The Paypers has just launched the Global Ecommerce Report 2026 – Scaling Ecommerce and SaaS: Finding the Right Partners to Succeed across Borders.
The global ecommerce landscape is shifting. Trade tensions, tariff volatility, and recession fears defined 2025, resulting in the slowest ecommerce growth since 2022. However, projections for 2026 suggest that we are nearing a period of stabilisation, as the market is anticipated to reach USD 6.8 trillion.
China, the US, and Western Europe remain the largest contributors to global ecommerce, accounting for an impressive 80.5% of sales worldwide. While the growth of these mature markets is slow and steady, emerging economies lead, showing a double-digit increase, with Southeast Asia and LATAM particularly ranking among the fastest-growing ecommerce sources.
To make sense of these dynamics, we brought together voices from across the industry – from industry organisations and consultants to merchants and payment service providers (PSPs) – to explore what's working, what's changing, and what comes next.
The result is the Global Ecommerce Report 2026, a comprehensive guide packed with actionable insights designed to help industry professionals make strategic decisions for global success. The new edition offers a forward-looking, data-driven perspective on the evolution of ecommerce, focusing on innovation efforts, consumer expectations, and the technologies shaping the next wave of digital growth – from agentic commerce and social selling to stablecoins.
What’s inside the report
Across five chapters, the Global Ecommerce Report 2026 examines the trends, technologies, and opportunities shaping global ecommerce today. Key highlights include:
- An overview of the global ecommerce landscape: from geopolitical tensions and how they impact the cross-border market to the increased proliferation of super apps, QR code-initiated A2A payments, agentic commerce, stablecoins, livestream ecommerce, and others;
- Growth markets in focus: regional analysis of LATAM, MEA, and APAC;
- Merchant of Record models and how they act as a tool for global expansion with less complexity;
- Payment orchestration as a change lever from flexibility to trust, the buy vs build dilemma, the intersection of payment and fraud orchestration, and how AI makes self-optimising payments a reality;
- Best practices for merchants and platforms – FX strategies, payment mix optimisation, gaming payments, infrastructure gaps, and much more.
Original research by The Paypers
The report includes two in-house research pieces:
- An infographic on payment orchestration players, structured into two sections: a key capabilities breakdown of the featured providers and a regional overview of where orchestration players activate (North America, Europe, APAC, LATAM, MEA);
- An infographic on growth markets: together with PCMI, we’ve mapped the payments landscape in six markets: Brazil, Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia, the UAE, and Nigeria, highlighting merchant acquirers and PSPs operating in each country.
Whether you’re a merchant seeking new market entry, a solution provider exploring growth opportunities, or a payments expert interested in all things ecommerce, our report aims to equip you with the clarity needed to stay ahead of the competition. Download your free copy of the Global Ecommerce Report 2026 by clicking HERE.
