The 2026 Global E-commerce Payments and Fraud Report from the Merchant Risk Council (MRC) provides a detailed view of how merchants are managing payment acceptance and fraud risk.
Based on survey responses from more than 1,200 merchants, the findings show a payments environment that is expanding in measured ways while merchants concentrate on efficiency, revenue, and operational control.
Several patterns stand out in MRC's report. Merchants are adding new payment methods, though at a slower pace than in earlier years. Real-time payments continue to gain traction and are moving into the mainstream.
Newer payment models such as AI-initiated transactions remain in early stages but are drawing attention. At the same time, merchants are focusing on a set of core metrics and relying on established tools to improve performance and manage risk.
Merchants continue to broaden the range of payment methods they support, though the pace of change appears measured. On average, merchants report accepting 4.6 payment methods, a figure that has remained relatively stable over the past two years. MRC’s surveys reported a figure of 4.3 in 2025 and 4.5 in 2024.
This suggests that most merchants have already built out a core set of payment options and are now making incremental additions rather than sweeping changes. While some payment methods saw meaningful adoption, 21% of merchants reported adding no new payment methods in the past 12 months.
The mix of accepted methods remains consistent. Cards, digital wallets, and bank transfers are each accepted by more than 60% of merchants. Mobile payments are accepted by nearly half at 48%, indicating that mobile channels are well established but not universal.
Adoption patterns vary by merchant size. Enterprise merchants accept about 5.0 methods on average, compared to 4.2 among SMBs, reflecting greater resources and broader customer bases. Bank transfers and buy now, pay later (BNPL) showed the greatest difference between adoption by enterprise merchants and SMBs.
Among the methods gaining ground, real-time payments stand out. 43% of merchants now accept real-time payments, marking a 6 percentage point increase year over year.
This growth places real-time payments among the top five most widely accepted methods globally, indicating it has moved beyond early adopters and into broader use. Among merchants that do not yet accept real-time payments, 48% say they are likely to add the method within the next 12 months.
Merchant feedback also points to increasing customer usage. Among those already accepting real-time payments, 83% report a definite increase in customer usage over the past year, and 86% expect to see growth in real-time payments use in the future.
Overall, real-time payments are moving from an emerging option toward a standard offering. The pace of adoption suggests continued growth, though the timing and scale will vary across merchant types.
While talk of agentic commerce has accelerated over the past year, real-world implementation of agentic AI payments is still in its infancy. Despite this, however, 19% of merchants report having solutions in place to accept agentic AI payments. Enterprise merchants are leading adoption, with 28% reporting having AI payment solutions in place, compared to 12% among mid-market and SMB merchants.
Another 63% of merchants say they are exploring or implementing solutions for AI-driven payments, with about half of that group already in the implementation phase.
This gap between current adoption and planned activity suggests that merchants see potential value in agentic AI payments but are still working through practical considerations such as infrastructure, risk, and customer demand.
Interestingly, MRC members are much more likely than merchants overall to say they have no current plans to accept agentic AI payments, at 46%. This may reflect a higher level of risk-consciousness among MRC members, who may be more concerned about the potential for chargebacks driven by agentic AI payments.
When evaluating payment performance, merchants are concentrating on a relatively small set of metrics. Two stand above the rest: payment success rate and revenue.
More than half of merchants rate both as “extremely important,” making them the most prominent indicators in the survey.
This emphasis reflects a focus on outcomes that directly affect business performance. Payment success rate captures operational efficiency, while revenue reflects overall effectiveness.
Beyond these two metrics, merchants track a wider set of indicators. Over 70% rate at least seven additional metrics as very or extremely important, including authorization rate, authentication rate, loss rates, cost per customer, and order conversion rate.
The breadth of metrics suggests that merchants are monitoring payments from multiple angles, including financial performance, operational efficiency, and customer experience.
Differences emerge between merchant segments. MRC members place less emphasis on certain metrics such as refund rate, settlement time, and cost per customer, suggesting a more selective approach to measurement.
In 2026, 72% of merchants report using one or more forms of payment tokenization, representing a significant increase from 60% in 2025. However, that figure was 67% in MRC's 2024 survey. It’s unclear if the sudden changes in the use of tokenization represent a real decline and rebound or just a statistical artifact.
Merchants cite improved security, reduced risk of data breaches, and higher authorization rates as primary reasons for using tokenization. At least half of token users point to these benefits.
Other optimization tactics are also common. Around 40% of merchants use intelligent payment routing and strong customer authentication, while similar shares rely on automated retries, machine learning tools, and 3D Secure 2.
These approaches reflect a layered strategy. Merchants are combining multiple techniques to manage authorization rates, reduce fraud, and maintain customer experience.
Adoption again varies by size. Larger merchants are more likely to use advanced tools, particularly network and gateway tokens.
The overall pattern suggests that these practices have become standard components of payment operations for many merchants, with the focus turning toward how best to apply them rather than whether to adopt them.
Decisions about which payment methods to support and which tools to deploy are not driven by customer demand alone. Resource availability, technical complexity, and risk tolerance all shape outcomes. This helps explain why some merchants move quickly on newer methods while others take a more deliberate path.
In practice, this means that adoption curves rarely follow a single pattern across the market. Larger merchants often have the capacity to test and implement new methods earlier, supported by dedicated teams and more flexible infrastructure. Smaller organizations may face tighter constraints, leading them to prioritize stability and proven performance over experimentation.
These differences can persist even when customer demand signals are similar, since internal readiness ultimately determines how quickly those signals translate into action.
New capabilities tend to move from experimentation to broader use as operational hurdles are resolved and confidence builds. What matters most is not how quickly a method is adopted in isolation, but how well it fits within the broader system of tools, processes, and controls already in place.