Average NPS for ecommerce in 2026: vertical benchmarks across SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, ACSI and MeasuringU

If you searched "average ecommerce NPS by vertical" expecting a clean table, four different benchmark providers will hand you four different numbers and all of them are technically correct. SurveyMonkey says the consumer goods and retail median is +57. Qualtrics via Shopify puts retail brands at +33 and apparel at +39. CustomerGauge clusters consumer ecommerce around the mid-+40s. MeasuringU's mass-merchant website panel averages +6. They are measuring different things on different instruments, which is the actual story.

This page reconciles the four most-cited 2025-2026 NPS (Net Promoter Score) benchmark sources for ecommerce, gives the per-vertical numbers where they exist, flags the ones that do not, and walks through what to do if your internal score lands below the vertical median. The operator decision at the end is almost never "run more NPS surveys." It is "look at repeat purchase rate by cohort," because NPS without repeat data is a vanity number.

The four sources everyone cites, and what each one is actually measuring

The reason you cannot get a single "ecommerce NPS average" is that the four most-cited benchmark sources sample different audiences and ask the NPS question at different stages of the customer relationship.

SurveyMonkey's 2025 cross-industry benchmark pulls from more than 150,000 organizations that use SurveyMonkey to run NPS programs. The global average is +32, the median is +44, the top quartile is +72 or higher, and the bottom quartile sits at 0 or below. The consumer goods and retail macro-cut (the closest ecommerce proxy in their taxonomy) lands at +57 median, +36 bottom quartile, +74 top quartile.

Qualtrics's per-industry NPS data is gated, but the most-cited public excerpt is the Shopify blog post citing Qualtrics's 2024 numbers: retail brands average +33, apparel industry average +39. This is brand-level relationship NPS (asked to a customer panel about the brand overall), which is why the absolute numbers are lower than SurveyMonkey's macro-category cut.

CustomerGauge publishes sector benchmarks in the +40 to +55 range for consumer ecommerce and DTC brands, with CPG B2B at +54, non-CPG B2B at +45, and financial services at +44 for 2025-2026. Their data is vendor-customer skewed but the relative ranking across sectors is stable across years.

MeasuringU's 2026 UX and NPS Mass-Merchant panel reports website-experience NPS, which is the variant asked in the context of using the site (not the brand). Mass-merchant average +6, with a panel range from Target +33 and TJ Maxx +25 at the top, Amazon +21 and Nordstrom +20 in the middle, Macy's -11 and Walmart -30 at the bottom. Website-experience NPS tends to read materially lower than relationship NPS for the same brand on comparable benchmark instruments, which is the most common reason operators panic over a low score that is not actually low.

Retently's 2026 benchmark headline is that the highest reported industry NPS dropped from +80 in 2025 to +68 in 2026. The per-vertical detail in their report is in interactive components that do not surface as crawlable text, so we treat Retently as directional rather than line-item.

NPS by vertical: what the published data actually says (and where the gaps are)

The single biggest reason operators get NPS-benchmarking wrong is that they pick a number from a Google search without checking whether their vertical was actually measured. Below is the table you can extract from publicly disclosed 2024-2026 sources. The "not publicly disclosed" rows are deliberate. We have not seen a credible per-vertical number for those categories and treating an inferred range as authoritative would mislead you.

Vertical	NPS value	Source	Year	Notes
Consumer goods / retail (median)	+57	SurveyMonkey	2025	Macro-category; closest ecommerce proxy
Consumer goods / retail (bottom quartile)	+36	SurveyMonkey	2025	Below this is bottom-tier for ecommerce
Consumer goods / retail (top quartile)	+74	SurveyMonkey	2025	Above this is top-tier for ecommerce
Retail brands (average)	+33	Qualtrics via Shopify	2024	Brand-level relationship NPS
Apparel / fashion (average)	+39	Qualtrics via Shopify	2024	Most-cited apparel-specific number
Beauty / cosmetics	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	Use SurveyMonkey consumer goods +57 as proxy
Food & beverage / CPG (B2B)	+54	CustomerGauge	2026	B2B only; DTC food not separately benchmarked
Supplements / vitamins	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	No vendor benchmark; survey your own cohort
Home & furniture	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	Treat as retail proxy
Electronics (consumer)	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	Apple historically cited +47 to +72
Pet supplies	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	Chewy and BarkBox cited anecdotally +55 to +70
Baby / kids	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	No vendor benchmark
Sporting goods	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	No vendor benchmark
Jewelry	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	No vendor benchmark
Luxury	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	No vendor benchmark
Subscription boxes	Not publicly disclosed	n/a	n/a	No vendor benchmark
Department stores (ACSI proxy)	79 (0-100 ACSI)	ACSI	2026	General merchandise ACSI score
Mass-merchant websites (panel)	+6	MeasuringU	2026	Website-experience NPS; not comparable to relationship NPS
Amazon (website-experience NPS)	+21	MeasuringU	2026	Highest of the mass-merchant panel
Software / SaaS (context)	+44	SurveyMonkey	2025	For context, not ecommerce
Financial services (context)	+44	CustomerGauge	2025	For context, not ecommerce

