October 2012 eCommerce Survey

The Ecommerce Survey is now

The October 2012 eCommerce survey found 35,218 sites in the Alexa Top 1 Million. This is a 4% increase since the February eCommerce survey.

Magento, with a 23% share of the market, is the leading eCommerce software platform. Equating to 8,087 sites, Magento has seen growth in every single edition since the survey began 2 years ago. It sees a 20% growth rate since the last survey in February alone.

Magento isn’t the only one. The popularity of Zen Cart continues to increase, up 12 percentage points to 4,451 sites. Both Magento and Zen Cart have released new versions since the last survey.

Following the top two platforms, both VirtueMart and osCommerce take a dip in numbers. Conversely, both PrestaShop and OpenCart see significant increases.

Download the full results

Turning to the top 100K busiest sites according to Alexa, 1,623 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 401 stores. Second and third most popular in this category are the traditional Enterprise products IBM WebSphere and ATG.

As an aside, I would just like to apologise for the delay of this edition. I have had to prioritise client work in recent months, and I appreciate people’s patience.

Full Results

The aggregated results for all platforms.

eCommerce Platform Feb Oct 2012
Magento 6795 8087
Zen Cart 4042 4541
VirtueMart 3914 3657
osCommerce 3199 2881
PrestaShop 2187 2621
OpenCart 1129 1747
Volusion 1266 1080
Yahoo! Stores 1217 1068
Interspire 983 987
Ubercart 891 856
WP e-Commerce 861 800
ECSHOP 703 774
Actinic 777 682
Miva Merchant 721 611
Shopify 345 573
CS-Cart 538 555
IBM WebSphere Commerce 527 528
X-Cart 617 509
OXID eSales 404 381
3DCart 317 313
ATG 248 276
Demandware 189 245
E-junkie 265 210
Intershop 240 170
Shopp 199 150
AbleCommerce 151 142
nopCommerce 129 130
ProStores 154 105
ShopSite 112 84
FoxyCart 94 70
Big Cartel 83 67
ekmPowershop 63 61
GSI Commerce 57 46
ShopFactory 59 42
CubeCart 45 34
RomanCart 43 33
TomatoCart 13 31
Drupal Commerce 15 28
BluCommerce 26 23
LemondStand 14 20

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Check the latest eCommerce Survey to purchase a dataset.

About the Survey

The survey takes the list of the top 1 million sites as provided by Alexa (an Amazon-owned company). It then fetches the HTML document for the home page and analyses against a library of over 170 signatures that have been written. A signature is a rule that identifies an individual platform. For example, for Magento this would be a reference to the varien/js.js JavaScript file. The accuracy of the survey is being improved with each edition as signature rules are added and reviewed.

The platform is built to scale on Amazon EC2, Mongo HQ and Redis, so the survey is predominantly limited by source sites to analyse. 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 inevitable bias of using a single dataset.

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 demise of others. 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.

Feedback, suggestions and questions always welcome. Say hello on twitter, I’m @bobbyshaw.

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