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U.S. ecommerce sales grew 9.8% year over year in the first quarter of 2026, versus 3.9% growth for total retail sales, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Yet growth is harder and more expensive to capture. Merchants must now coordinate customer acquisition, checkout, delivery, fraud controls, privacy, artificial intelligence, inventory, retention and compliance while protecting contribution margin.
The most consequential challenges are interconnected. More traffic can reduce profit if acquisition and fulfillment costs rise; faster delivery can increase conversion but make returns uneconomic; automation can lower labor costs while introducing accuracy and privacy risks. The winning response is not to adopt every new tool, but to remove the highest-cost friction while controlling risk and unit economics.
The challenges at a glance
| Challenge | Main business impact | Leading metric |
|---|---|---|
| Profitable customer acquisition | Rising acquisition cost and channel concentration | Contribution profit per new customer |
| Checkout and payment friction | Lost conversions | Checkout completion rate |
| Delivery and returns | Margin erosion and dissatisfaction | Cost per delivered or returned order |
| Fraud and security | Chargebacks, account abuse and trust loss | Fraud loss plus false-positive rate |
| Privacy | Legal and reputational exposure | Consent, deletion and incident metrics |
| Artificial intelligence | Efficiency versus accuracy and control risk | Verified resolution or conversion lift |
| Platform dependence | Fee, ranking and account-suspension exposure | Revenue concentration by channel |
| Inventory and supply chain | Stockouts, excess stock and late orders | Fill rate and inventory turnover |
| Customer retention | Weak lifetime value | Repeat contribution margin |
| Compliance | Fines, remediation and market restrictions | Open issues by jurisdiction |
1. Acquiring profitable attention in a crowded market
What changed
The objective is no longer traffic. It is qualified traffic that remains profitable after product cost, shipping subsidies, returns, payment fees, discounts, support labor, chargebacks and inventory carrying costs. Paid search and social ads compete with marketplaces, creators, email, organic search, social commerce and AI-assisted product discovery.
DHL reported that 69% of U.S. shoppers had already purchased through social media and 61% expected social platforms to become their primary shopping destination by 2030. Those are survey findings, not a prediction that conventional search will disappear. They do show that discovery and checkout increasingly happen inside platforms. Source: DHL 2025 U.S. ecommerce trends report.
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Business consequences and warning signs
- Revenue rises while contribution profit per order falls.
- One ad network or marketplace supplies most new customers.
- Return on ad spend looks strong because variable costs are excluded.
- Product feeds, reviews and structured product information are incomplete, reducing visibility in search and AI-assisted shopping.
Practical response
Calculate customer-acquisition cost against contribution margin, not revenue alone. Track payback time and lifetime value by cohort and channel. Build owned email and SMS audiences, useful product content and referral partnerships; use social commerce and marketplaces where margins survive their fees. Keep product data, availability, shipping promises and reviews accurate so both conventional and AI-mediated discovery can interpret them.
Do not treat social commerce as an automatic replacement for an owned storefront. It can add reach, but the platform controls customer access, fees and policy changes.
2. Converting traffic despite checkout and payment friction
Why small obstacles matter
Customers can compare prices instantly and leave with almost no switching cost. Unexpected shipping charges, forced account creation, vague delivery dates, missing local payment methods and slow mobile pages can erase expensive demand.
DHL’s 2026 global survey found that 67% of shoppers had abandoned carts because of the delivery offering. It also found that 62% would immediately abandon a purchase if their preferred payment method was unavailable, while only 45% of businesses identified payment availability as a major abandonment driver. Sources: DHL 2026 ecommerce trends report and DHL press release.
Fixes to test
- Show total landed cost and a concrete delivery date before payment details.
- Offer guest checkout, address autocomplete and clear inline validation.
- Support cards, digital wallets and locally relevant methods for the customer’s country.
- Preserve carts across devices where appropriate and provide a visible payment-failure recovery path.
- Test on slower mobile connections and segment abandonment by device, country, payment method and traffic source.
BNPL may improve conversion for some customers but introduces merchant fees, repayment and compliance concerns. Wallets can reduce form friction while limiting the customer data a merchant sees. Aggressive fraud screening can reject legitimate international buyers.
3. Meeting delivery and returns expectations without destroying margins
Logistics is part of the product
Customers often judge the retailer by the carrier’s final-mile performance. DHL’s 2026 U.S. findings describe fast, free delivery and easy returns as dominant expectations: 93% of U.S. shoppers identified as convenience-driven, and 57% wanted same-day-or-faster delivery and returns within five years. Source: DHL U.S. 2026 findings.