The honest read: more than half the ecommerce verticals operators care about (beauty, supplements, home, pet, baby, jewelry, luxury, subscription) have no publicly disclosed vendor benchmark. If you run one of those, your benchmark is either the SurveyMonkey consumer goods +57 macro-cut or a panel you run yourself. There is no third option.

ACSI is the cleaner retail benchmark for 2025-2026

If you want a stable retail satisfaction benchmark that does not bounce 10 points year to year, ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Index) is the cleaner read. It is a 0-100 satisfaction scale, not NPS, but for ecommerce-adjacent segments it is the closest thing to a regulator-grade number.

For 2026, online retailers score 79, specialty retailers 80, general merchandise 79, supermarkets 78, and the national ACSI across all sectors sits at 76.9 in Q4 2025. The four ecommerce-adjacent retail segments are converging in the high-70s with no segment more than 2 points off the national average.

To translate ACSI to NPS for back-of-envelope comparison: ACSI in the mid-70s corresponds roughly to NPS in the +20 to +40 range. ACSI of 80+ corresponds roughly to NPS +40 to +60+. There is no official conversion and the mapping is directional, but it gives you a way to sanity-check whether your internal NPS is in the ballpark of what ACSI would predict for your segment.

Why prefer ACSI? Three reasons. First, methodology is consistent year over year, so a 1-point move is meaningful. Second, the sample is independent of any single survey vendor's customer base. Third, the score is anchored to overall satisfaction rather than referral propensity, which is what most operators actually want to know when they ask "are my customers happy."

Three traps founders fall into when they compare their NPS to an industry average

Trap one: survey timing. A transactional NPS pulled 7 days after delivery captures the "I just got my order and it was good" moment and skews 10-20 points higher than a relationship NPS pulled to your full email list. If your benchmark source is using relationship NPS and you are running transactional, you will look like a winner. If the reverse, you will look like a loser. Neither is the truth about your business.

Trap two: sample bias. Post-purchase surveys only reach people who completed a purchase. Detractors who abandoned cart, churned in month 2, or never came back are not in your sample. This bias inflates NPS by 5-15 points depending on category. The fix is to run a separate relationship survey to your full 12-month customer list, including churned cohorts, at least twice a year.

Trap three: the channel question. If you sell on Shopify direct and Amazon Marketplace, your NPS for the same SKU can be 20+ points apart across channels. Amazon customers benchmark you against Amazon's logistics and customer service. Shopify direct customers benchmark you against the brand. A combined NPS averaged across channels tells you almost nothing actionable.

What to do if your NPS came in below your vertical's median

The reflex is to commission more research. The right move is the opposite.

Step one. Pull repeat purchase rate by cohort for the same period your NPS was measured. If repeat is stable or rising while NPS is dipping, the NPS dip is almost certainly a survey-timing or sample artifact, not a real customer problem. NPS is a leading indicator and repeat is the verdict. They should move together over a 6-month horizon. If they do not, trust repeat.

Step two. Pull CX ticket volume and the top three complaint themes for the last 90 days. If ticket volume is flat or down but NPS dropped, the problem is not your product or fulfillment, it is brand expectation. If ticket volume is up and concentrated in one theme (delivery time, returns, product quality), that theme is the actual fix and NPS will recover after you address it.

