This Week in M&A Issue #252

U.S. ecommerce is growing at rates not seen since the early days of the pandemic.

U.S. online retail sales hit $340.2 billion in Q2 2026, up 12.2% from the same quarter last year. That follows 10.1% growth in Q1, putting ecommerce growth at 11.1% for the first half of 2026.

That’s a big change from the slowdown that followed the pandemic. By Q2 2022, ecommerce growth had fallen to just 5.1%. Growth started improving again last year.

Online sales are also growing faster than retail overall. Total U.S. retail sales increased 6.7% in Q2, compared with 12.2% for ecommerce. Online sales now make up 17.1% of all retail sales, up from 16.3% a year ago.

Before you get too excited, it’s important to note that the figures are not adjusted for inflation, so some of the growth comes from higher prices. Amazon also moved Prime Day from July to June this year, which likely pulled some sales from Q3 into Q2.

The growth also varies quite a bit by category.

General merchandise was up 21.6%, while sporting goods, hobbies, and books grew 20.4%. Food and beverage increased 8.1%, health and personal care grew 9.3%, furniture was up 4.6%, and clothing grew just 3.8%.

The size of the category matters too. Health and personal care grew faster than clothing, but clothing actually added more sales dollars because its overall market is larger.

So while the broader ecommerce market is showing stronger demand, the opportunity still depends heavily on the category, product mix, customer base, and sales channel. The next few quarters should show whether this growth marks a lasting acceleration or a temporary spike.

.Org Ecommerce Sites Are Outperforming .Com by 34%

Thinking about building an AI tool? The biggest question probably isn’t whether people want AI. It’s what they actually want to use it for.

OneLittleWeb analyzed 9,531 AI tools and their web traffic to see which categories are getting the most attention. Looking at web traffic from May 2025 to April 2026, it found that some AI categories are attracting significantly more demand than others.

Unsurprisingly, Chatbots are in a league of their own. They generated 86 billion visits over the past year, accounting for 59.5% of all AI tool traffic. That’s up 90.8% from the previous year. This category includes ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity, so it’s already highly competitive.

Design is the next big category, generating 10.9 billion visits. But there’s a catch. Canva accounts for 96.3% of that traffic, making it a difficult market for a new general-purpose design tool to break into.

Translation is another huge category, with 5.7 billion visits, but traffic fell 22.5%. With translation increasingly available inside general-purpose assistants, users have less reason to visit a dedicated tool.

Some of the smaller categories look more interesting from a growth perspective.

Video generators grew 31.2% to 2.6 billion visits, while music generators grew 21.2% to 1.3 billion. Image generators attracted 3.5 billion visits, although traffic was basically flat.

Project management is worth watching too. Traffic grew 18.6% to 2.6 billion visits, and the category includes 285 different tools. Unlike design, there isn’t one company dominating the market.

The biggest category isn’t always the best opportunity. A large market with strong growth and plenty of room for different products can be much more interesting than a huge category that’s already dominated by one or two platforms.