150+ eCommerce statistics and facts for 2022

Whether you’re a long-term fan of online shopping or you’ve been pushed towards shopping online due to world events this year, it is impossible to deny how eCommerce has changed the face of retail. The whole world has been moving towards shopping online since the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Amazon was a website that just sold books – rather than almost everything under the sun! Since eCommerce is the biggest thing to happen to retail since the barcode was invented, we thought we’d take a look at some of the statistics that really matter in 2020.

 

Let’s get started by looking at the major players in eCommerce – then we’ll get to the biggest companies and the incredible statistics that those companies produce, followed by worldwide figures and where the most eCommerce sales come from, before a quick look at social media and eCommerce, B2B eCommerce, mCommerce and payments. There’s going to be a lot of numbers to take in – are you ready? 

Who’s who of eCommerce

We all know that Jeff Bezos – the founder of Amazon – is richer than anyone in the world, (and possibly richer than anyone ever will be?!) but do you know who else is in the eCommerce billionaires club? Here are the biggest winners in eCommerce today:

 

1. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos is currently worth $179.8 billion – and that is even after a $35 billion divorce settlement!
2. Alibaba Group cofounder Jack Ma is currently worth $47.9 billion
3. eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is currently worth $17.6 billion
4. Shopify founder Tobias Lutke is currently worth $8.4 billion
5. Wish cofounder Peter Szulczewski is currently worth $1.8 billion

Note that Jeff Bezos is currently worth over $100 billion MORE than the rest of the five people on the list! Although if they’re billionaires, we doubt that they are probably feeling the pinch, so we won’t offer them too much sympathy.

 

The biggest eCommerce companies worldwide

If you’re not in the eCommerce industry, you might be under the impression that the two biggest eCommerce companies in the world are Amazon and eBay – and although Amazon is the second biggest, eBay is way down the list in fourth place. Chinese companies Alibaba gets first place, and JD.com (also known as Jingdong and was formerly named 360buy) is right behind Amazon to round out the top three.

 

Alibaba >$768 billion (B2B, C2C)

Amazon $280.5 billion (B2C, C2C)

JD.com $215 billion (C2C, B2C)

eBay $93 billion (C2C, C2B)

Shopify $33 billion (C2C)

Rakuten >$31 billion (B2C)

Walmart >$19 billion (B2C, C2C)

Source: The Motley Fool

 

Note how, that although we might think that Amazon is the biggest eCommerce retailer in the world, Alibaba has more than twice the revenue of Amazon. Most of the Alibaba Group’s operations are based in and around China, and are marketed mostly at Chinese customers, so that’s pretty impressive. Let’s take a closer look at Alibaba.

 

eCommerce statistics from Alibaba

The Alibaba Group was set up in 1999 by Jack Ma, with the intention to sell more Chinese items worldwide. They’re achieving that too, since many items that are sold online come from Alibaba or AliExpress, either from sellers who buy the stock in bulk from Alibaba suppliers, or using DropShipping from AliExpress.

 

It’s worth noting that the Alibaba Group actually encompasses more than one company – there are 13 separate entities within the Alibaba Group! The companies that Alibaba includes are:

 

Alibaba is a B2B marketplace that allows businesses to buy at wholesale prices – Alibaba alone reported a net income of over $3.1 billion in May 2020.

Alibaba Cloud is a cloud computing services company is worth $5.6 billion – but that is just 1/6^th the size of Amazon Web Services!

AliExpress is a B2C marketplace that allows retailers to sell worldwide is reported to be worth $3.83 billion.

AliOS is a Linux distribution designed for smart devices provides an operating system for free (as part of the Android Open Source Project) and took more than 1600 engineers to develop it.

Alipay is a third party mobile and online payment platform that has more than 1.2 billion unique users worldwide.

AliGenie is an open platform intelligent personal assistant and as of October 2019, had been installed on more than 200 million devices.