Step three. Run a transactional NPS at delivery plus 14 days as a control. If your transactional score is 30+ points higher than your relationship score, the gap between "I just bought this and it was fine" and "I think about this brand and it does not move me" is wider than it should be. That is a brand and expectation problem, not a product problem, and the fix is positioning and post-purchase nurture, not more discounts.

NPS without repeat data is a vanity number. The four published "ecommerce average" benchmarks disagree by 60 points because they measure different things on different instruments. Your repeat purchase rate by cohort is the only score that matters for unit economics. Everything else is leading indicator.

What we are watching next

SurveyMonkey refreshes its benchmark annually, ACSI's retail study lands in late January each year covering the prior calendar year, and Retently refreshes its benchmark annually. The next meaningful update for this page is February 2027, when the ACSI 2027 Retail Study and SurveyMonkey 2026 benchmarks both land. We will refresh the page within 14 days of each release.

For more on how customer-loyalty signals interact with unit economics on a DTC P&L, see our contribution margin benchmarks for DTC brands, the subscription churn benchmarks, and the average ecommerce repeat purchase rate by vertical.

Sources and methodology

SurveyMonkey 2025 NPS benchmarks. Pulled from SurveyMonkey's "What Is a Good Net Promoter Score?" landing page, which summarizes their global benchmark cohort of more than 150,000 organizations. Quartile cuts by macro-category (consumer goods/retail; technology; software and online services) are exposed in the article body. The +32 global average and +44 global median are the headline cross-industry figures; the +57 median for consumer goods and retail is the closest ecommerce proxy.

Qualtrics retail and apparel NPS via Shopify. Qualtrics's direct benchmark page is behind sales gating. The most-cited public excerpt is the Shopify blog post citing Qualtrics's 2024 data: retail average +33, apparel average +39. These are brand-level relationship NPS, not transactional, which is why the absolute numbers are lower than SurveyMonkey's macro-category cut.

ACSI Retail and Consumer Shipping Study 2026 plus Online Retailers industry page. ACSI publishes a 0-100 customer satisfaction index, not NPS. The 2026 study covers data collected January through December 2025. Key segments from the press release: general merchandise 79, specialty 80, supermarkets 78. Online retailers are taken from the industry-page satisfaction table at 79 for both 2025 and 2026. National ACSI for Q4 2025 was 76.9.

CustomerGauge consumer and B2B NPS benchmarks 2025-2026. Most-cited numbers: financial services average +44 (CustomerGauge financial-services use case article); CPG B2B median +54 and non-CPG B2B median +45 (CustomerGauge "Consumer Packaged Goods B2B NPS and CX Benchmarks for 2026"); consumer ecommerce and DTC cluster +40 to +55 (CustomerGauge consumer benchmark summary, 2025).

Retently 2026 NPS benchmark report. Retently publishes an annual NPS benchmark. The headline exposed in the 2026 article is that the highest reported industry NPS dropped from +80 in 2025 to +68 in 2026. The detailed per-industry table is embedded in interactive components and is not crawlable from the open web; we treat Retently as a directional source only.

MeasuringU 2026 UX/NPS Mass-Merchant panel. UX research firm MeasuringU samples mass-merchant websites and reports website-experience NPS. The 2026 panel reports an average of +6 across mass-merchant retailers, with Target +33 and TJ Maxx +25 at the top, Amazon +21 and Nordstrom +20 in the middle, and Macy's -11 and Walmart -30 at the bottom. These are website-experience NPS (asked in the context of using the site), not relationship NPS, which is why the absolute values read materially lower than survey-vendor brand-level benchmarks. We do not have paired same-brand data to quote an exact gap, so treat the differential as directional only.

Bain and Company NPS thresholds. Bain (NPS inventor) publishes qualitative thresholds: above 0 is "good," above +20 "favorable," above +50 "excellent," above +80 "world-class." Bain does not publish a public per-industry quartile table; their detailed industry tables are distributed via NPS Prism client materials, not their public website.

SEC EDGAR review for DTC brand NPS disclosure. We cross-checked the most recent 10-K and S-1 filings for Yeti, Warby Parker, Allbirds, Solo Brands, Beyond Meat, Casper, Honest Company, Olaplex, and Oddity Tech. None of the most-recent filings disclose a quantified NPS score. NPS appears in narrative text without a number. This confirms vendor benchmark reports as the right source layer, not SEC filings.

