eCommerce Statistics: 100 Stats and Trends about Online Shopping

It’s not always easy to find the eCommerce research you’re looking for. We took the time for you to find and compile some of the best eCommerce statistics on the web. Check out 100 statistics about mobile, marketplaces, shipping, personalization, and more! Use our resource as the one place to find lots of data points to use for whatever purpose you need.

eCommerce Stats

The desire for instant access and fast turnaround, 24/7, will be the norm by 2026, driven in particular by millennials (born approximately 1980–95) and also by Generation Z consumers (born approximately 1996–2010). [1]

One of the key conditions for success for retailers in 2026 will be their ability not only to keep track of users across a growing number of devices and touchpoints, but also to figure out how to effectively measure which of those are most effective at driving sales. [1]

2015 worldwide spending on digital commerce platform software reached approximately $4.7B, attaining 15% year-over-year increase. [5]

On average, Millennials now make 54% of purchases online versus 49% of non-Millennials. [17]

4 and 10 purchases were made using only an online channel for searching and buying. [17]

32% of online shoppers own at least one connected home device. [17]

55% of online shoppers tell friends and family when dissatisfied, the top action. [17]

74% of online shoppers rate product selection as important during the online search process. [17]

72% of shoppers return 10% or less of purchases. [17]

40% of US males aged 18-34 say they would ‘ideally buy everything online, compared to 33% of females in the same age bracket. [19]

88% of shoppers characterize detailed product content as being extremely important. [18]

38% of people will leave a website if they find the layout unattractive. [19]

58% of the Top 1000 US online retailers send welcome emails. [19]

Multichannel shoppers spend 3 timesmore than single-channel shoppers. [19]

96% of Americans have made an online purchase in their life, 80% in the past month alone. [22]

Ecommerce is growing 23% year-over-year, yet 46% of American small businesses do not have a website. [22]

Online orders increase 8.9% in Q3 2016, but average order value (AOV) increased only 0.2% — indicating that transactional growth is outpacing total revenue. [22]

Americans spend 64% of their shopping budget in-store, and 36% online. [22]

Marketplace Stats

1 in 4 online shoppers expects to use marketplaces more to research and purchase in the coming year. [17]

90% of U.S. independent online retailers sell through marketplaces. [17]

ChannelAdvisor estimates that marketplace sales account for approximately 25% of total online retail sales. [17]

35% of online shoppers start their searches on a marketplace. [17]

65% of online shoppers chose marketplaces over other retailers because of better prices. [17]

Over 90% of people buying on Amazon wouldn’t purchase an item with less than three starts. [18]

Online Curated and Subscription Services Stats

23% of online shoppers have signed up for an online subscription service. [17]

53% of online shoppers have cancelled a subscription service. [17]

10% of online shoppers have signed up for online curated service. [17]

61% of online shoppers cancelled curated service. [17]

Mobile Stats

Smartphone sales volumes will reach 2.05 billion by 2020. [1]

Mobile payments for online goods and services will grow over the next five years and beyond from an estimated 452.78 million global users in 2014 to 2.07 billion users in 2019. [1]

M-commerce will reach $284 billion, or 45% of the total U.S. e-commerce market, by 2020. [6]

80% of e-commerce retailers with at least $50 million in annual sales either currently offer or plan to offer m-commerce. [6]

One third of all ecommerce purchases during the 2015 holiday season were made on a smartphone. [7]

80% of shoppers used a mobile phone inside of a physical store to either look up product reviews, compare prices or find alternative store locations. [7]

60% of shoppers say they plan to start making more purchases on their smartphones in 2016. 54% are more likely to shop with a retailer that makes it easy to buy on several devices and platforms. [8]

60% of consumers have completed a “buy online” to “pickup in-store” purchase via mobile. [18]

Only 40% of retailers engage with customers through a loyalty app. [18]

Despite retailers making big mobile investments in 2016, basic functions like page load times (47%), site/app navigation (31%) still disappoint buyers. [18]

1 in 5 searches on US android mobile app are voice searches. [19]

Mobile sessions accounted for 59% of all sessionsby device on eCommerce sites, but these mobile browsers made up just 38% of revenue. [19]

Conversion rates on smartphone (1.5% average) are one third of those of desktop (4.4%). [19]

Personalization Stats

By 2026, consumers will have come to expect a high level of convenience and personalization in their interactions with retailers and brands and will accept that this is enabled by sharing personal data. [1]

