US Ecommerce Growth Doubled, Canada Went the Other Way

US online retail grew 12.2% year on year in the second quarter of 2026, more than double the pace of a year earlier. Canadian ecommerce hit 7.7% of retail in June. Shopify says it now handles over 14% of US ecommerce. Below is what the official 2026 numbers show for merchants selling in or into the US and Canada, which popular statistics fall apart when you check them, and what we would change in a store because of it.

Every figure here comes from a primary source: the US Census Bureau, Statistics Canada, Shopify's own results and earnings call, Adobe Analytics and Leger. We checked each one on 17 September 2026. Where a number could not be confirmed at source, we left it out.

What are the biggest Shopify trends in the US and Canada right now?

Five things stand out in the 2026 data. US ecommerce growth has sharply accelerated. Shopify is growing far faster than the market it sits in. AI assistants have started sending real, though still small, order volume. Cross-border selling into the US now carries customs cost on every parcel. And in Canada, a second round of US tariffs has revived Buy Canadian sentiment, with price still deciding most purchases.

How fast is US ecommerce growing in 2026?

Faster than in any quarter shown in the Census Bureau's latest release. The Census Bureau's Q2 2026 release puts seasonally adjusted US retail ecommerce at US$340.2 billion, up 12.2% on Q2 2025. Total retail grew 6.7% over the same period, so online is growing at almost twice the rate of retail overall.

The more interesting number is the trend. Here is year-on-year ecommerce growth for each quarter in the same release:

Growth roughly doubled between the second half of 2025 and the first half of 2026. Two cautions before reading too much into that. The Census figures are not adjusted for inflation, so part of the jump is higher prices, including tariff-driven ones. And Q2 2026 is a preliminary estimate that can be revised. Even so, a move from 5% to 12% is too large to be rounding.

Shopper behaviour points the same way. Adobe's holiday 2025 data showed US$257.8 billion spent online between 1 November and 31 December, 56.4% of transactions on a smartphone (up from 54.5% in 2024), and buy now, pay later passing US$20 billion for the season. If your mobile checkout is slower or clumsier than desktop, it is now the majority of your transactions that pay for it.

How big is Shopify in the US ecommerce market?

On the Q2 2026 earnings call, CFO Jeff Hoffmeister said Shopify represents over 14% of the US ecommerce market. He added, citing eMarketer, that since the start of 2025 Shopify merchants have captured nearly half of all incremental US ecommerce dollars.

Compare that with the Census data. US ecommerce grew 12.2% in Q2 2026. Shopify's Q2 results show total GMV up 32%, and North America GMV up 28%. These are not like-for-like measures. Shopify's GMV includes point-of-sale and B2B orders, and its North America figure is not only the US. But a gap of more than two to one is wide enough to say Shopify merchants are taking share, not just riding the market.

The practical meaning for a merchant: your competitors in the US are increasingly on the same platform, with the same checkout and the same app ecosystem. Platform choice is no longer a differentiator. Product, speed, data quality and operations are.

Where is Shopify growing fastest outside the online store?

In physical retail and wholesale. Offline GMV grew 32% and B2B GMV grew 76% in Q2 2026, according to Hoffmeister. Management named Canadian retailers Holt Renfrew and Canada Goose among recent point-of-sale wins, and said native B2B features had been extended beyond Shopify Plus for the first time.

That second change matters to mid-sized brands in both countries. Wholesale ordering, price lists and company accounts used to be a reason to upgrade to Plus or bolt on an app. For many stores that is no longer true, which we cover in detail in our guide to Shopify B2B without Plus. If you run wholesale through spreadsheets and email, 2026 is the year to price out moving it into the same admin as your retail store.

Is AI shopping actually driving sales yet?

Yes, but from a small base. On the Q2 call, Shopify said AI-driven traffic and orders to Shopify stores both tripled year on year, while describing the volume as still small relative to total GMV. Traditional search remains one of the largest sources of buyer traffic, and it is still growing.

Three dated facts explain where this stands:

• 11 January 2026: Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard for AI agents to handle discovery through checkout, co-developed with Google.
• 20 March 2026: CNBC reported that OpenAI was ending Instant Checkout inside ChatGPT in favour of retailer apps that send shoppers to the retailer's own site to buy. The first version of in-chat checkout did not stick.
• 17 June 2026: In the Spring '26 Edition, Shopify said Shopify Catalog and UCP are enabled by default for merchants, with eligible products syndicated to ChatGPT, Copilot and the Shop app without extra feeds.

The number worth acting on is this one: Shopify says AI searches powered by Catalog convert at twice the rate of those using scraped data. Since Catalog is on by default, the lever you control is the quality of the product data it reads. Incomplete variants, vague titles, missing size and material attributes and stale inventory are what make an AI assistant skip your product. We have written about the ChatGPT side of agentic commerce separately. Our view has not changed: fix product data before chasing any single AI channel.

What changed for brands shipping into the US from abroad?

Every parcel now goes through customs. The US ended its US$800 de minimis exemption for all countries on 29 August 2025, so low-value parcels that once entered duty free are now dutiable and need proper entry.

This hit a lot of Shopify businesses. In a Shopify survey of 1,994 US-based merchants selling physical goods, conducted in April 2025, one in five said they used a de minimis exemption, and a third of those relied on it for over 90% of their shipments.

