Ecommerce Statistics 2026: U.S. Sales, Growth and Market Share

U.S. shoppers spent $340.2 billion online in the second quarter of 2026. That is 17.1% of all retail sales, the highest share the Census Bureau has recorded in its seasonally adjusted series.

This page collects the ecommerce statistics people look for most: sales, growth, share of retail, the biggest companies, jobs, payments and fraud. Every number comes from a government agency or a company’s own SEC filing, and every one is listed with the period it covers and a link to the source.

You are welcome to quote any figure here. A ready-made citation is at the bottom of the page.

Last updated: October 6, 2026. Latest Census quarter: Q2 2026, released August 18, 2026.

Key ecommerce statistics

“Seasonally adjusted” means the Census Bureau has smoothed out predictable swings like the holiday rush. “Not adjusted” is the raw dollar total. Both are official. We say which one we are using every time.

U.S. ecommerce sales in the latest quarter

Americans bought $340.2 billion of goods online in the second quarter of 2026, according to the Census Bureau’s Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales report. That is up 3.8% from the first quarter and up 12.2% from a year earlier.

Total retail sales came to $1.99 trillion in the same quarter, up 6.7% from a year earlier. Online sales grew almost twice as fast as retail overall.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales for Q2 2026, released August 18, 2026. Q2 2026 figures are preliminary and will be revised. Census puts the margin of error on the adjusted year-over-year ecommerce change at plus or minus 0.9 percentage points.

Here is how the last nine quarters look on a seasonally adjusted basis.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, seasonally adjusted time series, last revised August 18, 2026.

Ecommerce share of total retail sales by year

Ecommerce was 16.4% of U.S. retail sales in 2025. It was 7.1% in 2015 and 2.5% in 2005. About one dollar in six now gets spent online.

Online sales passed $1 trillion a year for the first time in 2023 and reached $1.23 trillion in 2025. That is 3.7 times the $331.5 billion sold online in 2015.

Annual totals, shares and growth rates are calculated by My Millennial Guide by adding up the four quarters of each year in the Census Bureau’s not adjusted time series (last revised August 18, 2026). Census publishes the quarters, not these annual sums. Figures are not adjusted for seasonality or inflation and cover retailers with paid employees.

The share changes with the season. In the not adjusted data it peaked at 18.3% in the fourth quarter of 2025, because holiday shopping leans online. The adjusted series removes that swing, which is why reporters usually quote the adjusted number.

So far in 2026, shoppers have spent $630.8 billion online in the first half of the year (not adjusted). That is 10.9% more than the first half of 2025.

First-half totals are calculated by My Millennial Guide from the same Census Bureau not adjusted time series, Q1 and Q2 of 2025 and 2026.

How fast is ecommerce growing?

Ecommerce sales grew 5.4% in 2025, the slowest full year in the table above. Growth has picked up since. Sales were up 10.1% year over year in Q1 2026 and 12.2% in Q2 2026 (seasonally adjusted), the first double-digit gains since 2021.

The biggest jump on record came in 2020. Online sales rose 32.6% from the first quarter of 2020 to the second, and ecommerce went from 11.2% of retail sales at the end of 2019 to 16.3% in Q2 2020. For the full year, online sales grew 42.1%.

That share then slipped as stores reopened. It took until Q2 2025 to get back to the 16.3% reached in spring 2020. It has set a new high in each of the last four quarters.

Quarterly figures are from the Census Bureau seasonally adjusted time series. The 2020 and 2025 full-year growth rates are calculated by My Millennial Guide from the not adjusted time series.

Ecommerce sales by type of retailer

Retailers without stores still take most of the money. Nonstore retailers, the Census category that includes online-only sellers and mail-order houses, booked $190.8 billion of the $329.5 billion in ecommerce sales in Q2 2026. That is 57.9% of the total.

The fastest growth in the table is at general merchandise stores. Their online sales rose 21.6% from a year earlier, almost twice the pace of nonstore retailers.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, supplemental quarterly ecommerce tables for Q2 2026 (preliminary, not adjusted). Sales are grouped by the retailer’s main line of business, not by product, so a sofa bought from a general merchandise chain counts under general merchandise. Electronics and appliance stores are left out because Census suppressed that estimate. The share column is calculated by My Millennial Guide as each line divided by the $329.5 billion total.

