If you sell online — or you’re thinking about it — numbers matter more than opinions. The e-commerce landscape shifts fast, and decisions made on gut feeling instead of data are expensive mistakes.
This roundup pulls together 65 e-commerce statistics from recent industry research, analyst reports, and platform data. Every number is linked to its original source. Whether you’re launching your first store, rebuilding an underperforming one, or trying to squeeze more revenue from what you’ve already built, these benchmarks tell you where the bar actually is — and where the opportunity lives.
Let’s get into it.
Global E-Commerce Market Size
The overall trajectory of online retail should give every business owner some optimism. The pie is growing — the question is how much of it you’re capturing.
1. Global ecommerce sales are forecast to reach $6.88 trillion in 2026, a 7.2% increase from 2025’s $6.42 trillion. That’s not a bubble. That’s a decade-long structural shift in how the world buys things.
2. E-commerce now accounts for 21.1% of total global retail sales. Just a few years ago, that figure was in the low teens. Online’s share of retail is growing every year and showing no signs of plateauing.
3. The B2B e-commerce market is valued at $32.11 trillion as of 2025, growing at a 14.5% CAGR and expected to reach $36.16 trillion by 2026. B2B buyers now expect the same seamless digital experience as B2C consumers. If your business sells to other businesses and your ordering process is still over phone or PDF, you’re leaving serious money on the table.
4. Southeast Asia is the fastest-growing ecommerce region, with 18.6% growth and a path to $230 billion GMV by 2026. Meanwhile, Mexico is on track to surpass U.S. ecommerce penetration levels by 2026 — global markets aren’t waiting for anyone.
5. Global ecommerce is projected to hit $7.89 trillion by 2028. What you build today needs to be able to scale into that future.
Conversion Rates: What “Good” Actually Looks Like
One of the most common questions we get: “Is our conversion rate good?” Here’s the honest answer — it depends, but here are the benchmarks.
6. The global average ecommerce conversion rate sits around 1.89%, according to IRP Commerce data across all industries and store sizes. This is the broad baseline.
7. Shopify merchants average a 1.4% conversion rate overall — lower than the broad average because the platform includes many newer stores still optimizing their funnels. Don’t benchmark against a platform average that includes day-one stores.
8. Most analysts and consultants target 2.5–3.5% as the realistic “good” range for established ecommerce stores. Anything above 3% is typically considered above average.
9. Personal care and beauty brands see some of the highest conversion rates, up to 6.8%, while luxury goods often hover at 0.9–1%. Industry matters. Your niche is the real benchmark.
10. A 14-industry study by Ruler Analytics found an overall average conversion rate of 2.9% across e-commerce and services. This is one of the more comprehensive multi-sector datasets available.
11. E-commerce sites that load in 1 second achieve a 3.05% average conversion rate. Every second slower, and that rate drops. Speed isn’t a technical concern — it’s a revenue concern.
12. Desktop maintains a higher conversion rate than mobile despite mobile dominating traffic, because desktop users tend to have stronger purchase intent and a more usable browsing environment. This gap is narrowing, but it’s still real — which is why checkout UX on mobile deserves serious investment.
Cart Abandonment: The $18 Billion Problem
No section of e-commerce data tells a more painful story than cart abandonment. Visitors add to cart. And then they leave.
13. The average global shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.2%, based on Baymard Institute’s analysis of 49 different studies. More than two-thirds of everyone who adds something to a cart doesn’t buy it.
14. Mobile cart abandonment rates hit 75.5% — more than 5 percentage points above the overall average. A checkout designed for desktop will leak revenue on mobile.
15. E-commerce retailers lose approximately $18 billion annually to abandoned carts. That’s not a hypothetical loss — it’s revenue that was close enough to touch and slipped away.
16. A 1-second delay in page load can reduce conversions by 7%. Checkout pages are the worst place to have a slow server or unoptimized images.
17. 26% of shoppers abandon their cart specifically because mandatory account registration is required. Guest checkout is not optional if you want to minimize abandonment.
18. The Middle East and Africa have the highest regional cart abandonment rate at 93%. Asia Pacific and Latin America follow at 87%. Even the Nordics — typically high-trust ecommerce markets — sit at 80%.
19. According to Baymard Institute, the top reasons for cart abandonment are extra costs (shipping, taxes) revealed late in the checkout, being forced to create an account, and complicated or confusing checkout flows. All three are fixable with deliberate UX design.
Mobile Commerce: Desktop Is the Second Screen Now
Mobile has already won. The question is whether your store is built to capture that audience.
20. Mobile commerce is expected to account for over 70% of global online retail by 2025. If your mobile experience is an afterthought, you’re losing business to competitors who take it seriously.
21. Mobile generates 73% of all ecommerce traffic, but desktop still converts at a higher rate. The implication is clear: mobile attracts, desktop closes — unless you close that conversion gap with better mobile checkout.
