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
The aggregated results for all platforms.
| eCommerce Platform | Oct 2011 | Feb 2012 | Change |
| Magento | 5589 | 6795 | 3414,4074,4705,5589,6795 |
| Zen Cart | 3758 | 4042 | 1556,1533,3167,3758,4042 |
| VirtueMart | 2753 | 3914 | 2683,2701,2753,3914 |
| osCommerce | 2334 | 3199 | 3123,3033,2554,2334,3199 |
| PrestaShop | 1518 | 2187 | 852,1079,1302,1518,2187 |
| Volusion | 1157 | 1266 | 889,906,1099,1157,1266 |
| Yahoo! Stores | 977 | 1217 | 1315,997,1217 |
| OpenCart | 757 | 1129 | 335,492,660,757,1129 |
| Interspire | 918 | 983 | 605,739,819,918,983 |
| Ubercart | 1305 | 891 | 706,992,1305,891 |
| WP e-Commerce | 747 | 861 | 779,754,861 |
| Actinic | 221 | 777 | 290,229,237,221,777 |
| Miva Merchant | 464 | 721 | 710,894,802,464,721 |
| ECSHOP | 831 | 703 | 667,831,703 |
| X-Cart | 639 | 617 | 733,740,659,639,617 |
| CS-Cart | 383 | 538 | 397,383,538 |
| IBM WebSphere Commerce | 396 | 527 | 223,1011,396,527 |
| OXID eSales | 311 | 404 | 310,314,305,311,404 |
| Shopify | 251 | 345 | 122,143,204,251,345 |
| 3DCart | 249 | 317 | 209,249,317 |
| E-junkie | 265 | ||
| ATG | 112 | 248 | 91,112,248 |
| Intershop | 240 | ||
| Shopp | 193 | 199 | 171,193,199 |
| Demandware | 182 | 189 | 118,140,182,189 |
| ProStores | 132 | 154 | 275,132,154 |
| AbleCommerce | 151 | ||
| nopCommerce | 111 | 129 | 52,64,81,111,129 |
| ShopSite | 112 | ||
| FoxyCart | 47 | 94 | 27,34,47,94 |
| Big Cartel | 47 | 83 | 28,41,44,47,83 |
| ekmPowershop | 62 | 63 | 71,58,65,62,63 |
| ShopFactory | 59 | ||
| GSI Commerce | 63 | 57 | 48,59,64,63,57 |
| CubeCart | 56 | 45 | 47,56,45 |
| RomanCart | 43 | ||
| BluCommerce | 26 | ||
| Drupal Commerce | 15 | ||
| LemondStand | 16 | 14 | 12,16,14 |
| TomatoCart | 15 | 13 | 11,16,9,15,13 |
Download Now
Check the latest eCommerce Survey to purchase a dataset.
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.
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1 quick question: is this list with sites from UK only or world-wide?
Hi Alexandru. This list is worldwide: http://www.alexa.com/topsites
Tom, how are your lists organized? For example, can the Magento list be filtered by Magento Community or Magento Enterprise sites?
Hi Dan, in this edition, they are but this feature is likely to be removed in future versions for now. The survey is limited by only looking at the homepage of the site. It can sometimes quite difficult to be able to tell the platform, let alone the version of the platform being used. For this reason, in the current data, some Magento Enterprise may be “mis-represented” as Community sites as they don’t show any Enterprise features on the homepage. To avoid confusion and mis-attribution this will be removed for the data until such point as I can make the analysis more accurate on the version level.
Many thanks.
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Tom, thanks a lot for this great stuff. I am searching for e-commerce market share statistics and now I am totally happy, that I found yours. But I have one question: It is a world wide market share, but unfortunately there is no filtering, so that I can only see the market share for a single country. In my case I would like to see the market share of Germany (.de), Austria (.at) and Switzerland (.ch). Will this be possible in future versions or are there other possibilities? Tim
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Very interesting data. However I would not put together all the platforms together as it does not give correct comparative results since many platforms presented here have different target audience and conceptual technologies which make it vitually impossible to choose the best of all. Plus some companies like Demandware platform are closet platform while osCommerce are opensource softwares and are available for common use.
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How is the sites classified as one or another system?
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I second Dan’s question. Would be interesting from a technical point of view to know what defines a system looking at frontend code.
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Hi Jonas and Dan. Sorry if I didn’t give too much description in this blog post about how the signature analysis works, it’s something that I normally do.
When I visit the home page of each site, I take the HTML and run it over some content rules that I’ve previously written. These are regular expressions that are looking for recognisable patterns which I’ve decided are sufficient enough to indicate the platform.
So, this might be looking for JS/CSS file inclusion patterns, particular pieces of javascript, or actual mentions of the software package which is always a giveaway!
For example with Magento. It has a very specific theme structure, e.g. skin/frontend/[interface_name]/[theme_name]/css/styles.css. It also has javascript files which are unique to itself, e.g. varien.js. There may be references to magento within the markup, or javascript, e.g. Mage.Cookies.path. In some cases it might be as simple as “Powered by [platform]“.
I’ve spent a huge number of hours going through adding new platforms, revisiting the signatures of previous platforms, trying to improve coverage and accuracy over the last 18 months since the first survey (which only included Magento and osCommerce). It’s grown an awful lot over that time. Hence the investment with the February survey of rebuilding properly and moving to Amazon so that it can run quicker with parallelism and stand it in good stead for future developments.
To Yuliya, I completely understand where you’re coming from in terms of lumping the different packages together. However, I’m not conducting this survey to rate and review each platform from a market and functionality point of view. It’s just something that I was interested in doing just to get some numbers to give an indication.
Any other questions, just ask
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Great research – are you able to provide UK sites only? thanks
Hi Jocelyn. Custom site lists are available, please hit the email icon up top to get in touch with your requirements. Thanks.
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Are you planning to run this survey again anytime soon? I find it quite interesting that platforms like IBM and ATG show up in the top 100K sites, but their number must be so small that they fall under the “Other” category in the top 1M sites category.
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waiting for the next survey….
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Hi Tom. Very exiting article. May I ask which info is included in the list you offer? Is it merely the URLs in one column with a URL per row or do each entry contain more information?
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