The Ecommerce Survey is now 
The February 2013 eCommerce survey found 34,864 sites in the Alexa Top 1 Million. This is a slight decrease on the October 2012 survey.
The eCommerce software with the largest market share continues to be Magento. Out of all the eCommerce sites detected, 26% are attributed to the platform.
This edition sees Zen Cart losing almost 2,000 sites and dropping significantly to the 4th most popular software. While we can expect that some sites have migrated platform, this large a change is more likely due to movement of sites into, and out of, the top 1 million since the last survey. To account for this, future editions will include all previously surveyed sites.
This brings VirtueMart to be the second most popular ecommerce package in the Alexa Top 1 Million. This is despite the observation that numbers have dipped slightly from 3,657 to 3,324.
On trend from the previous surveys, osCommerce loses further market share and now represents 7% of the ecommerce landscape.
Large increases are seen this month for Prestashop (+14%) and Open Cart (+39%).
Turning to the top 100K busiest sites according to Alexa, 1,632 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 468 stores. Second and third most popular in this category are the traditional Enterprise products IBM WebSphere and ATG. This month sees Hybris added to the survey and 62 sites in the top 100K were found to be on the platform.
Full Results
For this edition, technology signatures for 8 more ecommerce softwares has been added, including Hybris and Digital River. Here are summarised results for each platform.
| eCommerce Platform | Oct 2012 | Feb 2013 |
| Magento | 8087 | 9063 |
| VirtueMart | 3657 | 3324 |
| PrestaShop | 2621 | 2998 |
| Zen Cart | 4541 | 2515 |
| osCommerce | 2881 | 2461 |
| OpenCart | 1747 | 2425 |
| Volusion | 1080 | 1168 |
| Interspire | 987 | 1106 |
| Yahoo! Stores | 1068 | 1014 |
| Shopify | 573 | 826 |
| WP e-Commerce | 800 | 799 |
| Ubercart | 856 | 770 |
| CS-Cart | 555 | 620 |
| Miva Merchant | 611 | 547 |
| IBM WebSphere Commerce | 528 | 525 |
| ECSHOP | 774 | 484 |
| X-Cart | 509 | 399 |
| OXID eSales | 381 | 338 |
| 3DCart | 313 | 338 |
| ATG | 276 | 335 |
| Demandware | 245 | 304 |
| Hybris | 214 | |
| E-junkie | 210 | 213 |
| Actinic | 682 | 166 |
| MonsterCommerce | 161 | |
| AbleCommerce | 142 | 159 |
| Intershop | 170 | 156 |
| Shopp | 150 | 152 |
| ePages | 146 | |
| nopCommerce | 130 | 145 |
| plentyMarkets | 138 | |
| xt:Commerce | 118 | |
| ProStores | 105 | 100 |
| ShopSite | 84 | 82 |
| ekmPowershop | 61 | 73 |
| Big Cartel | 67 | 72 |
| FoxyCart | 70 | 68 |
| Drupal Commerce | 28 | 68 |
| GSI Commerce | 46 | 45 |
| ShopFactory | 42 | 40 |
| CubeCart | 34 | 34 |
| CosmoShop | 29 | |
| RomanCart | 33 | 28 |
| LemondStand | 20 | 23 |
| BluCommerce | 23 | 21 |
| TomatoCart | 31 | 19 |
| RBS Change | 16 | |
| Digital River | 16 | |
| AgoraCart | 3 |
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For each site the Alexa site rank and the eCommerce platform are provided. Additionally, a DNS lookup is conducted and provides IP and hosting country when successful.
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 225 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 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 a reasonable argument could be made for a biased 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.