Limitations. First, the four most-cited NPS benchmark sources measure different things and cannot be reconciled to a single "ecommerce average" without context. Second, multiple verticals (beauty, supplements, baby, pet, sporting goods, jewelry, luxury, subscription boxes) have no publicly disclosed per-industry NPS, so operators must benchmark against the SurveyMonkey consumer-goods macro-cut or run their own panel. Third, ACSI is a 0-100 satisfaction index, not NPS, and no official ACSI-to-NPS conversion exists. Fourth, the bundled triangulation research for this page (Pinecone founder-call library plus Perplexity) is filed alongside this post in the research bundle.

Update cadence. This is a Group A living index, refreshed quarterly. Next update target: February 2027 when the ACSI 2027 Retail Study and SurveyMonkey 2026 benchmarks land.

Frequently asked questions

what is a good nps score for an ecommerce brand in 2026?

Above +40 is solid for an ecommerce brand running a relationship NPS survey. The SurveyMonkey 2025 consumer goods and retail median is +57, the Qualtrics 2024 retail average is +33, and the cross-industry global median is +44. If your number sits between +30 and +50 you are in line with peers. Above +72 puts you in the SurveyMonkey 2025 cross-industry top quartile, and above +74 in retail specifically.

what is the average nps for dtc brands by vertical in 2026?

There is no single source that breaks NPS out by every DTC vertical. SurveyMonkey publishes a consumer goods and retail macro-cut (+57 median in 2025). Qualtrics via Shopify gives apparel specifically (+39 in 2024) and retail brands overall (+33). For beauty, supplements, home, pet, baby, jewelry, luxury and subscription boxes there is no publicly disclosed vendor benchmark. Treat the SurveyMonkey consumer goods median as your default proxy.

why does my nps look so different from the industry average?

Three reasons. First, survey timing: a transactional NPS pulled 7 days after delivery skews 10-20 points higher than a relationship NPS pulled to your full email list. Second, sample bias: post-purchase surveys only reach people who completed a purchase, so detractors who abandoned are underrepresented. Third, channel: Shopify checkout NPS and Amazon Marketplace NPS for the same SKU can be 20+ points apart because customer expectations differ.

is a relationship nps of 40 good for a $10m apparel brand?

Yes, it is on the high end of healthy. The Qualtrics 2024 apparel average is +39. SurveyMonkey's 2025 consumer goods and retail median is +57, but that macro-category aggregates higher-margin segments. At $10M GMV in apparel, +40 means you are slightly above peer, and the bigger question is whether your repeat purchase rate at month 12 is rising or falling. NPS is a leading indicator, repeat data is the verdict.

how often should i run an nps survey for my dtc brand?

Run a transactional NPS continuously (every order, delivery plus 14 days, sample 100 percent). Run a relationship NPS twice a year to a clean panel of your last 12 months of customers. Quarterly is overkill at under $20M GMV. Monthly relationship NPS produces noise, not signal.

how do i compare nps to acsi for retail benchmarking?

ACSI uses a 0-100 satisfaction scale, NPS uses a -100 to +100 promoter scale, and there is no official conversion. A directional rule of thumb: ACSI in the mid-70s tends to correspond to NPS in the +20 to +40 range, ACSI 80+ to NPS +40 to +60+. Use ACSI when you want stability across years (the index is published annually with consistent methodology); use NPS when you want movement quarter over quarter on your own panel.

does nps actually correlate to repeat purchase rate?

Loosely, not tightly. A high NPS predicts referral propensity better than it predicts repeat. Many high-NPS brands have mediocre repeat rates because the survey captures emotional sentiment, not buying intent. The cleanest check: pull repeat purchase rate at month 3, 6, and 12 by cohort and compare to NPS for the same cohort. If they move together, your NPS is a real signal. If repeat is flat or declining while NPS rises, your NPS is being inflated by post-purchase survey timing.

what should i do if my nps is below my vertical's median?

Three steps in order. First, look at repeat purchase rate by cohort for the same period. If repeat is stable or rising, your NPS dip is likely a survey-timing or sample artifact and not a real customer problem. Second, pull CX ticket volume and top complaint themes for the last 90 days. Third, run a transactional NPS at delivery plus 14 days as a control. If transactional NPS is +30 points higher than your relationship score, the problem is brand or expectation, not product. Spend on the right thing.