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.
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 |
Download Now
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.