22. 59% of all e-commerce sales in 2025 are projected to come through mobile channels. More than half of revenue is flowing through a screen smaller than a paperback book.
23. 48% of shoppers made their most recent retail purchase on a smartphone, according to the 2025 Global Digital Shopping Index from PYMNTS and Visa. That’s not “some shoppers.” That’s nearly half of everyone who bought something recently.
24. 75% of consumers prefer mobile checkout because it saves time. The preference is there. The opportunity is whether you’ve built a mobile checkout worthy of it.
25. By 2028, 63% of all ecommerce purchases will be made through mobile channels, according to Statista. Mobile-first isn’t a future-forward strategy — it’s basic catch-up.
26. The top 10 ecommerce websites load in an average of 1.96 seconds on desktop. Best-in-class brands are already fast. They’re not giving competitors a speed advantage.
Social Commerce: The New Storefront
Social media is no longer just a discovery channel. It’s increasingly where the transaction happens.
27. U.S. social commerce sales reached $87.02 billion in 2025, up 21.5% year over year. This isn’t a niche anymore — social commerce is a major retail channel.
28. Social commerce sales will surpass $100 billion for the first time in 2026, growing another 18% over 2025. The trajectory is steep.
29. TikTok Shop made up nearly 20% of all social commerce in 2025. One platform, one in five social commerce dollars.
30. TikTok Shop’s sales are forecast to exceed $20 billion in 2026 and surpass $30 billion by 2028. Even with uncertainty around the platform’s regulatory future in the U.S., the shopper behavior it created isn’t going anywhere.
31. US TikTok Shop sales reached $19 billion in Q3 2025 alone. Quarterly. Let that settle for a moment.
32. 34% of U.S. consumers aged 18–34 shop on social media every week. For brands targeting younger demographics, this is where the audience spends money — not just time.
33. By 2026, around 80.4 million users — 67% of TikTok’s U.S. audience — are expected to shop through the platform. A majority of TikTok’s American users are becoming shoppers on the platform.
34. Instagram Reels video views for luxury brands grew 234% in Q2 2025 as some brands shifted content distribution away from TikTok. Social commerce is multi-platform, and smart brands aren’t betting on just one.
Page Speed: Fast Sites Win
We’ve mentioned speed in relation to conversion rates. But the data deserves its own section — because the cost of slowness is specific and compounding.
35. 53% of mobile users will abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Over half your mobile audience is gone before they ever see your product. This is the single most impactful number in this entire list.
36. A 1-second delay in page load reduces conversions by 7%. For a store doing $500K/year, that’s $35,000 vanishing because of a slow server or uncompressed images.
37. A 0.1-second improvement in site speed increased conversion rates by 8% for retail sites and increased customer spending by 10%, per Deloitte’s landmark study. A tenth of a second. That’s what milliseconds-scale optimization delivers.
38. Website conversion rates drop by 2.11% for each additional second of load time, measured from 0 to 9 seconds. The relationship is linear and predictable.
39. For every 10 seconds of load time, bounce rates increase by 123% according to Google’s research. The longer your site takes, the more you’re actively pushing people away.
40. Only 47% of websites currently meet Google’s Core Web Vitals thresholds. That means more than half the web is underperforming Google’s own performance standards — and suffering in rankings as a result.
41. The top ecommerce websites load in an average of 1.96 seconds. That’s your competitive benchmark. If your product pages take 5 seconds, you’re losing business to stores that load in 2.
42. An ecommerce site with 50,000 daily visitors, a 3.5% conversion rate, and a $50 average order value generates $87,500 per day. Shaving two seconds off that site’s load time can meaningfully increase that number. Speed optimization has one of the highest ROIs of any investment you’ll make.
Trust Signals and Reviews
People buy from businesses they trust. And trust on the internet is built through specific, measurable signals.
43. 91% of customers use some form of online review before making a purchase. Reviews aren’t a nice-to-have. They’re part of the buying process.
44. 87% of customers say online reviews have a larger impact on their purchasing decisions than influencer reviews. User-generated trust beats paid trust, every time.
45. Positive online reviews can increase conversion rates by up to 370%. That’s not a typo. Moving from zero reviews to substantial positive reviews doesn’t just increase conversions — it can multiply them.
46. 44% of people won’t purchase from a business with no online reviews. Nearly half your potential customers will self-filter before they even reach your product page if you have no social proof.
47. Products with 50+ reviews see 37% higher conversion rates than products with fewer. Volume matters — not just average rating. Fifty reviews signal an established product with real buyers.
48. 75% of people judge a company’s credibility based on its website design. Your store’s visual design is itself a trust signal. Outdated layouts, inconsistent fonts, and amateur photography undermine credibility before anyone reads a review.
