As Q4 2025 is already in full swing, the Track Me Fast team explores major trends that are likely to shape the global e-commerce landscape in 2026.
Despite the observed slowdown in global retail sales growth rate YoY, projected for 2025 at 6.8% vs. 7.7% in 2024, per eMarketer, the overall e-commerce market predictions for 2026 remain optimistic across most verticals. And as experts admit, the explosive growth of AI-based technologies will remain among the major industry drivers in the coming year.
Solid Trends: E-commerce Market Volume Continues Growing
While the average e-commerce growth dynamic isn’t likely to undergo significant spikes in 2026, the overall market volume will be growing steadily in the coming months. In this respect, this continued increase will be driven primarily by mobile commerce, expanding e-commerce demand across Asia and South America, and certainly, generative AI.
Namely, according to Statista, global e-commerce revenue is expected to grow at ~6.3% CAGR in 2025-2030, with the projected market volume reaching ~4,960,000,000,000 by 2030.
Accelerating Trends: Generation of Digital Consumer Personas
While the concept of digital twins has already been widely adopted by large ecommerce businesses, most experts agree that this trend will get another push in 2026, through the creation of the so-called digital personas using LLMs to better identify potential shoppers for particular product categories and/or specific products.
This method is likely to help online retailers conduct consumer research more efficiently, hence enabling them to refine personalized, highly nuanced offerings for each consumer cohort, improving sales outcomes during busy holiday seasons and throughout the year.
Emerging Trends: Online Shopping via Agentic AI Tech
Back in September 2025, OpenAI announced the launch of its agentic commerce protocol (short: ACP), enabling online shopping directly via ChatGPT and inviting e-commerce businesses to implement the protocol into their digital properties to ensure a smooth purchasing journey for their customers.
Namely, as of October 2025, the company has deals signed with major e-commerce conglomerates like Walmart and Etsy to power its generative AI tech, but more integrations are expected in 2026.
While at this point the galloping evolution of agentic AI appears to threaten search traffic for e-commerce companies, the integration of ACP can potentially help them mitigate negative effects by driving purchase rates directly via GAI agents.
Namely, even though the immediate impact of these signed deals is still unclear, they definitely mark a colossal shift in how consumers, particularly among Gen Z, will be shopping online in the months to come, given their high daily use of generative AI, compared to other audience segments.