Taobao is an online shopping website that has more than 299 million daily active users, and made more than $853 billion in general merchandise sales in 2019.

Tmall is a B2C online retail website that was created in 2008 and now has a GMV of approximately 3.2 trillion yuan.

Lazada an international e-commerce company that was formed in 2012, and was sold to the Alibaba group in 2016, having been valued at around $2 billion.

1688.com is a multinational technology company specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet, and technology. In China over the last twelve months, it is the fifth most used online store.

Daraz is an online marketplace and logistics company and was worth around $250 million when it was bought by the Alibaba group in 2018. By 2021 it was predicted to be a billion dollar industry.

PayTM is an Indian e-commerce payment system and financial technology company and is preparing to launch an initial public offering (IPO) in 2022. The PayTM company made Vijay Shekar Sharma the youngest billionaire of India in 2017.

Xiaomi is an electronics company that was set up in 2010 and currently has a 9.7% market share of the global smartphone market.

 

The statistics that most interest us in terms of the global eCommerce market belong to Alibaba and AliExpress. In 2019, the Alibaba platform had 960 million annual active customers, while AliExpress (the B2C platform) has just 79 million annual active customers.

 

Amazon eCommerce statistics

Jeff Bezos left his job to launch Amazon from his garage in 1994, and since then Amazon has grown to be one of the world’s most widely used and recognisable retailers. 119,928,851 products were on sale on Amazon in April 2019, and there are more than 4000 items sold on Amazon.com every minute! That is likely to have changed significantly during the COVID-19 lockdowns, but this figure is still incredibly impressive. 225,000 sellers on Amazon marketplaces worldwide have made more than $100,000 in sales.

 

89% of customers agree that they are more likely to buy from Amazon than other eCommerce websites, while 66% of customers say they start their search for a product on Amazon.

 

86% of British people use Amazon on a regular basis, while 44% of US Amazon shoppers have bought electronics from the platform.

 

Amazon has more than 150 million Amazon Prime members worldwide. 103 million of those subscribers alone were in the US! Prime members are generally very engaged with the brand and make purchases from Amazon a few times a week or more.

 

Although the power of Amazon worldwide is undeniable, there are plenty of critics of the company – around half of Amazon users say they believe that Amazon is responsible for the decline of the high street. However, 75% of Amazon shoppers say they check in-store prices on Amazon, while 70% say they research products they want to buy elsewhere, but ultimately turn to Amazon when they want to buy. While there are clearly other factors at play with the decline of the high street, it is perhaps not surprising that Amazon is having an impact on the retail sector.

 

JD.com eCommerce statistics

JD.com (also known as JingDong and formally known at 360buy) is the main competitor in China to Alibaba’s Tmall. It was founded in 1998, with the B2C platform being made available in 2004. Like Amazon and Tmall, JD.com has an incredible array of products for sale, from fresh food and clothing, to electronics and cosmetics. JD.com has established itself as a quality retailer, and they have a zero tolderance policy to counterfeit goods, which no doubt contributes to the success of the platform.

 

As of 2019, the JD.com marketplace had 220,000 sellers, which was up by 29% year on year. JD has more than 650 warehouses are located in 81 cities across China, totalling more than 16 million square meters, at the end September 2019.

 

When it comes to customers, there are currently 310.50 million annual active customer accounts on JD.com, and 88 million of those accounts are active daily. The JD platform is growing too – the revenue for the twelve months ending March 31, 2020 was $85.471 billion, a 23.38% increase year-over-year. 90% of JD.com orders were placed via mobile devices. That’s not surprising though, considering that there are around 1.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions registered in China – which is more than the entire population of the country!

 

eBay eCommerce statistics

Established in 1995, eBay now has 23 international websites that are popular in over 100 countries. Although the marketplace began as an auction site, now more than 89% of goods sold on eBay are fixed price rather than auction, and more than 80% of items sold on eBay are brand new.