For a longer view, the Census Annual Retail Trade Survey last broke out online and mail-order sellers for 2022. That year they sold $1.12 trillion in total, $870.5 billion of it through ecommerce.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Retail Trade Survey, supplemental ecommerce table for electronic shopping and mail-order houses (NAICS 4541), 2022, the most recent year posted. These figures were published before Census revised its quarterly series in April 2025, so do not mix them with the tables above.

Ecommerce company statistics

These figures come straight from each company’s annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They are worldwide numbers unless the row says otherwise.

Read the “what it measures” column before comparing them. Amazon and Walmart report their own sales. Shopify, eBay and Etsy report the value of goods other sellers moved through their platforms, which is a much bigger number than the revenue those companies keep.

All figures are as reported by each company in the linked SEC filing. Walmart’s three ecommerce figures are described as approximate in its filing. Amazon’s “online stores” line covers products Amazon sells itself. Sales by independent sellers on Amazon show up as the commissions and fees in “third-party seller services,” not as the full price of the goods.

A few details worth quoting:

• Amazon’s net sales grew 12% in 2025, from $638.0 billion to $716.9 billion. In Q2 2026 its online stores brought in $70.4 billion, up from $61.5 billion a year earlier. (Amazon Form 10-K, 2025 and Form 10-Q, Q2 2026)
• Amazon employed about 1,576,000 full-time and part-time workers as of December 31, 2025. (Amazon Form 10-K, 2025)
• Shopify’s gross merchandise volume grew 29% in 2025 and 32% year over year in Q2 2026. As of December 31, 2025, 44% of its merchants were in the United States. (Shopify Form 10-K, 2025 and Form 10-Q, Q2 2026)
• Walmart U.S. ecommerce sales rose from about $79.3 billion to about $99.6 billion in the fiscal year ended January 31, 2026. Online sales were roughly one-fifth of Walmart U.S. net sales of $483.0 billion. (Walmart Form 10-K, fiscal 2026; the one-fifth share is calculated by My Millennial Guide)
• eBay’s gross merchandise volume rose 7% in 2025 to $79.6 billion. (eBay Form 10-K, 2025)
• On Etsy, 74% of 2025 gross merchandise sales came from U.S. buyers. Etsy’s active buyers fell 3% during the year. (Etsy Form 10-K, 2025)

Ecommerce jobs: warehouses and delivery

Every online order has to be stored, packed and delivered. The two industries that do that work have added about 741,000 jobs since February 2020, the month before the pandemic hit the job market. Over the same stretch, retail trade employment barely moved.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics, series CES4349300001, CES4349200001 and CES4200000001, seasonally adjusted. September 2026 is preliminary. The change column and the 741,000 total are calculated by My Millennial Guide. These industries also handle freight that has nothing to do with online orders, so treat them as a proxy for ecommerce jobs, not an exact count.

Warehouse hiring has cooled from its peak. Warehousing and storage jobs topped out at 1,939,300 in March 2022 and are down about 108,000 since.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, series CES4349300001, January 2017 through September 2026. The decline is calculated by My Millennial Guide.

New retail business applications

More new business applications are filed in retail than in any other sector. Americans filed 1,166,015 applications for new retail trade businesses in 2025, about 20.6% of the 5,671,836 business applications filed nationwide.

The pace is faster this year. From January through August 2026 there were 813,073 retail trade applications, up 10.7% from the same months of 2025.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Business Formation Statistics, monthly business applications, not seasonally adjusted, January 2025 through August 2026. The annual and year-to-date totals, the share and the growth rate are calculated by My Millennial Guide from the monthly figures. Retail trade covers every kind of retailer. Census does not publish a separate count for online sellers, so this is not a count of new online stores.

