E-commerce Conversion Rate Statistics 2026: Benchmarks and AI Traffic

Ecommerce conversion rate statistics rest on one figure with an auditable base: 70.22% of online shopping carts are abandoned, an average that Baymard Institute calculated from 50 separate published studies. US retail ecommerce sales reached $340.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, or 17.1% of all retail spending, according to the Census Bureau. What no public dataset supplies is a measured, industry-wide conversion rate.

No source captured for this update publishes an average conversion rate measured outside a single vendor’s own customer base. The figures below come from organizations that disclose their sample and their method: Baymard’s study list, Census Bureau retail estimates, Adobe Analytics panel data, the Eurostat ICT survey, and Contentsquare’s benchmark disclosure. Numbers without that provenance are left out.

Key Takeaways

• The average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 70.22%, calculated from 50 different studies, according to Baymard Institute.
• The ten studies Baymard itemizes range from 55.00% to 84.27%, a spread of 29.27 percentage points.
• AI-referred retail visitors converted at a rate 54% higher than non-AI traffic in May 2026, according to Adobe Digital Insights, reversing a gap that ran the other way a year earlier.
• The average US checkout flow shows 23.48 form elements by default, against a tested ideal of 12 to 14.
• Smartphones carried 56.4% of US online holiday transactions in 2025, up from 54.5% in 2024.
• 95% of EU individuals aged 16-74 used the internet in the last 12 months of 2025, and 78% among them bought or ordered goods or services, per Eurostat.

Editor’s Choice

• US quarterly ecommerce sales: $340.2 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 12.2% year over year.
• Ecommerce share of US retail: 17.1% of total retail sales in the second quarter of 2026.
• US online holiday spend: $257.8 billion between November 1 and December 31, 2025, up 6.8% year over year, per Adobe Analytics.
• Recoverable lost orders: $260 billion across US and EU ecommerce sales of $738 billion, on Baymard’s modeled checkout uplift.
• Generative-AI referral traffic: Up 693.4% year over year in traffic to US retail sites from generative-AI tools.
• Buy Now Pay Later spend: $20 billion in online spend, up 9.8% year over year.

Ecommerce Cart Abandonment Benchmarks

• Baymard Institute calculated an average documented cart abandonment rate of 70.22% from 50 different studies, last updated on September 22, 2025.
• Baymard has tracked the global average cart abandonment rate for 13 years, and reports on its checkout research page that the average currently sits at 70.19%.
• That rate means 7 out of 10 users leave without completing a purchase after adding a product to the cart.
• The 2025 entry in that list, from Uptain, recorded 71.72%.
• Baymard publishes the full list of studies behind its average, with the provider, the year, and the retrieval date for each one, which makes the number checkable rather than merely quotable.
• Cart abandonment is not the inverse of a conversion rate, and the two should not be subtracted from one another: an abandonment figure counts sessions that reached a cart, while conversion counts every session that arrived.

Source: Baymard Institute, cart abandonment study list, September 2025

Why Shoppers Abandon Carts

• 42% of US online shoppers told Baymard they had abandoned a cart because “I was just browsing / not ready to buy”.
• Setting the browsing segment aside, extra costs including shipping, tax, and fees lead the remaining reasons at 40%, per Baymard.
• Trust in the payment step appears twice on the list: 19% did not trust the site with their credit card information, and 10% had a card declined.
• Forced account creation drove 18% of abandonments, ahead of checkout length and site errors at 17% each.
• The list splits into intent problems a merchant cannot fix and interface problems it can.
• Only 7% of respondents could not name a reason.

By the numbers: Baymard Institute records 40% of non-browsing cart abandonments as a reaction to extra costs at checkout, ahead of slow delivery at 20% and payment distrust at 19%. Pricing transparency, not persuasion, sits at the top of the measured list.

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Recent Developments

• August 2026: The Census Bureau reported US retail ecommerce sales of $340.2 billion for the second quarter of 2026, an increase of 3.8% (±0.4%) from the first quarter.
• June 2026: Adobe Digital Insights reported that AI-referred retail visitors converted at a rate 54% higher than non-AI traffic in May 2026.
• May 2026: AI-driven retail visit share grew 138% year over year in the second quarter, behind travel at 194% and ahead of financial services at 105%.
• February 2026: Eurostat released its 2025 e-commerce results, showing 78% of EU internet users aged 16-74 bought or ordered goods or services.
• January 2026: Adobe reported a record $257.8 billion in US online holiday spend for November 1 to December 31, 2025.
• September 2025: Baymard Institute last updated its cart abandonment meta-analysis, holding the average at 70.22% across 50 studies.