 

eBay has around 182 million active buyers worldwide, and there are more than 1.5 billion eBay listings. This adds up to $2.8 billion of revenue.

 

A huge contributor to eBay’s success is due to the app – it has been downloaded 476 million times. Around 66 million users access the app monthly, and electronics and accessories is the most popular category – around 16.4% of items sold on eBay are from this category. However customers visit eBay, they don’t spend long browsing – the average visit lasts just 7 minutes and 22 seconds.

 

Walmart eCommerce statistics

The Walmart entity is made up of three sections: Walmart US, Walmart International and Sam’s Club.

There are 4,756 stores throughout the United States

Walmart eCommerce sales in 2019 were $27.81 billion, which is around 4.6% share of the US eCommerce market. Worldwide, Walmart have around a 0.5% share of the total retail market.

 

eCommerce sales are currently just 8% of Walmart’s total revenue, but the company is working to increase their eCommerce presence to remain competitive with Amazon. Forbes predicted this figure to rise to expected to reach 12.3% in 2020, but this report was prior to the impact of COVID-19, so it is pretty likely that this will increase.

 

eCommerce website solution statistics

While online marketplaces might commandeer the bulk of eCommerce sales worldwide, not all those incredible eCommerce sales happen on Alibaba, Amazon and eBay. Many businesses have their own websites, but not all are using original code to build their websites – some are using solutions from website building tools that include themes, plugins, add-ons and apps to create the functionality that they need.

 

Currently Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce hold just under two thirds of market share:

Shopify – 21%

WooCommerce – 26%

Magento – 9%

OpenCart – 3%

BigCommerce – 3%

Other solutions – 37%

 

The ‘big three’ of eCommerce website solutions are Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce – they’re the ones that are the most well-known. While they are the most widely used solutions, they’re far from the only options for businesses to choose from, and although each of them help to create a website, they’re not the only solutions available. There are loads of different website builders, and when building a new website – especially where payments will need to be processed – businesses must ensure they’re using the best, and most secure solution for their needs.

 

Shopify eCommerce statistics

Shopify is a software as a service eCommerce solution that was developed in 2004 when the founders attempted to open an online store for snowboarding equipment. They found they weren’t happy with the eCommerce solutions that were available, and so Tobias Lütke (who was a computer programmer by trade) decided they would build their own solution. One of Shopify’s main aims is to make selling as simple as possible, and to that end they offer their users 24/7 customer support via email, live chat and phone. Not only that, they work to continually improve their platform – to date they have paid over $1 million to ethical hackers to help secure customer transactions and data. If you are worried about your own site’s security this guide is insanely in-depth full of tips. 

 

Today there are more than one million Shopify stores in existence, with more than $135 billion of total platform sales that have been processed to date. They’ve processed over a billion orders, and are way past that number now – they received order number one billion in Q2, 2018.

 

In 2019, total revenue for Shopify was $1.578 billion, which was a 47% increase on 2018. The top 10 countries with the biggest Shopify use are:

1. China
2. United States
3. France
4. Australia
5. Russia
6. Canada
7. Germany
8. United Kingdom
9. Japan
10. South Korea

Businesses and web developers love Shopify for how quickly a website can be made live and they can start selling. There are more than 100 themes available to help businesses build and customise a Shopify store, taking huge amounts of time out of design work and coding. Not all of those themes are free, and more than 350,000 paid themes have been used by sellers.

It isn’t just design work that Shopify saves time on either. There are more than 4,200 apps in the Shopify App Store, and 25.8 million apps have been installed by Shopify users. These apps provide functionality such as payment gateways (although Shopify charges for these, as they want businesses to use their own), SEO tools, customer behavior analytics and customer service tools such as chatbots and messaging tools.

All this adds up to an incredibly successful eCommerce website solution. There are now Shopify customers in 175 countries – which is pretty much worldwide. Not bad going for a group of snowboarders from Canada.

