Feb 2012 eCommerce Survey

The February 2012 eCommerce survey found 33,632 sites in the Alexa Top 1 Million. The survey visits each site and analyses the HTML document against a set of rules that detect the use of any one of 40 different eCommerce platforms.

The most popular platform was Magento, with 6,795 sites, a 20% share of eCommerce stores found. Magento has seen a staggering growth-rate, increasing in popularity by over 21% in the last 4 months alone.

Previously, Zen Cart has done its best to grow at a similar rate but only accumulated 7% more sites since October 2011. With 4,042 sites in total, Zen Cart still retains an honourable 2nd position. Following closely is VirtueMart with 3914 sites, which also sees huge growth this month, in part due to new signatures being written.

While osCommerce has reliably lost sites in previous surveys, it gains a signficant number of sites this month, up to 3,199. This is likely due to improvements in the content rules, but we will wait until the next survey to identify whether it is actually bucking the downward trend.

Turning to the top 100K busiest sites according to Alexa, 1,655 stores were detected. In this section of the survey we are expecting more enterprise-focussed shopping cart solutions.

The results of which show that Magento continues to have the most stores in the top 100K, with 345 stores.

Second and third most popular in this category are the traditional Enterprise products IBM WebSphere and ATG.

Improvements

The eCommerce survey has come a long way since the first survey in September 2010. This month sees the coverage of the survey extend to 40 different platforms in an effort to give as broad a view of the market as possible. This, together with improvements to the survey process itself, has resulted in a 26% increase in eCommerce stores found since the October 2011 survey.

The content matching rules for each platform have been rewritten and incorporated into a more sophisticated signature engine. The survey now runs on Amazon EC2 allowing for more sites to be visited and analysed in parallel, and results in a more scalable system.

While the relative popularity of eCommerce platforms has remained static for the majority of solutions, the re-build has, as one might expect, caused some fluctuations in actual number of sites seen. However, trends are expected to emerge in future editions of the survey. Including some reports on where sites are moving from and to, rather than simply viewing software growth and decay.

Thanks goes to Nick Jones for technical assistance with the re-architecture.

Full Results

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Limitations

The accuracy of the survey is being improved in each edition with signature rules reviewed and new ones added.

Currently, the survey is limited by source sites to analyse. The Alexa produces their site list based on visits to sites by the Alexa toolbar user community. Plans are being made to include data from Quantcast to try and reduce the bias inevitable in any one dataset.

Only one run-through of the analysis is conducted and so if I site fails to respond or there is a network issue at the time of lookup, there will be no result for that site.

I co-own an eCommerce development company, Meanbee. We specialise in Magento, and hence an argument could be put forward that there is a bias towards Magento in the survey. I would respond that significant effort has been put into writing rules for each and every platform and regular improvements are made to the accuracy of all signatures. Focussing on eCommerce as a company we are interested in observing how the market share of platforms changes over time. This enables us to judge the speed of adoption of new platforms and the rejection of old ones. This way we can be sure that we are knowledgeable about the solutions that are available and offering the most appropriate platform for our clients.

That’s all folks

Thanks for reading. I hope you found the statistics interesting. I’d love to hear any comments or questions.

Say hello on twitter, I’m @bobbyshaw.

Related posts:

1. October 2012 eCommerce Survey
2. Feb 2013 eCommerce Survey
3. Oct 2011 eCommerce Survey
4. Magento Extends Lead in eCommerce Survey – February 2011
5. June 2011 eCommerce Survey