56% of consumers say Amazon demonstrates an understanding of their individual preferences and needs on a regular basis—a number that dwarfs consumers’ feelings about traditional retailers. [8]

88% of consumers say they’re more likely to shop with retailers that deliver personalized and connected cross-channel experiences. [8]

94% of companies see “higher engagement and conversion rates” as benefits of a commitment to customer experience. [8]

Only 39% of retailers send personalized product recommendations via email. [9]

Less than 10% of tier 1 retailers believe they are highly effective at personalization. [9]

The biggest challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%). [9]

Nearly three-fourths (74%) of online consumers get frustrated with Web sites when content (e.g., offers, ads, promotions) appears that has nothing to do with their interests. [9]

Smart personalization engines used to recognize customer intent will enable digital businesses to increase their profits by up to 15%. [10]

79 percent of organizations that exceeded revenue goals have a documented personalization strategy, compared to 31 percent of those that met revenue goals and 8 percent of those that missed revenue goals. [10]

Personalized home page promotions influenced 85% of consumers to buy while personalized shopping cart recommendations influenced 92% of shoppers online. [10]

Shopping Cart Abandonment Stats

56% of shoppers said that being presented with unexpected costs is the reason they leave without completing their purchase. [11]

Online shoppers abandon their shopping carts 68% of the time. [12]

At the average abandonment rate of 68% each of these sites could be losing $3 billion, if not more. [12]

A PayPal study revealed that 43% of shoppers abandoned shopping carts because the shipping charges were too high. [12]

Out of 10 items that get tossed into an average user’s online shopping cart, only about 3.2 items end up being purchased. [13]

The global average cart abandonment rate increased from 71.39% to 77.24%.

Furthermore, the cart abandonment rate of each individual device increased as well. The biggest increase in rate was for mobile, (8.66 percentage points), then tablet (5.36 percentage points) and lastly for the desktop (3.67 percentage points). [13]

23% of users will abandon their shopping cart if they have to create a new user account. [14]

54% of shoppers will purchase products left in shopping carts, if those products are offered at a lower price. [14]

An inconvenient returns policy deters 80%of shoppers. [19]

Online Customer Reviews Stats

55% of shoppers say that online reviews influence their buying decision. [14]

88% of consumers say that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations’ [15]

Buyers consult reviews early in the search, with 68% reading reviews as they build their shortlist. [15]

40% of buyers form an opinion of a business after reading just 1-3 reviews. [15]

Reviews can have an impact of up to 10% on a business’s search rankings. [15]

72% of buyers will take actiononly after reading a positive review. [15]

92%of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews. [16]

30%of consumers say they begin their purchase research by going to Amazon and reading reviews. [16]

Four or more negative articles about your company or product appearing in Google search results is likely to cause you to lose 70% of potential customers. [16]

It only takes one to three negative reviews for most people to decide not to buy your product or service. [16]

eCommerce Shipping and Fulfillment Stats

50% of online shoppers have shipped to store for pickup. [17]

48% of online shoppers find guaranteed delivery dates important when checking out online. [17]

51% of online shoppers are satisfied with availability of same-delivery options. [17]

31% of online shoppers expect expedited shipping options to get orders faster when checking out online. [17]

Two-day delivery preference is up significantly (20% in 2016 vs 16% in 2015 and 10% in 2014). [17]

Over half of shoppers are interested in an alternate pickup location with extended hours and lower fees. [17]

65% of shoppers prefer home delivery. [17]

85% of Amazon users hesitate to buy because of shipping charges, while slow shipping deters both Prime and non-Prime members (60% and 41% respectively. [18]

Free shipping is the incentive online shoppers want most. [18]

B2B eCommerce

Frost & Sullivan projects that B2B e-commerce will hit $6.7 trillion in sales worldwide by 2020, accounting for 27% of all B2B sales. [4]

On average, B2B researchers do 12 searches prior to engaging on a specific brand’s site. [2]

80% of companies implementing B2B e-commerce believe that their customer expectations have changed due to B2C practices. [2]

50% of B2B buyers surveyed identified improved personalization as being a key feature for suppliers they would want to work with. [2]

30 percent of today’s B2B buyers complete at least half of their purchase online. It is the expected the percentageto double by 56% in 2017. [3]

