Of every website category WebAIM tracks, shopping sites are among the worst performers. The WebAIM Million 2026 study, which runs automated accessibility tests against the home pages of the top one million websites, found shopping sites averaged 71.0 detectable errors per page, 26.6% above the 56.1-error average across every category combined. Only a handful of categories, sports sites among them, scored worse. For a sector where every single page exists to move a visitor toward a purchase, that gap is not a rounding error.
The platforms built for selling are the worst offenders
The more striking number sits one level down, in the report’s breakdown by content platform. General-purpose site builders do comparatively well: Squarespace averaged 33.0 errors (41.2% below the overall average), Wix 33.3 (40.6% below), and even WordPress, which powers a huge share of the web, came in at 52.8, still slightly under average. The platforms built specifically for running an online store tell a different story. Shopify averaged 75.1 errors per page, 33.9% above average. Magento came in at 75.8, 35.0% above. Prestashop averaged 143.2, more than double the typical site. The report doesn’t say why dedicated e-commerce platforms fare so much worse, but the likely explanation isn’t mysterious: product grids, variant selectors, filter panels, cart widgets, and third-party checkout scripts all add interactive complexity that a static content page simply doesn’t have, and each one is a fresh opportunity for a missing label, an unannounced state change, or a contrast failure.
Lawsuits are concentrated exactly where you’d expect
That gap shows up in litigation data too. UsableNet’s 2024 year-end report counted over 4,000 ADA digital accessibility lawsuits filed across US federal and state courts in 2024, and found roughly 77% of them targeted e-commerce sites specifically, with every other industry combined making up the remaining share. That concentration isn’t really surprising once you connect it to the error data: a retail site with a broken checkout flow or an unlabeled “add to cart” button isn’t just failing a usability test, it’s blocking a transaction a disabled customer was actively trying to complete, which is precisely the kind of concrete, demonstrable harm that tends to end up in a complaint.
The revenue nobody puts on a quarterly report
Lawsuits are the visible cost. The less visible one is the customer who never files a complaint and just leaves. The Click-Away Pound Survey, a long-running UK study on disabled consumers’ online shopping experience, estimated in 2019 that UK retailers were missing out on roughly £17.1 billion a year in sales because disabled shoppers couldn’t complete purchases on inaccessible sites, up from an estimated £11.75 billion in the same survey’s 2016 edition. Whatever margin of error applies to any single estimate like that, the direction is the relevant part: the gap grew over three years, not shrank, even as awareness of web accessibility as a business issue increased. A shopper who can’t tell which size is selected, or can’t reach a coupon field with a keyboard, doesn’t usually write in about it. They close the tab and buy from whoever got it right.
A market that’s catching up to the problem
That gap is starting to show up on the other side of the ledger too. Fortune Business Insights sized the global digital accessibility software market at roughly USD 0.93 billion in 2026, projecting growth to USD 1.89 billion by 2034, a 9.33% compound annual growth rate. That’s a market responding to real, measurable demand, not one growing on hype: North America and Europe together account for the large majority of it, the same regions carrying most of the litigation and regulatory pressure described above.
What this means if you run an online store
None of this data says every e-commerce site is a lawsuit waiting to happen, but it does say the baseline risk for the category is measurably higher than for the web generally, on both the error-rate side and the legal-exposure side. The practical starting point is the same regardless of platform: checkout flows, product variant selectors, and cart interactions are where the report’s data says e-commerce specifically struggles, so that’s where a first audit should look first, not the blog or the About page. Our guide to accessibility for e-commerce covers the specific checkout and product-page patterns worth fixing first, and our comparison of accessibility solutions for online stores looks at how platforms like Wawsome and EqualWeb differ in how they handle the dynamic, cart-and-checkout-heavy pages this data shows are the actual weak point.