NRF projected that 19.3% of online sales would be returned in 2025, with total retail returns of $849.9 billion. It reported that 82% of consumers consider free returns important and estimated that 9% of returns were fraudulent. These are U.S. retail estimates, not a universal ecommerce rate. Source: NRF 2025 Retail Returns Landscape.
Protect contribution margin
- Offer free returns where margins and fraud rates support them.
- Use exchanges or store credit for suitable categories and returnless refunds for low-value goods when reverse shipping costs more.
- Apply extra verification to high-risk orders and handle wardrobing, bracketing, damaged goods and international returns explicitly.
- Use product-specific sizing guidance to prevent avoidable returns.
Set free-shipping thresholds from order-level contribution analysis, not a competitor’s headline policy. A 3PL, in-house warehouse, dropshipping or hybrid model can work; compare storage, pick-and-pack, carrier, inspection, repackaging, markdown and support costs.
4. Managing fraud, chargebacks, bots and payment security
The balancing problem
Stolen cards, account takeover, refund abuse, friendly fraud, promotion abuse, bots, credential stuffing and payment-page skimming all create losses. Blocking too aggressively creates false declines and frustrates good customers.
The FTC said consumers lost $2.1 billion to scams originating on social media in 2025, and nearly 30% of people who reported losing money to a scam said it began on social media. This covers social-media scams generally, not ecommerce transaction losses. Source: FTC social-media scam data.
Controls and accountability
- Score device, IP, geography, velocity, account age, address mismatch, behavior and purchase history rather than relying on one signal.
- Route borderline orders to review instead of automatically rejecting every anomaly.
- Use tokenization and strong authentication, patch the storefront and monitor checkout scripts and third-party tags.
- Require multi-factor authentication for staff and high-risk customer actions, with least-privilege access.
- Document chargeback evidence, monitor refund velocity and maintain an incident-response plan.
Outsourcing payment processing does not remove responsibility for the ecommerce environment. PCI Security Standards Council guidance explains that a compromised merchant site can redirect shoppers or manipulate payment pages even when a third party handles card data. Source: PCI Security Standards Council FAQ 1292.
5. Protecting customer data while preserving personalization
Use data deliberately
First-party data comes directly from customer interactions; zero-party data is information a customer intentionally volunteers; third-party data is obtained from outside sources. Personalization is valuable only when its measurable benefit justifies collection, storage and sharing.
The FTC advises businesses to collect only what they need, secure it, dispose of it safely and ensure privacy promises match actual practices. Sources: FTC privacy and security guidance and FTC data-security guidance. NRF reported that 52% of consumers were comfortable sharing data, but 83% expressed overlapping concerns about privacy, misuse or unwanted marketing. Source: NRF agentic-commerce research.
Build an operating system, not just a banner
- Inventory customer data, purposes, legal bases, vendors and subprocessors.
- Remove unnecessary fields and separate operational data from advertising data.
- Set retention, deletion, access, correction and opt-out procedures.
- Explain cookies, marketing, recommendations, AI assistants and data sharing clearly.
- Test whether personalization improves profit or merely increases surveillance and complexity.
Children, healthcare-related information, EU customers and other regulated categories require additional legal analysis. A cookie banner cannot cure excessive collection or inaccurate disclosures.
6. Adopting AI without sacrificing accuracy, trust or control
Three different risks
Operational AI automates internal work; customer-facing AI talks with shoppers; agentic commerce allows software agents to search, decide and transact. Each has different requirements for data quality, permissions, testing and accountability.
DHL reported that 38% of shoppers and 36% of businesses were using AI chat or virtual assistants to buy or sell. Misinterpretation and trust were leading concerns, and 41% of shoppers did not want voice-enabled search. In the U.S., 64% of shoppers’ biggest AI concerns involved privacy, trust and security, while 46% wanted AI-powered fraud detection in the future. Sources: DHL 2026 global report and DHL U.S. findings.
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Safer implementation sequence
- Start with internal productivity and searchable knowledge bases.
- Expose customer-facing AI only to authoritative, current catalog and policy data.
- Log prompts, outputs, actions and human overrides; restrict permissions.
- Provide human escalation and test accuracy, bias, privacy, security and revenue impact.
- Define rollback procedures before allowing AI to change prices, approve refunds or transact.
The FTC published a proposed policy statement in July 2026 about AI systems that manipulate outputs contrary to reasonable expectations for objectivity and accuracy. It is a proposal, not a general ecommerce rule. Source: FTC proposed AI-accuracy policy statement.