According to a June 2015 survey of US B2B companies from Accenture and Blackstone Group, 86% offered an online website as a purchasing channel to B2B buyers. [4]

By 2018, 40% of B2B digital commerce sites will use price optimization algorithms and configure, price, quote (CPQ) tools to calculate and deliver product pricing dynamically. [5]

Spending on B2B e-commerce platform technologies, systems and services continue at a pace over 2X the B2C e-Commerce market. [5]

The number of capabilities in e-commerce technology stacks is increasingTotal Cost of Ownership (TCO), making companies consider a unified cloud platform more than before. [5]

Social Media Influence

34% of online shoppers said that social media influences their purchases. [17]

23% of online shoppers purchased products on a social media network. [17]

28% of online shoppers are likely to comment on social media when dissatisfied. [17]

When looking for new products, social media is more influential for online shoppers, up 4% to 24% in 2016. [17]

Referrals from Instagram spend the longest time on eCommerce sites, with an average session duration of 192 seconds – almost double Facebook and Triple Pinterest. [19]

Facebook has the highest conversion rate for all social media ecommerce traffic at 1.85%. [20]

71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others. [21]

Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content. [21]

In 2015 Facebook influenced 52 per cent of consumers’ online and offline purchases, up from 36 per cent in 2014. [21]

78% of people who complain to a brand via Twitter expect a response within an hour.[21]

Sources and Citation Info

Just a reminder, none of these statistics in this blog post are based on nChannel research. We just did the dirty work of finding and compiling the most compelling stats about eCommerce. We hope it can serve as a convenient resource for your own needs.

Feel free to link to this post, but for any formal or academic purposes, please cite the original source of data. Below you’ll find where we found the statistics. Check out these sites for even more data about your specific interests.

1. http://www.criteo.com/media/4094/ovum-the-future-of-e-commerce-the-road-to-2026.pdf, Criteo
2. http://ecommerceandb2b.com/b2b-e-commerce-trends-statistics/, eCommerce & B2B
3. http://www.avatarsyndicate.com/inline/b2b-e-commerce-statistics-latest-trends-2017/, Avatar
4. https://www.emarketer.com/Article/B2B-Ecommerce-Market-Still-Maturing/1014311, eMarketer
5. https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/09/12/predicting-the-future-of-b2b-e-commerce/#7cc7561e1eb9, Forbes
6. http://www.businessinsider.com/mobile-commerce-shopping-trends-stats-2016-10, Business Insider
7. http://www.outerboxdesign.com/web-design-articles/mobile-ecommerce-statistics, Outerbox Design
8. https://blog.optimizely.com/2016/08/30/website-personalization-shopper-stats/, Optimizely
9. http://www.cmo.com/features/articles/2015/2/18/mind-blowing-stats-personalization.html#gs.6vEEC_Q, CMO
10. http://www.business2community.com/marketing/10-surprising-stats-personalization-01791432#VyXl1Vbb72cShGEz.97, Business 2 Community
11. https://www.shopify.com/blog/8484093-why-online-retailers-are-losing-67-45-of-sales-and-what-to-do-about-it, Shopify
12. http://www.cpcstrategy.com/blog/2014/03/why-are-shoppers-leaving-my-site/, CPC Strategy
13. https://www.barilliance.com/cart-abandonment-rate-statistics/, Barilliance
14. https://blog.kissmetrics.com/5-ecommerce-stats/, Kissmetrics
15. http://blog.capterra.com/customer-reviews-stats-you-need-to-know/, Capterra
16. https://zuberance.com/zuberrants/category/top-10-stats-about-online-reviews, Zuberance
17. https://solvers.ups.com/ups-pulse-of-the-online-shopper/, UPS Pulse of the Online Shopper
18. https://www.forbes.com/sites/tompopomaronis/2016/12/19/these-12-astonishing-shopping-facts-perfectly-sum-up-e-commerce-for-2016/#85e44ae38bee, Forbes
19. http://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/ecommerce-strategy/37-indispensable-ecommerce-stats-to-inform-your-2017-strategy/, Smart Insights
20. https://www.shopify.com/blog/12731545-which-social-media-platforms-drive-the-most-sales-infographic, Shopify
21. https://www.dreamgrow.com/21-social-media-marketing-statistics/, Dreamgrow
22. https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/ecommerce-trends/, BigCommerce

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