method by 2027. (Searchlab)
US buy-now-pay-later users are expected to reach about 96 million in 2026, up from 91.5 million in 2025. (Chargeflow)
Global BNPL gross merchandise volume is expected to hit $560.1 billion in 2026, a 13.7% annual increase. (Chargeflow)
The average ecommerce return rate in 2026 is 19% to 20.5%, roughly 2 to 3 times the brick-and-mortar rate. (Eightx)
Return rates vary sharply by category: apparel at 25%, footwear at 18%, electronics at 10% to 11%, and beauty at 8%. (Eightx)
US retail returns totaled $849.9 billion in 2025, about 15.8% of annual sales, with each return costing $20 to $30 to process fully loaded. (Eightx)
Payments got easier, but returns quietly got expensive. Every return is a shipping cost, a labor cost, and often a support conversation attached to it. Handling those exchange and return calls well is half the battle, which is why we wrote up ecommerce returns management and the wider ecommerce return statistics for 2026.
Social commerce statistics
The global social commerce market is valued at around $2.6 trillion in 2026, projected to reach $8.5 trillion by 2030 at a 26.2% CAGR. (SellersCommerce)
Social commerce will make up 22.4% of all ecommerce transactions in 2026, up from 17% in 2025. (SellersCommerce)
US social commerce sales will surpass $100 billion in 2026 ($100.99 billion, to be exact), an 18% year-over-year increase. (SellersCommerce)
31.2% of global ecommerce consumers and 35.9% of US consumers now shop on social media. (Numerator)
Video commerce captured 43.22% of the social commerce market in 2025, making short-form and shoppable video the dominant format. (SellersCommerce)
Social is where discovery happens now, but the buying journey rarely stays there. A shopper finds you on TikTok, checks your site, then calls with a question before ordering. If you want the full channel picture, our social commerce statistics for 2026 covers it end to end.
What this means for ecommerce brands
Strip away the trillion-dollar headlines and a simpler picture shows up. The market is still growing, but slower, so every point of margin now comes from running a tighter operation instead of riding demand. Mobile drives most of your traffic and most of your friction. Returns and support are quietly eating a bigger share of your P&L than they did five years ago.
The thread running through nearly every stat above is the same: more orders create more questions, and those questions still land on the phone. 76% of shoppers prefer to call, 74% expect help around the clock, and 20% to 40% of what they ask is the same order-status question. That's a huge, repetitive, expensive workload, and it doesn't scale by hiring one more rep every quarter.
This is exactly the gap AI is closing fastest. Not because it's trendy, but because phone support is a bounded, repetitive job that automation handles well. The brands pulling ahead in that 7% who've actually scaled AI didn't automate everything. They picked the one channel bleeding time and money and handed it off, keeping their people for the calls that genuinely need a human.
If you run a Shopify store, Ringly.io handles 73% of support calls automatically, in 40 languages, around the clock, and escalates the rest cleanly to your existing helpdesk. It finds orders, answers product questions, and processes returns so your team stops answering the same call 50 times a day. Curious what your callers would hear? Try free for 14 days, or read how AI voice agents work for ecommerce and how brands are building Shopify voice agents into their support stack.
Service quality shapes repeat purchases. Our customer service statistics for 2026 break down what shoppers now expect.
Reviews drive a growing share of sales. Our online review statistics for 2026 quantify the impact.
Support staffing is a hidden cost of scaling a store. See the figures in our call center turnover statistics for 2026.
Gen Z shops differently from older generations. Our Gen Z shopping statistics for 2026 break down how.
Frequently asked questions
How big is the ecommerce market in 2026? Global ecommerce revenue is projected to reach $6.88 trillion in 2026, about 21.1% of all retail sales worldwide. In the US, online sales are expected to total $1.53 trillion, roughly 23% of total US retail.
What percentage of ecommerce is mobile? Mobile devices drive roughly 60% of all global ecommerce sales in 2026, and that share is projected to reach 67% by 2030. Mobile also has the highest cart abandonment rate at 85.65%, so a mobile-first checkout is where most brands lose orders.
What is the average ecommerce conversion rate in 2026? The global average sits in a 1.4% to 3.0% band, with Shopify-only stores averaging about 1.4%. It varies widely by category: food and beverage can hit 6%, while luxury and jewelry fall below 1.2%.
What is the average cart abandonment rate? The documented average is 70.22%, meaning about seven in ten carts are abandoned before purchase. Roughly 48% of that is caused by unexpected costs at checkout like shipping and fees.
How much is AI being used in ecommerce? 84% of ecommerce businesses rank AI as their top strategic priority in 2026, and 89% have adopted it in some form, though only 7% have scaled it. On the consumer side, 51% of shoppers used generative AI for shopping in 2025, up from 38% the year before.
Do people still call ecommerce brands for support? Yes. 76% of consumers still prefer phone calls for customer support, and 71% of Gen Z say they'd reach out by phone. Phone is also the most expensive channel at $15 to $25 per interaction, which is why brands are turning to AI to handle the repetitive calls.
What is WISMO and why does it matter? WISMO stands for "where is my order," the most common ecommerce support question. It accounts for 20% to 40% of all support tickets and can exceed 50% during peak season, making it the single biggest driver of support volume for most stores.
What is the average ecommerce return rate? The average ecommerce return rate in 2026 is 19% to 20.5%, about 2 to 3 times the brick-and-mortar rate. Apparel is highest at around 25%, and each return costs $20 to $30 to process once you count shipping, labor, and restocking.