MoreOnline business ideas you can start now

How people pay when they are not in a store

More than a third of the payments Americans make no longer happen at a checkout counter. In 2025 the average U.S. consumer made 47 payments a month. Since 2023, about 17 payments a month (37%) have been remote, meaning online, by phone or by mail, and about 30 (63%) have been made in person.

Cards do most of the work. Consumers averaged 16 credit card payments and 15 debit card payments a month. Cash was third at six payments a month, or 14% of the total.

Source: Federal Reserve Financial Services, 2026 Findings from the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice (data collected in 2025). “Remote” covers bills and person-to-person payments as well as shopping, so it is broader than online shopping alone.

Online shopping fraud statistics

Online shopping problems were the second most reported type of fraud in the U.S. in 2024, behind imposter scams. The Federal Trade Commission took in 383,441 reports in its “online shopping and negative reviews” category.

Source: Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, published March 2025, covering calendar year 2024. It is the most recent annual data book on the FTC’s reports page as of this update. The category includes orders that never arrived, undisclosed costs and refused refunds. These are reports people chose to file, so the true totals are higher.

The typical loss is small, $130, but the odds of losing something are high. Three out of four people who reported an online shopping problem lost money, twice the rate for fraud reports overall.

Ecommerce outside the U.S.: the United Kingdom

The U.K. buys a much bigger share of its retail goods online than the U.S. does. Internet sales were 27.3% of British retail sales in August 2026, according to the Office for National Statistics. For all of 2025 the figure was 27.5%.

The U.K. share peaked at 37.8% in January 2021. It was 19.1% in February 2020.

Source: Office for National Statistics, Internet sales as a percentage of total retail sales, series J4MC, seasonally adjusted, released September 17, 2026. The U.K. and U.S. agencies define retail differently, so compare the direction, not the exact gap.

We have left global totals off this page on purpose. The worldwide figures quoted most often come from private forecasters, and we could not trace them to an official source we could read ourselves.

What these numbers mean if you want to sell online

The short version: the market is still growing, and it is crowded. Online sales grew 12.2% over the last year while retail overall grew 6.7%. But you are up against companies that sell hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Small sellers usually get in one of two ways. You can list on a marketplace like Etsy or eBay and borrow its shoppers. Or you can open your own store on a platform like Shopify, where you keep the customer relationship but have to bring the traffic yourself.

Neither is free money. Marketplaces take a cut of every sale, and your own store needs a marketing budget. Price both before you pick. Our guide to ecommerce success walks through what tends to separate the stores that last from the ones that do not.

You will also need a way to take cards. Fees vary a lot between processors, so compare them in our roundup of the best merchant services for small business. And if you are starting on a shoestring, read how to start a business with no money first.

Where these numbers come from, and when they are refreshed

We only use primary sources. That means the agency that collected the data or the company that filed the report. We do not copy figures from statistics roundups or paid research summaries, and we leave out any number we cannot find at its original source.

We read every source on this page on October 6, 2026. Here is what we used and when each one updates.

Release dates are from the Census Bureau’s retail release schedule and the ONS series page. Recent Census quarters are preliminary and get revised, so a figure here can change slightly after the next release.

Where we did our own math, we say so next to the number. It is always simple arithmetic you can check: adding four quarters to get a year, dividing one figure by another to get a share, or comparing two periods to get a growth rate. We update this page after each quarterly Census release.

One note on comparing older articles to this page. In April 2025 the Census Bureau removed businesses without paid employees from its ecommerce series and revised the history. Numbers quoted before that change will not match the ones here.

How to cite this page

You may quote or reuse any statistic on this page with a link back. Copy the line below.

If you are citing a single number, please also name the original source listed next to it, such as the U.S. Census Bureau.

Ecommerce statistics FAQs

Sources and disclosures

Advertiser disclosure: We may receive compensation from some of the companies listed on this page. This does not influence what we write about them.

Sources: the U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales report, Annual Retail Trade Survey and Business Formation Statistics; the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics; Forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC by Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, eBay and Etsy; the Federal Reserve’s Diary of Consumer Payment Choice; the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024; and the U.K. Office for National Statistics’ internet retail sales series. All read on October 6, 2026.