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Ecommerce by Region: USA, Asia-Pacific, Europe and the Middle East & Africa

By Imad Eddine Ajenoui September 29, 2026 September 30, 2026 (updated) 5 min read

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Ecommerce by Region: US retail e-commerce growth

If you sell online, or plan to, one global figure won’t tell you much about where your customers are. Shoppers around the world are expected to spend about $6.88 trillion online in 2026, according to Emarketer forecasts. That is roughly a fifth of all retail sales. But the way that money is spent changes a lot from one part of the world to the next. This article looks at four regions: the USA, Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Middle East and Africa. For each one, you’ll see how big the market is and what is behind its growth.

Ecommerce by region

USA

The USA has some of the clearest ecommerce data anywhere, because the US Census Bureau measures it every quarter. In the second quarter of 2026, Americans spent $340.2 billion online, up 12.2% from a year earlier. Online sales now make up 17.1% of all US retail, or about one dollar in every six. Across all of 2025, they came to $1,233.7 billion. The share creeps up a little most quarters because online sales keep growing faster than retail overall. At the end of 2025, for example, online sales were up 5.3% on the year while total retail rose 2.7%.

Asia Pacific

Asia-Pacific is the largest ecommerce region by a wide margin. Emarketer expects it to hold more than 60% of the world’s online retail sales. Most of that comes from China, where close to half of all retail spending now happens online. Shopping through live video, where a host shows products and viewers buy during the stream, is set to pass $1 trillion across the region for the first time. Growth isn’t even, though. EMARKETER forecasts online sales in the Philippines to rise 21.5% in 2026, while Japan’s grow just 4.7%. India and Southeast Asia are expected to supply much of the region’s next wave of online shoppers.

Europe

Europe’s online market is growing more slowly than Asia’s, and the pace is easing. The European E-commerce Report 2026, released in September by Ecommerce Europe and EuroCommerce, puts online sales to shoppers across 38 countries at €911 billion in 2025. That is 7% more than the year before, or 4% once inflation is taken out. Western Europe makes up 57% of the total but grew the least, at 5%. The fastest gains came from Eastern Europe at 14% and Southern Europe at 11%. For 2026, the report expects growth of about 5%, which would take sales to around €961 billion.

Middle East and Africa

The Middle East and Africa is the smallest of the four regions and the hardest to pin down. Research firms count it in different ways, so their estimates vary a lot. Mordor Intelligence puts the market at $176.68 billion in 2026 and expects it to reach $338.08 billion by 2031, which works out to about 14% growth a year. Much of today’s spending is in Gulf countries such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE, where incomes are high and most orders are placed on phones. In much of Africa, shoppers often pay through mobile money services like M-Pesa in Kenya instead of bank cards. Patchy delivery networks there still slow things down.

Conclusion

Asia-Pacific is where most of the world’s online spending happens, with China setting the pace. American shoppers keep moving online at a steady rate, and about one in six retail dollars now goes through a website or app. Europe is still growing, but more slowly, and most of its new growth is coming from the east and south. The Middle East and Africa starts from a much smaller base but is expected to grow quickly. If you compare these markets, check what each number measures. Some figures are real sales and others are forecasts, and they don’t all use the same currency.

Sources

Written by

Imad Eddine Ajenoui

Ben Ajenoui is the Marketing Director of OpenCart LTD, where he oversees marketing strategy for one of the world's leading ecommerce platforms with 350,000+ active stores. He's also the Founder of SEO HERO LTD, a Hong Kong-based SEO agency that has helped 50+ businesses achieve 40-300% organic traffic growth. Ben specializes in ecommerce SEO, technical optimization, and data-driven content strategies.