Why Published Conversion Benchmarks Disagree

• Contentsquare builds its 2026 Digital Experience Benchmark from 99 billion web sessions across more than 6,500 websites in 9 industries.
• Adobe Analytics covers over 1 trillion visits to US retail sites, 100 million SKUs and 18 product categories.
• Eurostat’s 2025 results rest on responses from around 172,000 households and around 330,000 individuals aged 16-74.
• Baymard’s figure is a simple average of 50 published studies rather than a measurement of a population.
• Each base answers a different question, so the outputs are not interchangeable. A vendor panel describes that vendor’s customers; a government survey describes a population.
• None of the four is an industry-wide conversion rate, and none of them claims to be. The number circulating as “the average ecommerce conversion rate” has no owner willing to attach a sample to it.

Source: Baymard Institute 2025, Adobe Analytics 2026, Contentsquare 2026, Eurostat 2026, US Census Bureau 2026

What is the average ecommerce conversion rate?

No organization publishes an industry-wide average measured across all online stores. The figures quoted as averages come from analytics vendors reporting on merchants who use their software, which is a self-selected sample. Contentsquare, for example, draws its benchmark from more than 6,500 websites that run its product.

What is considered a good conversion rate on Shopify?

Platform-level conversion figures circulate widely, but no primary source in this dataset publishes a verified Shopify benchmark. The measurable comparison is abandonment: Baymard’s 50-study average of 70.22% applies across platforms rather than to any single one. Judge a store against its own prior period.

Checkout Length and Form-Field Load

• The average US checkout flow displays 23.48 form elements by default, or 14.88 counting only the form fields.
• Baymard’s usability testing puts the ideal flow at 12 to 14 form elements, or 7 to 8 fields.
• Most checkouts can absorb a 20-60% reduction in the number of elements shown by default.
• Baymard documents 140 separate causes of checkout usability issues.
• A benchmark of 60 leading ecommerce checkout flows found an average of 39 potential areas for improvement per site.
• Baymard’s tested set includes Walmart, Amazon, Wayfair, Crate & Barrel, and ASOS.

Source: Baymard Institute checkout benchmark, September 2025

Why it matters: Baymard Institute measures 23.48 form elements in the average US checkout against a tested ideal of 12 to 14, and separately records 17% of shoppers abandoning over checkout length. The gap between those two numbers is the part of the funnel a merchant controls outright.

Ecommerce Share of US Retail Sales

• US retail ecommerce sales for the second quarter of 2026 were $340.2 billion on a seasonally adjusted basis.
• Total retail sales for the same quarter were $1,986.5 billion, an increase of 6.7% (±0.5%) from the second quarter of 2025.
• Ecommerce grew 12.2% (±0.9%) year over year against 6.7% (±0.5%) for total retail.
• On an unadjusted basis, the same quarter came to $329.5 billion, or 16.4% of total sales.
• The adjusted ecommerce share has risen in each of the last four quarters covered by the release.

Mobile Share of Online Transactions

• Smartphones carried 56.4% of US online holiday transactions in 2025, up from 54.5% in 2024.
• Mobile share peaked on Christmas Day at 66.5% of online sales, against 65% in 2024.
• Desktop still dominates the return flow: only 38.8% of holiday returns happened on a mobile device.
• Returns fell 1.2% across the holiday season compared with the prior year.
• The split between where people buy and where they send things back suggests mobile is tuned for acquisition and left thin at the service end.
• The same device split runs through our smartphone statistics coverage.

AI-Referred Traffic and Conversion

• AI-referred retail visitors converted at a rate 54% higher than non-AI traffic in May 2026, after converting at nearly half the non-AI rate a year earlier.
• Those visitors generated 53% more revenue per visit than non-AI traffic, reversing a position 12 months earlier when non-AI visits were worth 128% more.
• Engagement ran 15% higher in May 2026, the strongest advantage recorded since tracking began and above the 9-14% range seen through late 2024 and 2025.
• AI-referred retail visitors were 36% less likely to bounce.
• Traffic to retail sites from generative-AI tools rose 693.4% year over year over the season, and 670% on Cyber Monday alone.
• Adobe attributes part of the shift to sentiment: 66% of consumers agree that generative AI provides accurate results and 38% say they trust it more than they used to.
• We read this as the sharpest channel-level movement in the current data, tracking the adoption curve in our AI statistics.

Marketing Channel Revenue Share

• Social media accounted for 4.6% of holiday revenue on US retail sites, up 40.3% year over year from a 3.3% share.
• Affiliates and partners, a group that includes social media influencers, took 20.4%, up 15.9% from a 17.6% share in 2024.
• Adobe reports that paid search and Email remain reliable drivers of traffic and sales online.
• A share this small growing this fast is the shape that produces overconfident channel forecasts.

Source: Adobe Analytics, 2025 US holiday season, January 2026

Holiday Category Spend

• Three categories drove over half (54%) of the $257.8 billion spent online over the US holiday season.
• Electronics led among the categories Adobe named, at $59.8 billion, up 8.2% year over year.
• Groceries posted the highest growth rate among the categories Adobe named, at 10.2%, reaching $23.7 billion.
• Consumers spent more than $4 billion in a single day on 25 days of the season, up from 18 days in 2024.

