The Maze: US online retail accelerated in the second quarter of 2026. Dollar sales grew faster online than across retail as a whole, which includes the online channel. The broad retail market was picking up, too. The question for retailers is how much of their own growth came from winning orders in the channel that gained share.
📈 The growth gap widened. Marketplace Pulse reports 12.2% annual online growth, versus 6.7% for total US retail. Both figures are seasonally adjusted and measure spending in dollars, not items sold. This was the second straight double-digit quarter for online retail after roughly 5% growth in 2025. The latest difference is 5.5 percentage points between growth rates, rather than a 5.5-point change in share.
🛒 Online took a bigger slice. Online accounted for 17.1% of retail sales, or about $17 of every $100. A larger share can coexist with growing store sales. A retailer could beat the all-retail growth figure and still lag its online competitors. Its own category and customer mix are the closer benchmark.
Our take: Compare revenue momentum with market share and order volume before moving money between channels.
🏷️ Separate prices from orders. Marketplace Pulse estimates inflation-adjusted online growth near 8%. Track orders, units and selling prices separately to see how much of your revenue gain reflects more shopping. A category with rising average prices can generate higher revenue even with unchanged orders. Track units per order, too: order counts alone can miss customers buying less each time.
📏 Match the yardstick to the business. The comparison includes 28% growth in Shopify’s North American merchant sales. Benchmark a US retailer against its own online category; a platform’s sales across merchants and countries answer a different question. Walmart’s 24% US ecommerce growth and Amazon’s 15% online-store growth are useful operating signals. They cannot be added to Shopify’s figure or turned into shares of the same US market.
Sources: Marketplace Pulse
