Feb 2013 eCommerce Survey

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%).

Download the full results

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

Download Now

A range of site lists are available to purchase.

Email me to discuss a site list purchase

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.

View Comments