 

Magento eCommerce statistics

Magento is an open source eCommerce website solution that offers both a service hosted version, and an on-premise platform for businesses. Open source means the code for the solution is freely available for anyone to work with and adapt, and that means developers can quickly create websites that suit the needs of the business.

 

Similar to Shopify, there are extensions and themes available from Magento, which helps developers to create websites and add extra functionality pretty quickly. The Magento store has more than 5000 plugins and apps, with many offered for free.

 

Magento doesn’t just power small business websites though – big brands like Ford, Omega Watches, Christian Louboutin, Bulgari, Land Rover, and Harvey Nichols all rely on Magento to power their online stores.

 

Magento powers 1.2% of the internet, which is 12% of all eCommerce websites – and it is the second most popular eCommerce solution. There are more than 202 Magento users are in the Internet Retailer Top 1000 list, and Magento handles more than $155 billion in gross merchandise every year. It is expected that worldwide eCommerce sales from Magento websites will smash past $224 billion by the end of 2020.

 

Despite the fact that Magento offers no customer support at all (although there is an incredibly active community of more than 150,000 developers that offer support to one another), Magento became so successful that it was bought by Adobe in 2018 for $1.68 billion.

 

WooCommerce & WordPress eCommerce statistics

WooCommerce is another open source eCommerce solution that retail businesses love. WooCommerce is a plugin that helps businesses to create an eCommerce store on WordPress websites. Both WordPress and WooCommerce are free to use, and just like Magento, since both are open source, anyone can audit, modify, or extend the code to suit their own needs. It is perhaps unsurprising then, that WooCommerce is by far the most popular plugin in any category – it has a 75% market share, completely smashing the 13% that Ecwid and 8% that Hextom have managed.

 

It is near impossible to know how many themes are available for WooCommerce, since there are many WordPress themes that offer WooCommerce support, as well as themes that are available on other marketplaces and design websites – but WordPress.org has 1,068 themes as we write this post. When it comes to plugins, apps and add-ons, the figure is almost countless too, since not all WooCommerce developers post their offering in the WordPress store. However,

 

WooCommerce powers 22% of the top 1 million ecommerce sites in the world, and as of August 2020, WooCommerce has been downloaded 103,320,450 times (and of course, that’s constantly increasing, so click the link to get the most recent figure). That is possibly in part because of the fact that WooCommerce supports 56 languages – making it more accessible than Shopify (which supports 20 languages) and Magento (30 languages).

 

The company that owns WooCommerce also owns WordPress, and in their last series D funding round, (completed in September 2019) had raised $613.7 million in 8 funding rounds. The company doesn’t disclose their earnings, so it is impossible to know how much the company is worth, but we’re willing to bet that their profits aren’t small.

 

Worldwide eCommerce statistics

Total eCommerce sales are expected to reach $6.54 trillion by 2022. In 2021, more than 2.14 billion people will buy goods and services online, and by 2040, the majority (around 95%) of purchases are expected to be eCommerce. Today, two in three businesses (66%) that sell online are already selling cross-border, but there are major differences in eCommerce in different areas. Let’s take a look at the breakdown of eCommerce in different continents worldwide, starting at home.

 

UK eCommerce statistics

UK retail ecommerce sales will account for 27.5% of total retail sales this year, and sales are expected to far exceed £200 million. In the UK, the most popular category is clothing and sporting goods, with a 60% share of the market.

 

The top 5 most popular UK online retailers (non-grocery) are:

Amazon (estimated 362 million monthly visits)

eBay (estimated 254.5 million monthly visits)

Argos (estimated 41.9 million monthly visits)

Screwfix (estimated 21.2 million monthly visits)

Marks and Spencer (estimated 21 million monthly visits)

 

In the UK, PayPal and credit or debit cards are the most popular method of payment online, with 49% and 37% respectively in 2019. Other methods such as Amazon Pay, Google Pay and Apple Pay are becoming more popular, but most multichannel retailers are slow to adopt these methods, which may account for their slow growth in the UK market.