49. 94% of first impressions are design-related, formed in under 0.05 seconds. Shoppers are making unconscious credibility judgments faster than they can consciously think about it.
Personalization: Treating Customers as Individuals
Mass marketing is over. The data is clear: customers respond to relevance, not volume.
50. Personalization drives up to 31% of e-commerce revenue. Showing customers products relevant to their history and behavior isn’t a luxury feature — it’s a revenue driver.
51. McKinsey research shows personalization can lift revenue by 5–15% and increase marketing ROI by 10–30%. At scale, those percentages represent enormous absolute dollar amounts.
52. Companies using first-party data in their marketing see 2.9x revenue increases versus those that don’t. The brands that own their customer data relationship are compounding their advantage every year.
53. Personalization reduces customer acquisition costs by up to 50%. Getting new customers is expensive. Personalization makes your existing traffic more valuable, which lowers the effective cost of acquisition.
54. Showing customers products they’ve previously viewed, recommending complementary items at checkout, and personalizing email campaigns based on purchase history are the three highest-leverage personalization moves for most small and mid-sized stores. None require enterprise software to implement.
Checkout Optimization: The Last Mile Matters Most
You can have great products, excellent trust signals, and a fast site — and still lose the sale at checkout. The final step deserves as much attention as everything that preceded it.
55. The average checkout abandonment rate worldwide is 78.77% — meaning nearly 4 in 5 people who start checkout don’t complete it. Most of that loss is recoverable with better UX.
56. 26% of checkout abandonments happen because sites require account creation. This is one of the most common — and most unnecessary — sources of revenue loss. Guest checkout eliminates it entirely.
57. 48% of shoppers made their most recent purchase on a smartphone. If your checkout has small tap targets, requires excessive scrolling, or doesn’t autofill common fields, you’re creating friction that costs you sales.
58. Payment method variety is a purchase driver. Stores that offer buy-now-pay-later options, digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay), and multiple card types see fewer payment-stage abandonments than those that accept only cards. The data consistently shows that removing payment friction at checkout increases completed orders.
59. By 2028, 63% of all ecommerce purchases will come through mobile. The stores investing in mobile checkout optimization now are building an advantage that compounds as that share grows.
Email Marketing for E-commerce
Email remains one of the highest-ROI marketing channels for online stores — especially for cart recovery and repeat purchase campaigns.
60. Industry data consistently shows email marketing generating $36–$42 for every $1 spent, making it the highest-ROI digital marketing channel for most ecommerce businesses. (Source: Litmus 2025 State of Email Report)
61. Cart abandonment emails — automated messages sent to shoppers who left without purchasing — recover between 5–15% of abandoned carts when optimized. Given that abandonment represents $18 billion in annual losses, even 5% recovery creates substantial revenue.
62. A three-email cart abandonment sequence (sent at 1 hour, 24 hours, and 72 hours after abandonment) consistently outperforms single-email sequences in recovery rate. The third email, typically including a discount incentive, often drives the highest portion of recoveries.
63. Post-purchase email sequences — thank you, shipping confirmation, review request, and repurchase reminder — have some of the highest open rates of any email type because the recipient is already engaged with the brand. Neglecting post-purchase communication is one of the most common ways online stores underinvest in customer lifetime value.
What’s Coming: The E-commerce Landscape in 2026
64. Global ecommerce will grow from $6.42 trillion in 2025 to $7.89 trillion by 2028. The brands scaling now are building customer relationships and operational infrastructure that will compound through that growth.
65. AI is reshaping every layer of ecommerce — from personalization engines and dynamic pricing to AI-generated product descriptions and customer service chatbots. The stores deploying AI to deliver better experiences are widening the gap between themselves and competitors who aren’t.
What These Numbers Mean for Your Business
The picture painted by these 65 statistics is consistent:
- The market is massive and growing fast
- Most of the opportunity is being left on the table — by slow pages, mandatory account creation, poor mobile UX, and absent social proof
- The difference between a 1.4% and a 3% conversion rate is a business that’s twice as profitable, without a single additional marketing dollar
These aren’t problems that require millions of dollars to fix. Most of them are website design and optimization decisions. Better checkout flow. Faster load times. Guest checkout. Product reviews. Mobile-first design. Visible trust signals.
That’s exactly what we work on.
Ready to see what these improvements look like for your store specifically? Get a free website audit at YourWebTeam.io → We’ll tell you exactly which of these statistics apply to your current site — and what fixing them would mean for your bottom line.
Richard Kastl
Founder & Lead EngineerRichard Kastl has spent 14 years engineering websites that generate revenue. He combines expertise in web development, SEO, digital marketing, and conversion optimization to build sites that make the phone ring. His work has helped generate over $30M in pipeline for clients ranging from industrial manufacturers to SaaS companies.