For Indian D2C brands selling to American customers, the consequence is simple. If duties are not calculated and collected at checkout, the customer meets them at the door, and a surprise charge is one of the fastest ways to get a refused parcel and a chargeback. Shopify said on the Q2 call that it extended Managed Markets beyond US merchants for the first time in the quarter, to merchants in Canada and the UK. Check what duty and import tax options your plan and country of registration actually support before you assume checkout is handling it. Our guide to Shopify Markets for cross-border selling from India walks through the setup.

How big is Canadian ecommerce, and is it growing?

According to Statistics Canada's retail trade release of 21 August 2026, seasonally adjusted retail ecommerce rose 9.9% in June to C$5.7 billion, or 7.7% of total retail, up from 7.1% in May.

Two things are worth knowing before you plan around that. First, one strong month is not a trend. Monthly ecommerce figures in Canada move around a lot, and StatCan itself warns that revisions can be extensive, especially for recent months and during periods of economic disruption. Second, Canada's online share looks far lower than the US figure of 17.1%. The two agencies measure retail slightly differently, so treat it as a rough comparison, but the gap is large and consistent. Canadian shoppers still buy far more in physical stores, which is one reason Shopify's point-of-sale wins in Canada matter.

Shopify does not publish separate Canadian GMV, so any article quoting a precise Shopify Canada sales figure is guessing. What we can say from primary sources: Canada was among the top five selling countries for Shopify merchants over Black Friday Cyber Monday 2025, and Canadian merchants gained access to Managed Markets in Q2 2026.

How are tariffs and Buy Canadian changing what Canadian shoppers buy?

Trade tension is back, and so is the sentiment, but price still wins. After trade talks failed, the US imposed 50% tariffs on a list of Canadian-origin goods from 22 August 2026 under Section 338 of the Tariff Act. Trade advisories note that a USMCA claim does not exempt covered goods. Canada's Department of Finance announced on 25 August that it would match the US tariffs dollar for dollar and rate for rate, with counter-tariffs on US goods taking effect on 8 September.

Leger surveyed Canadians on 28 to 30 August 2026, just after the US tariffs landed. The results are more useful than the headline:

• 64% plan to look more actively for products made in Canada
• 50% plan to look more actively for products from Canadian-owned companies
• 45% plan to avoid US-made products
• Only 10% say they will not change what they buy at all
• Asked what would most influence a switch to a Canadian-made alternative, 67% said price, 56% said quality and 45% said Made in Canada

Our reading: for a Canadian merchant, Made in Canada is a strong tiebreaker, not a licence to charge more. Show origin clearly on product pages, in collection filters and in your product data so AI assistants and search can pick it up, but keep your price comparable. For a US brand selling into Canada, expect some shoppers to filter you out on origin alone, and compete on value, delivery speed and duty-inclusive pricing.

What should a Shopify store selling into Quebec check?

French-language compliance. Under Quebec's Bill 96 changes that took effect on 1 June 2025, French on product packaging and labelling must be at least as prominent as any other language, and law firm guidance notes the rules apply to products sold online into Quebec as well as in stores. A transition period for some older stock runs to 1 June 2027. For a Shopify store, that usually means a proper French market with translated product content, not a machine-translated storefront bolted on. Get Quebec legal advice for your specific packaging; this is a summary, not legal advice.

Which popular Shopify statistics should you not trust?

While researching this, we read the statistics roundups that rank on page one for Shopify US and Canada data. Several claims do not survive a check against primary sources:

• Market share of 29% or 30% in the US. These come from tools that count which platform websites run on. They measure share of stores, not share of sales. Shopify's own figure is over 14% of US ecommerce sales, which is the one that matters for competitive planning.
• Store counts ranging from about 3 million to 4.8 million. These are crawler estimates, sometimes on the same results page, and none are Shopify disclosures. Use them for rough scale only.
• US or Canada-only BFCM sales figures. Shopify's BFCM 2025 release gave a global figure of US$14.6 billion and ranked top countries without a dollar breakdown. A country-specific number attributed to Shopify has come from somewhere else.

If a statistic drives a budget decision, open the source. Census, StatCan and Shopify's investor releases are free and take five minutes to check.

What should US and Canadian Shopify merchants do next?

Is it still worth an Indian brand selling to the US in 2026?

For the right products, yes. US ecommerce growth more than doubled in a year, and over one in seven US online dollars already runs through the platform you may be using. What changed is that margin now depends on landed cost. Model duties, shipping and returns per product before you run ads into the US, and drop the SKUs that only worked because they entered duty free.

Get your North America setup checked

Free review. Email hello@exactwhy.com with subject "North America" and tell us your store URL, which countries you sell into and how you currently handle duties. We respond within 4 hours with what we would fix first across Markets, checkout, duties and product data. Often it is one setting and a product feed, not a rebuild.

Prefer a form? Send it through the contact page instead. It reaches the same inbox.

The US and Canada are moving in different directions on the same platform: one is accelerating online, the other is reshaping what it buys around a trade dispute. The merchants who do well in both will be the ones reading the actual numbers rather than the roundups.

Data checked against primary sources on 17 September 2026. Figures in US$ unless marked C$.