 

Europe eCommerce statistics

eCommerce revenue in Europe is expected to grow to $510.5 billion by 2024, and around 70% of European internet users have made online purchases in the last 12 months. There is a dramatic difference in the number of internet users who purchase online, with just 16% of internet users in Montenegro buying online, compared to more than 80% in other countries such as Denmark, The Netherlands and Sweden. There isn’t anything to suggest that there is a problem with eCommerce in the countries that don’t shop online though – 73% said that they simply prefer shopping in person in order to be able to see the products before purchasing them, out of loyalty to shops or through force of habit.

 

The most popular category in European eCommerce is clothing and sporting goods, which makes up around 65% of purchases. This led to the 500 largest online retailers in Europe growing by 16.9% in 2019, and in line with global trends, more than 35% of online shoppers made purchases from sellers in other EU countries.

 

The top 5 European online retailers in 2019 were:

1. Amazon (European headquarters in Luxembourg) – with €89 billion turnover in Europe
2. Otto Group (Germany) – with €12.06 billion turnover in Europe
3. John Lewis PLC (UK) – with €7.46 billion turnover in Europe
4. Apple (Ireland) – with €63 billion turnover in Europe
5. Zalando SE (Germany) – with €6480 million turnover in Europe

North America eCommerce statistics

 

US consumers spent in excess of $586.92 billion on eCommerce in 2019, and it is expected that the North American e-retail market will surpass 1 trillion U.S. dollars by 2022.

80% of US internet users have made at least one online purchase, with the favourite category in the US being books, music and video, which has 62.7% of the market.

 

The top five US online retailers are:

1. Amazon (estimated monthly traffic: 2.012 billion visits)
2. eBay (estimated monthly traffic: 746.5 million visits)
3. Walmart (estimated monthly traffic: 294.5 million visits)
4. Etsy (estimated monthly traffic: 222.5 million visits)
5. Home Depot (estimated monthly traffic: 129.5 million visits)

Note how Amazon dramatically outperform the rest of the top five – the rest of the top five don’t even match the numbers of visits to Amazon!

 

South America eCommerce statistics

Although eCommerce sales in Latin America are much smaller than in North America, in 2019 it reached more than $70 billion, and that figure is expected to reach approximately $83.6 billion this year (forecast adjusted to account for COVID-19). 155.5 million people use online platforms to buy goods and services in 2019 in Latin America. The most popular eCommerce category in the region is travel, with 47% of the market, closely followed by fashion, with 44% of the market.

 

The most popular eCommerce website in Latin America is Mercado Libre, generating $2.3 billion in 2019, with $1.4 billion being spent in Brazil alone.

The retailers with the most traffic in Latin America are:

1. Mercado Libre (estimated monthly traffic: 56.3 million visits)
2. Amazon (estimated monthly traffic: 22.4 million visits)
3. B2W Digital (estimated monthly traffic: 16.1 million visits)
4. Alibaba (estimated monthly traffic: 11.8 million visits)
5. eBay (estimated monthly traffic: 9.5 million visits)

The majority of eCommerce purchases in Latin America in 2020 were from Brazil and Mexico, with 32.49% and 28.8% of purchases in these countries. Argentina, Colombia and Chile have around 8% of purchases, and with other countries making less than 5% of purchases across the region.

 

Australia eCommerce statistics

Australia is the tenth largest eCommerce market in the world by revenue, and the Australian eCommerce market value is expected to be more than $25.2 billion by 2021. From a population of 23.35 million, that’s not bad going! Internet penetration is pretty impressive, with 22.31 million users, and 32.89 million mobile phone connections.

