Adobe's 2026 Commerce report: what they got right and missed

Adobe Commerce publishes an annual State of Commerce report. The 2026 edition came out in Q1 with the usual mix of vendor-flattering trend data and useful industry benchmarks. After running the numbers against our own client engagements since 2019, here is our annotated read: five claims worth taking seriously, three we think are overstated, and what is missing.

Claim 1: mobile commerce now represents 73 percent of ecommerce sessions globally — we agree

The report's mobile-share number tracks with what we see across the 500+ stores we have audited. Mobile-share has been climbing steadily since 2019; the 2026 number is consistent with the trend line. Magento store owners who have not invested in mobile-first checkout in the last 18 months are losing meaningful revenue.

Where the report stops short: mobile sessions translate to lower conversion than desktop on Magento stores specifically, because Luma-themed Magento performs particularly badly on mobile. The mobile-share number is therefore not a victory; it is a problem statement.

Claim 2: Core Web Vitals now correlate with conversion at every cart size — we agree, with caveat

Adobe cites internal data showing LCP improvement of 100ms correlating with 0.8 to 1.5 percent conversion lift. This matches our measurements across performance-optimization engagements and matches third-party studies from Akamai, Cloudflare, and Google.

The caveat: the conversion lift curve flattens past LCP under 1.5 seconds. Past that, optimizing further produces diminishing returns. Most Magento stores have not reached that ceiling, so this finding is actionable. Stores already at LCP under 1.5 should look elsewhere for next-marginal-revenue.

Claim 3: B2B is growing faster than B2C in ecommerce — partly true, badly framed

B2B revenue is growing in absolute terms. So is B2C. The report's "growing faster" claim depends on which baseline year you pick and which segments you include. Across our B2B Magento engagements specifically, the growth has been concentrated in mid-market B2B (companies between £5M and £50M GMV), not at the enterprise tier.

Adobe's framing suggests every B2C Magento store should be considering B2B features. That is overstated. B2B operations require different staffing, different sales motions, and different fulfillment infrastructure. Most B2C stores adding B2B features without those changes ship the features and fail to attract B2B revenue.

Claim 4: AI features are the top investment area for Magento merchants in 2026 — qualified yes

This claim is true in survey data and partially true in real deployment. Stores are buying AI-related modules at unprecedented rates. Fewer stores are deploying them successfully.

The gap between purchase and successful deployment is wider for AI features than for any other category we have tracked. Three reasons. Underlying data quality is often too poor for AI personalization to work. Customer journeys are not instrumented well enough for AI to find decision points. Integration with existing email and CRM platforms is harder than vendors advertise.

If your store is investing in AI in 2026, plan the data and integration work first. The AI itself is the easy part.

Claim 5: composable commerce architecture wins in the long run — we disagree at mid-market

Adobe leans heavily on the "composable" narrative: best-of-breed pieces stitched together rather than monolithic platforms. This is true at enterprise scale where teams of 50+ engineers can manage the complexity.

At mid-market (£1M to £50M annual revenue), composable architecture frequently costs more total ownership than a well-tuned monolithic Magento. The integration burden grows faster than the team can absorb. We have helped three stores migrate back from composable to consolidated Magento because the composable architecture was eating engineering bandwidth on plumbing rather than features.

The composable pitch is right for very large stores. It is overstated for mid-market.

Claim 6 (their's not ours): Adobe Commerce drives 35 percent more revenue than Magento Open Source — we are skeptical

This number appears in the report based on Adobe-internal customer data. The selection bias is severe: Adobe Commerce customers are larger stores that would generate more revenue regardless of platform.

A controlled comparison (same store size, same vertical, randomized assignment) would be needed to validate this. No such study exists. Take the 35 percent figure with significant salt.

Claim 7 (also theirs): merchants on Adobe Commerce Cloud see 99.97 percent uptime — true but incomplete

Uptime numbers are accurate. What the report omits is total cost of ownership. Adobe Commerce Cloud delivers excellent uptime; it also costs 3 to 5 times the equivalent self-hosted deployment. Whether the uptime difference justifies the cost depends on your tolerance for incident risk.

What is missing from the report

Three topics the report did not cover that we would have wanted to see.

Hyvä adoption and impact. The Hyvä theme has reshaped Magento frontend performance over the last three years. Adobe's report does not mention Hyvä once, which is glaring.

Module ecosystem maturity. The third-party module market is one of Magento's strongest advantages over competitors. Adobe's report focuses on Adobe Commerce features and skips the broader ecosystem.

Migration patterns. How many stores migrated to Magento in 2025? How many migrated away? The directional data would tell us a lot about ecosystem health. The report does not engage with the question.

Final read

The report is useful for industry-wide directional data (mobile share, conversion-versus-performance correlations, AI investment trends). It is less useful when it argues for Adobe Commerce specifically. The latter is expected; vendor reports flatter the vendor.

If you are a Magento merchant trying to read this report, skim the macro trend data and discount the Adobe-specific claims by about 40 percent.

Related

• Magento performance optimization guide covers the performance trends.
• Hyvä: the complete guide covers the topic Adobe missed.