7. Reducing dependence on platforms and intermediaries
Marketplaces, social networks, search engines, payment providers and hosted commerce platforms provide discovery and infrastructure while controlling ranking, fees, customer access and account rules. The risk is not using platforms; it is unmanaged concentration.
Resilience measures
- Maintain an owned storefront and permission-based email audience.
- Keep exportable customer, order, product and analytics data.
- Develop at least two viable acquisition channels and, where appropriate, a backup payment processor.
- Track channel-level contribution profit and model fee or algorithm changes.
- Document suspension, appeal, refund and policy procedures.
A marketplace may still be economically rational when its trust, logistics and conversion benefits exceed its fees. Evaluate that contribution rather than assuming independence is always cheaper.
8. Maintaining inventory and supply-chain reliability
Accurate availability and rapid fulfillment require synchronization among the storefront, warehouse, marketplaces and customer service. Forecasts must cope with seasonality, promotions, viral demand, supplier disruption, geopolitical events and sudden platform traffic.
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- Overselling across channels or promising inventory that is reserved, damaged, returned or in transit.
- Frequent stockouts alongside aging, low-velocity inventory.
- Forecasts treated as certainty despite variable supplier lead times.
- Returns taking too long to become sellable again.
Metrics and decisions
Monitor inventory turnover, sell-through, stockout rate, fill rate, order-cycle time, forecast error, return-to-stock time, contribution margin by SKU and aging inventory percentage. Use safety stock and local inventory selectively; evaluate dropshipping against quality control, delivery reliability and supplier concentration risk.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.9. Improving retention when switching costs are low
Customers can compare alternatives immediately, cancel subscriptions and switch brands. A loyalty program or discount is useful only if it creates incremental repeat behavior rather than rewarding customers who would have returned anyway.
DHL found that 40% of shoppers and 53% of businesses had delivery-and-returns subscriptions, but about half of shoppers with one had canceled during the previous three months because it cost too much. Source: DHL 2026 ecommerce trends report.
Build the post-purchase experience
- Set accurate product expectations and delivery dates.
- Provide helpful setup, usage and support information.
- Use relevant replenishment reminders without excessive messaging.
- Offer loyalty benefits with clear value and exchanges or warranty help without unnecessary friction.
- Measure repeat contribution margin, not repeat orders alone.
High repeat rates can be misleading when caused by deep discounts, free replacements or subscription-cancellation games.
10. Complying with a widening patchwork of rules and expectations
Obligations can arise from the customer’s location, product category, data practices, payment model, marketing claims, accessibility needs and vendor relationships. There is no single global ecommerce law.
Common obligation areas
- Consumer protection, advertising, reviews and endorsements
- Privacy, security, children’s data and marketing consent
- Automatic renewals, subscriptions, credit and BNPL disclosures
- Sales tax, marketplace-facilitator rules, customs and duties
- Product safety, labeling, accessibility and environmental claims
- AI governance, platform rules and cross-border returns
The FTC says privacy promises must accurately describe actual practices and that sensitive information must be protected. Source: FTC privacy and security guidance. Current U.S. policy work includes AI accuracy, online competition and accessibility, but a rule affecting one government-entity category does not automatically create a deadline for every private ecommerce site. Sources: FTC AI policy statement, U.S. Senate online-competition legislation and Federal Register accessibility notice.
Run compliance as a process
- Maintain a matrix of jurisdictions, products, customer categories and vendors.
- Document consent, refunds, cancellations, complaints and data-processing agreements.
- Audit checkout disclosures, accessibility, analytics tags, AI tools and marketing automation.
- Obtain counsel for high-risk claims and review obligations before entering a new market.
How to prioritize the work
First: protect the transaction
Fix checkout completion, payment reliability, delivery promises and fraud controls. These issues can lose a sale immediately.
Second: protect the economics
Calculate contribution margin after acquisition, shipping, returns, payment costs and support. Then address advertising efficiency, inventory and return leakage.
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Third: protect future competitiveness
Build first-party customer relationships, diversify channels, improve retention and introduce AI only with governance, authoritative data and rollback controls.
Fourth: protect the license to operate
Keep privacy, consumer-protection, accessibility, product and marketing compliance aligned with what the business actually does, including vendor and platform behavior.
The Bottom Line
Ecommerce’s biggest challenge in 2026 is coordinating growth with control. Merchants that measure contribution profit, remove checkout and delivery friction, diversify dependencies, secure data and deploy AI cautiously will be better positioned than those that optimize traffic or technology in isolation.
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