 

The biggest eCommerce retailers in Australia are:

1. eBay (estimated monthly traffic: 69.6 million visits)
2. Amazon (estimated monthly traffic: 22.5 million visits)
3. Woolworths (estimated monthly traffic: 20.4 million visits)
4. JB Hi-Fi (estimated monthly traffic: 13.3 million visits)
5. Big W (estimated monthly traffic: 11.9 million visits)

The most popular categories in Australia eCommerce stores are variety stores (35.6%), fashion (27%) and homeware and appliances (11.5%).

 

The average revenue per user (ARPU) in Australia is expected to amount to US $1,408.81 each year. This is in part due to a service called AfterPay, which was introduced in 2015 and allows customers to pay off products in instalments with no interest. Around 10,000 websites offer this service in Australia.

 

Asia eCommerce statistics

Asia eCommerce sales are expected to US$1,433,199 million by the end of 2020. However, we’re not quite sure where to start with breaking down Asian eCommerce, since both China and India are responsible for a huge chunk of worldwide eCommerce sales and deserve their own individual analysis! To keep things succinct, we’ll focus on these two countries in this section.

 

China

China’s eCommerce market is the biggest in the world – their sales total 15.9% of total retail sales, and over 40% of the whole world’s retail ecommerce revenue – which amounts to $672 billion. With over 1.4 billion people in the country, and the fact that two of the world’s biggest eCommerce businesses (Alibaba Group and JD.com) were launched there, it should come as no surprise that eCommerce in China is so huge.

The biggest eCommerce retailers in China are Taobao, Pinduoduo, JD.com, VIP.com and Tmall.

 

India

The estimated size of the eCommerce market in India is $73 billion – and this figure is expected to more than double by 2025. The population of India is smaller than China, at just under 1.4 billion, and there is a 74% active eCommerce penetration. Fashion is the biggest selling category in India, closely followed by electronics.

 

The top five eCommerce websites in India are:

1. Amazon
2. Flipkart
3. Jabong
4. Snapdeal
5. Myntra

There are many government initiatives that are encouraging growth in the Indian eCommerce sector, and there has been more than $4.32 billion in investment put into Indian eCommerce companies, so we expect to see much more from Indian eCommerce in the coming years.

 

Africa eCommerce statistics

Africa’s eCommerce market is significantly smaller than the rest of the world. The global average spend on eCommerce purchases in 2019 was $499 per person. Across the African nations, this was much, much lower: In South Africa, the average online spend was just $109, while in Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Morocco, individuals spent between just $41 and $96.

 

There are a number of issues that currently impact the emerging eCommerce markets across Africa – from lower levels of disposable income, payment issues (cash on delivery is still widely used in many African nations to avoid scepticism) and accessibility in delivery.

The most popular eCommerce platforms across Africa include:

• Jumia (launched in Nigeria in 2012) has over half a million sellers
• Takealot (launched in South Africa in 2002) makes around 79 billion in revenue
• Kilimall (launched in Kenya in 2014) has over 10 million users on the platform
• Konga (launched in Lagos in 2012) is referred to as ‘The Amazon of Africa’ and gets more than 83 million visits each month
• Bidorbuy (launched in South Africa in 1999) is similar to eBay in that customers can use the site’s auction facility to encourage trade

There is a lot of talk about how eCommerce can grow across Africa – and while there are a lot of issues still to be resolved, eCommerce in Africa reached $16.5 billion in 2017 and is expected to reach $29 billion by 2022.

 

eCommerce and social media

We can’t talk about eCommerce without mentioning the impact of social media on the sector. We’ll keep it brief, but suffice it to say there is a lot of ways that social media helps eCommerce:

• 83% of people say Instagram helps them discover new products and services
• 81% say that social media helps them research products and services
• 80% say it helps them decide whether to make a purchase

The majority of eCommerce businesses are using social media to help market their products, and the majority of social media users follow a minimum of one business.

Social media companies are of course, not blind to the potential revenue there is on offer, and so there are more eCommerce options being added to platforms – almost daily, it seems!