Category Discount Depth

• Electronics discounts peaked at 30.9% off listed price, against 30.1% in 2024.
• Apparel discounting deepened by the widest margin among the categories Adobe named, moving from 23.2% to 25.1%.
• Furniture was the only named category to discount less than the prior year, at 18.8% against 19%.
• A category that converts better while cutting price harder has not fixed its funnel; it has bought the order.

Online Buying Across Europe

• In the EU in 2025, 95% of individuals aged 16-74 had used the internet within the last 12 months.
• Among those internet users, 78% bought or ordered goods or services.
• The 25-34 and 35-44 age groups remained the main contributors to EU e-commerce in 2025.
• 27% of EU internet users bought a transport service in 2025.
• Purchasing incidence answers a different question than a site metric: how many people buy online at all, not how many buy on one visit.

Source: Eurostat, E-commerce statistics for individuals, February 2026

Online Purchase Problems in the EU

• 63% of EU individuals who bought or ordered goods or services in 2025 reported no issue while purchasing online.
• Delivery speed slower than expected was the most reported issue at 20%.
• Website usability problems affected 12%, and a wrong or damaged good affected around 10%.
• Fraud was reported by around 4%.
• Two of the top three EU complaints occur after the order is placed, which is a reminder that post-purchase experience shapes the next conversion more than the current one.

Buy Now Pay Later and Payment Mix

• Buy Now Pay Later contributed $20 billion in US online holiday spend, up 9.8% year over year.
• That was $1.8 billion more than the previous season.
• Smartphones drove the vast majority (82.2%) of Buy Now Pay Later purchases over the season.
• Payment friction still costs orders directly: 10% of abandonments followed a declined card, and 9% cited too few payment methods.
• Deferred payment has grown alongside mobile checkout, a pairing we track in our Buy Now Pay Later statistics.

Source: Adobe Analytics, 2025 US holiday season, January 2026

Worth noting: Adobe Analytics recorded $20 billion in Buy Now Pay Later spend over the 2025 US holiday season with 82.2% of it on smartphones, while Baymard Institute finds 9% of cart abandonments trace to too few payment methods. Payment breadth is a conversion lever with a measured cost on both sides.

What Is a Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate?

No independently measured industry standard exists to answer this. The benchmarks in circulation come from analytics vendors reporting on the merchants who license their software, and those merchant sets differ by size, category, geography, and traffic mix. Contentsquare’s benchmark, for instance, covers more than 6,500 websites in 9 industries rather than the whole market.

A more defensible target is directional. Compare the current period against the store’s own prior period on the same traffic mix, then compare the checkout against a tested structure. Baymard’s tested ideal of 12 to 14 form elements gives a concrete target that does not depend on anyone else’s sample. Platform-level context sits in our ecommerce platform statistics.

Is a 2.5% Conversion Rate Good?

Judged against a vendor benchmark, the answer depends entirely on which vendor. Judged against the store’s own funnel, the useful question is where the other visitors stopped. Baymard’s 50-study average puts cart abandonment at 70.22%, so a large share of the loss happens after intent is already established.

That points the attention to the checkout. Baymard models a 35.26% conversion increase for the average large ecommerce site from checkout design changes alone, worth $260 billion in recoverable orders across US and EU sales of $738 billion.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate for Retail Stores?

Physical retail and online retail are not measured the same way, so a shared benchmark does not exist. The comparable figure is the online channel’s share of the total. Ecommerce accounted for 17.1% of US total retail sales in the second quarter of 2026.

For a retailer running both, the more actionable metric is growth differential. US ecommerce grew 12.2% (±0.9%) year over year in the second quarter of 2026 while total retail sales grew 6.7% (±0.5%). Traffic composition for the online side is covered in our website statistics.

Conclusion

Ecommerce conversion rate statistics are best treated as a set of measured differentials rather than a single number, because the single number does not exist in any public dataset with a stated sample. What does exist is checkable: Baymard Institute’s 70.22% cart abandonment average across 50 published studies, the Census Bureau’s 17.1% ecommerce share of US retail sales, Adobe’s 54% conversion premium on AI-referred traffic, and Eurostat’s 78% purchasing incidence among EU internet users. Each of those carries a disclosed base, and each answers a narrower question than the benchmark most stores go looking for.

That narrowness is the point for merchandisers, checkout owners, and channel planners. A store cannot act on an industry average it cannot verify, but it can act on a checkout that shows 23.48 form elements where testing supports 12 to 14, or on a referral channel whose conversion advantage has flipped inside a year. The measurement gap is likely to persist while the only organizations with full-funnel data are the ones selling funnel software.