• A quarter of companies are now selling items via Facebook
• Facebook Pay launched in November 2019, working across Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp
• Shoppable posts have been available on Instagram since 2018
• Even social media newcomer TikTok are testing eCommerce functionality!

We’ll take a look at social media and eCommerce in a future post, but we see huge things for eCommerce as social media companies look to blur the line between social and retail even further.

 

Mobile eCommerce statistics

Just a few decades ago it seemed inconceivable that we would be ordering shopping through the internet on a little device in our hand. The size and clarity of mobile phone screens, slow loading times and the lack of mobile websites meant that trying to shop on a mobile phone used to be a frustrating experience. Most people would give up quickly and wait until they were at their desktop PC to place their orders.

 

In 2020, it is almost as inconceivable that we shouldn’t be able to shop on our phones, wherever we are in the world! mCommerce, M-commerce or mobile commerce – essentially shopping through a smartphone or tablet – has been on the rise for the last few years, and unsurprisingly, it is a huge phenomenon. Driven by faster speed data connections and a mobile-first approach to websites by retailers, mobile commerce has exploded. Approximately 51% of online shoppers now complete purchases via their smartphones.

 

Predictions set mobile eCommerce purchases to be worth $3.56 trillion by 2021. That’s almost tripling over the past four years! Experts predict that mobile eCommerce sales will account for 72.9% of all retail sales by 2021, which shows the impact that mobile eCommerce has had on the retail industry.

 

People are impatient when it comes to page loading times – just 26% of 18 -24 year olds will wait 4-6 seconds for a web page to load, so it is essential that all businesses (but especially retailers) ensure that their website loads quickly and smoothly on mobile devices.

 

The UK mobile commerce market is worth approximately 82.57 billion. That’s over twice the amount of transactions completed in an app, and just under half the amount completed in a desktop browser.

 

Shopify stores are designed to be responsive for mobile, and traffic reflects the global trend towards mobile commerce – more than 81% of traffic and 71% of orders are from mobile traffic.

 

Payment statistics

 

Worldwide, credit and debit cards take the most transactions, while PayPal, Alipay, WeChat Pay and Union Pay have more than 80% share of shoppers in Europe. That might come as a surprise to some, considering most of us have a mobile device in our pockets, most of the time – but Apple Wallet, Google Wallet and Baidu Wallet all have less than 20% market share – except for in India, where such payment methods are as high as 32%.

The five biggest mobile payment platforms online are:

Alipay with more than 1.2 billion active users

WeChat with more than 1.151 billion active users

Apple Pay with more than 441 million active users

PayPal with more than 305 million active users

Samsung Pay with more than 51 million active users

 

Hot on the heels of Samsung Pay are Amazon Pay, with around 50 million users, while Google Pay has just 39 million users worldwide. While we expect users of all mobile payment platforms to continue to increase, how long it will take for these platforms to reach the numbers of users that the top four have remains to be seen.

 

Note how China’s population are driving the mobile payments industry – both Alipay and WeChat are in the billions, whereas Apple Pay doesn’t even hit half a billion. Mobile payments are much, much more common in China – with 81.1% of smartphone users are using them. The next countries that are using mobile payments the most are Denmark (40.9%), India (37.6%), South Korea (36.7%) and Sweden (36.2%). Although mobile payments are slowly taking off, around 92% of millennials said they expected to start using mobile payments in the next three years.

 

Final thoughts

These are pretty impressive statistics as they stand, but at the time of writing, no reports had yet been made available that fully investigate the impact of COVID-19 on the eCommerce sector – although early indications show that the pandemic has boosted eCommerce massively. We expect that the global pandemic has created major changes to the world of eCommerce, and we fully expect reports in late 2022 to paint quite a different picture.

 

With statistics like these, it is pretty safe to say that the world of eCommerce is here to stay, and will continue to grow. If you are looking to grow your ecommerce store have a look at what KPI’s you should be tracking and working towards improving.